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Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani with his wife, Rama Duwaji, right,...

Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani with his wife, Rama Duwaji, right, at his primary election party, Wednesday. Credit: AP

Zohran Mamdani’s bombshell victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday has left everyone scrambling to interpret its implications for Democratic Party politics. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state Assembly member, is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America and is a strong critic of Israel’s war in Gaza who even recently refused to repudiate the slogan “Globalize the intifada.” Does his win signal a leftward lurch in the national Democratic Party — and if so, what does it mean in the age of Donald Trump?

One common view is that we shouldn’t read too much of a political shift into Mamdani’s win. He won primarily by stressing quality-of-life issues and staying away from divisive culture-war ones. He has backed away from the calls to “defund the police” which he espoused in 2020 and from proposals to do away with New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test used as a qualification for the city’s elite schools — though he still advocates examining potential race and gender biases in the test. While he has remained relentlessly critical of Israel, he has also stressed his opposition to antisemitism and to attacks on civilians; he has angered some on the left by calling the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel a “horrific war crime.”

That Mamdani is young, energetic and charismatic — and ran a highly effective voter outreach campaign — is also a highly salient fact. Meanwhile, his principal opponent, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, didn’t do a great job of either capitalizing on Mamdani’s weaknesses or neutralizing his own. For many people, the fact that Cuomo resigned his post under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations was insurmountable. In fact, there’s a strong argument to be made that most of the allegations were either questionable or trivial — but Cuomo never made that argument strongly enough during the campaign. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment looked hypocritical for first pushing him out as governor and then endorsing him as mayor.

Many other factors contributed to Mamdani’s victory — including, some say, the oppressive heat on Tuesday which may have lowered turnout among the elderly voters who were a large part of Cuomo’s base.

That said, Mamdani’s enthusiastic support from college-educated young voters undeniably shows that progressivism remains a force to be reckoned with in the Democratic Party. Democratic voters who are sympathetic to socialism, unsympathetic to tough anti-crime and pro-law enforcement policies, and hostile to Israel will continue to pull the party to the left.

Mamdani’s victory in November, which would make a progressive socialist the mayor of the most populous city in the United States, will inevitably energize this left-wing pull in the Democratic Party on the national level. Such a trend poses several dangers. It would make the revitalization of the political center far less achievable in the near future, locking the two parties into an even tighter contest between the progressive left and the populist right and leading to an escalation of both polarization and demagoguery. But since America remains far more conservative than progressive, it would also further damage the Democratic Party’s ability to compete on a national level and empower the right.

If only for these reasons — reducing polarization and keeping the Democratic Party a viable force in national politics — the best-case scenario is that Mamdani either loses the general election or pivots to the center hard enough to change the election’s political narrative.

 

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a writer for The Bulwark, are her own.

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