In a year dominated so far by terrible news — the cruelty and chaos unleashed by the Donald Trump administration, the spectre of war in Iran, the atrocities in Gaza — many on the Left in the United States are drawing hope and inspiration from the New York City mayoral race. This year’s campaign pitted Andrew Cuomo, the champion of the establishment Democratic Party, and Zohran Mamdani, a left-wing insurgent. It was a reprise of the 2020 battle between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, but this time — to the surprise of many — victory went to the insurgent.
Neal Meyer works as a project manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York Office.
The Setting
For years, the state of New York as well as New York City have been governed by Democrats. The state party leadership is dominated by neoliberal centrists in the mould of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. With few exceptions, Democratic governors and mayors have been recruited from their ranks.
The most significant of these in recent years was Andrew Cuomo. The son of a famous liberal former New York governor, Cuomo led the state from 2011 until 2021. He did oversee the legalization of same-sex marriage and cannabis use, raised the state’s minimum wage, and signed into law its paid family leave policy in the face of popular pressure. Nevertheless, that nominally progressive record was undercut by most of his other efforts, including tax cuts for the rich and corporations, major budget cuts to healthcare and education spending, and starving the city’s public transportation system of much-needed funding for repairs. Major funding instead went to a series of expensive construction projects: a major new bridge, an extension of the subway line to the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood, and a new main train hall for NYC. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Cuomo ordered nursing homes not to test incoming patients for the virus and required them to admit patients regardless of whether they had COVID or not. This led to especially lethal outbreaks in old-age homes compared to other states, while Cuomo’s team worked aggressively to cover them up.
Cuomo was most famous for his vindictive control of state politics and abusive treatment of those under him as well as his barely-concealed corruption. These traits made him an effective representative of the major real estate and financial institutions who have long funded his campaigns. They needed a fighter in New York to keep progressives in check, and Cuomo did the job well. In return, companies and wealthy backers have long showered his campaign coffers with gargantuan contributions.
Cuomo’s time as governor ended, however, when multiple women reported being sexually harassed and assaulted by him. After resisting calls to step down for months, Cuomo eventually relented and resigned in the summer of 2021.
Despite the state Democratic Party being dominated by neoliberal centrists, New York City is home to one of the largest bases of left-leaning progressives and democratic socialists in the US.
While Cuomo’s tenure as governor was long and notoriously eventful, New York’s incumbent mayor Eric Adams has had a comparatively short but no less corrupt time as an executive. Adams has no progressive policy accomplishments. Instead, he declared war on homeless people in the city in his first year in the office, tasking the police with ejecting them from the subway system and breaking down their temporary shelters. His budgets also slashed funding for education and other social services in pursuit of an austerity agenda. He also has been especially hostile to migrants.
Like Cuomo, Adams is an aggressive defender of the city’s rich and its real estate developers — and like Cuomo, scandals will most characterize his tenure. Many of his closest associates and staffers have been taken down on corruption charges. In 2023, Adams himself was accused of taking bribes from the Turkish government in return for favourable treatment of its consulate in the city and not attending an Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day event. An FBI investigation was opened.
After the election of Donald Trump last year, Adams and Trump developed an alliance. In recent months, Adams has worked with the Trump administration to sidestep NYC’s laws protecting undocumented immigrants. With Adams’s support, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has sent agents into the city to round up immigrants. ICE arrests have spread fear throughout the immigrant community in NYC, and also target those with full rights to live in the US, most famously the Palestine solidarity organizer Mahmoud Khalil. While immigrants suffer, Adams’s alliance with Trump has been beneficial to the mayor: in April, the Trump administration ended the investigation into the mayor’s alleged corruption.
The Challenger
Despite the state Democratic Party being dominated by neoliberal centrists, New York City is home to one of the largest bases of left-leaning progressives and democratic socialists in the US. As the abysmal record of Cuomo and Adams creates space for a much bolder and more hopeful left-wing politics, this base has given those politics its full-throated support. In the 2025 mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani became the unlikely face of that movement.
Mamdani is a state legislator from Queens. He is 33 years old and was born in Uganda. His parents moved to the United States when he was a child. He co-founded his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and has been a political activist ever since. After graduating from university, he worked as a housing rights organizer. Following Trump’s first election, Mamdani was one of the tens of thousands of young people who joined the resurgent Democratic Socialists of America in 2017. He was a DSA activist before running for the state legislature and winning along with a slate of DSA candidates in 2020. Since then, he has been one of DSA’s most vocal and outspoken champions in state politics, whose biggest legislative accomplishment is the passage of a pilot project to bring free buses to New York city.
As a candidate for mayor, Mamdani championed a number of progressive and left-wing policies. The campaign was most vocal about its support for three plans to reduce the cost of living in New York: a proposal to freeze rent increases on the approximately one million rent-controlled apartments in New York, a plan to make all buses in the city free, and a new pilot program to build five municipally owned grocery stores.
On Tuesday, 24 June, almost 1 million of the city’s Democrats voted in the primary to decide who will get the party’s nomination to run in the general election in November. Given the city’s overwhelming Democratic majority, the primary election usually decides who will be mayor, and the November election acts as a final, formal step to confirm the result.
