Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and his pending general election success in November, sheds light on critical facets of the city’s and the broader U.S. political turmoil.
Mamdani’s campaign speaks to the cost-of-living crisis that makes NYC difficult or unlivable for much of its working-class population — particularly housing and transport costs, the absence of reliable and safe childcare, and food deserts. It also offers a response to the gangsterism of the Trump administration.
While New York obviously has distinctive features, the affordability crisis is not unique to the city. It is sucking the life out of many U.S. urban and rural communities. Add to that the terrorism of the Trump administration as it sends masked men into communities to arrest, imprison and deport people who are seeking sanctuary and to intimidate anyone who dares speak in their defense.
Mamdani’s standing with immigrant communities has provoked Trump into saying he should be deported. Even if this is empty bluster, it’s an implicit incitement to violence at this particularly frightening moment in U.S. politics. And it certainly menaces the Muslim communities in the city and beyond.
The genocide in Gaza, perpetrated jointly by the Israeli state and the USA, and the ethnic cleansing and Israeli annexationism in the Palestinian West Bank, are key issues in Mamdani’s campaign. His support for Palestinian rights has included visiting synagogues to meaningful dialogue with the Jewish community as he stands with Jewish supporters of Palestinian freedom. Yet he and his supporters are viciously branded by the right as “antisemites” and “supporters of terrorism.” We stand with Mamdani and his supporters in their opposition to Islamophobia.
Mamdani himself is a committed “democratic socialist” (and polling suggests that as much as 40% of the U.S. public looks favorably on “socialism,” even if not clearly defined). The campaign raises essentially reforms in the New Deal tradition — and are anathema to the ruling elites in New York City and USA. (Important elements in Mamdani’s platform are in line with socialist principles yet the campaign does not challenge the framework of a capitalist economy.)
Mamdani clearly chose to run inside the Democratic Party, not to take an independent course. We don’t agree with this perspective; in fact, we see it as a contradiction with the campaign’s demands. And we note the Democratic party establishment does everything possible to evade these very issues.
Mamdani’s success shows the importance of a well-organized campaign and in this case, socialist organization as well as a strong community network that he’s built up as a state assembly rep. This included, for example, his hunger strike for taxi medallion owners.
The campaign has depended on community, union and socialist movement activists to succeed — and will require even further mobilization to achieve its economic and social justice goals.
Comrades in NYC have seen how the visibility of the campaign, its posters and homemade signs, and its activities drawing huge crowds on a few hours’ notice, have changed the face of city politics.
New York City DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) poured thousands of its members into door-knocking and neighborhood canvassing for Mamdani, who is himself a committed — i.e. more than just paper — DSA member. At the same time, Mamdani was always committed to running as a candidate inside the Democratic Party and is quite likely building his governing coalition with elements of the party apparatus who will undoubtedly insist on stripping away the radical thrust of his program.
Solidarity does not support the tactic of running electoral campaigns in Democratic primaries or on the party line. It’s impressive, however, that the messaging, mechanics and logistics of this campaign have involved and trained tens of thousands, getting out the biggest vote that anyone has received in a NYC primary campaign.
Despite Mamdani’s commitment to the Democratic Party, this was most definitely not the campaign of the party leadership, which is intimately connected to the financial and real estate elites most enraged by Mamdani’s affordability message. NY governor Kathy Hochul (who’s up for reelection next year and more susceptible to pressure) has belatedly endorsed her party’s mayoral candidate, while the wretched Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Congressional minority leader Hakeem Jeffries so far remain silent.
Some within the state Democratic establishment have endorsed Mamdani, including even the pro-Israel centrist Richie Torres, yet the state party head Jay Jacobs refused.
With less than five weeks until the election, Eric Adams pulled out of the race. While not endorsing Andrew Cuomo, Adams warned voters to beware of “insidious forces” pushing “divisive agendas.” Now Cuomo has the opportunity to unlock the piggy bank and come from behind to overtake Mamdani.
Although that scenario is a longshot, a Mamdani win will face the vengeful wrath of the city’s financial elites, the menace of the Trump gang, and the resistance of governor Hochul. Some of the measures NYC needs require statewide approval, particularly a 2% tax surcharge on incomes of over $1 million dollars a year and a rise in the corporate tax rate to 11.5%.
