Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved

It backed another tired, entitled candidate in Andrew Cuomo. Voters finally had enough.

Zohran Mamdani, a previously obscure state assemblyman who polled at as little as 1 percent in early surveys of the race, became the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City on Tuesday.

Technically speaking, the contest isn’t over yet because votes have not yet been reallocated as per New York’s ranked choice voting (RCV) system. As of just after midnight New York time, Mamdani has 43.5 percent of the first-preference vote: the lack of an outright majority means that second-choice preferences¹ will come into play.

But make no mistake: this race is every bit as finished as the Knicks’ playoff run. Based on the polls — which did not have a great day as most showed Mamdani’s main opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, winning — Zohran is at least as likely to gain ground as to lose it from vote reallocations, in part thanks to alliances he formed with other candidates and in part because of Cuomo’s polarizing candidacy. Already at 43.5 percent, he should be a safe bet to claim a majority after RCV. Polymarket puts Cuomo’s chances at less than 1 percent — and in fact, Cuomo has conceded the race.

The only real question is the November general election, which is not quite a foregone conclusion as Cuomo will potentially appear again on the Fight and Deliver Party ballot line, along with incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who left the Democrats to run as an independent, and the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the GOP nomination unopposed. Mamdani has some vulnerabilities as a candidate, and there’s a long way to go until November. But it helps him that Adams, Cuomo and Sliwa will all be running on similar law-and-order themes. And unlike the primaries, the general election does not use RCV. Polymarket gives Mamdani a 75 percent chance of winning the general, with Adams getting most of the rest of the pie.

Furthermore, Mamdani’s win came on what by New York City standards was relatively high turnout. The New York Times is reporting just under 1 million Democratic votes counted with 7 percent yet to be tallied, so that projects to an eventual total of around 1.07 million votes. That’s still a minority of New York City’s 3.3 million registered Democratic voters. But it’s higher than the turnout in the past six mayoral primaries, where initial vote totals ranged from 330,000 (in 2009) to 942,000 (in 2021).

The comparatively high turnout and relatively decisive margin ought to put to rest questions about whether Zohran won only because he motivated a narrow slice of the electorate. It looks slightly less impressive on the map because Cuomo won his share of lower-density neighborhoods on Staten Island, and in the outer reaches of Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. But anybody who knows New York City (where I’ve lived since 2009) knows that this was pretty thorough ass-whooping by Mamdani (colored in orange on the Times’s map). He won his share of precincts even on what ought to have been Cuomo’s home turf, like in the relatively conservative Upper East Side, on Staten Island, and in Flushing, Queens, where the substantial Asian American population is usually loyal to establishment candidates and sympathetic to law-and-order campaigns.

Let’s keep the scope of the rest of this relatively narrow.² I’m not going to consider, for now, how Mamdani would perform as mayor, should he win in November. The reasonably large polling error might be worth a post at some point, but polling often misses the mark in primaries.

RCV wasn’t really a factor either, with Mamdani projected to win the first round by a solid margin. What might have happened if the non-Cuomo, non-Zohran candidates had consolidated around a single alternative is perhaps an interesting academic exercise — in theory, the whole campaign might have played out differently. But I don’t think that’s the main story given the breadth of Zohran’s win. And although I did say I thought Mamdani was a good buy when he was trading at just 17 percent on Polymarket a few weeks ago, I’m certainly not going to give myself a pat on the back. I assumed he’d lose the first round, but then had a puncher’s chance to pull ahead because of RCV.

When an election outcome is decisive, default toward all-of-the-above explanations

You’re going to see a lot of takes on the New York race, which will probably fall into roughly four categories:

1. That Cuomo ran a terrible campaign, as people who have followed the race in more detail than I have (like Ross Barkan and Michael Lange) have consistently attested.

2. That Mamdani is a uniquely talented candidate, with lots of voter engagement, slick commercials, and an understanding of the RCV system.

3. That this shows there’s an appetite for leftist candidates — Mamdani is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America — provided they emphasize cost-of-living issues rather than the culture wars.

