This wasn’t supposed to happen. When Zohran Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign in late October 2024, the candidate himself was probably the only person in the city who thought he could win.

Donald Trump’s election two weeks later cemented the mainstream consensus that New York City and the nation were turning decisively rightward. Pivoting to the “moderate center,” we were told, was the Democratic Party’s only chance at electoral survival. Even the most optimistic of Mamdani’s leftist supporters thought that the best-case scenario was a respectable loss in the mayoral primary.

Tonight’s historic win proves the skeptics wrong. Despite millions of dollars poured into billionaire-bought attack ads and despite Trump’s attempts to blackmail voters into backing Andrew Cuomo, New Yorkers are sending a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist to Gracie Mansion with a strong mandate to make our city affordable again.

It turns out things don’t need to just keep getting worse and worse. At a moment of deepening authoritarian attacks, astronomical economic inequality, and Democratic Party disarray, the shock waves of Mamdani’s political earthquake will be felt nationwide. This campaign’s core message — up with affordability, down with billionaires — is no less relevant beyond New York.

Turning Zohran’s vision into a reality won’t be easy. Some of the most powerful people and institutions in the world are going to do everything to stop us. But transforming our city is possible, if large numbers of everyday New Yorkers join the fight. America’s oligarchs are right to be worried.

How He Won

How did Mamdani pull off one of the most improbable upsets in modern American politics? Pundits tied themselves into knots last night to downplay the political significance of this race, searching to highlight any takeaway other than the most obvious one: Zohran was an authentic voice for a platform that spoke to working-class anger at a broken status quo.

Yes, it’s true that Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams were flawed candidates. And yes, it’s true that Mamdani is charismatic and his team brilliantly leveraged social media. But the dynamism of this campaign can’t be separated from its politics.

Nor was the content of Mamdani’s campaign reducible to only talking about kitchen-table issues — a strategy that centrist Democratic consultants are now peddling as a panacea for the party’s ills. Yes, his focus was on bringing down the cost of living for working people. But Mamdani cut through the noise by