Mamdani’s Win in NYC Transforms America’s Mid-Term Political Contests

26 June 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

A typical initial take on the totally unexpected landslide win, by the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani, of the Democratic nomination for (and thus almost certainly) the Mayoralty of NYC, was Eric Levitz’s June 25th Vox News article “What Democrats can (and can’t) learn from Zohran Mamdani’s triumph”, which said that

Some on the left have suggested that Mamdani’s victory proves Democrats do not need to moderate their party’s image to compete for national power. This argument does not make much sense. To secure a Senate majority in 2026, Democrats will need to win multiple states that backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by double digits. And even if Democrats give up on winning Senate control next year and shoot for doing so in 2028, they will still need to win in states that voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot.

According to some political scientists, pollsters, and pundits, doing this will require Democrats to moderate their national reputation, since modern voters tend to judge candidates less by their own idiosyncratic positions than by their party’s general image. In this analysis, acquiring the power necessary for advancing even incremental progressive change federally requires the Democratic leadership to observe strict ideological discipline. So long as the party’s brand is toxic to the median voter in Ohio — who backed Trump every single time he’s been on the ballot — Democrats will have no prayer of passing ambitious federal legislation or confirming liberal Supreme Court justices.

This theory could very well be wrong. But a socialist winning 43.5 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City does not tell us much about its validity one way or another.

However, that was 43.5% of the voters in a four-candidate race, in which 36.4% went to the overwhelming favorite by ‘the experts’, Andrew Cuomo, 11.3% went to another candidate, and 4.3% went to the corruption-scandal-plagued current incumbent Mr. Adrienne Adams. So, even if Mr. Mamdani won’t receive the donations or endorsements of ANY of NYC’s billionaires and their media, New York City is going to have its first socialist and anti-Wall-Street Mayor in 2025, and all of those “political scientists, pollsters, and pundits” will be proven wrong; and here is why:

All indicators are that currently Americans are very dissatisfied with both Parties; the public sentiment in favor of a new Third political Party to become formed is at an all-time-high; and the public’s polled trust in America’s institutions and especially in its governmental and media institutions is at an all-time low.

Nonetheless the ‘experts’ overwhelmingly predict upon the basis of the assumptions that worked for them in the past. When voters have been asked by pollsters what their POLICY-preferences are, their answers are remarkably as they were in the past. However, this does NOT say anything about the public’s policy-PRIORITIES, which have recently changed RADICALLY. I have several times stated this, but it is the most-meaningful polling result so far this year, and is extremely relevant to the Mayoralty contest in NYC, so I shall repeat it again:

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And that is a dictatorship by the super-rich.

As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein, reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”.)

To see the empirical evidences proving that there IS class-warfare in America, and that the billionaire-class is ruling this country and (behind the scenes) writing and executing its laws, click here. That’s the situation as it had been since at least 1980, but the current trend away from that is toward even more of a dictatorship (by the super-rich) in America.

Between now and November 4th — the upcoming NYC Mayoralty election — there is plenty of time for a rip-roaring campaign that will either rip the Democrat to pieces, or else rip the Republican nominee to pieces. The likelihood that Mamdani will get ripped to pieces by the Republicans seems low to me because he is the son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. Click on those and you will see a personal background that explains his politics; and, so, the likelihood of scandal being found by Republican opposition researchers against him is just about as low as it can go, though freakish exceptions do exist to contradict any generality.

The BIG issue in politics, which will be coming increasingly to the fore during all of the political contests throughout Trump’s second term, will be TRUST (honesty). Levitz’s article misses this fact entirely when he says “4) The odds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning in 2028 look higher. Finally, it is easier to picture Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination today than it was yesterday.” She has been enough of a disappointment to progressive voters (such as on the the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide against Gazans, regarding which, she has continued to speak only in platitudes, knowing that she can climb her way up ONLY if she can get the Party’s billionaires to back her), as to make Levitz’s analogy of Cortez to Mamdani an unintended and false insult to Mamadani. So, Levitz’s comparing her to Mamdani is so very far off-base that Levitz’s throw there might as well have been into the stands, as to the baseman, trying to stop the base-runner.

Mamdani’s win of the Democratic nomination will probably turn out to have been a major turning-point in American politics. The Democratic Party’s billionaires will have lots of difficulty dealing with it, and might even lose their grip-hold of the Party. All of them turning toward the Republican Party would end the hoax of their saying we have a democracy because we give you the choice: it’s between arsenic and cyanide. That’s what they’ve done to our ‘democracy’.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.