4. That this demonstrates how the Democratic establishment is out to lunch, with much of it backing Cuomo, an obviously flawed candidate who came to prominence because of his family name, who hasn’t lived in New York City in decades, and whose preferred “bagel” order consists of an English muffin.

If the election had been closer, I might try to apportion credit (or blame) between these various themes. But considering the margin and the breadth of Mamdani’s victory, all of them are probably true to a large extent. As far as #3 goes, I’d note that New York City is not as friendly to progressive leftism as you might find on the West Coast. Instead, it has elected mayors like Adams, Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, and there’s recently been a conservative backlash in the city, which swung strongly to Donald Trump last year. But that makes Zohran’s win more impressive, not less. New York isn’t Portland, or San Francisco.

The aging Democratic establishment should probably be put out to pasture

Still, the headline on this newsletter focuses on theme #4, in part because Silver Bulletin mostly takes a national lens. Cuomo’s campaign produced a laundry list of endorsements, such as Bloomberg, former president Clinton, former majority whip Jim Clyburn, plus lots and lots of unions. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which can be incredibly influential in the city, issued a half-hearted anti-Zohran endorsement after initially swearing off involvement in local races, encouraging voters to rank Cuomo toward the lower end of their ballot but Mamdani not at all.

The Clintons, Clyburn, the New York Times and the unions, plus Black groups, Jewish groups, Italian groups and every other stripe of the rainbow: that was supposed to be a winning formula in New York. But the old formula doesn’t compute anymore.

It’s hard not to be reminded of the past three presidential races, and particularly the Democratic establishment forcing an eat-your-spinach choice down the throats of the primary electorate. It was Hillary Clinton’s turn to win the nomination in 2016 after she lost to Obama in 2008 and she heavily emphasized this in her campaign — although to be fair, she performed much better in New York City against Bernie Sanders than Cuomo did against Zohran.³

Democratic Party leaders including Clyburn, panicking about a potential Sanders nomination as the COVID pandemic hit American shores, then successfully intervened to boost Joe Biden in 2020. That was forgivable — maybe even quite smart — given that Biden won. But then Democrats made a catastrophic error by failing to seriously challenge Biden in 2024 until it was too late, pretending that a primary against the likes of Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips constituted a real choice for voters — and then nominating Kamala Harris in lieu of the sort of “mini-primary” that some observers⁴ had called for.

Cuomo, like Clinton, was from a political dynasty that most people under the age of 40 have little or no affection for. And although Bernie is an exception, maybe it isn’t that complicated. If you want to inspire younger voters, nominate younger candidates. Mamdani, at age 33, is literally half Cuomo’s age: the former governor is 67.

Meanwhile, Clinton, Biden and Harris were all nominated despite all being previous primary losers. (Clinton in 2008 to Obama; Biden in both 1988 and 2008; Harris in 2020.) You can’t say the same about Cuomo, at least, who thrashed former Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. But in the mayor’s race, Cuomo trotted out the same boilerplate, tired themes, including a heavy emphasis on Trump, that had also failed Clinton, Biden (in 2024) and Harris rather than the local issues that mayoral races often turn upon.

The extent to which this might be a leading indicator for national politics, and particularly the 2028 presidential nomination race, is an open question. But I think you could go too far in dismissing it, and some fellow center-left types probably will. New York City is a weird place, but it’s also an exceptionally diverse place, home to every imaginable ethnic group, more conservatives in the Democratic primary electorate than you might think, and plenty of voters who were probably closer to Cuomo on the issues but who just didn’t like his vibe, or who liked Mamdani’s.

So Zohran thoroughly earned the win, and Cuomo and the Democratic establishment thoroughly earned the loss. And even if they finally take the hint, generational turnover in the Democratic Party is coming whether they like it or not.

1. And third-, fourth- and fifth-choice preferences: New York primary voters can rank up to five candidates on their ballot.

2. It’s still relatively early by Vegas standards, but it’s been another long day of poker at the WSOP. I thought it was worth getting this item out sooner rather than later, so my apologies in advance for any stray typos.

3. Her more problematic areas were upstate.

4. Including yours truly.