Three-ish takeaways from Zohran's win

There have been a lot of Zohran Mamdani thinkpieces since November 4th, and I've read most of them! But I want to add three takeaways that I really haven't seen discussed elsewhere in detail.

No repeats of Buffalo#

In the past few weeks people have talked a lot about how Obama's volunteer army fell apart after he was elected and how Mamdani campaign leaders are trying to prevent that from happening by launching "Our Time", a separate entity that can organize former campaign volunteers and keep them politically activated.

But more immediately, I think it's worth understanding that there was a specific effort to prevent a repeat of Buffalo's 2021 mayoral election in which a socialist (India Walton) upset the incumbent mayor (Byron Brown) in the Democratic primary, so Brown launched an independent campaign for the general, rallied the Democratic establishment to support him and not Walton (the Democratic nominee), winning the general by 20 points.

With that context, it made perfect sense that immediately after the primary we saw Zohran moving to consolidate the establishment behind him, including labor and elected officials. It mostly worked, just about everyone backed him except Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Oh and Jay Jacobs, the chair of the state Democratic party, who refused to endorse Zohran just like he refused to endorse Walton, except at least this time he didn't compare the socialist upstart to David Duke!

On primary day, Hell Gate interviewed Walton and afterwards City & State NY interviewed her too.

But I have yet to see any reporting on how many volunteers came down from Buffalo to support the Zohran campaign in the final stretch. I met a decent amount of people who were very open about why they had come to the city: to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2021.

Being ineligible for president can be a boon#

Because of the natural-born-citizen clause in the U.S. Constitution, Zohran is ineligible to run for U.S. president. Meanwhile it was incredibly obvious that Andrew Cuomo was running for mayor to relaunch his political career so he could run for president in 2028. That would follow the recent trend of NYC mayors running for president, including Bill de Blasio (2020), Michael Bloomberg (also 2020) and Rudy Giuliani (2008).

And of course, way too many people touted Eric Adams as the "future of the Democratic party" and a future presidential candiate. Oops, should've listened to Andrew Yang.

I think it's underrated that Zohran can't run, and so after the primary win, there was no endless dicussion of whether he'd run in 2028 or some made up hypotheticals of him vs. AOC as to who should be the left's standard bearer, etc. And, it's much easier to convey and convince people that Zohran was genuinely interested in improving the lives of New Yorkers as the mayor and not just using it as a stepping stone to higher office.

Indians can move left#

In 2024, it very much felt that Indians were moving right, with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy rising in the Republican ranks and Kamala Harris losing. Polling indicated Asians broadly shifted right (though I didn't find anything about Indians specifically). Not to mention the backdrop of Modi's right-wing government rising in India, which undoubtedly affects the views of the diaspora.

Anecdotally, the WhatsApp forwards were getting worse.

Zohran is easily the most high-profile Indian American politician in the U.S., but more importantly, his campaign was backed by incredibly strong South Asian turnout across the board, with Indian turnout rising from 18% to 45%. To quote: "South Asians and Muslims account for just 7 percent of the city’s registered voters, yet they cast an estimated 15 percent of all ballots in the general election." The aunties are activated.

Not to mention, Ro Khanna is now a legitimate 2028 presidential contender who also campaigned with Zohran in the final stretch while Ramaswamy is possibly starting to collapse.

Regardless of how that turns out, it's clear that it's far from inevitable that Indians will move right, and more importantly, we can move them left.

Final thoughts#

People keep repeating how this mayoral election was like none other, and I geniunely have no idea what they mean. This was my first mayoral election as a New York City resident so it's also my baseline. I expect things to only go up from here, starting with the special election for my assemblymember and then the open primary for my U.S. House district.