The Long Mayoral Primary
Two weeks ago Zohran Mamadani shocked everyone, including myself, with a resounding victory in the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City. I wrote about the alliance between Zohran and Brad Lander, and what it could mean for the future of progressive politics in America, but I didn’t think that Zohran getting so many votes in the first round of ranked choice voting that Andrew Cuomo would drop out that night. That’s a truly resounding victory, and now that there’s been some time for the dust to settle I want to talk about what the lay of the land looks like after Mamdani’s primary victory.
The first thing to note is that this election is not over, and we can tell from the nonsense controversy over Zohran’s application to Columbia, a university where his father works and that he, very importantly, did not get into. I call it a nonsense controversy because the core of it is that Zohran, who was born in Uganda, selected the African American box and also wrote in Ugandan, because he was born there and lived the first five years of his life in Uganda. This was published by the Times because of hacked materials provided to them by a race scientist and rushed to print because they were afraid of getting scooped by Chris Rufo, a notorious right-wing troll. The reporting is a mess, but there’s something going on here that treating this as a media criticism story is going to miss.
New York is a one-party city, but as any good comparative politics student will tell you, any polity existing under one-party rule is going to have factions competing for power inside of that party in a time of succession. The divisions of the factions are clear to observers, and clear along geographic lines. Zohran was the progressive candidate, and the candidate of the inner boroughs, with his winning precincts mapping surprisingly cleanly to subway lines:
Cuomo was the candidate of the more suburban, car dependent outer boroughs, a lane that was ceded when Eric Adams bowed out of the primary following his legal trouble and let’s call it questionable exoneration. I was fully prepared for this to be an election where the takeaway was “There’s more of them than there are of us”, with Zohran not able to run the score up in Brooklyn and Queens, but that wasn’t the case. That doesn’t mean that the losing faction is going to go down quietly. Far from it.
Going after Zohran for checking African-American on his application is a very specifically designed attack. Both Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams are trying to run as third parties in the general election, which is importantly not using ranked choice voting. This means that they will be competing with beret-and-vigilantism aficionado Curtis Sliwa, who won the Republican primary, to try to defeat Zohran. The point of this attack is to try to convince the generally older, Black residents that made up substantial portions of both Cuomo’s base in 2025 and Adams’s in 2021 that Zohran is trying to leverage their identity for his personal gain to pull them away from voting on the party line in November. I don’t think it’s going to work for a couple reasons.
For one, it’s incredibly cynical about the kinds of voters it’s attempting to attract, to the point of being deeply condescending. Anyone who’s been to J’Ouvert or lived in Brooklyn can tell you that there’s a very complex understanding of identity among Black New Yorkers. Trying to argue that Zohran was trying to exploit his identity as a 17 year old isn’t going to hit as hard as they’d hope. The bigger issue is there’s not a whole lot of votes to split. Sure, Andrew Cuomo got more votes in the final round than Adams did in 2021 (428,530 versus 404,513), but Zohran got 545,334, which is just about 200k fewer votes than Adams got in the 2021 general election (753,801). That’s a lot of new voters that were activated by Zohran, which means you’re going to have to peel away even more voters from the party line, and while New York isn’t as progressive in its politics as the national stereotype of New Yorkers suggests, it is a Democratic town, and peeling off those voters is going to be hard. This is complicated by how Adams and Cuomo have both done a lot in their political careers to upset Republicans, and the Republican voters they need to scrap over can just vote for Sliwa. No amount of Bill Ackman money is going to fix that.
That’s not the biggest Republican issue that Zohran’s challengers are facing, either. That’s Donald Trump, who can’t help but try to bumble his way into every election with a national profile, almost always to the detriment of the side he’s trying to help. By threatening to denaturalize and deport Zohran, Trump has been very successful in taking regular Democrats from “I’m not 100% sold on this Zohran guy” to “I will take to the streets if they hurt my beautiful boy”, and those are the exact guys that any of Zohran’s challengers need to break off to have any chance. They also aren’t going to look too kindly on Eric Adams, who Trump has said is “under his thumb”. They’re swimming upstream, and the more nonsense attacks that Zohran faces, the harder the current is in their faces. It’s a small sample size, but my father, who doesn’t live in New York and doesn’t pay much attention to our politics, thought the Times article was nonsense. It’s more obvious to regular people than you think.
But that’s not going to stop the attacks. And winning in November won’t stop them either. As an outsider, Zohran represents a threat to power and influence in the city. That’s why so many insiders lined up to support Cuomo, he wasn’t going to rock the boat. The pitch was that if Cuomo wins, nobody’s going to fire your nephew from his gig at the Board of Elections, and the same people will take your calls. They weren’t going to get that kind of guarantee from the guy running as a proud outsider challenging the establishment they have a clear interest in maintaining.
What’s interesting in the aftermath of the primary is that local electeds, groups, and party operatives have generally lined up behind Zohran, because they don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing. The people who continue to grumble are well-connected outsiders and megadonors, and they’re getting desperate. That’s why former Governor David Paterson held a sweaty press conference with the somehow even sweatier owner of NYC’s worst grocery store chain — it’s not that Zohran is going to be mayor, it’s that his success means that everything changes in the one-party state if he wins and they find themselves on the outs. The people who are complaining the loudest are the ones with the most to lose, and if you look at the blue strip of Cuomo voters east of the Park in the most expensive part of New York’s most expensive neighborhood, you have to wonder whose ear they have at the Times.
That’s the nature of power, and there’s always going to be a struggle for it. Progressives are fighting for real power in the city right now, and they’re going to have to hang onto it if (and very likely when) they win here, just like how every two years some yutz backed by conservative money goes after Ilhan Omar and falls short. If you think this is a fight for the soul of the party, then you’d better get used to this. There’s a lot of people who want to see Zohran fail, and are going to do what they can to make him fail. What he can do to stop them is to keep doing what he did to win in the first place — continue to make alliances and leverage them to create wins. Zohran’s much more pragmatic than his opponents assume, willing to listen and learn on things like transit and housing policy, and there are reasons to believe he’s going to be a savvy political operator in City Hall if he wins. Even if he’s unable to deliver on some of his bigger controversial plans, he can rack up a bunch of smaller wins that will keep the people who voted for him hoping for a more affordable, pleasant city happy. I’m optimistic, but Zohran’s opponents are going to fight him hard. That’s politics, Suzyn.
