The first major elections since Donald Trump re-entered the White House were a major blow to him and his party. But the stunning result in New York was also a significant rebuke to the leadership of the Democratic Party which, in the main, has put up little resistance to the challenge posed by Trump’s far right agenda.
Right across the USA there were hundreds of elections, for positions ranging from mayoralties to state governors down to city officials, judges and school board governments. The key contests of the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia and the mayoralty of the biggest city in the USA, New York were won by the Democrats, giving a bloody nose to Trump and the Republicans.
By far the most significant vote was in New York, where there was the highest voter turnout for decades and where ‘democratic socialist’ Zorhan Mamdani won 50.4% of the vote. He was well ahead of his nearest rival, and the man beaten to the Democratic nomination, Andrew Cuomo, and the Republican, Curtis Silwa, a distant third with just over 7%. Trump had backed Silwa at first, but swung behind Cuomo towards the end, in an attempt to stop Mamdani.
For the first time ever, the biggest city in the USA, like London, has a Muslim mayor. Before the election, the Republicans and their client media threw everything they could at Mamdani to discredit him. He was a “communist” who was bound to “ruin” the economy of the city. He faced a disgraceful barrage of Islamophobia, Cuomo even suggesting he would have supported the 9/11 attack.
Billionaires pumped tons of money into anti-Mamdani advertising. Forbes, the magazine for the very wealthy, reported that “26 billionaires and members of billion-dollar families from around the country have sunk at least $100,000 each into supporting Cuomo…,” adding that altogether they spent “over $22 million to back opposition campaigns, flooding the airwaves and mailboxes of Big Apple residents with anti-Mamdani messages”.
All to no avail, because in the event, Mamdani won handsomely, winning four out of the five New York boroughs, including Brooklyn, where the majority of the New York Jewish population live, where he got nearly 57% of the vote. Mamdani was an outspoken critic of Israel and its policies in Gaza and the West Bank, but he still drew a significant proportion of the New York Jewish vote. A poll by Fox News prior to the vote (October 16) had shown him heading for 28% of the Jewish vote, against Cuomo’s 42%.
In his blog, Ken Klippenstein noted that “Zohran Mamdani won by literally meeting people where they’re at — in bodegas, subway stations, busy sidewalks, even at the New York Marathon. He met people on the streets, not to pitch them, but to listen and learn”. Many of these interviews featured in this video in which it was ordinary working people who were the centre stage, not Mamdani.
The interviewees raised all the ‘ordinary’ issues of every day life: prices, rents, the cost of transport, low pay, high prices and rents, and so on and in circulating videos like this, Mamdani came across as a ‘man of the people’ and not a ‘professional’ politician. “If you’re speaking the things that people want to hear about, I don’t care what colour you are, I’ll vote for you,” one woman told him.
Mamdani electrified and energised a whole layer of young activists, including many members of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, in a similar way to the Corbyn movement in Britain in 2015 and 2016. He won support above all because of his radical agenda and a commitment to address the cost of living crisis that affects so many working class people.
Mamdani’s policies (see inset above, from his platform website, here), addressed directly the permanent squeeze on living standards that voters face. In a city where many workers have to do two or more jobs just to stand still, where some New Yorkers can no longer afford to live in the city but have to commute there, his promises of meaningful reforms struck a chord among hundreds of thousands of workers and youth.
Overwhelmingly, younger voters favoured Mamdani and he polled ahead of his rivals on all of the key issues voters thought important: housing, the economy, taxes and crime. A detailed post-election analysis of the vote may show slightly different figures, but the general pattern will no doubt be as these polls predicted.
Mamdani tapped into a profound, but barely articulated ‘gut’ feeling: that the system is rigged against workers. The US polling agency Pew reported in 2021 that 87% of Americans believe that the government should play a role in ensuring clean air and water; 64% that it should ensure health insurance for everyone and 43% that it should even provide high speed Internet access.
