Zohran Mamdani facing 9/11-themed attacks from Andrew Cuomo’s political machine and criticism from a billionaire at a Saudi conference, and then being elected mayor of New York on the same day Dick Cheney passes — it’s like the final scene of a drama about this entire era. And yet it wasn’t a Hollywood script; it’s what just happened.
Mamdani long ago cast his campaign as something more than a race to run one city. He told the Lever that “this is the heart of the battle for the future of the Democratic Party.” It’s a theme he’s continued to amplify throughout the campaign — and the battle he identified has been on full display over the last week.
On one side are the party’s long-standing luminaries, politicians, media elites, and operatives still clinging to the dream of a return to pre-MAGA normalcy. Many in this faction spent Election Day valorizing Cheney. Others were insisting that to win elections and face down Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, Democrats should construct a big tent that avoids any unifying national agenda at all, periodically try to out-Republican the Republicans on some social issues, and then label that incoherence “centrism.”
On the other side of the divide are Democratic voters, who, according to polls, are more enraged at their party’s leaders than they ever have been, and for good reason. After years of being told that Democratic politicians simply cannot do anything, even when those politicians have power, Democratic voters watched Republicans use that same power to do whatever MAGA wants — and they’ve watched Democratic leaders do all but nothing to stop the GOP rampage.
All of the discontent culminated in a perfect storm in New York City — the capital of global finance, where one in four residents lives in poverty and one in twenty-four residents is a millionaire. An anti-oligarch message targeting the affordability crisis was bound to resonate in such Dickensian conditions, but it could only reach…
Auteur: David Sirota
