New Yorkers Just Dealt Americans a Win
- Gabriel Goldstein
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
In a time of crisis, class politics won against a system built to suppress it.
Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was historically unprecedented: he became the first convicted felon, the second former president to return to office as a non-incumbent, and the oldest candidate ever elected to the office of the president of the United States. In the year since defeating former Vice President Harris, Trump and the MAGA movement have advanced the perception of a grand mandate, enabling a despotic agenda that has produced more executive orders in its first hundred days than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among these are orders to punish states that do not cooperate with ICE, create new “domestic terrorist” designations for the political opposition, and condition federal grants on ideological alignment. How did we get here, and where do we go next?
To begin, despite Trump’s projection of executive power, his election does not represent a rightward shift, nor a mandate for the MAGA agenda. To see this, one must look past Harris’s defeat and instead examine Trump’s ambivalent victory among total eligible voters. Donald Trump won 3 million more votes than he did in 2020, amounting to an equivalent share of the eligible voting population (32%). At the same time, Harris’s share of eligible voters dropped 3.5 points from Biden’s 2020 campaign (31.1%). The swing in the popular vote can largely be accounted for by a decrease in turnout in the bluest counties of blue states. In these 20 counties, Harris trailed Biden’s vote count by 2.9 million—a margin greater than her total popular vote deficit to Trump across the country—while Trump improved his vote total by only 150,000 votes out of 25.6 million registered voters.
As shown above, Trump’s gains were largely the product of Democratic voter erosion: Harris underperformed relative to Biden in deep-blue counties, while Trump’s gains were minimal. Hopefully, this lets us do away with the notion that Trump’s 2024 victory was the result of an ideological shift in the American people, an endorsement of the MAGA agenda, or a mandate for authoritarianism. Instead, it’s part of a larger trend. The House, the Senate, or the executive has flipped in nine of the past 10 electoral cycles. This volatility is unprecedented in the broader history of American politics. It speaks to Americans’ invariable disapproval of the governing party and to a failure of both parties to capture the political imagination of the electorate. The story of each election is not which platform excites, but which disappoints the least. It is a politics that rewards whichever platform most effectively stokes fear by proclaiming the failure of the status quo, all the while maintaining it. Americans are tired of parties which they perceive as not being substantively different—a political system in which ambivalence supplants vigor, and neither party tangibly forwards the aims of the working-class majority of our country.
Anecdotally, this makes sense. It is not as though, especially among blue state urban voters, support for ICE paramilitary deployments has risen substantially over the past four years. Instead, these voters likely saw their vote as inconsequential in the electoral college’s calculus and—fatigued by a third straight election spent resisting MAGA—decided to stay home. In battleground states, the swing—which can be accounted for by Kamala’s vote share falling, not Trump’s rising—was even less, at only 2.2 points, as compared to 4.4 points in the rest of the country.
We are not only, as Scott Sloop recently claimed in the Forum, facing a crisis within the Democratic Party. Instead, America confronts an entire political system in crisis. And this has created openings for young leaders promising change.
Enter Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor-elect, who won in an election featuring the highest turnout in over fifty years. If you open social media and search “Mamdani” or “New York,” you’ll find endless videos of young people celebrating a platform that is certainly firebrand, but also compassionate and inclusive. Though a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s platform is not actually “socialist.” He advocates raising taxes on million-dollar earners and corporations, strengthening tenant protections through rent freezes, and expanding public services such as childcare and fare-free public transit. In practice, though, his "democratic socialism" functions as part of a moral vocabulary for pursuing redistribution within existing institutions—a liberal reformist expansion of social programs rather than an upheaval of the city’s capitalist infrastructure.
