Only time will tell whether Zohran Mamdani is the rightful heir to Bernie Sanders’ political legacy, but for the moment at least, he’s a leading contender. Despite big differences in age and experience, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City and the 84-year-old independent U.S. senator from Vermont share a broadly progressive vision of an American future sharply at odds with what’s currently on offer from the reckless Republicans and the feckless Democrats into whose hands the nation has fallen.
Mamdani explicitly acknowledges his debt to Sanders, whom he has called “the single most influential political figure in my life.” He told a town hall meeting in Brooklyn in September that “it was Bernie’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 that gave me the language of democratic socialism to describe my politics.”
Mamdani’s success surely owes much to Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, which fell short of the nomination but thrust his signature issues such as Medicare for All and free college tuition into the political mainstream.
The lineage is also clear in Mamdani’s laser-like focus on making life more affordable for working families, something that Sanders has been preaching for more than 40 years. The mayor-elect campaigned on bread-and-butter issues such as freezing rents on rent-stabilized apartments, building more affordable housing, and providing free bus service and universal child care.
The popularity of this affordability agenda is reflected in demographic trends analyzed by The New York Times. He forged an unusual coalition of younger white progressives, South Asians and Muslims along with traditional Democratic voting blocs such as older Black moderates. More than a million New Yorkers voted for him in what was the largest turnout in a mayoral election in more than half a century. Sanders demonstrated similarly broad appeal on a bigger stage during his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. In 2016, for example, he drew huge crowds to his rallies, won primary contests in more than 20 states and arrived at the Democratic National Convention with 46% of the pledged delegates.
Mamdani has proposed paying for his affordability agenda by raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents. Naturally, this did not sit well with what Sanders refers to as the billionaire class, members of which are now proclaiming that with socialism on the march, the end is near for New York. Real estate agents in Florida are said to be anxiously looking forward to finding new homes for the diaspora of the obscenely wealthy.
This plutocratic panic is premature and probably misplaced. Mamdani has only aced the first part of the mission impossible test: getting elected. Soon he will be trying to govern a city that is regarded by many as almost ungovernable. Perhaps more to the point, whatever progress he is able to make in rendering life in the city more affordable benefits everybody who lives there. Mamdani’s message is inclusive, as Sanders’ has always been.
Moreover, Mamdani shows early indications of being, like Sanders, a practical idealist, which in our book is the best kind. Prominent among his first appointments to his incoming administration was the selection as his top deputy of a veteran government operative who knows how things get done both at City Hall and in the Legislature in Albany.
We suspect that if the political landscape in fact harbors the grave diggers of the current order, the most likely suspects are not Mamdani and Sanders but rather the ultrawealthy themselves and the many politicians who do their bidding. The Mamdani election moment was bookended by two examples.
A group of Senate Democrats caved and voted to reopen the government only after airline flights were curtailed, while throwing overboard millions of Americans who face the loss of health insurance. The affluent fly; the health care system dies.
And then there was the gilded Great-Gatsby-themed Halloween party thrown by President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where, it has been reported, the costumed guests ate, drank and made merry just hours before 42 million Americans faced the suspension of federal food aid. The oblivious ostentation of this event is characteristic of unheeding wealth, or as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the novel that provided the theme: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed things up . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Mamdani and Sanders have some good ideas about how to clean up the mess Trump and his enablers are leaving, and they should get a fair hearing.