We should absolutely not count any chickens before they are hatched. This is a country that is absolutely mad for slaughtering chickens, with a communications system perfectly capable of convincing most people that chickens never existed. The first thing to do right now is to help Zohran Mamdani close out the victory and become mayor of New York City, despite oligarchs’ efforts to buy out other candidates, and media efforts to, among other absurdities, “protect Jews” from the candidate backed by the most Jews.
The second thing to do is to make Times Square look like the football field did at the University of Virginia on Friday after the team won. And if you accidentally stray into the New York Times offices and happen to point out to any employees that doing stuff people actually like is a viable electoral strategy, I would say no harm done.
But the third thing to do has got to be pushing to actually enact the popular policies in Mamdani’s platform: freezing rent, building affordable housing, making buses free and fast, offering free pre-Kindergarten to anyone who wants it, creating an effective Department of Community Safety, taxing corporations and the super rich, opening public grocery stores, raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030, etc. This will mean pressuring Mayor Mamdani to follow through on his promises (he’s shown minor indications of weakening positions of late, no longer talking about reducing copaganda expenses or saving over a billion dollars by eliminating police overtime, for example). Much more so, it will mean pressuring the City Council and the state legislature and governor. Many of Mamdani’s proposals can be done and done swiftly if the City Council is pressured to act, but some will require the state — including the hardest one, which is not only extremely popular but also required for many of the other ones, namely: taxing corporations and the super rich. The state will also have to be deterred from new initiatives to prevent the city from doing useful things.
To win in November, Zohran Mamdani should follow India Walton’s advice of not watering down anything. But that advice will remain even more important post-election. Whether Mamdani successfully enacts his platform will have an enormous impact on tens of thousands of young volunteers who worked for it, on Zionist billionaires who invested enough money to transform thousands of lives into trying to prevent it, on the “leadership” of the Democratic Party that would rather lose elections than pursue an agenda opposed by plutocrats, and on people across the United States and the world who long for any scrap of good news and have generally been reduced to fending off cynicism with wishful thinking and desperate, counterproductive proposals.
If Mayor Mamdani keeps promises, there will be no more visits to New York City by Benjamin Netanyahu, and no more collaboration between the NYPD and the Israeli military. Screams of “anti-Semite” at opponents of genocide will lose a lot more power than they already have. If Mayor Mamdani and the City Council and the rest of us improve people’s lives, warnings against Muslim candidates as an evil threat — warnings made by the likes of Saint Charlie Kirk — will reach vastly fewer suckers.
If Mamdani becomes mayor and follows through, a Democratic Party misleadership that preferred Trump to Bernie, blamed Russia for its mistakes, and would currently rather shrivel away than oppose a genocide will be faced with glaringly bright evidence that Mamdani is an example to the rest of the United States. Socialism is beloved. Zionism is toxic. These messages will be up in lights over Broadway.
Many local, state, or national elections could be won by a talented candidate with a strong progressive platform. They need good videos, good graphics, good social media, and truly awful tales-from-the-crypt opponents, but all of those are very easily obtained. They do not need the support of the Democratic Party, and they may be better off with the corporate media against them. As a national paper, the New York Times can help by opposing great candidates nationwide. Great candidates can win in primaries and even more easily in general elections.
It helped in this case to have ranked-choice voting, but that’s not necessarily required. (More and more elections do have it. It may in some cases do the opposite of helping good candidates. And I value verifiability over it. But it helped here.)
It helped in this case to have a post-election Trump tanking in the polls, to have opponents in many ways Trumplike and connected to Trump, to have frustration with Israeli propaganda reaching a high, and to have opponents who focused heavily on pushing Israeli propaganda. No two elections will be identical. But a candidate who had followed all the usual Democratic Party strategist advice would have lost miserably in New York City and likely in many other places, and the world would be a little sadder.
I recommend a book called Run, Zohran, Run by Theodore Hamm, which tells the story of the campaign thus far — and the author plans an updated version after the election in November. A great deal of organizing and base-building was done prior to and during this campaign. Endless door-knocking was followed by more door-knocking. But that can be done without needing near-misses to realize what is possible. If every jurisdiction has to go through years of almost electing somebody decent before it occurs to anyone what they could do, we’re in bad shape. Let other locations look at New York — a dirty, godforsaken, traffic-jammed, decaying mess that gave us Donald Trump — and realize that New York is not blessed with the special privilege of electing a candidate who doesn’t totally suck. Anywhere can do it. Anywhere can choose to become a beautiful, equitable, enjoyable place to live.
But none of this works if Zohran only runs successfully. He’ll also have to succeed at governing. And he won’t be able to do that without public pressure.
A young Zohran was inspired by Obama, whose fraudulent nature seemed obvious to me from 100 miles off. Many people, including a lot more discerning people, are now inspired by Zohran. He looks to me as though he means it, and has meant it for many years. We now have a responsibility to help him make it happen, or the post-Obama hopium hangover is going to be back with a vengeance.