When An Earthquake Hits New York City - 6/30/25

When an upstart political rebel rages against the establishment—whether Donald Trump from the right or Bernie Sanders from the left—they are channeling the growing unhappiness and dissatisfaction that frustrated voters feel toward the political system. Think of this phenomenon as middle-finger politics. And it should be no surprise that the residents of our nation’s largest city have found a new way to demonstrate their anger.

There is no guarantee that Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York. The incumbent Eric Adams could still gain re-election, and the just-defeated Andrew Cuomo could still decide to seek revenge. But Mamdani’s surprisingly large margin of victory in the Big Apple’s Democratic primary last Tuesday will have a tremendous impact not just on the politics of NYC but on the electoral landscape in the other 49-and-a-half states too. Voters are furious; they are desperate for something different, and a 33-year-old Muslim state legislator with a compelling TikTok account who promises free public transit and child care, city-run grocery stores, and a rent freeze seemed like a convenient way of expressing their displeasure.

City leaders have been predictably slow to react. After supporting the scandal-plagued and divisive Cuomo in the primary, they now appear to be coalescing behind the scandal-plagued and divisive Adams as their last-ditch choice to stop Mamdani. In addition to the upstart’s expensive plans for government spending, his call for increased taxes on the wealthy and statements regarding Israel that have enraged many Jewish voters make Mamdani an extremely polarizing candidate. But New York political leaders are clearly at a loss for how to deal with him and his voters, and they are divided between those who will grudgingly support him in the general election and those who are tempted by Adams’ relatively centrist approach.

While New York City’s fate is obviously of great import in its own right, Mamdani’s convincing win raises broader questions on how Democrats nationally will address this progressive insurgency heading into next year’s midterm elections and how both parties' leaders will try to capture the populist anger driving our politics without being consumed by it. Donald Trump has shown his fellow Republicans how to ride that wave and channel it toward his own goals, but at the cost of driving away the political center. Those swing voters are tantalizingly available for Democratic candidates next year, but only if they can figure out how to balance the demands of the grassroots that propelled Mamdani with the needs of the less ideologically extreme voters who decide elections.

Complicating this challenge even further is that the up-from-the-streets fury that now defines American politics is no longer the sole province of the far left and far right. Rather, the voters who occupy the political center are just as determined to upend the political establishment as their more ideologically radical accomplices. They are no longer moderate about very much at all.

At the national level, Trump is a fixed point. Americans know exactly what they will get from him—for the good and the bad. His support (as well as that of Republican congressional candidates) only varies in relation to how voters are feeling about Democrats at that particular moment. GOP strategists understand this, and so they are already working to turn Mamdani into a national face of the Democratic party, the same role that Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have played in recent years.

Which means that Democratic candidates in competitive races will need to find a way to distance themselves from Mamdani’s aggressively left-leaning agenda while simultaneously tapping into the widespread voter unhappiness that propelled him to his victory last week. Not only is this an achievable feat, especially because Trump himself is such a motivational force (for both his supporters and his opponents), but it’s one that the Democrats pulled off during Trump’s last midterm election in 2018 when they won 40 House seats to regain their majority in that chamber.

But Mamdani’s election would almost certainly make that task harder, not easier. His gift for motivating young voters and other progressives in a deep-blue coastal metropolis would be difficult to pull off in more ideologically balanced communities. Democratic candidates in those races would be running away from him as quickly as they can, and many of them may be silently hoping for his defeat in November.