One compelling way to make electoral prognostication more authoritative is to incorporate historical precedent: Donald Trump is the second coming of Andrew Jackson; Bernie Sanders is continuing the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal; X is possible because Y already happened. But what about those who seek to do the unprecedented? What can, say, a socialist seeking the office of New York City mayor look to in their quest for victory?
The city’s 2025 mayoral election invites comparison to two previous races: 1977’s race, when weak incumbent Abraham Beame was primaried by a pack of ambitious Democrats led by Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, and 1993’s, when David Dinkins, the city’s first and only black mayor was defeated for reelection by Rudy Giuliani and a wave of white resentment.
As models, neither 1977 nor 1993 suggest much success for Zohran Mamdani, the state assemblymember from western Queens who in October became the first major socialist to contend for citywide elected office in recent memory. Though Mamdani’s push for executive office marks a new endeavor for the city’s resurgent socialist movement — which has elected fourteen total city and state legislators endorsed by the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) since 2018 — he is far from the first socialist to run for mayor in New York.
The record of those candidates is of course flush with defeat. But Mamdani can still learn valuable lessons from the most successful of these runs: immigrant labor lawyer Morris Hillquit’s 1917 campaign, in which he garnered nearly 22 percent of the citywide vote, about half the winning candidate, defeating the incumbent mayor in the Bronx while running even with him in Brooklyn and Queens. That race, which the New York Times trumpeted as “the most extraordinary in recent memory” and an unpredictable “puzzle without parallel,” bears striking similarity to the one ahead of Mamdani and DSA next year.
Auteur: Charlie Dulik
