What Zohran Mamdani's Win Can Teach the Democratic Party
CJ Penneys (Charles Penneys)
A year ago, Zohran Mamdani was polling at one percent. Every pundit said his mayoral campaign in New York City was a sideshow — a socialist experiment that might play on Twitter but not on ballots. He wasn’t supposed to beat a legacy name like Andrew Cuomo, or the millionaires and billionaires who poured obscene amounts of money into trying to stop him.
But he did.
He won because people — real people — stopped listening to the noise. The attack ads calling him anti-police didn’t land. The attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism didn’t stick. The voters didn’t care about the caricature. They cared that someone finally sounded like he gave a damn about the rent, the grocery bill, and the basic insult of trying to live in a city that rewards wealth and punishes work.
I know because I was there. I canvassed for him. And what I saw — in the hallways of walk-ups, on the stoops, in the cramped elevators of East New York — is what the DNC keeps missing about politics, even as the country slips further away.
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