Turn the Volume Up

At 6am on Tuesday morning outside a high school in Queens the press pack was already beginning to gather in the chilly pre-dawn dark. At this hour the day before, Zohran Mamdani was striding across the Brooklyn Bridge, picking up a crowd of supporters as he marched to a final campaign press conference outside City Hall.

Although the polling booth has just opened, Mamdani won’t be here to vote with his wife inside the upstairs gymnasium for a couple of hours, by which time photographers from international wires services and the ABC will have arrived from Washington. A freelance photojournalist out the front has been covering politics in New York City for years but hasn’t seen anything like this.

“This amount of press for a mayoral election is fucking insane,” he told me as we waited for electoral officials to find Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji’s name on the rolls. “We don’t normally pay attention to this.”

The world might be watching Mamdani’s campaign but Mamdani is not interested in the eyes of the world. At the press gaggle up the road, he barely engages with my question about what his victory might mean for the world. “My ambitions are squarely within these five boroughs my friend,” he offered as his press secretary stepped in to direct traffic to another local reporter’s question about federal funding threats from Trump. Eyes on the prize.

The Mamdani campaign machine is formidable, more fitting for a Prime Minister than a municipal election. Midway through election day they announced that they knocked more than 3 million doors with their 100,000 campaign volunteers. According to a Democratic Socialists of America campaign source, though, the videos are the magic ingredient. By the end of election day Mamdani had more than 6 million followers on Instagram. He was up early the next morning to deliver yet another slick and snappy reel introducing the transition: “A New Era for New York.”

His campaign has had time to prepare. Ahead in the polls since the primary where he squashed Cuomo the first time, his State Assembly chief of staff turned primary campaign manager has been working solely on the transition for months. His communications team is young and polished, operating as a protective perimeter well in advance of the new mayor arriving with his secret security detail and wife, who always looks like she’d prefer to be behind the tinted windows of the black SUV than in front of the cameras.

No such fanfare for Andrew Cuomo a couple of hours later at another polling booth across the East River on the Upper East Side. When he rolls up driving a white Toyota truck with his entourage of Kennedy children there is no campaign presence to speak of, just a handful of old society dames to cheer him in front of the photographers. Everyone hustles into a lift as Cuomo tells me he “feels great”. On the way back out, he is happy to entertain my typical query about what the world should make of all this, monologuing for several minutes about the evils of socialism.

“I think what you're seeing is a civil war in the Democratic Party that has been brewing for a while,” he starts. If it says a fair bit about Cuomo’s campaign mentality that he answers a question on global significance by leaning into internal party politics before pivoting to fifth columnists destroying the party of his kids’ grandparents, he’s also right. Mamdani’s victory is immediately interesting not just because it offers a relief and rejoinder to Trump’s national populism, but because the Democratic establishment is humbled. Mamdani has answers to problems they can’t even articulate.

On Tuesday night, at the biggest DSA watch party at a Bavarian-style outdoor beer garden in Mamdani’s home neighbourhood Astoria , Chuck Schumer gets bigger boos than Trump early in the evening. It’s a party from the start (my media request got rejected, and the ABC are haggling for entry at the front of the queue as we arrive) and the result is never in doubt a Mamdani starts and finishes with an absolute majority. Curtis Sliwa, framed as a wrecker, doesn’t make any difference to the daylight between Mamdani and Cuomo, who must have stolen most of the Republican vote if his sole majority in Staten Island is anything to go by.

Sliwa is in tears on stage at an Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side as he repeats his vow to stay and fight to keep New Yorkers safe (Mamdani says that Sliwa was the only candidate to call to congratulate him). Trump’s reaction starts flashing up on screen and the crowd of thousands in the massive beer garden are really getting into it now. “And so it begins,” posts the President, who must be unaccustomed to having his own star outshone this brightly.

Zohran swiftly deals with Cuomo when he finally walks out on stage at his official campaign event in Brooklyn (ram-packed; if I can’t even get an email back from his media people, I’m told there’s no chance I’ll make it inside to brush shoulders with Hasan). “I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” and he pauses for the collective in-draw of breath at the emphasis, “but let tonight be the final night I utter his name.”

With that chapter over the mayor-elect turns to Trump, “since I know you’re watching.”

“We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” he begins. “And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.”

Zohran has toppled the dead centrist orthodoxy and installed in its place the promise of another force to match Trump’s talent for virality, wit and the power to mobilise. His speech last night was unrestrained, as radiant as his eternal smile.

“New York, this power, it’s yours,” he promised his people. “This city belongs to you.”

A Muslim mayor, an immigrant born in Uganda, elected without a hiccup in a country considered to be sliding swiftly towards fascism. The National Guard will come, the ICE raids will spill out of federal court buildings and into the streets, but the people have elected their response, and he’s got numbers at his back. It will be fascinating to observe the next phase of the fightback.

“This country is not a socialist country,” Cuomo had told me on the Upper East Side on Tuesday morning. “The city is not a socialist city. The state is not a socialist state. Socialism has never worked anywhere on the globe. Not Venezuela, not Cuba. It's not going to work in New York City.”

Let’s see what happens. Cuomo’s era is over, and the world is watching the alternatives line up.

This piece was co-published with Crikey.