If Zoran Mamdani governs the way he campaigned, he will prove that the people have the power to shape their own future.
Zohran Mamdani has no greater responsibility than being a great mayor of New York. After all, that's his job now that New Yorkers have elected him to the top office of America's largest and most dynamic municipality. Still, if he succeeds, Mamdani has the potential to change not only the city but also the politics of a country desperately in need of a credible antidote to the oppression of Donald Trump. As told by Mamdani Nation after winning the Democratic primary in June: “You can't defeat this attack on democracy until you prove its worth.”
What turned Mamdani's candidacy from impossible to inevitable was his fundamental understanding that to prove the value of democracy, leaders must make the lives of the people who elect them significantly better. Trump has failed miserably in this regard. But so do many Democrats. One of the main reasons for the Democratic Party's defeat in 2024 was that its technocratic response to the affordability crisis struck Americans as lacking both urgency and ambition. So Mamdani, a democratic socialist who draws inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia and Bernie Sanders, set the bar higher. “A decent life should not be left to just the lucky few,” he said. “This should be something that the city government guarantees to every New Yorker.” He combined that vision with practical proposals for rent freezes, fast and free buses, universal child care and urban grocery stores in food deserts. And he promised to fund his plan by taxing the very billionaires Trump enriched and coddled by establishment Democrats.
Prominent pundits have refused to accept the prospect of New Yorkers electing a democratic socialist as mayor (hello, cable news commentators), as have newspaper editorial writers (hello, New York Times) and top Democrats (hello, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who refused to endorse his party's nominee for mayor of his hometown). The elite were slow to grasp the fact that this 34-year-old Muslim Ugandan immigrant, having served three terms in the relative obscurity of the New York State Assembly, had captured the imagination of the city's multiracial and multiethnic electorate. Of course, Mamdani's mastery of social media helped. He showed himself with a confidence that belied his age, a calm that countered the hysteria of his critics, and a clarity that both inspired and reassured voters. Tens of thousands of young volunteers rallied behind a candidate who was comfortable telling the truth to power. When Mamdani declared genocide in the Gaza Strip, he was attacked New York Post and a smear campaign funded by billionaires. However, he received a mandate from New Yorkers who demanded moral clarity amid Republican brutality.
Mamdani built his year-long campaign against failed policies of the past, exemplified by an increasingly desperate former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and around the understanding that while democracy is certainly under attack from authoritarian powers in Washington, “it is also under attack from within.” [because of] fading faith in its ability to meet every need of the working people.”
Mamdani's determination to restore faith in democracy through economic justice is not new: Roosevelt made the connection with his Economic Bill of Rights. Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are doing the same with their “Fight the Oligarchy” rallies. But Mamdani's relentless drive to put government at the service of the working class reflects the zeitgeist of 2025. His vision is so powerful that Trump has done everything he can to derail Mamdani's campaign, threatening to seize city funding, send in federal troops and arrest the Democrat if he keeps his promise to protect immigrants. While Mamdani relied on government funding and volunteers to spread his message, billionaire-funded political action committees funneled $19 million into a bitterly divisive campaign against him.
With Mamdani's election, attacks from his bitter enemies in Washington and on Wall Street will only intensify. To counter them, he must surround himself with tough and experienced managers. In the face of a hostile media and corporate lobbying, Mamdani's determination to continue his viral social media campaign will be essential to mobilizing his base, uniting New Yorkers and keeping the pressure on wary Democrats in Albany.
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State and national Democrats have a vested interest in Mamdani's success. Together with Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their allies, he has a vision that can renew a Democratic Party that has been recklessly resistant to change and big ideas that will inspire voters ready for an alternative to the false promises and dark machinations of Trumpism. This does not mean that every Democratic candidate in 2026 must reflect every position of Mamdani, but they must channel his energy and courage.
Mamdani would take office at a difficult time for his city and his country—just as La Guardia did after his election in 1933 as a radical mayor of a city of immigrants and working-class families impoverished by the Great Depression. La Guardia captured the imagination of New York and the nation, becoming a beacon of hope in a time of chaotic economics and looming fascism. Mamdani's campaign celebrated LaGuardia's legacy. When we interviewed him, he recalled that his predecessor “took on these twin crises of anti-immigrant hostility and denial of the dignity of working people, and did so with an understanding of what the embodiment of democracy looked like—and even what the exercise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness looked like—understanding it in the language of the urban sphere: more parks, more beauty, more light.”
Mamdani's election proves the political promise of democracy. And if he governs the way he campaigned—as a bold and deeply principled but always results-oriented champion of economic justice and social uplift—he will prove, as LaGuardia did before him, that people have the power to shape their own future. This is what Trump and the billionaires are really afraid of, because Zoran Mamdani is right when he says: “These are authoritarian regimes that seek to keep us under their control because they know that once we are free, we will never be held again.”
