Zohran Mamdani and the Antifascist Democratic Tea Party
On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim New York assemblyman from Queens and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won an upset victory in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York by a convincing 43.5% to 36.4% margin against former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Ex-governor Cuomo at first conceded victory to Mamdani, then clarified that he planned to stay on the ballot under the Fight and Deliver Party, a party that Cuomo formed in May 2025 as an “insurance policy” that would allow to keep running for mayor as an independent. (Cuomo’s preemptive concession to Mamdani may also be an attempt to throw sand in the gears of the ranked choice voting process, because he doesn’t like the result.)
Even in a city as big as New York, a municipal election might seem like a parochial thing to talk about, what with Donald Trump’s unilateral bombing of Iran and the new Supreme Court decision enabling Trump’s multi-year campaign against birthright citizenship. But I believe in tying the different strands of the news together & I think that, if we want to beat Donald Trump, we have to grapple with the ramifications of this past week’s NYC mayoral primary.
The Popular Front Against Donald Trump
I firmly believe that defeating Donald Trump requires a popular front against fascism and authoritarianism. The use of the term “popular front” originally came from Communists during the 1930s who made a tactical decision after Hitler and Mussolini’s rise to power to ally with liberal or left-wing parties that they otherwise would have opposed. I prefer to use the term “popular front” more expansively to refer to any ideologically broad-based pro-democracy coalition that is opposed to authoritarianism and fascism. In other words, a modern-day popular front could include democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani, but also anti-Trump Republicans like Bill Kristol.
The reason I’m focusing on the New York mayoral primary is that Democratic primaries can be a major part of the process of assembling a larger pro-democracy coalition to defeat Trump, but it can also create schisms that weaken anti-Trump resistance. In 2016, the pro-democracy coalition was weakened by the conflict between the supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. At least 6% of voters who supported Bernie in the primary were Sanders-Trump voters who voted for Trump in the general election. In addition, votes for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 exceeded Trump’s margin of victory in the former “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
On the non-Bernie side, staffers at the Democratic National Committee openly derided Bernie Sanders and his supporters in leaked emails that contradicted the DNC chairwoman’s insistence that “the DNC remains neutral.” After the 2016 primaries were over, the DNC later apologized in an email to Bernie Sanders that the contents of leaked DNC emails included “inexcusable remarks.”
In 2020, a major reason why the pro-democracy coalition against Trump held together was due to a Biden-Sanders unity task force that year, which issued a 110-page document that different factions of the Democrats could agree on. Both factions made concessions. Sanders did not get a commitment to a full Green New Deal, but Biden eventually adopted the much stronger eco-friendly Evergreen Action Plan advocated by Governor Jay Inslee in the 2020 primaries. Sanders did not get his Medicare for All proposal, but Biden agreed to add a more robust public option provision to the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, progressive priorities such as abolishing ICE and a DNC ban on “dark money” in Democratic primaries were rejected by the Biden team.
In the early days of Biden’s administration, the pro-democratic coalition maintained a temporary truce between progressives and centrists. For example, Rep. Pramila Jayapal got the Congressional Progressive Caucus to support Biden’s American Rescue Plan despite Joe Manchin watering down the bill by reducing unemployment benefits, limiting stimulus checks, and eliminating a $15 minimum wage provision.
But fault lines already started to appear during the 2020 Democratic Congressional primaries. Progressive Jamaal Bowman ousted Rep. Elliott Engel over accusations that Engel abandoned his district during the COVID pandemic, but also because Bowman opposed Engel’s hawkish line on Israel. Another progressive, Cori Bush, defeated Rep. Lacy Clay by emphasizing her record as a Black Lives Matter activist who led anti-police brutality protests in Ferguson, Missouri while Clay largely avoided participating directly.
In 2021, India Walton, a nurse who belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated the incumbent mayor of Buffalo Byron Brown in the Democratic primary, but Brown went on to defeat Walton in the general election in an independent party write-in campaign that was backed by the GOP. According to a quote by New York Democratic Assembly Member Patrick Burke, “Brown didn’t need help from some of Donald Trump’s most hardline supporters to beat India Walton, but he took it anyway.”
Ultimately, the pro-democracy coalition started to fly apart over the war between Israel and Gaza that began in 2023. By 2024, progressive Democrats affiliated with the Squad supported pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, while 21 other House Democrats wrote a letter demanding that university trustees be ousted if they did not suppress the protests. By promoting crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests, leading Democrats unwittingly paved the way for even more authoritarian measures, such as Trump’s “war on colleges” and the kidnapping of foreign college students.
