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waleed shahid
Zohran Mamdani's Battle Against the Billionaire Class and Democratic Establishment Is Just Beginning
Noting that corporations, large landlords, developers, and donors "want to keep him out of the mayor's office," India Walton urged Zohran Mamdani's campaign to "stay ahead of the messaging and stay on doors."
Jun 26, 2025
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday beat disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic NYC mayoral primary—but progressives within and beyond the city don't expect the billionaire class and party establishment that lined up against him to give up so easily. Going into the general election, those who believe in Mamdani's vision are encouraging him and his supporters to maintain the momentum of the movement they've built.
"This is a foot-on-the-gas kind of moment," RootsAction senior strategist India Walton told Common Dreams.
Walton knows about what she speaks. In June 2021, the community activist and healthcare worker defeated incumbent Byron Brown in the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo, New York's second-largest city. However, following a bruising general election race, Brown won in November as a write-in candidate—dashing the hopes of Walton's working-class agenda.
"Folks like myself and Zohran have not fallen out of the sky," Walton said. "We have our roots in organizing, and to be able to turn out 40,000 volunteers speaks volumes about how Zohran has been on the frontlines of movements and of issue-based campaigns. And when people know that you have a moral compass and you are fighting for them, they are motivated to come out for you—not only to vote but to volunteer, and I think that we have to believe for ourselves, as progressives, that not only is our message resonant, but our relationships are vital to continuing to see these kinds of wins."
"The way that you combat fear and lies is by having one-on-one conversations with people, because if it comes on a glossy mailer, it's easy to believe."
As Mamdani and his supporters—in New York City and across the country—turn their focus to the general election, Walton said, "we need more people out, more people in the media, cheering him on, congratulating him, and talking about how progressive values do win elections."
"Do what is in your lane to do right: if you can donate five dollars, then donate five dollars; if you can spend an hour phone banking then spend an hour phone banking; if you can make a piece of original art and send it to the campaign to be used on campaign materials, do that," she said. "Whatever it is in your spirit, whatever time, talent, and treasure you have, do that, because this is gonna take all of us in order to make sure that he makes it over the finish line, and it's gonna send a resounding message in November, what this country wants, what this country needs, and what a city that really sets the stage for the tone of the rest of the nation could be."
Walton also cautioned that "I think that we should have every reason to be suspicious of people who endorsed Andrew Cuomo and now want to jump on the Zohran train, because they're only there for their own self-interest."
"I think that a part of where I made a mistake was trying to cozy up to the corporate Democrats who rejected me in the first place," she said, reflecting on her 2021 loss. Mamdani can "keep the tent big," because "we know other people are gonna wanna come along when the train is moving," she noted, "but you don't have to put them in your inner circle."
Billionaires, including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and corporate interests, such as DoorDash, poured money into Cuomo's primary race. "There's gonna be more of that," as well as attacks on Mamdani from "folks who traditionally donate to Republicans," Walton warned. "It's corporations. It's large landlords. It's developers. It's the donor class. It's the billionaires and the 1% who want to keep him out of the mayor's office."
As Common Dreams has reported, members of the U.S. oligarchy—including Republican President Donald Trump, an erstwhile New Yorker who publicly melted down about Mamdani's primary win, and billionaires like Bill Ackman—are "terrified" that the democratic socialist may be the city's next mayor.
Warren to CNBC's Joe Kernen as he fear-mongers about Mamdani being a socialist: "Where is your outrage over a Republican Party that is saying 'We want to fund every more tax giveaways for billionaires ... while we take healthcare away from everyone else'"
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) June 26, 2025 at 9:03 AM
On Thursday, the billionaire hedge fund manager Ackman, who has made his distaste for Mamdani well known, announced he would lavishly back any "superhero" candidate who emerged to challenge the Democratic primary winner in the general election. Ackman said large amounts of donor money would "pour in" for a candidate who could take on Mamdani's proposals for more affordable housing, healthcare, food, and transportation in the city.
Walton urged Mamdani's campaign to "stay ahead of the messaging and stay on doors. The way that you combat fear and lies is by having one-on-one conversations with people, because if it comes on a glossy mailer, it's easy to believe and people don't have time to go doing their own research, but if someone knocks on your door and has a three-minute conversation with you about who Zohran is, what he's done, and why you should vote for him, that's so much more meaningful than getting a piece of mail."
It's not yet clear exactly who Mamdani, a current member of the New York State Assembly, will face in the general election. Cuomo is considering his next move after conceding Tuesday night—but the ex-governor, who resigned from that post during a sexual harassment scandal, is openly teasing a potential independent run.
