What Zohran can teach Democrats

Some notes after last night

At what became the victory party for Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old phenom who palpitated the political establishment to become the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, the guests were trying to process a shared feeling that was hard to put into words.

It was the opposite of what everyone had been feeling for seven and a half long months. What is this feeling? people kept saying to each other, only half-joking, half also wondering.

It was something at the intersection of believing sincerely again, feeling defended again, not thinking yourself crazy to want basic things. It was a feeling of dawn after a very long night.

Overnight, Mamdani’s improbable victory drove headline writers to their thesauruses for synonyms to “stun” and “shock” and “surprise.” But victories like this one are, of course, not miracles or black swan weather events. They are the product of very specific choices.

If the Democratic Party Mamdani took by storm is interested in learning from what he did, there are lessons. If it isn’t too scared by the idea of winning by making people feel things.

In his victory address last night, Mamdani himself did not shy away from this interpretation of his own success. He spoke of a goal “to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.” So what are some elements of the model?

1. Embrace the politics of feeling

Faced with a populist authoritarian demagogue in Donald Trump, one whose pulsing rallies were the foreshadowing of electoral success, Democrats continue to be stuck in a pointy-headed contempt for simplicity and feeling.

There is a dismissal of “vibes.” There is a sneering attitude about “messaging.” A brilliant pundit like my friend Ezra Klein will call Mamdani’s highly simple, memorable ideas “memetic,” as if designed to spread more than help.

Let me say this plainly, since more subtly has not worked. The Democratic Party establishment, and various others in its orbit, including many political commentators and opinion journalists and others, are brainiacs with a personal blind spot for how most human beings feel and think, and their discounting of the politics of feeling is risking the republic itself, and it needs to stop now.

Just ask Zohran. Mamdani had ideas — was full of policy ideas. He even has a website and everything. But he understood, as few in his party do, as few in his party want to do, that it’s hard to get people to think like you if you can’t get them to feel for you. He used his, yes, simple, memetic ideas to make people remember, and then, having remembered, he gave them something to talk about with their grandmother and their ex. He used a combination of these simple, repeatable ideas, shrewd and disciplined messaging, and in-person human communion to awaken people from slumber.

Anytime anything happens like this, the Democrats get scared. Nothing scarier than young people getting excited about something. Stop it now! So scary. A party that too often caves to donors is liable to be afraid of voters finding their voice and power and believing they can actually have nice things. But maybe, just maybe, Democrats should try to make people feel.

When the old guard sent out former President Bill Clinton to endorse former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, you had to laugh. It was like an attempt to forge a union of solidarity among men who have been accused of sexually harassing women.

Stop circling the wagons. When something new is happening, let it bloom. Don’t be scared.

2. Excite the base to move the middle

What is the counter-offer to Trumpism?

To listen to many Democrats in this moment is to hear warnings to play it safe, lay low, offer lite, moderate, no-jazz-hands incrementalism.

The theory is that Trump is self-immolating. So just be the guy who’s not on fire.

Mamdani did something different. He channeled what the progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio has called animating the base to move the middle — her attempt to overturn the prevailing Democratic Party approach of catering to the middle at any cost, including, all too often, demoralizing the base.

Exciting the base to move the middle works like this: You give your core supporters something to write home about. Ideas they simply cannot shut up about. Wow? He proposed that?

As they start not being able to shut up, people hear them. Because of how ideology and population distribution work, the people who start hearing them are often less ideological or passionate or knowledgeable than they are. But they like seeing their friend/lover/relative come alive. Like in “When Harry Met Sally,” they want to have what that person is having. And so ideas spread from base to middle.

Mamdani didn’t water down his ideas to court the middle. He tried to thrill the living hell out of a core base of support, so that they would take time they didn’t have out of their lives to tell everyone they knew. And he won.

3. Mercy and empathy for Trump voters

Democrats have a confused attitude toward Trump supporters. They view them, in many ways, as victims of giant manipulation by billionaire media owners and the demagogue-in-chief himself. But all too often they treat them as irredeemable, morally abominable souls.

One of the signature elements of Mamdani’s campaign was not doing that.

He went deep into the heart of immigrant Queens and filmed conversations with people born elsewhere, many of them people of color, who had voted for Trump. Without judgment, he asked why. He heard their stories. I have seen few Democrats doing this since November 2024. He seemed genuinely curious.

What he found was that people’s lives hadn’t gotten easier in tangible ways, and almost universally had grown more expensive. These immigrants in Queens weren’t signing up for white nationalism. They were signing up for a hope, a dice roll, of shaking up the system.

The more he talked to them, a funny thing happened. People who had voted for Trump were also super excited about his democratic socialist ideas of free buses, publicly run neighborhood stores, and universal childcare.

Politics isn’t as ideological, as neatly left-right, as many think. People are complicated, full of cross-currents. He demonstrated how empathy and mercy for people who lurch to the right can bring them back in democracy’s fold.

4. Reclaim what cities are for

Mamdani focused totally on affordability. The campaign framed itself as aspiring to build a city people can afford to live in. It was, one presumes, the message that won the primary.

But along the way, Mamdani verged on something important in the discussion of prices. High prices, he said in various ways, change what cities are, how they work, what they’re for. High prices turn a place like New York into a hamster wheel of daily survival instead of a place where people are consumed by the things they want to make, the art they came here to create, the businesses they dream of starting, the families they want to start.

Prices are not just about prices. When they rise, they turn a place like New York into a place one goes to enjoy having had success rather than a place one goes to find success. That is a fundamental change in the meaning of a city. Mamdani pointed toward a new theme of making cities more livable, not just because livable is good, but because this is a country where people want to build and create and do stuff, and affordable cities make that happen.

5. Organizing is everything

I took a very, very long walk through Brooklyn on Sunday — different neighborhoods, real estate price points, racial mixes, social histories.

In a few hours of walking, I saw canvassers for Mamdani several times. I did not encounter one canvasser for any other of the many candidates in the race for mayor.

Organizing is everything. The Mamdani campaign was not a campaign of a political star. He is a star, who ran on the top of a giant organizing effort. Physical, IRL, boots-on-the-ground organizing.

The Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and other organizations put people on doors. This was not an airwaves campaign. It was a stoop campaign. As obvious as this might seem, it’s a lesson that keeps going unlearned.