Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York received enormous attention worldwide, but the political story is bigger. For the first time since his election in November 2024, President Donald Trump has received a substantial popular rebuke. In a rare acceptance of electoral rebuff, he admitted the morning after that “it was a bad night for Republicans”.
What happened? And how do we interpret it?
Let us begin with Mamdani, especially his invocation of Jawaharlal Nehru in the victory speech.
Reviving Nehru
“A moment comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” Nehru delivered these immortal words in an epoch-defining speech, Tryst with Destiny, at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, in Delhi. Mamdani has only won a mayoral, not a national election. So why would he cite a national independence speech?
Nehru is clearly an icon for Mamdani at several levels. Like Nehru, Mamdani is a democratic socialist. The idea of “the soul of a nation long suppressed” finding utterance was clearly a metaphor, not a mathematically exact set of phrases. It depicted how the political battle against Andrew Cuomo, one of the biggest political dynasts of New York, felt—to Mamdani and to his 1,00,000 volunteers.
A three-time state governor and former member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet, Cuomo had the New York wealthy backing him, as well as Trump. Mamdani’s funds came from hundreds of thousands of small individual contributions. Emerging triumphant against the odds, feeling affirmed and invigorated, a 34-year-old Mamdani felt he was ready to usher in a new political dawn.
Mamdani has an Indian background. He is not shy of using Indian motifs in his political tapestry. Other than Nehru, there was the use of Bollywood music in the concluding act of the victory rally. He also emphatically presented himself as a Muslim American. That, too, had made the odds of winning tougher. The victory was, therefore, doubly sweet.
But there is no doubt that the use of Nehru was also a message to fellow Indian Americans—many of whom, if not most, are Modi devotees. An antithesis of Nehru, Modi is not an icon for Mamdani. The young Democrat’s speeches are carefully planned and choreographed. Nehru could not have been an accidental slip. Mamdani would perhaps like to revive Nehru in the minds and thoughts of the new-generation Indian Americans, who only hear about Modi these days.
Let us now move beyond the Indian connection and ask: what has Mamdani achieved?
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‘Left populism’
Socialism is not a term valorised in the capitalist land of America. Still, Mamdani’s proposals of free buses, free child care, freezing of house rents, a $30 per hour minimum wage—to be financed by higher taxes on the richest individuals and corporations—emerged victorious. This kind of socialism is now described as “Left populism” in political discourse, to be distinguished from the “Right populism” of Trump. Classically, socialism also used to mean a government-planned production system. That is not where Mamdani is headed. His plan is welfare-based, not production-based. He wants to make New York affordable to its low-income and even middle-income households.
New York is the richest American city, and perhaps its most cosmopolitan. Its annual budget is bigger than that of all but four states in the US (California, Texas, Florida, and the state of New York). Anywhere up to a third of its population is foreign-born, making its networks truly international. It shapes elite discourse in the US in a way no other city does. Its mayor is not just a local phenomenon, but a national figure, and for many, even an international one. In a political career that is only a few years long, New York elections have thus put Mamdani on a very high pedestal. Whether his plans would succeed is another matter and need not detain us here.
But after all is said and done, New York’s politics are not generalizable to the country. The city is America’s most cosmopolitan outpost, not its heartland. When I lived in South Bend, Indiana, I met a lot of people for whom New York was really a foreign country.
That is why we need to pay attention to what happened elsewhere on 4 November.
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Democrats on the rise
In two important and more widely relevant states, New Jersy and Virginia, Democrats won the governor’s races as well as several key others. Virginia’s deputy governor-elect is a Hyderabad-born Ghazala Hashmi. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom won the referendum on adding five likely Democratic seats to the next year’s House elections, neutralising the five likely Republican seats that the Republican Governor of Texas had added some months back. Three Democratic judges in Pennsylvania, a state which elects its justices, got re-elected for 10 years. Two seats on the Utility Board of Georgia, previously with Republicans, also went to Democrats. As the night ended, it was unclear whether Republicans had won anything politically significant.
Moreover, unlike Mamdani, who belongs to the Left wing of the Democratic Party, these latter victories belonged to party moderates or centrists. If the moderates had not won, the Left wing would have pushed the party in their direction, creating a serious internal conflict. With both factions winning, they will now have to coexist. That will most likely lead to a stronger party in the next year’s hugely important mid-term elections. If Democrats win the House of Representatives, the power of the White House will no longer be the same.
Within a year of Trump’s landslide victory, the US is entering a political phase where two parties will be alive, not simply one. His path will now encounter greater political resistance.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)