Zohran Mamdani's Victory Is the Sweetest Thing

A good guy won. The worst people lost. Doesn't that feel nice?

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

With Zohran Mamdani’s decisive, astonishing win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, New Yorkers are waking up to an utterly changed political landscape—and a lot of people across the country are grappling with a feeling they’re just not used to these days. I think it’s called “hope”?

The conventional wisdom headed into the election was that it would take a good long while for us to find out who’d won. But the race was over almost the second the polls closed. Mamdani, a 33-year-old, DSA-aligned, Muslim immigrant, stomped all over his chief rival, former governor, political titan, and permanent sociopath Andrew Cuomo, so badly that Cuomo was forced to concede within hours.

Mamdani isn’t guaranteed a trip to Gracie Mansion. He still has to defeat incumbent Eric Adams, and possibly Cuomo, in November. But by winning the primary, he has stunned the political world and thwarted the efforts of some of the worst people in America to destroy his candidacy.

Make no mistake: Mamdani earned this win. He came from literally zero percent in the polls, and just kept rising. He ran a highly disciplined, ruthlessly focused campaign centered around cost-of-living issues. He pitched easy-to-love, winning ideas, like a rent freeze and free buses. He showed the kind of communication skills that are impossible to teach. (Oh, and there was the hotness factor.)

Most of all, in an era where it’s common to see New York described as an ever-spiraling hellhole, Mamdani’s campaign appeared to actually like the city he was asking to run. There was a palpable exuberance and energy to his messaging, and a sense of fun. Campaigns everywhere will surely be taking note. His social media team can write its next meal ticket.

If Mamdani does win in November, it will be the most significant victory for the electoral left that I can remember. After all, running to be the mayor of New York—and defeating a former three-term governor—is an order of magnitude more challenging than running to win a single congressional district or a spot in a state legislature. But Mamdani’s primary win is huge in and of itself, particularly when you consider what he was up against.

His win is a catastrophic defeat for Andrew Cuomo, a terrible person. Cuomo, with his usual preening arrogance, thought that he could cruise to victory because he was Andrew Cuomo. He figured that name recognition, tons of cash, and a huge dollop of fear would be enough to sew things up without much of a try. It didn’t matter that he hadn't lived here for decades, or that he thought he was too good to actually hustle for the nomination, or that he was a corrupt, unrepentant predator and grandma-killer. He ran a racist, demagogic, cynical campaign that showed the same contempt for the city and its people that he’s shown throughout his political career.

And he got his ass handed to him. Chef’s kiss. It’s great that Mamdani won. But it’s so, so great that Cuomo, specifically, lost.

Mamdani’s win is also a defeat for the gang of crooked dinosaurs known as the Democratic establishment, which went out of its way to humiliate itself in this race. A parade of elected officials, well-connected unions, and political machers, all of whom had demanded that Cuomo resign the governorship just a few years ago, stampeded shamelessly to get behind him this time around. Cuomo wheeled out endorsements from party grandees like Jim Clyburn and Bill Clinton, neither of whom has any real connection to the city. None of it mattered. Voters looked at this panoply of power and recoiled. Cuomo and his cronies were a symbol of everything ordinary people currently hate about the political class, and they failed.

So did the city’s moneyed elite. Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg and Bill Ackman poured tens of millions of dollars into Cuomo’s Super PAC, which drowned New Yorkers in a vast sea of apocalyptic anti-Mamdani propaganda. (Judging by the endless number of Mamdani-bashing mailers I received, there’s a small forest missing somewhere thanks to these bozos.) The New York Times editorial board, which had vowed to stay out of the race, reversed course, warning readers to leave Mamdani off their ballots. They will all be licking their wounds this morning, and that is wonderful.

Most importantly, Mamdani’s victory is a seismic defeat for the forces of anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim bigotry. Cuomo and his backers ran one of the most nakedly racist campaigns I can remember seeing, even darkening Mamdani’s beard in one mailer to make him look more like a stereotypical Scary Muslim. And they went all-in on weaponizing his support of Palestine, smearing him relentlessly as an antisemite who would all but send the city’s Jews to the gas chambers. New York’s equally ossified media joined in, framing Mamdani’s opposition to Israel’s apartheid and genocide as “troubling” and peppering him with questions about whether he’d visit Israel as mayor. (Meanwhile, Cuomo’s decision to literally join the legal team fighting to keep Benjamin Netanyahu out of the Hague went completely unaddressed.)

And it didn’t work. The voters in one of the Jewish capitals of the world said no. They sent the message that standing up for equal rights and an end to mass slaughter doesn’t make you a danger to the world—it makes you the kind of person who should maybe be the mayor of New York City. That has huge implications for the politics around Palestine and Israel more generally. What more evidence do you need that people don’t want a blank check for Israel than New York City voting for a Muslim, socialist, pro-Palestinian mayor? That is earth-shaking stuff—and, amid the never-ending hell in Gaza, it is a cause for some hope.

Hope—there’s that word again. We should all probably temper our hope. Electoral politics are not revolutionary politics. The American system is designed to either destroy people like Mamdani or to absorb and neuter them. He first has to win in November—no certain feat. And if he does, the task of governing New York City will be brutal. His agenda will be fought viciously at every turn. He will be presiding over the NYPD, an emblem of municipal fascism that knows how to protect its supremacy. He will face unceasing opposition from the ruling class. He will make bad decisions and grim compromises.

None of that will be fun, and we will all have to put our current standom aside and hold Mamdani to account when he inevitably stumbles. Things will get ugly.

But that’s no reason not to have a spring in our step today. This world is in a terrible state. Things are bleak as could be everywhere you turn. And yet! And yet. Something genuinely good just happened. Even when things are this bad, good things can still happen.

How sweet it is.