Well, it’s official: Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City. He will be the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history, the first Democratic Socialists of America member since David Dinkins, and the second-youngest, just behind Hugh J. Grant in 1889.
The major publications called the race early on Tuesday night. At time of writing, Mamdani had cleared 50 percent of the vote, with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the low 40s.
It is one of the most impressive come-from-behind victories in the history of New York politics. Mamdani was polling at literally 1 percent in February, only to win the primary and now the mayoralty.
It’s encouraging on many levels: New York City didn’t submit to a campaign of flagrant bigotry from disgraced two-time loser Cuomo; Americans, particularly young ones, can still be politically inspired by a good candidate with a good message; and, not least of all, a bunch of MAGA billionaires flushed millions and millions of dollars down the toilet losing to a brown, Muslim democratic socialist. According to Forbes, no fewer than 28 billionaires donated at least $100,000 to stop Mamdani, including Daniel Loeb, Barry Diller, Steve Wynn, Reed Hastings, and Alice Walton. Terminally online hedge fund manager Bill Ackman donated $1.75 million, while failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg donated $8.3 million, all to no avail.
Ah, that’s the stuff.
The final stages of the race made for quite a contrast: on the one hand, Mamdani’s youth, his humorous, sunny optimism, his laser focus on affordability, his obvious affection for New York, and his team’s groundbreaking skill at social media and short-form video.
The overt, public attempt from a handful of MAGA billionaires to buy the election provided Mamdani with perfect talking points.
On the other, Andrew Cuomo, an elderly has-been, the lesser son of a greater sire, who as governor literally conspired with Republicans to hand them control of the New York state Senate for half a decade; who resigned from office in disgrace after he was credibly accused of 13 instances of sexual harassment; and whose campaign quite obviously had no purpose other than satisfying his own lust for accumulating personal power, along with that of his billionaire donors.
As the campaign progressed and Mamdani’s victory became ever more likely, Cuomo descended into vindictive gutter racism. He did not disagree with a right-wing radio host who said that Mamdani would be “cheering” another 9/11, suggested that Mamdani would have Muslim women “completely covered up,” and that he “doesn’t understand New York culture” because he’s a “citizen of Uganda.”
Cuomo happily took Donald Trump’s endorsement and went on Fox News to tout it. His closing campaign message, as The Nation’s Jeet Heer pointed out on Bluesky, smacked of Vidkun Quisling—implicitly threatening New Yorkers with a Trumpian occupation if they voted for anyone but Cuomo.
It was disgusting stuff. But it also was palpably desperate, and coming from one of the worst candidates imaginable. Mamdani is exceptionally talented, on par with the young Barack Obama in my estimation, but (also like Obama, whose first U.S. Senate opponent was Alan Keyes), he was also exceptionally fortunate in his opponent. It’s easy to dunk when you’re playing against a fifth grader.
That in turn indicates the astounding incompetence of Cuomo’s billionaire backers. For one thing, again, Cuomo was a terrible candidate—the fact that he managed to lose to a nobody state assemblyman from a 32-point head start is proof enough of that. For another, the campaign was shockingly tin-eared. He and his allies attempted to make the entire contest about Israel, constantly grilling Mamdani about why he doesn’t respect Israel enough, why he wouldn’t visit there, and all but calling him a terrorist.
On the merits, this was an absurd argument. There is no reason why the mayor of New York City should be particularly concerned with Israel or any other foreign country. And while 20 or even 10 years ago such a cynical, racist smear campaign might have worked, two years of genocide has obliterated Israel’s reputation among Democrats—a recent CNN poll found that the fraction who sympathize more with Palestinians or Israelis has shifted to the former by more than 70 percentage points since October 7th. Cuomo’s ultra-Zionism doesn’t seem to be that popular among New Yorkers—indeed, one recent poll had Mamdani only slightly behind among New York Jews. It’s as if John McCain ran in 2008 loudly complaining that Barack Obama was going to make health care more affordable.
Finally, the overt, public attempt from a handful of MAGA billionaires to buy the election—not only by funding Cuomo but successfully bullying corrupt incumbent mayor Eric Adams out of the race, and attempting to do the same with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa—provided Mamdani with perfect talking points.
Sliwa, a central-casting New York Character who comes by his nuttiness honestly, pointed this out in an interview. “Ackman is a jerk. Has he been right yet? … Does he know anything about politics? No. Does he live in New York City? No. He lives in Chappaqua, the whitest suburb in America, where even the lawn jockeys are white,” he said. “Since when do we not let people vote? Billionaires determine the next mayor? If they don’t like it, they can leave. They have options.”
Sliwa is right—these guys are chumps. Ackman et al. certainly could have had a much greater effect if they had spent their money more strategically and thoughtfully. They’d have started much earlier, rounded up a candidate who was far less damaged than Cuomo, and drawn up a campaign message that wasn’t tremendously unpopular among the New York electorate. (Pro tip for Ackman and company: Next time, you can consult a “poll” to see what people think about things. They aren’t perfect, but it’s important data.)
What we see, I think, are a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X and in various group chats. It’s why they got so worked up about Mamdani in the first place—the New York City mayoralty is not some omnipotent office, and there are a dozen ways to hem it in at the state and local level if they so wished. What these oligarchs spent to stop Mamdani feels like less on an annual basis than he wants them to pay for a better future for all New Yorkers, a joke Mamdani himself has made.
In any case, his slight tax increase on rich people, free buses, and city-run grocery stores are pretty far from a communist revolution. But that’s not how it appears to rich people, surrounded on all sides by yes-men and toadies, who spend several hours a day marinating in an online Nazi sewer.