The Mamdani Win Is Populism Par Excellence

The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic mayoral primary has made a lot of news. Some are saying that it has shaken the political world. A democratic socialist as mayor of one of the world's most expensive cities which is a choice destination for the billionaire class, does make serious headlines.

Mamdani has made sure to carry the democratic socialist label. His campaign focused on the working class, on economic issues, housing, food prices, jobs, free bus travel, and community health. The term most used was affordability, and he constantly pitched himself against the control exerted by the rich and the corporate elites.

Compounding this image was the support he received from the 'radical Left' within the Democratic party, from US representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortes (AOC) to US senator Bernie Sanders. His support for Palestinian rights completed the picture.

But if you look at the composition of his voters, the picture changes quite a bit. It turns out that Mamdani has done surprisingly well among the richest voters of New York. Newsweek had the headline, “Zohran Mamdani Leads Andrew Cuomo Among Wealthiest Voters”.

While Mamdani has got lower income voters, their numbers are not commensurate with the purported lower class focus of his campaign. Cuomo, on the other hand, has done surprisingly well among lower income voters.

Politico reported that Mamdani “drew his core constituency — affluent, highly educated white voters in Brooklyn and Queens — to the polls in droves. Cuomo, meanwhile, won over his base of Black voters, but they did not turn out enough to maintain a similar share of the overall vote compared to past elections.”

And further that "Mamdani won middle- and high-income New Yorkers while Cuomo outperformed him with voters in the lowest income brackets”.

The other metric is education. College educated youth favoured Mamdani, while those without a college degree who were mostly lower class favoured Cuomo. With regard to black voters, a former Black Panther activist and New York City councilman Charles Barron put it well: “Mamdani didn’t earn the black vote, Cuomo didn’t deserve it”.

And yet, Cuomo still got a bigger share of lower class black votes. In fact, it does appear that if Black voters had turned out in larger numbers, Mamdani might have lost the race.

Old pattern

Mamdani is only repeating an earlier pattern. Working class voters do not always vote for a candidate who is raising economic issues, price rise and affordability – and if they do, then there are additional reasons why. AOC herself was surprised to find that Trump voters had voted for her in large numbers during the 2024 presidential elections. In the minds of voters, Trump and AOC were similar. Her rhetoric of fighting “fascist Trump” was meant to create an unbridegable gap between herself and Trump – but no not in the minds of her voters. She had famously gone online to talk to these voters to understand what she found puzzling.

The answer was simple: voters identified both AOC and Trump as anti-establishment, those who will “drain the swamp”. Mamdani himself got votes from the Trump base, as he himself pointed out. As he was facing against such a hardcore Establishment figure like Cuomo, Mamdani too passed off as anti-establishment and would garner votes from the Trump base. These voters expect Mamdani to go against the liberal establishment, whole hog against the Democratic Party and not just against Cuomo. They expect Mamdani to “drain the swamp”. If Mamdani does not do that and instead just becomes the liberal establishment then, notwithstanding his democratic socialist standing, that will amount to free-riding on the support of Trump voters.

Recall also the moment when soon after the Trump victory in 2024, Bernie Sanders posted on X that first it was the White working class, now it is Black and Latino workers who have voted for Trump. This was a wake-up call for those who called themselves left, liberals or progressives.

That is, working class voters are leaving the Democratic Party and voting for Trump on very left-wing grounds – that this party has become synonymous with the Establishment. That is why AOC and Mamdani will continue to get the vote and support from this constituency. 

Some might say that this tells us the following – that these Democrats are pushing for a particular kind of 'woke' agenda, which is 'radically left'. They might say that these reflect the values and ethos of a 'professional-managerial class' as identified by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in the 1970s, but not the working class.

So Mamdani might be really speaking for the woke aristocracy, rather than for ordinary working class people. How woke radicalism connects with the Palestine issue is another story. But then, Mamdani did focus splendidly on 'working class' issues, affordability, housing and the rest, didn’t he?

Working class subject

Here is the thing.

The working class gets it when a leader seeking votes is trying to over-identify with what is regarded as their issue of affordability and economic hardship. Often the working class and particularly the Black working class feel that they are being sequestered into this narrow economic issue. The working class wants to be seen as a political subject at the highest level. That might be why they want to be seen as part of Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, something Bernie Sanders still does not seem to understand. So they do not want to be seen to pursue only their own narrow gains, nor do they want to be thought of as a purely economic animal . This might have an impact on the elitism of the so-called 'pro-working class' leaders. I see some on the Left are giving the call Make America Good Again, for whatever it is worth.

On the other hand, take for example  Charles Barron’s point about why Mamdani can talk about Palestine but will not focus on the demand for reparations for the Black community. The Palestinian issue or the issue about Islamophobia brings in high visibility and media coverage in a way which the issue of reparations for Black people does not. Mamdani does not want to raise specifically Black issues because the Jewish lobby might attack him, according to Barron.

