What Democrats should learn from Zohran Mamdani

Ask Thomas Dewey. Politics is unpredictable. The polls are often wrong, and even the smartest of the commentariat don’t always get it right. Nobody thought Tom Dewey would lose to Harry Truman in 1948; Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in 2016; or Kamala Harris, to Trump in 2024. 

And few commentators, including me, thought Zohran Mamdani would win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.

So, at the risk of being proven wrong yet again, I want to boldly predict that Mamdani will trounce Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa by double digits today and be elected the next mayor of New York. 

But whether he wins or loses, Mamdani’s remarkable success contains several important lessons which Democrats would be foolish to ignore. The first is that the age issue is real. Americans are tired of today’s sclerotic political leadership. Experience is not such a big deal anymore because, as Mamdani points out, politicians with years of experience got us into today’s political mess. People want new blood, new faces and new ideas. That’s who Mamdani is.

Second lesson: Bread and butter. It may seem insightful to talk about such weighty issues as threats to democracy, undermining of the Constitution, or loss of our moral compass. But that’s not what voters want to hear about. They want to know what you’re going to do about soaring rents, lack of affordable housing, availability of childcare, and the price of groceries. That’s all Mamdani talked about. His one key issue was “affordability.”

Third, think big. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose 2016 presidential campaign inspired him to run for office, Mamdani doesn’t hesitate to rock the boat. He’s not running on the same old political pablum. He’s offering bold, new ideas, no matter how impractical they may be. For Sanders, it was universal health care. For Mamdani, it’s making buses free and faster; freezing the rent in the city’s rent-stabilized apartments; cutting water, gas and electricity bills; and universal care for kids starting at six weeks of age. All down-to-earth issues most New Yorkers deal with every day. Mamdani didn’t talk down to voters, he talked for them.

Fourth, stand up to Trump. Mamdani didn’t make this election a national issue. Former New York resident Donald Trump did. He couldn’t resist. On Truth Social, he called Mamdani a “100 percent Communist lunatic.” On “60 Minutes,” he told Norah O’Donnell he was “better looking” than Mamdani and all but endorsed Andrew Cuomo. He has threatened to cut off funding to New York City if Mamdani is elected and has already terminated the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel Project linking New York and New Jersey.

In response, Mamdani presented himself as the ultimate bulwark against Trump, willing to stand up to him where Cuomo and Sliwa are not. He is open to working with Trump, Mamdani insists, before adding, “But if the president wants to have a conversation about hurting New Yorkers, about sending more ICE agents here to terrorize families, about cuts that we’ve seen, whether it be taking from the city budget or suspending funding for city schools or threatening $18 billion in infrastructure grants being withheld, that’s not something I’m going to go along with. That’s something that I’m going to fight.”

Fifth lesson: Don’t be afraid to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At first, what stunned people most about Mamdani was the fact that a candidate so supportive of Palestine and so critical of the Israeli government could win the Democratic primary in a city that has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel. Many, including me, believed he had gone too far.

But Mamdani knew better. He recognized that one can support Israel and condemn the horrific attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, yet still be critical of Netanyahu’s brutal conduct of the war in Gaza where, according to many sources, over 71,000 have been killed, 70 percent of whom are women and children. Just as criticizing Trump is not un-American, criticizing Netanyahu is not antisemitic.  

True, Zohran Mamdani could not win in every city or state. But heading into the midterms, Democrats have a lot to learn from who he is, how he campaigned, and what he campaigned on. To regain power in the House and Senate, Democrats have a clear choice. They could follow the old, gutless, boring politics of Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse Mamdani — and lose. Or they could learn from Mamdani’s bold, new, exciting politics — and win.

Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”