"I said he won the primary election," Cuomo told The New York Times in a phone call shortly after his concession speech. "I said I wanted to look at the numbers and the ranked-choice voting to decide about what to do in the future, because I'm also on an independent line. And that's the decision, that's what I was saying. I want to analyze and talk to some colleagues."
The city's current controversial mayor, Eric Adams, is already running as an independent for another term—and, as Semafor reported Wednesday, in the wake of Mamdani's win, the ex-cop has suddenly found "'overwhelming support' from NYC's desperate business elites."
As Gothamist detailed Wednesday, the other candidates are the Republican nominee, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who "is back on the GOP ballot line four years after Adams trounced him in the general election," and defense attorney Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor "running a centrist campaign on yet another independent line."
Tuesday's results may be enough to deter Cuomo from launching another campaign for this cycle. As progressive Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid wrote Wednesday for Zeteo:
Mamdani's victory redrew the map of what's possible in New York City politics. He didn't win on the backs of white gentrifiers alone; he built a multiracial, cross-class coalition that reached from the brownstones of Park Slope in Brooklyn to the apartment towers of Jackson Heights in Queens. He ran up margins in progressive enclaves like Park Slope, East Village, and Cobble Hill, but also won working-class, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods across Queens and Brooklyn—Bangladeshi, Chinese, Latino, Arab, Indo-Caribbean. He was the highest performer in Queens among Latino and South Asian precincts and carried South Asian strongholds like Richmond Hill and Jackson Heights, and East Asian precincts like Sunset Park, Chinatown, and Flushing. Most strikingly, he flipped Oakland Gardens, a swing district in Queens... long seen as part of Cuomo's base. Mamdani didn't just activate the left; he broke into communities that conventional wisdom says don't vote socialist. And he did it with a disciplined message on public goods and affordability, backed by a massive, relentless volunteer field operation.
During the primary race, Mamdani battled Islamophobic threats and unfounded allegations of antisemitism. The Muslim victor and fellow candidate Brad Lander, who is Jewish, also endorsed each other—encouraging voters to take advantage of the city's rank choice voting system by listing both men on their ballots and leaving Cuomo unranked.
Other prominent Jewish people and groups also backed Mamdani—including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Action, which "endorsed Zohran on the first day he launched his campaign because we knew this would be a historic opportunity for our movements," the group's political director, Beth Miller, said in a Wednesday statement.
"Trump-supporting billionaires and hateful politicians spent millions of dollars trying to smear Zohran and use the New York Jewish community as a political pawn to drive division. They failed," Miller continued. "Jewish New Yorkers joined the broad and diverse coalition of this campaign to elect a mayor who will fight with us for the humanity, dignity, and freedom of all people—from NYC to Palestine."
"For decades, traditional political wisdom said that in order to win elections, politicians shouldn't speak about Palestinian rights, or hold the Israeli government accountable to international law," she pointed out. "But Zohran's historic victory last night that toppled a political dynasty shows that people are done with that tired, racist, and hateful old version of politics. Our future is not about any one politician. It's about all of us. It's about our movements and what everyday people can build when we come together."
While billionaire Jeff Bezos is popping champagne bottles in Venice with his rich celebrity friends at his $20 million wedding, he wants to lecture struggling New Yorkers that Zohran Mamdani is bad for New York City.The same Bezos-owned Washington Post that pulled its endorsement of Kamala Harris.
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— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 12:01 PM
In a Thursday opinion piece for The Guardian, Ben Davis, who worked on the data team for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, noted that "Mamdani is the progeny of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the U.S.'s largest socialist organization in a century."
"He is among the many young people inspired by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign," Davis wrote. "Mamdani was built by the DSA and the young left-wing milieu that emerged after the Sanders campaign. They cannot be separated. Not his charisma or campaign style. He is a product of the movement."
Sanders endorsed Mamdani last week and told Politico after the primary election: "Look, he ran a brilliant campaign. And it wasn't just him. What he understood and understands—campaign's not over—is that to run a brilliant campaign, you have to run a grassroots campaign. So instead of taking money from billionaires and putting stupid ads on television, which the people increasingly do not pay attention to, you mobilize thousands and thousands of people around the progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working-class people, and you go out and you knock on doors."
"You cannot run a grassroots campaign unless you excite people. You cannot excite people unless you have something to say. And he had a lot to say," Sanders explained. "He said that he wants to make New York City livable, affordable for ordinary people, that the wealthiest people in New York City are going to start to have to pay their fair share in taxes so that you can stabilize the outrageously high costs of housing in New York, which, by the way, is a crisis all over this country. That you could deal with transportation in a sensible way, deal with childcare, deal with healthcare, deal with the needs of ordinary working-class people."
