Red Dawn Over New York City

BAshvik, BRooklyn— The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) watch party was scheduled to begin when the polls closed at 9:00. evening. But when I arrived at 9:15, the line to enter was already long. Three dollar billwhich claims to be the largest gay nightclub in the area, and Mamdani enthusiasts were still coming to an end. We were all frantically scanning our phones for news. Opinion polls, while encouraging right up to Election Day, had previously been disastrously wrong. Given the millions of dollars spent smearing the Democratic nominee as an anti-Semite and radical Islamist, no one wanted to celebrate prematurely.

“AP is 10 points ahead of Zoran!”

“What percentage of votes are counted?”

“ABOUT. Only 30 percent.”

So we're back on our screens, switching from X to TV networks to Instagram to New York Times. Organizers, who had limited the number of participants to 2,000 people, moved down the line, handing out a blue ticket to everyone who responded early and red tickets to latecomers. At first they let blue tickets through, but in the end no one was turned away.

As we slowly moved forward, the news kept coming, spreading up and down the feed, hope and fear vying for dominance.

“Zohran is still above 50 percent, but only!”

— Has Staten Island been counted yet?

“What do Plum’s numbers look like?”

Being old school – not to mention old – your correspondent relied on Timewhich did an excellent job of updating its data every few minutes as results arrived from the Electoral Commission. Paper drop down menu also proposed a breakdown by region. Not surprisingly, Mamdani was strong in Astoria (+39 percent) and brown Brooklyn (+27 percent in Brooklyn Heights and +45 percent in Cobble Hill), while Cuomo dominated in the Upper East Side (+24 percent), Howard Beach (+25 percent) and Borough Park (Cuomo 78 percent). But in the Bronx, where Mamdani had lost to Cuomo in the primary by 18 points, he was now running ahead. The same can be said for Harlem, Bed-Stuy, Flatbush and several other historically black neighborhoods. Similarly in Latin American fortresses East Harlem (+30 percent), Washington Heights (+32 percent) and Jackson Heights (+28 percent).

When NBC called Mamdani at 9:33 a.m., the line erupted into applause and chants of “Zoran! Zoran! We were still outside, but the entrance was already visible. Behind me, two women from Los Angeles—one now a New Yorker, the other just arrived—were arguing about cigarettes.

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“You keep saying you're going to quit smoking. But you never do!”

“This may be my last time.”

“I've heard that before.”

“Fair.”

“I understand that under fascism, nicotine is one of the few pleasures allowed by the state. But socialism is coming! Don't you want to live to enjoy it?”

As we turned the last corner toward the entrance, the man ahead of me walked away to the bodega across the street and returned with a plastic bag full of bottles of beer, which he handed out in line. When we raised a toast: “To Mamdani! To socialism!”, I asked our benefactor, a young black man with an earring, what his name was. “I am Theory,” he said (or so it sounded). “It knows. It's a bit of an unusual name.”

Before I could ask how it was spelled, he disappeared inside, caught up in a wave of celebration. There were a lot of young white men in flannel shirts and young white women with asymmetrical hairstyles – just like other DSA events I've been to. But there were also a lot of Asians, South Asians, and a lot of black and brown faces. Some revelers wore “Not in My Name” or “Jewish Voice for Peace” T-shirts. On my way to the dance floor I passed the DSA tables and Jacobin. The only demographic poverty locally was people over 50 years of age. But there were other monitoring groups in Brooklyn, including one Brad Lander attended wearing a T-shirt with the words “Good riddance.”

It was a sentiment the Bushwick crowd could support. Before Cuomo's relentless concession speech, the host had us chant “Fuck Andrew Cuomo!” It felt less like a greeting and more like an exorcism. But much of that bitterness—not just over the disgraced ex-governor's campaign to thwart the clear will of New York's primary voters, but also over the Democratic Party's suicidal failure to embrace a new generation of leadership—has dissolved as Mamdani's address appeared on the screen:

“While we voted alone, we chose hope together. Hope for tyranny. Hope for big money and small ideas. Hope for despair.”