Mamdani Won New York City, But the Battle for Winning a Working-Class Agenda Has Just Begun

It truly is amazing that a Democratic Socialist has become mayor of the largest city in the United States, and that in the first line of his acceptance speech he quoted Eugene V. Debs, the brave socialist labor leader who was imprisoned in 1985 during the Pullman Strike and again in 1918 for his opposition to WWI:

“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

Mamdani’s youth, charisma, humor, and incredible organizational skills led to this remarkable achievement. He worked hard and he earned it, and so did the many progressive groups that supported him.

Mamdani may have the abilities and the working-class agenda to become a major transformational political leader. Free buses, free childcare, and a rent freeze are concrete and achievable, but the opposition will be fierce, especially as he intends to increase taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for these programs. And powerful landlords will be up in arms. This is the definition of class struggle.

There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone.

Mamdani is operating in the belly of the beast called runaway inequality. It’s nearly impossible to wrap our minds around the wealth that’s concentrated in New York. There are 123 billionaires living in NYC with a combined net worth more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars. And those numbers are surely an underestimate, given the many who have hidden their purchases of luxurious Manhattan apartments using shell companies.

To succeed against the rich and powerful, Mamdani will need a mass movement behind him, and that movement has to include enthusiastic support and the active participation of New York’s working class and labor unions.

Does he already have it? Is his victory the result of overwhelming support from highly educated liberals? Or has his working-class agenda also excited the working class more broadly, the way Eugene Debs did when he received nearly a million votes in his run for president in 1912?

All we have to go by, right now, are the exit polls, which aren’t really designed to include a clear demographic definition of the working class. But there is some suggestive information.

Let’s start with the standard media definition of working class based on education: You are often counted as being in the working class if you don’t have a four-year college degree. By this definition, Mamdani received most of his support from college-educated voters and ran behind Cuomo among working-class voters.

• New Yorkers are well educated: 58 percent of all the voters in this election had a four-year college degree or higher.
• This highly educated group overwhelmingly supported Mamdani over Cuomo, 57 percent to 37 percent.
• But Mamdani ran behind Cuomo among those who never attended college, 41 percent to 48 percent. One out of five voters are in this group.

The picture becomes blurrier if working-class is defined as having a lower income. New York voters are fairly evenly split between those whose family income is less than $100,000 year (58%), and those with $100,000 or more in family income (42%). And Mamdani’s support was identical between the two groups (51%), an almost exact match with his final vote of 51.5 percent.

But a closer look at the income brackets shows that Mamdani didn’t do as well with those with family incomes under $30,000. That group accounts for 16 percent of all voters. They favored Cuomo 50 percent to Mamdani’s 41 percent. But Mamdani won every other income bracket except those with family incomes of $300,000 or more, which he lost to Cuomo 61 percent to 34 percent. No way was a Democratic Socialist going to do well with the group he promised to tax more heavily to pay for his agenda.

Cutting it up into two income slices, Mamdani did slightly better with upper-income voters than lower-income voters. Those with family incomes of less than $50,000 gave 47 percent of their votes to Mamdani, and those with more than $50,000 supported him with 52 percent of their votes.

Revenge of the White Working Class?

Unlike Debs, Mamdani did not come out of the labor movement. He’s well-educated, an Asian immigrant born in Africa, and Muslim. Was that all too much for the allegedly racist white working-class? The exit polls don’t provide the crosstabs to give us definitive answers, but we can get some clues.

Here’s Mamdani’s support by ethnicity (of all educational and income groups):

• White 46 %
• Black 55 %
• Hispanic 49 %
• Asian 61 %
• Other 51 %

It’s hard to point the finger at white racism when support for Mamdani is almost identical between white voters and Hispanic voters. The big outlier is Asian, Mamdani’s own ethnic group.

The breakdown by gender shows less support among white men, but again the gaps are not gigantic:

• White men 43%
• White women 48%
• Black men 60%
• Black women 52%
• Hispanic men 52%
• Hispanic women 48%

Since we don’t know the income or education levels of these white men it’s not possible to see if working-class white men were less supportive, but that’s probably the case given the overall lower Mamdani numbers among those without four-year college degrees. However, while it’s not possible to tease apart racial identity and class when it comes to working-class voters of all shades, nothing big jumps out to suggest that this contest was about racial identity.

Mamdani needs those working-class voters, no matter how working class is defined and no matter what their ethnicity. He’s developed enormous support among liberal, well-educated New Yorkers, and that’s all to the good. But to take on the world’s richest, most powerful elites, that enthusiasm must spread deeply into the working class, where—even in New York—MAGA festers.

There will be major battles ahead that won’t be settled by Mamdani’s charisma and negotiating skills alone. That will require a mass movement in support of the progressive ideas the city’s new mayor campaigned on, the kind of movement New York hasn’t seen since the 1930s. Let’s hope Mamdani can reach even more deeply into the working class to strengthen his support. He’s going to need them.