My Little Communist Mayor
Plus: Air traffic control might stay home, Keith McNally embraces champagne socialism, and more...
Silver linings: At least now there's one more rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria that could be made available to an actual poor person!
Zohran Mamdani, who proudly calls himself a socialist and ran as a Democrat, solidly clinched the win and will be sworn in as mayor of New York City on January 1. Turnout was enormous: More than 2 million voted this election day, the highest participation in a citywide election since 1969.
Full vote results aren't in—just 91 percent currently reporting, per Associated Press tallies—but ex-gov Andrew Cuomo came in at 41.6 percent of the vote, with Republican Curtis Sliwa garnering merely 7.1 percent. Mamdani cleared the 50 percent threshold.
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The 34-year-old Mamdani has no management experience, and very little work experience. (But "this new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another," he assures us in his victory speech.) He worked briefly at a nonprofit in Queens before launching a bid for state Assembly. He was mostly absent as an assemblyman, barely voting in Albany at all. Maybe it's better that way. He's spent a fair bit of time speaking on Democratic Socialists of America panels and at meetings, including one where he suggested, in 2023, that when the New York Police Department's (NYPD) "boot" is "on your neck" it's been "laced by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]." This soundbite summarizes him perfectly: It's not really clear what he's talking about, except that there's a vaguely anti-colonialist, anti-Israel sentiment that plays really well with his Frantz Fanon-reading liberal-arts-school base. (To take him more seriously, as we now must, it's possible he's referring to the NYPD's international liaison program, which maintains offices—for training and counterterrorism purposes—in more than a dozen different countries; so why single out Israel?)
Other than his little speaking gigs, Mamdani's experience is sparse. No matter. He's now in charge of a workforce of 300,000. Whatever could go wrong?
I know a lot of people disagree with Zohran's policies, but I think it's distasteful to ruin the excitement by saying so. He's a 34-year-old who just got his first real job, and we should let him (and his parents!) feel good about that.
— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) November 5, 2025
At least he's highly educated: Mamdani went to the Bronx High School of Science, the elite public school where one must take an admissions test to get into, at which he "personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are." He called for the specialized admissions test to be abolished, before mysteriously reversing course later in his campaign. He's called for gifted programs for young kids to be abolished. He seeks to pull the ladder up after him now that he's climbed it—and this is one area he'll have a lot of control over.
After Bronx Science, Mamdani went to hoity-toity liberal arts school Bowdoin, in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies, graduating in 2014 right before peak "wokeness" took hold. Mamdani has been steeped in the language of postcolonial theory, of the oppression olympics, of third-worldism. He's focused on class. He's been marinading in these ideas for years.
"I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation," Mamdani told his followers in his victory speech. "Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour."
"We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about," he adds, tacking on a mission statement that will surely strike fear in the hearts of libertarians. (There's a reason why President Donald Trump calls the Marx-quoting Mamdani "my little communist mayor.")
Don't let anyone tell you this was a post-wokeness campaign; it wasn't exactly, but democratic socialist campaigns should be thought of maybe as a fusion of identity politics/colonial struggle themes and sleeker branding. "When you look at peak woke progressivism, one thing about it is that…it had an austere Calvinist element to it," says Reihan Salam. "The genius, you could say, of this democratic socialist moment around Mamdani is that it's all about offering you free stuff. And it is also saying that the bad guys are simple." ("Wokeness was almost anti-charismatic," theorizes Salam. This brand of democratic socialism, on the other hand, is "packaged as a consumer brand.")
Nor was it a kitchen-table issues campaign. Mamdani had solid marketing chops: He targeted ethnic enclaves in their own languages, at scale, something other candidates haven't really thought to do to nearly the same degree. He deployed massive teams of canvassers. He kinda sorta ripped off the Zabar's logo, and he pissed off the Knicks by more blatantly ripping off theirs. But mostly, he had the good fortune to run against a historically unpopular disgraced ex-governor who groped a few too many women to stay in office.