The mayoral campaign is generally a staid affair, but this year’s race so far has been full of surprises and attracted unprecedented national attention. The entry into the primary of Andrew Cuomo, who was attempting to revive his political career, drove the scandal-ridden Adams out of the Democratic nomination battle. (Adams is still running in the general election, but as an independent.) Cuomo quickly cornered the centrist vote within the Democratic camp and jumped to first place in every poll. His support relied on much of the city’s politically disinterested Democratic base who routinely vote for the party’s established leaders with the best name recognition. Cuomo also had the backing of many of the party’s longstanding local community leaders, who still command the loyalty of many voters. Much of the national party establishment consolidated around Cuomo as well — including former president Bill Clinton.
Despite winning the nomination, Mamdani will now face an even more challenging run in the general election.
Cuomo deftly used crime to scare many into backing him as the “law-and-order” candidate. That effort was made easier by the fact that many of the city’s progressive candidates, including Mamdani, were strong supporters of the Black Lives Matter mobilizations in 2020. Those mobilizations championed the demand to “defund the police”, a demand Cuomo consistently harped on. Mamdani, for his part, says he does not support defunding the police. Instead, he wants to create a new Department of Community Safety that would task social workers with most of the work of dealing with the city’s homeless and those with mental health needs.
Cuomo’s biggest asset, however, was the millions of dollars his top supporters were willing to spend on his behalf. Recent reports show that Cuomo was able to rely on almost millions of dollars in spending independent of his campaign from backers including former Mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Trump-supporter and billionaire Bill Ackman, and the food delivery company Doordash. That’s in addition to the millions of dollars Cuomo’s own campaign raised and is spending — money raised largely from the wealthiest in the city and beyond.
Given the fact that New York politicians have long had an especially close relationship with their Israeli counterparts and that right-wing, pro-Israel groups are very influential in city politics, the daily atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza were a major focus of debate. Mamdani and DSA have been adamant opponents of US support for Israel’s government and US arms sales to its army for years and were among the first voices to call for a ceasefire in 2023. Cuomo and his supporters tried to twist this into antisemitism on Mamdani’s part. Many in the city’s Jewish community denounced these baseless accusations, but it became a main line of attack in part because Mamdani is Muslim. Islamophobic and racist overtones have been a constant feature throughout the election and led to at least one incident of political violence. At a recent Mamdani event, a campaign supporter was bitten by an attacker accusing Mamdani of antisemitism. Mamdani himself has also been on the receiving end of numerous death threats.
Cuomo and his supporters also relentlessly attacked Mamdani for proposing what they claimed are irresponsibly expensive proposals. But as a long list of internationally-recognized economists recently noted in a signed open letter, Mamdani’s proposals are tested, consisting of programs the city could afford if it raised taxes on the rich.
The Final Stretch
Democratic primaries in New York City use a ranked-choice voting system. In this system, all voters are asked to rank their preferred candidates from 1 to 5 on their ballot, with 1 being their top choice. Ballots are then counted in rounds. In the first round, all first place rankings are counted. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-place rankings, rounds of counting begins. In each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. When a candidate is eliminated, their votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates according to who each voter ranked next on their ballot. Rounds of counting continue until only two candidates remain, at which point the candidate with the most votes wins.
The ranked-choice voting system proved to be especially beneficial to the city’s progressive and left-wing candidates this year. While a number of such candidates ran, they joined forces as part of the “DREAM” campaign (“Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor”) and were also all endorsed by the city’s progressive Working Families Party, which, while technically an independent party, primarily works as a left-leaning faction inside the Democratic Party. The WFP placed Mamdani at the top of its ranking.
In the final weeks of the campaign, the energy around Mamdani was electric. Mamdani’s early campaign was powered by members of DSA who fanned out across the city to recruit volunteers and raise money for his effort. Many of Mamdani’s top campaign staffers are DSA activists, but tens of thousands of volunteers joined the campaign in the last two months. Together they mounted one of the city’s most ambitious canvassing operations ever. Many of these have also joined DSA, and the citywide organization has grown by thousands in the last few months. Mamdani supporters were at many early voting poll sites, knocked on doors across the city, and spread out on street corners and even on the water. The late endorsement of Mamdani by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders added yet more fuel to the grassroots movement.
Despite winning the nomination, Mamdani will now face an even more challenging run in the general election: Eric Adams will almost certainly be in the field as an independent, and the Republicans are running Curtis Sliwa, the leader of a quasi-vigilante group called the Guardian Angels. Ordinarily, Sliwa would stand no chance (he ran and lost in 2021 as well, garnering less than a third of the vote), but in a multi-candidate competitive general election, victory is not impossible. The other question that remains to be answered is whether Cuomo or another candidate backed by the city’s business class will run in the general election as a third-party candidate.
Many questions hang over the race and will be decided in the weeks and months to come. But for now, Mamdani and his supporters in DSA and on the Left are relishing a hard-won victory.