cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/217883

Photo: Zachary Schulman

On November 15, 2024, Zohran Mamdani released a video of himself interviewing people on the street in Queens and the Bronx who had voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election the previous week. It was one of the first of the viral posts that propelled him into the spotlight and ultimately helped him all but capture the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Then polling close to zero percent, Mamdani seemed more like a local news anchor than a candidate, gamely thrusting a microphone into the faces of voters and letting them take the stage. The answers to why they voted for Trump — “Food prices are going up,” “Rent is expensive” — informed Mamdani’s campaign as it homed in on the issue of affordability. But the other answer that came up again and again — one that Mamdani chose to highlight — was Gaza. “They like Trump because they don’t want their Palestinian brothers to be killed,” one man says.

This was a terrible miscalculation on the part of these voters, as is almost any attempt to make common cause with Trump. But voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party for its unstinting support of the Netanyahu regime, just like their anxiety about the high cost of living in New York, was real, and both sentiments carried over into the mayoral primary in June, a setting for the liberal left to confront itself. And once again voters punished the Democratic Party for its inability to address those issues, coming out in droves for the most un-Democratic candidate in the field — a socialist, in fact.

It was not supposed to happen this way, not in a city with nearly 1 million Jews, the historic center of the Jewish diaspora outside Israel. Mamdani’s opponents predicted that his positions on Israel — his reluctance to affirm its right to define itself as a Jewish state, his refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” his assertion that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested as an indicted war criminal if he visits New York, all nearly unheard of for a Democratic-primary candidate — would sink him. What’s curious is that while panicked Democrats are now conceding that Mamdani crushed his principal rival, the Establishment favorite Andrew Cuomo, by underscoring pocketbook issues, running a galvanic campaign both on social media and IRL, and not being an alleged serial sexual harasser and all-around goon, they have yet to reckon with the fact that voters, particularly young voters, were drawn to Mamdani and supported him fervently because of his steadfast opposition to the war in Gaza. Publicly at least, the Democrats have yet to acknowledge the enormous, perhaps irreparable toll their support for the war has taken on their party.

Mamdani outperformed expectations in nearly every demographic, upending the conventional wisdom that leftist appeal is limited to young, highly educated, largely white voters. But his campaign was nevertheless powered by an overwhelming show of force from those same voters who reside in what the strategist Michael Lange in the New York Times playfully called “the Commie Corridor,” a stretch of gentrified Brooklyn and Queens that includes Ridgewood (80 percent for Mamdani), Bushwick (79 percent), and East Williamsburg (75 percent). And these voters, as anyone in New York with an Instagram account can attest, are vocal about their opposition to the appalling atrocities Israel has committed in Gaza, as are the Muslim voters whom Mamdani also unlocked.

Foreign policy was not technically a top issue in the race, which makes sense because the mayor of New York does not set U.S. foreign policy (in general, the trend of turning every food–co-op–board election into a referendum on Gaza probably isn’t the ideal way to conduct local affairs). But no matter how hard Mamdani tried to focus on his proposals for free bus rides and free child care, Gaza was still everywhere in the primary, principally because his Democratic opponents, as well as the financial elites who stand behind them and sympathetic media outlets, thought they could use his positions on Israel to turn Jewish voters against him. When Mamdani stood by the use of the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” Cuomo said those words “fuel hate” and “fuel murder” and “there are no two sides here.” But voters in the city with the most Jews outside Tel Aviv simply did not buy the notion that Mamdani is an antisemite who would discriminate against or fail to protect them. In fact, it’s clear that many Democrats, including many Jewish Democrats, voted for him because of his positions on Israel — or at the very least saw little objectionable about them. As the writer Bess Kalb put it in a recent essay explaining Jewish support for Mamdani, “I am not writing this on October 8th. It is June 25th, 2025. And if we do not change our perspective with time and events and evidence, we are living with our heads in the sand.”

Nearly 70 percent of Democrats now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to Pew. Yet Democratic officials carry on as if full-throated support for Israel were party doctrine. An article in Politico about the lessons Democrats are drawing from Cuomo’s defeat did not contain a single mention of Gaza or Israel; titled “Mamdani’s Surprise Win Reawakens Democrats’ Internal Factions,” the article’s omission suggests there are no pro-Palestine factions to speak of. Instead, Democrats have been more than happy to jump on the much safer affordability train as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, with his usual dead-eyed delivery, “I think what’s clear is that the relentless focus on affordability had great appeal all across the city of New York.”

Democrats have an odd habit of tuning out their own supporters even when those supporters are practically screaming at them to listen. In the past presidential election, New Yorkers were hollering at them about inflation, yes, but also immigration and crime. Democrats did eventually acknowledge they had been weak on those issues, which explains their timid response to Trump’s subsequent assault on undocumented and documented immigrants alike. The Democrats remain indifferent, however, to any pleas about Gaza, in ways that appear to be alienating to voters — especially young ones — on the left side of the spectrum who simply do not understand why the party that supposedly represents them is constantly bowing and scraping before a murderous regime.

Never was this more apparent than after Trump’s strike on Iran, which many Democrats, including Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, refused to condemn, despite the fact that Trump did not get the required congressional approval. In an instant, the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian coalition revealed itself to be an illusion because liberal Iran hawks and their Never Trump allies viewed the demise of Israel’s sworn enemy as more important than placing a check on a demagogue they have long warned has too much power. The consistent, principled thing to do would have been to oppose the strike outright, but Democrats like Antony Blinken and Steny Hoyer instead offered toothless criticisms of Trump’s brazen warmongering while cheering on the strikes anyway — to please whom, you may ask? Nearly 80 percent of Democrats oppose them.

As Mamdani barrels toward the general election as the heavy favorite to become mayor, Israel’s supporters in New York and beyond are marshaling an effort to remind voters of his heresies. New York’s political power brokers — Schumer, Jeffries, Kathy Hochul, and others — have declined to endorse him. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand slammed him for using words she felt were “permissive for violence against Jews.” Islamophobia has been rampant in the media and the halls of Congress with Republican representative Nancy Mace suggesting Mamdani was somehow responsible for 9/11. But more loudly than ever, Democratic voters in the country’s most formidable Democratic stronghold have declared their opposition to the seemingly unbreakable bond between the Democratic political class and the current Israeli regime. When given an actual choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine, Democratic voters broke hard for the alternative to the status quo, raising the possibility of primary debates over this issue throughout the country, in places with far fewer emotional and political ties to Israel.

Whether Democrats will listen is another matter. Some people have compared Mamdani to Barack Obama, who rose to power channeling voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party’s support for a different awful war. In its embrace of Obama, the party showed it had the capacity to adapt, to listen to reason, to recognize mistakes. He gave people a reason to believe in liberalism again, redeeming its sins. But the once clear-eyed and daring Obama, like so many others in his party, has lost his voice. He has been silent about Mamdani and the mayor’s race. He’s been virtually silent on Gaza, too.

More on Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani on Why He Won‘It’s Nice to Be Right!’Zohran Mamdani’s Win Prompted a Full-Fledged Elite Meltdown

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