Zohran Mamdani ran an excellent campaign. But his victory was made possible by a decade of serious electoral work by New York City’s democratic socialists and the structural dysfunction of the political establishment.

Zohran Mamdani’s astonishing victory in New York City’s mayoral election will electrify the Left nationally — as it should. But what does this win mean for socialists? It’s always tempting to read election results in sweeping ideological terms, as an index of the national mood or the vindication of an ideology. We all remember less than a year ago, when Kamala Harris’s loss showed that an increasingly anti-immigrant nation was lurching rightward — and older readers will even remember that four years ago Eric Adams’s tough-on-crime centrism was the future of the Democratic Pa

See Full Page