Could Anyone Be More New York Than Zohran Mamdani?

[justaprogressive]

“Mamdani was in the 21st century and Cuomo was in the 19th century,” NYU urban policy professor Mitchell Moss told The Washington Post in one of the many New York mayoral election post-mortems. “That’s all there is to it.”

Well, yes and no. And it’s the “no” that requires some explanation, both of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory and Andrew Cuomo’s correspondingly stunning defeat.

Cuomo first. Moss is clearly right that Cuomo didn’t understand how to communicate with today’s voters, young voters particularly, even if the substance of his messages, not to mention the substance of Andrew Cuomo himself, are equally if not more to blame for his loss. That said, Cuomo’s campaign would have done a lot better if it had been a good 19th century campaign. New York’s Democratic machine from the 1870s through the 1940s—Tammany Hall, and its outer borough allies—carried Election Day after Election Day on the strength of a massive ground game, powered by ward heelers who, like Mamdani’s precinct walkers, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors (and also provided jobs and favors to more than a hundred thousand voters). Tammany’s strength was also rooted in “contributions” that city employees were compelled to make to its coffers, and various payoffs of all descriptions that the Hall itself made to smooth its way.

Cuomo’s operation had no real ground game to speak of. Even his paid canvassers were Mamdani voters. So by the metric of the 19th century, Cuomo fell flat.

Mamdani, by contrast, had a ground game that quantitatively evoked Tammany’s at the height of its powers, but better. While Tammany had to put its ward heelers on the payroll to get them to prompt voters to the polls, Mamdani had a volunteer army that was inspired enough to work for their candidate.

But there’s another way in which Mamdani’s victory is in the grand tradition of New York politics; for that matter, in the grand tradition of American big city politics generally. As a rule, those politics have long been politics of ethnic succession. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they pitted Irish immigrants against native-born Yankees, and any political history of Boston, New York, or any Northeastern city from the 1840s through the 1930s must focus on that conflict. The subsequent arrivals of Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Southern Blacks, Caribbeans, and Mexicans and Central Americans to our major cities are central to their more recent political histories, too.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-27-zohran-mamdani-fiorello-la-guardia-new-york-mayor/

[walkingman]

1. NYC is an amazing place. I lived there for a little over a year in the early 70s

when I was right out of college and I think it changed my life.

I hope Mamdani wins - it would give me hope for our future.

[Mossfern]

6. I lived in the Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan for the first 30 years of my life

I would love to see Mamdani flesh out his ideas.
I personally am not pleased with what the city has become.

I lived in the Village and paid $82 per month for a funky railroad tenement apartment on Bleecker Street in the early 70's. That apartment is worth way more than a million dollars now. The soul of the Village has been replaced by what seems like an upscale mall. I'd love to see the city get its soul back.

[Doodley]

2. That question will send Trump into a rage!

[SocialDemocrat61]

3. Cuomo thought name recognition would win

So he just ran TV and did interviews on local news shows.

[Polybius]

4. Me

I was born and raised here.

[BannonsLiver]

5. I don't know, Liza is pretty New York.

She sang New York, New York before Frank did.