The challenges facing any progressive incoming NYC mayor are daunting. Some of these are outlined in Howie Hawkins’ article. As he points out:
“If Mamdani survives the general election, the same corporate forces will resist and undermine his mayoralty. The big capitalists have the private power to wreck New York City’s economy and fiscal stability with a capital strike or capital flight, as they are already threatening. The corporate Democratic leaders like Kathy Hochul in the governor’s mansion and the leadership of the state legislature have already made it clear that they will block his proposed city tax increases on personal income over a million a year and on big businesses that he needs to fund his reforms. He will need state approval for those tax reforms.
“The federal government will also make life hard for a Mayor Mamdani. One only has to recall President Gerald Ford’s refusal to provide federal assistance during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, which prompted the famous tabloid headline by the New York Daily News: ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead.’ President Trump has already said as much: ‘If he does get in, I’m going to be president, and he’s going to have to do the right thing, or they’re not getting any money.’
“Mamdani could find himself in office but not in power. That could mean an outcome like the progressive Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has experienced since being elected in 2023.”
A lengthy analysis by Eric Blanc (JACOBIN, September 2, 2025), “Zohran Mamdani Can Help Rebuild New York’s Labor Movement” outlines the urgent necessity and possibilities:
“Turning around labor’s decline is crucial for achieving Mamdani’s overarching goal of an affordable New York. In a state with the highest income inequality in the nation, millions of workers urgently need the wage boost and job protections that only a union can provide. Moreover, it will take a huge increase in grassroots power to force Albany and Governor Kathy Hochul to fund Mamdani’s core policy planks for childcare, transport, and housing. Union resurgence could both feed into and feed off of a broader bottom-up movement for an affordable New York.”
Despite Trump’s evisceration of the National Labor Relations Board, there are tools by which “Mamdani could leverage his platform and public policies to help turn New York back into a bastion of worker power.” These include city laws (LPAs) that can be used “to demand that employers who receive city money not interfere when their employees unionize.”
Another example, after the past three wretched neoliberal decades when the percentage of union-performed major construction work in NYC fell from 80 percent to 22 percent, under Mamdani “the city can create at least 15,000 union jobs by retrofitting five hundred city schools into ‘green schools,’” and eventually “initiate other union-made infrastructure projects — for example, by decarbonizing all public buildings and building up municipal solar programs or building storm-surge and sea-level-rise protection.”
Blanc outlines similar possibilities in sectors from care work and nonprofit employment to Amazon, gig work, hotels and food service. Whether the bureaucratically controlled NYC unions are capable of organizing these sectors is an open question. Mamdani of course cannot call into being a revived NYC labor movement. What his administration can do is kick down the barriers that prevent working people from building it themselves.
It will be especially important to /i>sustain and transform the movement that has propelled the Mamdani campaign. This is an essential counterweight to the pressures he’ll face and concessions that he’ll be forced into (and is already) making. It needs to become a force that organizes mass demonstrations and assemblies, mobilizes worker and student walkouts, and spreads to other parts of the state as workers demand their “fair share” of any increased taxes on the wealthy.
Solidarity consistently opposes the illusion that the Democratic Party can be reformed to be a progressive force. It is a party of capital and U.S. imperialism, even if with a liberal face. The victory of Zohran Mamdani will not change that reality; it is much more likely that the pressures of governing and the demands of the Democratic establishment will erode the strength of Mamdani and his movement.
We are in solidarity with that movement and will do everything we can to urge it toward an independent course, in opposition to the demands of the NYC and U.S. ruling class and the Democratic establishment.
As a revolutionary socialist organization, Solidarity’s strategy for change includes advocating independent political action outside and against the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties. In the NYC mayoral election, Solidarity members hold differing views on casting our votes. The majority of support voting for Mamdani, in solidarity with the movement, against the Islamophobic reaction mobilizing against him, and in critical support of his mayoral campaign.
There will be numerous important lessons to learn from the campaign, and even more importantly from the struggles to come. We will actively participate in those struggles and the accompanying discussions.