Andrew Cuomo’s allies spent a fortune shouting that Zohran Mamdani is a socialist. Result? A Mamdani landslide in the Democratic primary.
Zohran Mamdani attends the 2025 New York City Pride March on June 29, 2025.
(Noam Galai / Getty Images)
Fifty-six percent of New Yorkers supported a democratic socialist for the Democratic Party’s nomination to lead the nation’s largest city, according to New York City’s ranked choice voting tabulation. The results, which were released Tuesday, gave Zohran Mamdani a resounding 56-44 victory over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, confirming that Mamdani’s campaign had upended not only the calculus of municipal politics of New York City but also of a national Democratic Party that is struggling to identify its ideological direction following its 2024 election setbacks.
Mamdani’s grassroots campaign helped fuel the highest turnout in a Democratic mayoral primary since 1989. He secured a striking 545,334 primary votes in round three of the ranked choice voting process, and declared, “Democrats spoke in a clear voice, delivering a mandate for an affordable city, a politics of the future, and a leader unafraid to fight back against rising authoritarianism.” He also achieved a much-coveted goal of the left: expanding the electorate by getting tens of thousands of new voters, particularly young voters, to the polls.
Mamdani’s sweeping victory came after a campaign in which he and his opponents were absolutely clear about where the 33-year-old state legislator was coming from.
Two days before New York City’s June 24 primary, Cuomo made a last desperate attempt to scare Democrats away from supporting the surging campaign of a rival who had begun his bid with scant name recognition and single-digit poll numbers. The former governor used the “S” word, warning that the party was being “taken over by this far-left socialist mentality” and complaining that his ideological rivals wanted to do things like “invest all the money in education.”
Cuomo’s attack wasn’t just an end-of-the-race Hail Mary. During the long course of the campaign for the Democratic nod in New York City, the Cuomo camp and the free-spending political action committees that backed it left zero doubt that, like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, 1963 March on Washington organizers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and Pledge of Allegiance author Francis Bellamy, Mamdani had embraced a socialist vision for achieving economic and social and racial justice in the United States. Media outlets—especially The New York Post—highlighted every “grim warning to New Yorkers about electing a socialist mayoral candidate.”
Yet, Mamdani refused to run scared. He explained on a pre-primary Bloomberg podcast that, “I am a democratic socialist, yes. I started to call myself that after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president, when I finally had a language that described how I saw the world, and the way that I believe the world should be — which is one where every person has the dignity they need to live a decent life.” While Cuomo complained that Mamdani’s program was “just a fantasy,” Mamdani leaned into his ambitious platform, offering a costed-out plan to tax the rich and multinational corporations in order to pay for free buses, affordable housing, more access to healthcare, universal childcare and, yes, lots of education.
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Mamdani put an exclamation mark on things by welcoming the active support of Democratic Socialists of America campaigners in New York, along with endorsements from the nation’s two most prominent democratic socialists: Sanders, I-Vermont, and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York.
By end of the primary campaign, New Yorkers had gotten to know Mamdani and his agenda, and they approved. Yet, his critics still thought that attaching the socialist label would somehow disqualify the first-time mayoral candidate in the eyes of New York City voters. They were sorely mistaken. The initial election results weren’t even close. Mamdani finished so far ahead of Cuomo—with 44 percent to 36 percent for the former governor—that the former governor conceded on election night.
Headlines identified Mamdani as the winner long before the conclusion of the ranked-choice-voting process, which would only increase his numbers. The maps of where and how Mandani won were striking. The assemblyman was carrying Brooklyn by a staggering 17 points and maintaining comfortable leads in vote-rich Manhattan and Queens. Indeed, Mamdani won so many diverse neighborhoods in the vast city that, on election night, he was able to declare, “We have won from Harlem to Bay Ridge. We have won from Jackson Heights to Port Richmond. We have won from Maspeth to Chinatown.”
That freaked out the editors of The Post, which headlined its Wednesday morning post-primary paper, “NYC SOS: Who will save city after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral primary?” Fox News and other conservative media outlets took up the call, referring to Mamdani’s proposals to make rent, transportation, and food more affordable as “kind of bonkers.” President Trump labeled Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic” in a post-primary Truth Social post that scholars and fact-checkers immediately rated “false.” (He also questioned Mamdani’s citizenship and threatened to arrest him if Mamdani blocked New York from cooperating with ICE agents.) Corporate-aligned Democrats such as US Rep. Laura Gillen, D-New York, griped about the choice the voters had made. “I just didn’t think that New York would elect someone who is a self-proclaimed socialist to lead the city that is the global epicenter of capitalism. So, I was very surprised.”
But she shouldn’t have been surprised. The issue was litigated in the primary campaign—in debates, television appearances, TV ads, and mailings. It was all over the media. Yet, voters weren’t dissuaded. They chose a candidate who said, “This entire race was about the question of affordability, and ultimately I have run a campaign that speaks about the tools that city government actually has to deliver that affordability in the wealthiest city and the wealthiest country in the world.”
Mamdani defines his democratic socialism in an American context, saying, “Ultimately, the definition for me of why I call myself a democratic socialist is found in the words of Dr. King decades ago, when he said: call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country. And that’s what I’m focused on: dignity and taking on income inequality. For too long, politicians have pretended that we’re spectators to that crisis of affordability. We’re actually actors, and we have the choice to exacerbate it, like Mayor Adams has done, or to respond to it and resolve it, like I’m doing.”
Mamdani will face scandal-plagued incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking reelection on a third-party line, in November. Republican Curtis Sliwa is in the running, and Cuomo has reportedly decided to keep his name on the ballot, though it’s unclear whether he’ll actually mount a serious campaign.
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In the fall race, there will undoubtedly be plenty of talk about socialism. But New York is familiar with that. It’s a city that sent a Socialist Party leader, labor lawyer Meyer London, to Congress in the 1910s and 1920s, and that continues to elect AOC and many democratic socialist state legislators today. It’s also a city that repeatedly elected Fiorello La Guardia as its mayor in the 1930s and 1940s. Before he became mayor, La Guardia was a US House member who once won reelection to Congress on the Socialist Party ticket. As mayor, he frequently aligned with leftist political projects such as the old American Labor Party.
La Guardia took heat for those choices in his time, just as Mamdani does today. Yet, La Guardia was elected mayor of New York City in 1933, beating an incumbent Democrat at the height of the Great Depression. In his 1937 reelection bid, he again defeated the Democratic machine. And he did so once more in 1941. During the period of his mayoralty, one of La Guardia’s urban allies was Milwaukee Mayor Dan Hoan. One of three Socialists who led Milwaukee for most of the period from 1910 to 1960, Hoan was credited with making the city a model of sound and equitable governance. Indeed, during his 24-year tenure, Time magazine reported, “Milwaukee became one of the best-run cities in the US.”
Hoan did so in much the way Mamdani proposes to do now: as a defender of immigrants, a champion of racial justice, a supporter of labor unions and an advocate for bold programs to improve the circumstances of the working class. He even set up municipally operated grocery markets to lower food prices, as Mandani proposes to do in New York City. Like Mamdani today, Hoan was attacked for his ideology. “He counts the city’s bankers, utilities men and big real estate owners his sworn enemies,” noted Time in a 1936 profile of Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor. “The Press, except for a small Socialist sheet, is solidly against him. Republicans and Democrats have virtually lost their separate identities in uniting to oppose him. Yet Daniel Webster Hoan remains one of the nation’s ablest public servants, and under him Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
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