New Yorkers aren’t the only ones trying to wrap their heads around Zohran Mamdani.
Democratic Party operatives and elected officials around the country are both flabbergasted and inspired by the 33-year-old democratic socialist’s stunning success in Tuesday’s mayoral primary. In text chains and private conversations, they are scouring election precinct data from parts of Queens and the Bronx some had never heard of before and trying to understand how Mamdani might affect races all over the country.
Mamdani, a three-term state assemblyman, is poised to win pending a ranked-choice tally after his top rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, conceded the race Tuesday.
Many Democrats on Wednesday publicly embraced the enthusiasm Mamdani generated with younger voters by focusing on the affordability crisis gripping New York and many other places across the country. They also tried to avoid associating too closely with Mamdani proposals like freezing rent or opening government-run grocery stores that they think could get easily caricatured.
“Running a city myself, I’m not sure all those ideas are actionable and practical in the way they sound on a TikTok video, but that aside, he met people, he listened to people,” said Paige Cognetti, mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday morning, weeks after she romped in her own primary against her own city Democratic Party chair.
Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, New York City natives who lead their parties’ caucuses in each chamber of Congress, quickly issued statements saying they had spoken to Mamdani and praising the campaign he ran. They stopped short of endorsing him.
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, who flipped a House seat in the New York suburbs last year, lit Mamdani up as “the absolute wrong choice for New York” and derided his campaign as “built on unachievable promises and higher taxes.” Rep. Tom Suozzi, from a neighboring district on Long Island, said he still had “serious concerns” about Mamdani.
President Donald Trump, a Queens native, posted Wednesday that Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic,” echoing Republicans who say they’ll try to elevate him as a Democratic symbol.
Rep. George Latimer, a freshman from the New York suburbs who beat a Mamdani-aligned Democrat in his own primary last year, said he worries about Democrats in tough districts being associated with the mayoral candidate and his platform.
“It’s going to be tough for front-liners because they’re in districts that have a lot of Republicans in it that would look at a Democrat and want to hear the narrative, ‘Oh, this guy’s radical,’” he said.
In her swing corner of the nation’s biggest swing state, Cognetti thinks New York City politics only registers so much. She can already see Republicans salivating, though.
“I’m sure the ads are already being cut by the Republicans,” she told CNN, “but to me the lesson for the Democratic establishment is we need to stop thinking that the ads from 2006 are going to work in 2026.”
The rush by some to write Mamdani off or distance from him is a way to more losses, Cognetti argued.
“If 2024 wasn’t a wake-up call,” she said, “this needs to be.”
One possible lesson: Focus on affordability
Mamdani engaged thousands of new voters, expanding the electorate and encroaching into many neighborhoods and demographics where progressives had long struggled, with his ideas to help residents stay in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas. To pay for his ideas, he’s pushing for tax increases on the wealthy, something New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has said is a non-starter.
“For folks who are not happy about the cost of living in this city, you can point to a lot of people with traditional experience,” said Kal Penn, the actor and activist who worked briefly in the Obama White House and is a Mamdani family friend, standing at Mamdani’s election night party on Tuesday.
“No disrespect to them — a lot of them are my friends, and I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done together,” he added. “But that question of where to take the party and why certain things aren’t working, I think what you’re seeing is the solution to that, which is really bold ideas that are scalable, talking to people with respect, including as many people as possible in that movement, knocking on as many doors.”
Democrats will need to win seats in much tougher terrain than New York City to flip the House or cut into their deficit in the Senate in next year’s midterms, or to make the 2028 presidential election go better than last year, when Donald Trump won every swing state.
That’s the wrong way to look at what happened, argued Tommy McDonald, a Democratic ad maker who’s worked on multiple winning economic populist campaigns.
“In primaries and general elections, voters have rewarded people that are focused on concerns of class and issues that make their lives better,” McDonald said. “That’s a pretty consistent gain whether you’re talking about people who are deciding whether to sit on their couch or vote, who are deciding between primary fields of a lot of candidates, or the narrow sliver of the electorate that’s deciding whether to vote for Democrats or Republicans.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has embraced a more aggressive, populist stance himself since Trump’s second win, said this is what he has heard Democrats asking for, whether at home in Connecticut or as he’s been traveling to places like North Carolina and Missouri for town halls.
“I know that this feels like a shock to a lot of folks but it doesn’t seem like rocket science. He’s focused on reordering economic power, he’s dynamic, and he’s a new voice. Check, check, check,” Murphy said of Mamdani. Voters “want you to have a couple of new ideas. They don’t mind that some of that could sound a little dangerous. It’s almost like a calling card at this point to have some ideas that are out of the 20-yard line.”
The furor and speculation doesn’t appear to have reached everyone in Democratic politics. Asked for comment about the primary, one House member granted anonymity to speak candidly responded: “Who is Zohran?”
Echoes of AOC
But the last time a New York election evoked so much shock nationally was in 2018, when a near-unknown democratic socialist beat New York Rep. Joe Crowley in a primary. Now one of the best-known progressives in the country, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed and campaigned with Mamdani in the primary.
John Liu, a state senator from Queens and former city comptroller who endorsed Mamdani in the final stretch, pointed out that he himself is not a socialist but that he is excited to see the likely Democratic nominee try for all his big ideas.
“What is socialism exactly? The reality is that there are leaders like Zohran who think that government can and must do more. And I think at the end in its basic essence, that’s probably what socialism is, even though it’s still a nasty word for a lot of people. It’s just about having government understand people and do more for people,” Liu said. “Government’s certainly doing a lot of things for people who don’t really need the help. You know, the, the multi-billionaires have gotten a huge break in this country and in this city.”
Even New York Democrats who were not with Mamdani — including those whose feelings about Cuomo ranged from skepticism to disgust — urge those same counterparts around the country to take a breath.
“It shows that there’s a lot of foment in the party, a lot of dissatisfaction with the way the party and the country and the city are,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Manhattan-based congressman long seen as a liberal lion of the city who endorsed one of Mamdani’s other opponents and is already being talked about by several prominent New York progressives as the next target for a primary challenge. He has since endorsed Mamdani.
“We don’t know how far the party is going to go. This is one election for one person,” Nadler said.
One New York-based Democratic consultant also urged party leaders not to rush their reads on Mamdani’s win. The consultant noted that the winner of the primary four years ago was also held up as a model for the Democratic Party’s future, embraced by then-President Joe Biden and called “a rock I can build a church on” by then-House Democrats’ campaign chair Sean Patrick Maloney.
Now, Eric Adams is running for reelection as an independent. His likely Democratic opponent in the fall will be Mamdani. And Biden and Maloney are both out of office.
CNN’s Manu Raju in Washington contributed to this report.
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