Mamdani's success should be attributed to his tactics and to the circumstances he inherited, but also his ability to serve as an avatar for a specific class of people found mostly in New York: the highly educated creative class that perceives itself to be more working-class-adjacent than rich, with bougie tastes yet enough student debt to feel tethered to reality.
Zohran doing autocrat numbers at the park slope food coop
— Sophie Frances Kemp (@sophiefkemp) November 4, 2025
Democrats shouldn't be tempted to extrapolate too much from this one win. Democrats have pretended, for years, to be excited about milquetoast candidates they don't actually care for: Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Josh Shapiro, Eric Swalwell, Tim Walz, and Joe Biden. They're trying to get pumped about California Gov. Gavin Newsom. They're trying to rally behind Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. But it's just been so hard, and Mamdani's right there. He's someone they can get excited about (ewwww), for the first time in a while. He's fresh and new and a touch exotic and he feels like someone you could've maybe found at Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue pad a few decades ago. It's the "dawn of a better day" for the long-suffering tote bag class. Finally.
Meanwhile, in saner places: More conventional Democrats won last night in New Jersey (Mikie Sherrill) and Virginia (Abigail Spanberger).
Spanberger, in particular, has always seemed to have her head screwed on straight. If Democrats don't move toward more centrist positions, "we will get fucking torn apart," she warned in an internal call. "And we need to not ever use the words socialist or socialism ever again."
Alas, I wish this were the formula for winning New York. One struggle Democrats might have is succumbing to the belief that there's one clear formula for racking up wins nationally, when the actual approaches might need to vary: In these two states, at least, both women are highly pragmatic, eschewing big think campaigns in favor of highlighting a return to normalcy and bringing down the cost of living. (Biden was elected "to be normal and stop the chaos," said Spanberger, who has lots of criticism to direct at her own party, back in 2021.) Sherrill focused on high energy prices and housing costs, and appears to have decent instincts with regard to how to bring those down, even if she still does a bit of gratuitous corporation-bashing.
So "run down-to-earth candidates focused on cost issues" will remain in tension with the other possible takeaway: "Run 34-year-old ideologues who've turned their brains to mush with the Fanon they mainlined at Bowdoin." Which way, Democratic Party?
Scenes from New York: Naturally.
Keith McNally says all customers and staff at Balthazar will get free champagne tonight if socialist Zohran Mamdani wins
— Timmy Facciola (@TimmyFacciola_) November 4, 2025
QUICK HITS
The Cuomintang government has fled to Staten Island.
— New Left EViews (@NewLeftEViews) November 5, 2025
- Parts of our nation's airspace might close if the government shutdown continues, warns Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. You heard that right: Air traffic controllers might just stop coming to work, in which case, we're screwed.
- "The Trump administration is sending notifications to federal staff suggesting only those who are working during the government shutdown will be paid when it ends, despite a 2019 law that guarantees pay to furloughed employees, too," reports The Washington Post.
- In Austin, Texas, Proposition Q—which would have raised property taxes drastically to allegedly pay for more city services for the homeless (and fill depleted coffers)—was rejected by voters. Inside the scrambled politics. (Even more in-depth reporting here.)
- IBM is cutting thousands of jobs, per The Wall Street Journal.
- Amazon just sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, the artificial intelligence company, saying it must "stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases online for users," per Bloomberg. "The e-commerce giant is accusing Perplexity of committing computer fraud by failing to disclose when its AI agent is shopping on a user's behalf, in violation of Amazon's terms of service, according to people familiar with the letter sent on Friday. The document also said Perplexity's tool degraded the Amazon shopping experience and introduced privacy vulnerabilities, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters."
- "Once Chinese companies have come to dominate a wide stretch of the supply chain, flooding global markets with lower-priced products in the process," reports The Wall Street Journal, "Beijing brings in export controls that allow it to leverage its advantage and impose pain or threaten rival economies. Sometimes countries can procure alternatives at higher cost, but in other cases it is hard—or nearly impossible—to find suppliers outside China."