The major New York City trade unions endorsed him, including SEIU, and AFSCME District Council 37, the largest union in the city. The New York Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, equivalent to a city-wide TUC, also endorsed him.
When the detailed stats are revealed for these elections, they will show that younger voters today are overwhelmingly, in favour of radical change. What we saw in New York, and elsewhere in the USA, can be considered part of the world-wide protest of youth against a corrupt system, rigged in the interests of the rich and super-rich.
The swing against the Republicans in these elections, is likely to be repeated on a bigger scale in the mid-terms in November next year. They are an indication of growing opposition to Trump and his increasingly authoritarian regime. More than anything, the elections were influenced by workers’ living standards, although the creeping authoritarianism of Trump and the relentless raids against the Latino population will have also had an effect.
Trump may try to find solace in the fact, as he says, “I wasn’t on the ballot”, but that is his usual empty bluster. The rot runs deeper than that. It is the growing insecurity and uncertainty of everyday life – living standards – that is fundamentally undermining him. The US federal administration is now in day 37 of its shutdown, the longest in US history. That means that wage packets of federal employees are not being paid and many poorer families will be getting increasingly desperate.
All eyes now will be on New York and what Mamdani is able to do after his inauguration on January 1. In his victory speech, which is worth watching, he quoted the American socialist Eugene Debs and he freely acknowledged that he has raised the expectations and hopes of millions of New Yorkers.
But he has powerful enemies. The press and the billionaire class is bitterly opposed to Mamdani, not only for the promised reforms – which, Mamdani says, will be paid for by the rich – but for the sin of raising expectations and opening the door to a different possible future. Trump has threatened to withold federal grants and payments to the city of New York and in that alone there is a guaranteed recipe of consititutional and juridicial crises.
Seven years ago, another radical Democratic candidate won against the bitter resistance of the established party apparatus. She was Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, a figure still well to the left of most Democrats in Congress, but nevertheless, increasingly seen, like Bernie Sanders, as a ‘left shield’ for the Democratic Party machine.
The Democratic Party is, like the Republicans, fundamentally a party of capitalism. A poll by Gallup in 2023 found that, 63% of US adults agreed that “the Republican and Democratic parties do ‘such a poor job’ of representing the American people that a third major party is needed.”
It is not a matter of whether or not an elected representative is ‘sincere’ or not. What matters are the material conditions in which they work politically and the class forces that are brough to bear. There is a very real danger that Mamdani, despite what may be his good intentions, will be forced off course by the bitter opposition of the Republicans at federal level, by the billionaire class – which also owns the bulk of the media – and, not least, by the pro-capitalist leadership of the Democratic Party, which is seriously discomforted by Mamdani’s victory.
Against such a powerful opposing class force, it remains to be seen how much of his reforming programme will be implemented. It is not a good sign that he has already had more than one behind-closed-doors conferences with the very people – the very rich and very powerful – who he threatens the most, at least in words. Any ‘reassurances’ he offers to them can only be at the expense of the workers who voted him into office.
We can hope that the votes last Tuesday will embolden the opposition to Trump, among trade unions, fighting to oppose cuts in jobs and wages and within the communities of people of colour and Latine communities, many of these now fighting back against raids by ICE. This election round will add momentum to the movement against Trump and Trumpism in the run-up to the mid-terms a year from now.
But going into 2026, the situation is also fraught with the risk of disenchantment: because Mamdani is making a serious political error if he believes that those people he has met in secret, the billionaires and the powerful, will pay for the reforms that he has promised. They will not; they will sabotage him every step of the way.
Even from within the Democratic Party, Mamdani can mobilise to fight back against the resistance of the rich. But that would mean creating a movement based on organising working class people and on the already-organised – the trade union movement – for a new third party, one not tied to capitalism: a party of labour. That is something that would echoe Eugene Debs far better than secret meetings with financial and media oligarchs.
[Feature photograph is a still from Mamdani’s acceptance speech, here]
