Thursday Open Thread: What Lesson Should Democrats Learn from Mamdani's Election
Hint: New blood
I’m seeing a lot of pieces claiming that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City, with just over 50% of the vote, is a mandate for a far-left agenda. Free buses, government-run grocery stores, and gender-affirming care for all! That’s the future young Americans want!
Or do they?
Are there, perhaps, other lessons we should learn? Like, maybe don’t run terrible, tired, charmless old candidates like Cuomo? Or that candidates really need to make awesome, bite-sized TikToks and do things like walk the length of Manhattan to drive support? That they need to provide opportunities for young people to commune—in person!—around a vision of a better future, at a time of so much uncertainty?
That is: we need something, anything, new. Mamdani is full of charm. He’s poised. He’s got a terrific smile. And he has a real vision, no matter how difficult it will be to accomplish it. He is knowable, relatable, and appears trustworthy. He also took his opponents’ attacks like, well, a man.
What lessons do you think Democrats should learn—and where does the gender issue fit in?
"Like, maybe don’t run terrible, tired, charmless old candidates like Cuomo?" Definitely. But also, I think Tuesday's elections represent, in part, a mandate against Trump-style Republicans. The liberals I know hate him. As in, hate him. Total TDS. I mean, I'm no fan. I think he's absolutely despicable. But that doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly vote for the Dems (which I have not, since 2020, because of the gender stuff). There's not only a lot for the Dems to learn from this; there's also a lot for Republicans to learn. I frequently chat with Republican (and former Republican) friends who also hate Trump. I think a lot of American voters would be happy if our candidates could just try to be vaguely normal humans. That's probably wildly idealistic on my part, but here we are.
My current working theory is that Mamdani won because people feel battered, they need hope, and Mamdani inspired hope. It was striking to me to see a stat where 73% of voters thought Cuomo had the greatest governing skill, with Mamdani at a much lower percent—yet that didn’t seem to matter. Cuomo was a terrible candidate. Among his many other flaws, he was incapable, throughout this campaign, of inspiring hope. Indeed his meanest self, and that’s saying something, was on full display.
Where I live, we saw this surge of hopefulness all around us: A slight mention of concern about Mamdani, and even our older normie Dem friends’ faces visibly fell (even one who voted for Giuliani instead of Dinkins back in the day). Our neighbor Y was practically levitating with hope, and she’s more often a bit of a cynic.
And our social activist neighbor and truly an all-around good person was totally in her element, in her Zohran T-shirt, just back from a round of GOTV. She was in our lobby talking with a solid, generally very clear-eyed and well-informed, Democratic member of the building staff, who is excited, too (and he has no interest in, eg, males in women’s sports, which he long ago described, at its first mention, as a “losing position”).
I am still thinking about what this means for those of us who are aware and deeply concerned about the Democratic sex-denialist stances and all the harm they are causing on so many fronts. I’ll offer this preliminary thought for those of us who live in NYC, where Democrats are practically the whole ballgame: we need to find ways to become much more effective at and significantly scale up outreach to Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. The aim would be to build much, much more support at the grassroots level, and then aim that at our D electeds, who do know, generally, how to count votes. I only wish I knew how to make this happen.
PS: on another matter—I am in CA on an overdue visit with my 97-year-old Mom (she is an old-style small government conservative). Of course my planned mode of transportation back to NYC is by air. Good times . . .