In just a few months, Mamdani, a 34-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Socialist, has gone from a long-shot fringe candidate to a national figure — securing an upset win in the June primary, where voters 18-29 had the highest turnout of any age group.
Now, on the cusp of Election Day — where polls show him the clear frontrunner over his closest rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Mamdani is counting on that youth coalition to show up again. But his pledge to address rising costs appears to be resonating with young people far outside of the five boroughs. It’s a message that many Gen Z and millennials say speaks to their most pressing concerns at a time when many feel hopeless about their leaders and yearn for new voices willing to break with political norms.
“When a candidate is able to speak to the concerns of the populace and validate those concerns … I think that that has a big impact, especially when it comes to young people,” said Ruby Belle Booth, who studies young voters for the nonpartisan research organization CIRCLE.
On the one hand I’m farther to his left and am critical of some of his campaign decisions, and am not optimistic about his abilities to overcome the capitalists through purely electoral means.
On the other hand I’d be happy to see him prove me wrong.
I agree with you, and also, the US left is in no material position to hold our noses when a progressive politician gains mass popular support, so long as their words and deeds are to the benefit of the working class.
Don’t let ideological purity stop you from joining a movement that is, at the very least, building organizational power and class consciousness.
I’d vote for him if I lived in New York, but I wouldn’t expend any other energy on his campaign.
Who says he has to do it through purely electoral means? Why would you even assume that’s the plan? He’s a politician. The electoral part is where he fits in. That doesn’t mean he expects the rest of us to sit back and watch once he gets elected It’s never this approach or that, it’s everything.
It’s the only thing I see him doing. I don’t see him organizing workers or tenants and helping them unionize. I don’t see him distributing mutual aid. I don’t see him engaged in mass education. I don’t see him arming the poor and training a people’s army.
The electoral part is the only part I see him doing, and the only part I see his supporters doing.
Again, I’d be happy to see him prove me wrong.
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If you think that’s a realistic expectation to have for someone running for office in the imperial core you are in desperate need of a reality check. Even if your goal is an armed revolution there are so many prerequisites that have not been met to make such a thing possible. This is what happens when you spend too much time reading about revolutions and not enough time getting in touch with the people around you.
The Black Panthers existed.
But I notice you skipped over all the other things he could be doing, but isn’t, because he’s just doing electoralism and has no politics outside of it.
My point is you can’t expect him to do everything all at once. He’s chosen electoralism for himself and that is what he’s dedicated his time to. If your issue with Mamdani is that you think electoralism is pointless for socialists then just say that, and we can have that discussion.
One man doesn’t have to do everything. He is making space for those things to happen. Rent freezes and free transportation are at least cousins to mutual aid by my estimation, and they help free up resources in the community for members to do more. Again, one man, one role. Activists don’t make very effective politicians, and visa versa.
He’s not just one man. There’s an entire team of people behind him and an army of volunteers, and they all seem to be solely focused on the election. What I want to see is for him to focus on his role as merely the electoral front of that larger organized effort, he focuses on the election and the rest of the people around him have plans that extend beyond and outside of elections. That’s not what I’m seeing.
My expectation is, once the election is over, they’re going to go home and forget about politics.
We’ll see.
Sounds like armchair quarterbacking to me honestly, and you have no idea what else those people have going on.
Is it a fucking secret? Why would any of this be happening behind the scenes? We should have an idea what else they have going on! It would be the height of stupidity if they were engaged beyond electoralism but they kept it in the dark so no one could find out.
I’m not saying it’s a secret, but it’s not exactly stuff the media is gonna be covering now, is it?
Mamdani’s campaign isn’t intended to establish socialism in New York through purely electoral means, that’s impossible and no one serious is actually pushing for that. His campaign is part of the DSA’s party surrogate strategy. It’s a shift away from the realignment strategy they had been attempting before, and IMO is a move in the right direction, but I still think they have further to go. As far as I can tell they haven’t decided on a plan for a “dirty break” from the DNC when the time comes, and seeing the party surrogate strategy find success might lead some in the DSA to warm back up to the realignment strategy, which I don’t think has a chance in hell of working (though I would love to be proven wrong).
Edit: I’ll add that the DNC seem particularly afraid of the party surrogate strategy, and that gives me hope that it can actually work.
I think he’s going to run into a brick wall with the city council and police union and organized business leadership when he tries to do any of the things he promised. They’d happily destroy New York if it meant kneecapping the DSA from making any progress.
New Yorkers are pretty savvy, I don’t know if they’d be happy about that
And then what?
Unless he taps into that anger and uses it to overthrow the political interests aligned against him, he won’t be able to do anything. They’ll just be mad and march around, but no real change will occur.
There is a whole lot of money in influence centered in NYC. I think there is a reason why ICE hasn’t gone all out there yet.
Oh wow.
‘Mandani isn’t left enough for me.’
What planet are you from?
Freezing the rent on rent controlled apartments has been done by many mayors including Bill de Blasio.
Kansas City has free busses.
I can’t believe the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that you can’t even imagine someone being to the left of de Blasio or Kansas.
If you read my comment carefully you’ll see I’m not talking about Blasio or Kansas I’m talking about Mamdani.
I read it carefully enough to notice you didn’t specify which of his campaign’s policy positions you consider extreme left. So I assumed you were talking about his main ones.
Perhaps you could clarify? Is it government-funded childcare?
Taken as a whole they’re pretty left so there’s no need to point out specific ones.
.ml users tend to be Marxist-Leninists (hence .ml), so when they complain that someone is not “left enough”, it’s a code to mean is that the person is not a Marxist-Leninist/communist who wants to instigate an armed revolution, overthrow the system, and then seize the means of production. The thing is, many Americans could distinguish the difference between communists and socialists. Even the Fox news survey showed most young people support socialism, while only few support communism. I imagine ML clutched their pearls as hard as the conservatives upon learning of the survey.
Actually I think Marxist-Leninists and Black Maoists and anarcho-communists all have good ideas.
I’m really a centrist if you think about it.
.ml users are basically conservatives who want free money.
centrists know that money is for netanyahu and won’t use it for anyone else’s benefit.