This modest departure from the mainstream drew fierce resistance from New York’s Democratic establishment. After being decidingly defeated in the primary elections, Andrew Cuomo turned coat, re-emerging with a staunchly alarmist platform featuring Islamophobic and escalatory anti-leftist rhetoric. According to a poll of likely New York City voters, Cuomo supporters ranked crime as their top concern, followed by immigration and Israel—a triad of issues lifted from a MAGA “culture war” agenda in which identity politics fracture class solidarity. Cuomo’s aggression against Mamdani highlighted the stark difference in content and character of two platforms that, just months ago, were competing for the Democratic nomination. For many young voters like myself, it was disorienting to watch a disgraced Democratic behemoth claw at a young, popular, and evidently decent candidate. We celebrate Mamdani’s victory and hope that Cuomo swiftly exits the public sphere.
It is easy to disregard Cuomo as a fringe grifter. But his campaign offers a glimpse into the machinery of both parties, which, beholden to their campaign financiers, represent the interests of the billionaire class. Andrew Cuomo and his family have been, for years, in close concert with the Democratic top brass: he received an endorsement from former President Clinton, for whom he served as Housing and Urban Development Secretary; he chaired the 2016 New York delegation to the Democratic National Convention; his father Mario served three terms as governor of New York; his similarly disgraced brother Chris hosted “Cuomo Prime Time” on CNN.
The Cuomos aren’t rogue actors. They’re emblematic of the establishment networks that shape both major parties. Culture-war scapegoats distract from shared donor loyalties, all while these establishment figures uphold the status quo—continuously advancing the wealth and prosperity of the billionaire class. It should not come as a shock that Cuomo accepted donations from Republican and Democratic billionaires, nor that Trump endorsed Cuomo and threatened federal action against a Mamdani-led New York City. Nor will it be surprising if, come future elections, we find establishment Democratic politicians aligning themselves with Republican interests against democratic socialists.
This is what makes Zohran Mamdani’s victory historic. He has loosened, if only slightly, the grip the billionaire class has on mainstream politics and political thought. The preceding essay on Mamdani’s victory by upperclassman Scott Sloop is emblematic of this grip, framing Mamdani as part of the broader “far-left” shift alongside national Democrats like Harris and Gavin Newsom, collapsing starkly different political traditions into a single undifferentiated bloc. Yet Newsom and Harris belong to the same Democratic establishment that has presided over decades of political stagnation. Newsom championed Proposition 50, a gerrymandering measure designed to consolidate party control, while Harris, in her 2024 campaign, echoed former president Biden in calling for stricter border security, stronger policing, and a continuation of American military funding to arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They sustain the economic order in the name of stability, pointing to the failures of the Republican Party while engaging with the same culture war that diverts attention from class politics and harms the constituents that they claim to represent. This rhetoric subordinates democratic socialist platforms beneath a Democratic party that, in Bernie Sanders’s words in a recent New York Times interview, “isn’t much of a party at all.” By alienating working-class Republican voters and empowering MAGA’s “culture war” theatrics, the party fortifies the billionaire class—the “people on the top” it claims to want to restrain.
Sloop’s claim that the expansion of “far-left” ideology will strengthen resistance from the Republican party platform is well-founded, though too narrow in its scope and fatalistic in its prescription. The more profound crisis, as the electoral volatility of the past two decades shows, is not polarization but stagnation. Americans are not shifting left or right—they are shifting away from platforms they no longer believe uphold their material interests. Just as there is no mandate for Trumpism, there is no requirement that the Democratic Party continue to move rightward to survive. If Democrats cannot put forward a platform that reinvigorates the political spirit of the working class, they will preside over a victorious flipping election before the next defeating flipping election, as Trumpism erodes what little liberal social freedoms they have claimed over the past twenty years.
Nevertheless, Mayor-elect Mamdani has clearly tapped into the seething apathy of Americans, especially young Americans, and channeled it toward an agenda that extends the Overton window of American politics to again include the working class within its aims. Now, the fight to reclaim our politics from billionaire interests will not be easy. After all, Cuomo broke fundraising records, revealing just how deeply entrenched the system is and how formidable the fight may be against a politician without Cuomo’s tarnished reputation. Yet, Mamdani’s victory proves that it is possible to win. Will the next Democratic candidate be a figure cast in Mamdani’s mold? Perhaps not. But the very fact that a platform serving the social good has won in the financial capital of America is a win—for all Americans.