What we find is that the grass roots activism of Mamdani and AOC is highly calibrated to make sure that it would get picked up by and amplified by the local and global media. They are still wedded to the Big Brother, to the Establishment, and to what Black activists might call the Plantation. This is when you feel that democratic socialist self-image can be just a cop-out, taking on the most pious and radical stance. Apart from the fact that the word socialist is a culture war incitement in the US.

We tend to overlook all of this because Mamdani is very much under attack by the right-wing, invoking his Muslim identity and what not. MAGA’s Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani must not, however, be read as proof of his working class base. Mamdani and AOC are operating very much within the frame of culture wars, rather than that of class. It is the working class voters, as we saw, who approach and support them from the standpoint of class.

The billionaire class that AOC and Sanders keep attacking, of course, understands all of this. AOC and Sanders also know that the billionaire class understands what their politics is really about. 

Populist success?

The more interesting aspect of all this is in regard to what is going on at the level of representation and alliances across social bases, which might give a different picture. For now we enter  the domain of claims and symbolic gestures. At this level, it of course feels like Mamdani has the Black working class on his side. And here, of course, we have to view this matter in the framework of populism. 

Populism works by pitting the people against the elite. The internal composition of both groups keeps shifting and yet the oppositional divide works. 

So at this level, Mamdani has done a commendable job in pulling a cross class alliance which stretches across social groups. While he has got support from posh Jewish suburbs, the Palestinian/Arab and Jewish communities escaping the zero-sum 'Hamas versus Zionism' framing is worth noticing here. He has convincingly silenced those who accused him of anti-Semitism. For the beleaguered left today, this is no today populism par excellence.

And yet, as we know, even remaining within the framework of populism, where alliances are contingent and constantly sliding, , we notice big gaps in the popular support Mamdani is supposed to enjoy. Exclusions of certain sections seem endemic, rather than contingent. The construction of the 'people' is a work in progress, but here it feels like a way to elide over real class and power relations. It is in the nature of populism that it does feel like everyone is somehow represented in that alliance and thus, internal contradictions do not appear so clearly. Just declaring everything contingent, does not per se make everything contingent, as the Marxists have repeatedly pointed out with regard to populism.

Mamdani is at that moment where his populism must address the endemic asymmetries underlying what looks like an interplay of heterogeneous and diverse social forces. Then he might have to address the 'Arab versus Black' kind of split that is internal to the people. Arab and Asian immigrant hostility towards Blacks is also a real thing. One can only recommend watching Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), in which he explores the anti-Black racism of the postcolonial immigrant community. 

Right now Mamdani has just kind of glided over the deeper divides that can only be overcome through more genuine silent grassroots activism, not the flashy one playing 24x7 on social media. So we should not dismiss what K. J. Freeman is saying about Mamdani being a dangerous performance.

As pointed out earlier, just attacking billionaires, fascists and oligarchs  might come in handy in creating the populist narrative, but going forward, intractable problems are sure to arise. If anything, this celebratory, self-congratulatory populism becomes a symptom of the refusal to address the internal contradictions and keep gliding across through so-called alliances.

Out of the plantation 

The only way out is for Mamdani to listen to the aspirations of the voters. He should not imagine that working class voters have just innocently believed in his narrative and hence given him a mandate. Of course, on the face of it, that is the case, so he can just go forward with it. That would be disingenuous on his part, as that would amount to denying the political imagination which has given him this victory. Only the wealthy liberal White votes and compromised Black leaders like Jamaal Bowman want him to do just that. 

But if, as we saw, these voters expect him to break with not just Trump and the “fascists” but also with the liberal establishment, then he must completely break with the Democratic Party. As the Black Panthers say, he must leave the plantation altogether along with his mass base. Otherwise he will go the AOC, Bernie Sanders way – some kind of an inner conscience of the party, while being a mute spectator.

 Breaking out of the Democratic Party altogether, going beyond the two-party monopoly in the US, might seem utopian, as though one is asking for too much. Not at all. As we saw, a large section of the mandate aspires for precisely that new rupture. Bernie Sanders should understand that the black and latino workers who he said swung towards Trump really expect him to start a new radical political process and not keep playing the role of the jaded pious man inside the Democratic Party. Mamdani should step up to that role.

We must guard against getting captivated and immobilised by this victory. Populist victories tend to look rosier than they actually are. In that sense, a win like that of Zohran Mamdani somehow gets to you. It comes with the injunction that we must all feel good about it.

We have been here before, and yet it feels like this is the first time and so we must give it our all, not play spoilsport and let the possibilities unfold. There are self-serving and self-referential loops here. Is this why Freeman wants to call Mamdani’s win a dangerous performance?

Saroj Giri teaches politics at the University of Delhi.

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