Sanders—who has responded to Trump's second term and Republican control of Congress by taking his Fighting Oligarchy Tour around the country—framed Mamdani's win as an opportunity for Democratic Party leaders to learn important lessons after devastating losses during the last cycle: "We need an agenda that speaks to working-class people, activates millions of people around this country to get involved on that agenda. Take on the billionaire class, take on oligarchy. That's how you win elections."
"I think they have a lesson to learn, and whether or not they will, I have my doubts," the senator said of Democratic leadership. "If you look at the dynamics of this campaign, what you have is older folks voting for Cuomo, the billionaire class putting in millions of dollars into Cuomo, all of the old-time establishment candidates and politicians supporting Cuomo, and he lost."
In an early signal that Sanders may be right about the party leadership not learning any new lessons, Axios reported Thursday that "many Democratic leaders and donors are panicking" about Mamdani's win—noting that some party leaders have congratulated but not endorsed him, while other officials continue to speak out against him.
Responding to that report on social media, Nina Turner, a former progressive congressional candidate from Ohio, and David Hogg, a gun violence prevention advocate recently ousted as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee after pushing for primary challenges to "asleep-at-the-wheel" Democrats in blue districts, both pointed in jest to a longtime part line: "Vote blue no matter who."
Hogg this week also joined a growing chorus of progressives using Mamdani's victory to call for primary challenges against the Democratic establishment, and to launch campaigns prioritizing working-class priorities.
🎴 Mamdani's insurgent campaign—backed by grassroots activists and first-time voters—overcame tens of millions of dollars."This wasn't just a local upset," said Joseph Geevarghese, leader of Our Rev. "It's a referendum on the direction of the Democratic Party."@newsweek.com: tinyurl.com/4j6pmr5z
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— Our Revolution (@our-revolution.bsky.social) June 26, 2025 at 12:28 PM
"People are tired of a status quo that isn't working for them. Zohran Mamdani's campaign has sent shockwaves across the country and shown what's possible when candidates have the courage to stay true to their values and speak authentically to working people," said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, which is working to elect the primary winner.
Victor Rivera, co-founder and executive director of Beyond the Ballot, another organization backing Mamdani, said in a statement that "America's largest city just sent a clear message: Billionaire rule is on borrowed time."
"New Yorkers are done with a politics that serves luxury developers, hedge fund landlords, and police lobbyists. Zohran's victory proves that ordinary people, tenants, workers, students, and immigrants, are reclaiming power for the people," added Rivera, whose group is made up of Gen Z organizers fighting "both far-right extremism, and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party."
In a Wednesday fundraising email with the subject line "Zohran Mamdani," Sanders argued that "we cannot stop with just one primary victory in New York City," and promoted candidates including Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate hopeful in Michigan, and Troy Jackson, who is running for governor of Maine.
The senator also highlighted four candidates seeking seats in the U.S. House of Representatives: Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin, Adelita Grijalva in Arizona, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, and Robert Peters in Illinois.
"The political future of our country rests upon the very simple principles that working people need to stand together EVERYWHERE to fight back against corporate greed and create an economy that works for all of us, and not just billionaires and large corporations," he said. "We need to elect people up and down the ballot who have the guts not only to stand up to Trumpism, but to take on the monied interests and fight for a working class that has been ignored for far too long."
Facing Calls to Resign for Caving to Trump and GOP, Schumer Postpones Book Tour
"The only way to stop an authoritarian advance is to disrupt it, to make every step costly, to slow its march through whatever means necessary," wrote one Democratic strategist. "Instead, Schumer is helping smooth the path."
Mar 17, 2025
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has opted to postpone events promoting his forthcoming book amid sustained outrage over his decision to back a Republican-authored government funding plan that bolsters President Donald Trump's lawless assault on federal agencies.
Schumer's (D-N.Y.) office attributed the decision to reschedule the book tour events—including one that was supposed to take place in Baltimore Monday night—to "security concerns."
The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace was planning to hold a demonstration outside the Baltimore venue. Other progressive activists highlighted Schumer's upcoming tour dates after he announced he would vote with the GOP on the funding package, rebuffing calls from Democratic lawmakers, advocacy groups, and the largest union of federal workers to oppose the legislation on the grounds that it would effectively greenlight Trump's destruction of federal departments and illegal spending maneuvers.
Much of the Democratic Party erupted in fury following Schumer's decision to support the Republican bill, and he quickly faced calls to step down as Senate minority leader.
"The passage of this dangerous Republican funding bill is a travesty," Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive advocacy group Indivisible, said in a statement Saturday. "The ongoing administrative coup led by Donald Trump and Elon Musk is a constitutional crisis. The authoritarians stripping away our rights and trying to loot the government to enrich the billionaires are a five-alarm fire."
