The Political Youth Movement That Propelled Zohran Mamdani to Victory
“I’m feeling really good about a project that I started working on, one way or another, in 2019,” Andy Simpson, a DSA spokesperson said. “The work that has come before builds something like this now. We were only able to do this with 40 or 50,000 volunteers, whatever the final number is,” he said, “because there were so many people who worked so hard in previous campaigns and who believed in our theory of change and who believed in our mission, and this is not something that ends here.”
As the polls tightened in the days leading up to election night, there had been an absolute Death Star of political action committee donations to Cuomo—a reported $25 million—and establishment politicians who had previously ignored Mamdani’s campaign made last-minute endorsements of Cuomo, handwaving away the numerous accusations of sexual harassment that had forced him to resign as governor of New York in 2021 and allegations that he misled the public about Covid-related nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Mamdani’s victory was also a victory over an establishment that has for years oscillated between dismissing the left and vilifying it as an existential threat.
“Leftists are cursed with object permanence, and a lot of other people forget. The natural move is to do a sort of Jedi mind trick,” Simpson said. “Power doesn’t want you to remember the things that it does to you.”
The polls were looking great with Mamdani ahead with 86 percent of the vote when I left Manhattan, but I was well aware that the results could take days to tally, so my night would likely be anticlimactic. New York’s ranked-choice voting rules meant that an official winner wouldn’t be declared until July 1 at the earliest. Most pundits who weren’t predicting a Cuomo victory anticipated an extremely tight race.
Instead, I walked into the Brooklyn club 9 Bob Note to deafening cheers. Andrew Cuomo had just conceded. It wasn’t even 11 p.m. Madami had done it, winning the first round 44 percent to 36 percent—not even close, really.
A very mustachioed fellow in a Zohran volunteer shirt and a face filled with pure glee appeared and offered me a much-needed fist bump. “Let’s fucking go,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
Cuomo appeared on the news to offer a concession speech, which the room drowned out with boos and “We want Zohran” chants. Eventually, the DJ read the room and began blasting Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!”
The dancing went on for the next hour or so, people losing it to Lorde’s “Green Light” and the rest of those club classics. In between, results were pored over—a friend I had unexpectedly run into was practically levitating when she realized Cuomo had only won Staten Island by nine points. Across the gender spectrum, people were wearing “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirts, the summer’s hottest accessory.
