The bar trivia I went to last night screeched to a halt when the host announced the NYC mayoral election had been called for Zohran Mamdani. The bartenders blasted “New York, New York” and doled out free prosecco. While on a run before the polls closed, I saw a car covered in Mamdani posters at a traffic circle; as the driver honked their horn and yelled to people to vote, pedestrians started up a group chant of Zohran’s name. All of which is to say, there are a lot of very happy folks in the city right now.
Someone who is not happy is Andrew Cuomo, the former governor/sex pest who, after being swiftly trounced in the Democratic primary, stuck in the race as an independent. His campaign felt fueled by spite and bitterness, by what a friend of mine described as outrage that he had to rely on people to put him in Gracie Mansion. He ran a hateful and embarrassing campaign, showing his ass alongside the panicked wealthy threatening to leave the city if Mamdani won, and alongside legacy media establishments that seemed desperate to uphold an immiserating, unimaginative status quo.
In his concession speech last night, Cuomo called his campaign “a caution flag that we are heading down a dangerous, dangerous road” in politics. He noted “ironically” that his campaign got more votes on an independent line than his father, Mario Cuomo, did against Ed Koch in 1977, a bit of competition that doesn’t feel like the right use of irony. “Almost half of New Yorkers did not vote to support a government agenda that makes promises that we know cannot be met,” he said, a dig at Mamdani’s platform of quality-of-life improvements for regular people instead of billionaires. And he couldn’t resist one last mispronunciation of Mamdani’s name, a show of racist bullying I can only imagine was meant during the campaign to highlight Mamdani’s foreignness, but here also makes Cuomo look like he didn’t care enough about any of this to even learn the name of the person he lost to.
Cuomo’s interest in being mayor seemed most motivated by a desire to be mayor, not to actually do the job of helping the people of the city he’d lead. Part of the appeal of Mamdani’s campaign was his interest in everyday people and his plans to make our lives a little better. In the months leading up to the election Mamdani was seen everywhere with those people. His campaign ran videos of him talking to taxi drivers, union members, local influencers, and marathon spectators. It referenced pop culture staples like Law and Order, Survivor, and The Bachelor. He put out campaign spots in Arabic and Spanish in which he admitted he doesn’t speak the languages well while still trying, all of them reaching voters often overlooked in English-speaking campaigns.
In his own victory speech, Mamdani hit Cuomo with the excellent burn that “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life, but let tonight be the final time I utter his name.” He spoke to the city’s immigrant population and trans people. He aimed parts of his speech directly at Trump, who’s threatened to cut city funding and send in the National Guard if Mamdani won. “We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” Mamdani said in his speech. “After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him."
Cuomo insisted he would stand against Trump, even as Trump and his allies endorsed him. He toed a grosser version of the same line as Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and other Democrats who seem to recognize the seriousness of this moment but feel their top priority is sticking to a playbook that’s long gone out the window. Would whatever Republican backlash might come New York’s way if Cuomo won be less than whatever will happen now that Mamdani’s won? Possibly. But Cuomo wouldn’t put up a meaningful resistance to rising fascism. There wouldn’t be a fight everyday people could rally around with the passion they’ve shown for Mamdani’s vision. The city would compromise in inches, or get utterly steamrolled, with nothing to show for it but more misery for the everyday people who are in Trump’s crosshairs, and more safety for the people rich and powerful enough to not be affected by it.
Mamdani might not ultimately put up a strong enough fight either. And we can say with near-certainty that he won’t be able to do all the things he’s promised. No elected politician, however much we like them, is going to be a cure-all, or do more for people than we can do for ourselves.
But we will always know that he beat Andrew Cuomo, that he won against the imaginationless politics those in power want to consign us to so they can maintain their own positions. We can hang on to the knowledge that, at least this one time, fear-mongering and money couldn’t beat people’s hopes for the kind of lives they deserve.
It rules immensely that Mamdani won, and it also rules that Cuomo lost. It rules that a record number of New Yorkers came out to vote for something else. It rules that Mamdani’s campaign inspired people to get involved in local politics, one of many tools we have to build a world we want to live in. We’ll see what kind of mayor Mamdani turns out to be, but we can celebrate that he’ll be the mayor who beat Cuomo and everything he stands for.
