Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, is notable in many ways.
He will become the city’s youngest mayor since 1892, its first Muslim mayor, and its first mayor born in Africa.
He entered the race last year with next to no name recognition, little money, and no institutional party support.
That alone makes his victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa remarkable.
But more than that, he represents the kind of politician that many in the Democratic Party’s left have been seeking for years.
He is young and charismatic, with his generation’s natural comfort with social media.
His ethnicity reflects the diversity of the party’s base. He hasn’t shied away from political fights and has proudly espoused left-wing causes—such as free childcare, expanded public transportation, and government intervention in free-market systems.
Mamdani has also shown a laser-like ability to focus on the kind of core economic issues that have been a priority for working-class voters who have drifted from the Democratic Party recently, but he hasn’t disavowed the left’s cultural principles.
But critics have warned that such a candidate is unelectable in broad swathes of America – and Republicans have gleefully held the self-avowed democratic socialist up as the far-left face of the Democratic Party.
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Still, on Tuesday night in New York City, he was a winner.
By running against and defeating Cuomo, a former New York governor who is himself the son of a governor, he has vanquished the entrenched Democratic establishment viewed by many on the left as woefully out of touch with their party and their nation.
Because of this, Mamdani’s campaign for mayor has generated voluminous media attention, perhaps more than a municipal election, even one for America’s largest city, deserves.
It also means that, as mayor, his successes – and failures – will be closely scrutinised.
Twelve years ago, Democrat Bill de Blasio won his race for mayor on a platform of addressing New York City’s economic and social inequalities.
Like Mamdani, Americans on the left had high hopes that his administration would provide a national example of effective liberal governance.
De Blasio, however, departed office eight years later, widely unpopular and with a mixed record of achievements as he struggled with the limits of his mayoral power to implement new policies.
Mamdani will have to grapple with those same limits—and those same expectations.
