 "New York mayor election: 5 trump cards that won Zohran Mamdani ‘a city we can afford’")
In the New York City’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani ran a near-perfect campaign that sought to address the city’s unaffordability crisis and learnt from the failures of star Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris before him.
While Mamdani campaigned on local issues with a campaign tailor-made for New York City, his principal rival, Andrew Cuomo, ran like a governor, focussing on safety and crime and ignoring the most pressing issues.
Mamdani also turned the one flaw his campaign, his inexperience, into an asset. He pitched himself as outsider who could clean up the mess.
The end result was that Mamdani won comfortably by a margin of 9 per cent — despite President Donald Trump putting his weight behind Cuomo and threatening to cut federal funds to New York City in case of Mamdani’s victory.
Here are the five reasons Mamdani won.
Mamdani’s campaign mantra: A City We Can Afford
“It’s the economy, stupid!” was the driving force of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992.
In a throwback, Mamdani’s main message was “a city we can afford”.
While Cuomo campaigned about crime and safety, Mamdani zeroed in on affordability that politicians often forgot to mention in their discourse.
New York City has, after all, been infamous for its affordability crisis. And this was at display in his rallies where signs reading ‘A City We Can Afford’ were everywhere. His website said he was “running for mayor to lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers”. Some of the most placards among his campaigners were ‘Build Affordable Housing’ and ‘Childcare for all’.
Learning from mistakes of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris
In failed campaigns of Hillary and Harris, a common complaint was the lack of a coherent message. Mamdani had his messaging sorted.
In fact, Mamdani’s messaging was so tailor-made for the unique sociocultural landscape of New York City that some analysts have said Democrats should not get too excited with his victory because a similar approach would not work elsewhere.
Impact Shorts
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“When you have Trump voters supporting a democratic socialist, you are communicating something pretty clearly and consistently,” Eddie Vale, Democratic strategist, told The Hill.
Vale further said, “If you watch Zohran’s launch video, and then you watch the first ad of the primary campaign and then if you look at our messaging in the general, it has been the same campaign the entire campaign.”
The Trump factor: Democrats were on war footing against Trump
Unlike previous time when such elections could have been treated as a local affair, Democrats went all-guns-blazing in the election as they saw it as way to make a point against Trump. And they did.
Democrats all four contests on Tuesday: The mayoral election in New York City, the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, and the redistricting in California.
In his second term when Trump has no guardrails, Democrats are bound to present such election results as a referendum on Trump.
Democrats have finally got a momentum. They would want to keep that up and use it in the mid-term elections next year.
Carpet bombing campaign
In New York City, Mamdani was everywhere.
From outreach to influencers and creators on the internet, Mamdani had posters almost everywhere.
Mamdani visited a queer bar in Brooklyn and even ran advertisements on Fox News.
“Love him or hate him, you couldn’t get away from him. When we say we need to reinvent the playbook, we need to follow this kind of playbook, not the one we’ve run in years past,” one Democratic strategist told The Hill.
Youthfulness over experience: ‘Drain the swamp’ tone of the campaign
Mamdani pitched the system as rotten. And he said that those entrenched in the system like Cuomo, who had previously been the New York governor, could not be given the charge of the clean-up.
Using the ‘outsider’ status appeared to be an inspiration from Trump’s 2016 campaign.
In some ways, Mamdani campaign was the progressive version of President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which revolved largely around a narrative of bucking the establishment and ‘draining the swamp’, noted Amir Parnes in an article for The Hill.
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