In turn, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC raised a $100 million war chest to spend against progressives in the 2024 Democratic primaries, a factor which led to the defeats of incumbent Squad members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. (Not coincidentally, Bowman and Bush were the only Democrats to defeat an incumbent in a primary in 2020.) The AIPAC contributions also provided a vehicle for enabling GOP donor money to influence the outcome of conflicts that needed to stay internal to the Democratic Party. It’s hard to say that Donald Trump’s GOP is an existential threat to democracy if you are using them to gain the upper hand against your own fellow party members.
Two Models of How to Beat Trump
Fast forward to the Democratic primary between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani. The two frontrunners represent different approaches for how best to confront Donald Trump in the 2nd Trump Administration. Andrew Cuomo epitomizes the belief that the best way to beat Donald Trump is to create a Democratic version of Trump. Cuomo has been called a “control freak” who ran a governor’s office “defined by cruelty.” Even in his own memoir about leadership, Cuomo openly admits to having a “controlling personality,” arguing that you cannot be a successful person if you don’t have one.
Unfortunately, the similarities between Cuomo and Trump aren’t merely limited to personality and management style. Both are serial sexual harassers who have filed vindictive lawsuits against the women who accused them; both have attacked journalists just for doing their jobs; and both suppressed data on COVID-19. There are some who may argue that Cuomo’s ethical shortcomings are precisely what makes him better equipped to confront Trump, a variation of the “It takes a thief to catch a thief” argument. But this argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In Trump’s first administration, Cuomo refused to affiliate with the Resist movement or even criticize Trump by name. Similarly, during Trump’s second administration, Cuomo never criticized Trump publicly in the media until he decided to run for mayor.
Mamdani represents a different approach to beating Trump. His campaign was relentlessly focused on the high cost of living and his campaign website barely talks about anything else. He ran on the campaign slogan “A City We Can Afford.” By focusing affordability, Mamdani is fighting directly on the issue of inflation, the main economic driver for Donald Trump’s 2024 victory. Now that is directly taking the fighting to Trump.
In addition, when Mamdani addressed inflation in his campaign, he got his policy message across efficiently to voters with short, pithy slogans that could fit on a bumper sticker. Trump had “Build the Wall” and “Drain the Swamp,” but Mamdani had “Freeze the Rent,” “Free Buses,” and city-owned grocery stores he called a “public option for produce.” Like Trump, Mamdani realizes that you are more likely to win an election on policy if you can make the voters understand it on a visceral level.
There is a philosophy in Democratic campaign circles called “popularism,” which argues that Democratic candidates are most likely to succeed if they only talk about issues that poll well with the general public and avoid talking about issues that don’t. The problem with popularism is that “Voters like Policy X” does not automatically translate into “Voters will like me if I tell them I support Policy X.” The success of the Mamdani campaign convinces me of a completely different hypothesis that runs counter popularism: It’s not the positions you take that matter; it’s what the positions you take say about you.
For example, when Kamala Harris shifted right on of immigration, voters attributed the Harris immigration policies they liked to Donald Trump anyway, according to YouGov polling data on immigration compiled after the election. Harris adopted policies that alienated the pro-immigrant base, but got no credit for it with low-information voters and swing voters. By contrast, Mamdani had a built-in advantage of 50,000 volunteers working for him. When media outlets asked him questions about Israel in the hopes of heightening opposition to his campaign, Mamdani refused to apologize for his views in a way that might alienate his more zealous volunteers and base voters. He rightfully questioned why Israel should be a salient issue in a mayoral race and focused back on the issue of affordability where he was the strongest.
If anything, I think Mamdani embodies a new approach for Democrats championed by political scientists M. Steven Fish and Laila Aghaie in the book Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge. Fish and Aghaie argue that Democrats need to adopt a “high-dominance” style that matches Republican’s willingness to take risks, seek out conflict, and use language in a way that leaves no doubt as to where they stand. I like Mamdani, because he has figured out a way to be “high-dominance” and stand up to formidable opponents but without being domineering or adopting the social dominance orientation that correlates with support for authoritarianism and fascism.
Similarly, I think Mamdani’s focus on the affordability crisis meshes well with adopting a “high-dominance” stance of not backing down against Trumpism and authoritarianism. Sure, some of Mamdani’s positions on reducing the cost of living poll very well, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the source of his appeal.
I believe what matters most is that the cost of living is an extremely salient issue to New Yorkers right now. By focusing on affordability as his main issue, Mamdani is conveying to voters that the issue he considers to be important is the same issue that they consider to be important, which in turn makes Mamdani feel trustworthy, because voters feel like they are being listened to. This is a lesson that anybody of any ideology (whether they’re centrist Democrats or anti-Trump Republicans) in the pro-democracy coalition should heed. Even if you might not support Zohran Mamdani 100% ideologically, his methods got results.