"Senator Schumer should step aside as leader," Levin added. "Every Democrat in the Senate should call for him to do so, and begin making plans for new leadership immediately. Indivisible will be encouraging our groups and activists to talk to their Senators at town halls, community events, and office visits about the urgent need for a minority leader who’s up for the fight this moment demands."
Schumer has thus far brushed off calls to resign, telling The New York Times in an interview published over the weekend that while there is "spirited disagreement on which was the right vote," he and members of his caucus "have mutual respect" and "are all united, no matter how people voted on this vote, to continue fighting Trump."
But Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid argued Monday that Schumer "is stuck in 2005," believing that "if Democrats just wait long enough, if they hold the line and play nice, Republicans will suddenly come to their senses."
"Democrats like Schumer still behave as though the system will self-correct, that if they abide by procedural norms long enough and let Trump-Musk exhaust themselves, the fever will break. But the people dismantling democracy aren't waiting," Shahid wrote. "They are exploiting every available lever of power—hollowing out agencies, capturing the courts, stripping Congress of oversight—at a breakneck pace. The only way to stop an authoritarian advance is to disrupt it, to make every step costly, to slow its march through whatever means necessary. Instead, Schumer is helping smooth the path."
"Defending democracy requires more than safeguarding institutions in the abstract—it requires upholding the values those institutions were meant to serve," he added. "Right now, we are witnessing Musk's corporate coup and state capture in real-time. Politics is about knowing what time it is, and I'm not sure Chuck Schumer has the answer."
Palestinian Seen Burning Alive in Israeli Tent Massacre Identified
Sha'ban al-Dalou, 19, was a software engineering student who had survived an Israeli airstrike on a mosque that killed 20 people last week.
Oct 15, 2024
Warning: Contains images of death.
The Palestinian photographed while burning alive in a Gaza City tent encampment bombed by Israeli forces on Monday has been identified.
Sha'ban al-Dalou, was a highly promising 19-year-old software engineering student at Gaza's al-Azhar University, which was destroyed by an Israeli bombing last November, two months after he began studying there. Al-Dalou, his parents, and siblings sought shelter in the courtyard of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza after being forcibly displaced multiple times by Israel's onslaught, for which the U.S.-backed nation is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
"In this barbaric starvation war, we have [been] displaced five times so far," al-Dalou said in an undated video shared on social media.
"I'm taking care of my family, as I am the oldest," the teen explains as an Israeli drone can be heard hovering nearby. "I have two sisters and two little brothers and my parents. We left in... very hard circumstances, suffering... homelessness, limited food, and extremely limited medicine, and the only things between us and the freezing condition is this tent that we constructed by ourselves."
The teen was reportedly receiving treatment at al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital after surviving an Israeli strike on a Deir al-Balah mosque that killed more than 20 people earlier this month.
"Yesterday they bombed in front of al-Aqsa Hospital and I was there sleeping," al-Dalou wrote to his brother after the attack, according to The Siasat Daily, a major Indian newspaper. "I saw death in my eyes. They took me out of the rubble; I was unconscious, bleeding, injured—all like a dream."
"I'm injured in my head; I got 11 stitches behind my ear," he added. "If it was stronger, I'd be dead by now. I've also got an injury in my lung... it really hurts so much."
Al-Dalou, his mother, and at least two other people were killed early on Monday when Israel bombed the hospital's courtyard as they slept, sparking an inferno that tore through the tent encampment there. Video and photos showed al-Dalou burning alive, screaming for help, with an intravenous drip still attached to his arm.
In March, al-Dalou wrote:
I used to have big dreams, but the war has ruined them. It's taken a toll on me, making me physically and mentally sick. I suffer from depression and hair loss because of the constant trauma we face. Time feels like its stopped in Gaza, and we're stuck in a never-ending nightmare.
Responding to the grisly images of al-Dalou's death, Waleed Shahid, a U.S. progressive strategist who worked for lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), said on social media that "the image of hospital patients, tethered to IVs as American-supplied Israeli bombs ignite fires around them in Gaza, may well stand as the defining image of this horror," much as the photo of so-called "Napalm Girl" Phan Thị Kim Phúc does for the Vietnam War.
Al-Dalou, his mother Alaa al-Dalou, and the other victims of Monday's bombing are among the at least 42,289 Palestinians—most of them women and children—killed by Israel's 375-day assault on Gaza, according to officials there, United Nations agencies, and international human rights groups. Nearly 100,000 others have been injured, and at least 10,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Millions more Gazans have been forcibly displaced, starved, and sickened.
On Tuesday, multiple media outlets reported that the Biden administration last week warned Israeli leaders that they must take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days or risk losing billions of dollars in military aid from Washington.
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