Zohran Mamdani’s victory in an NYC primary has billionaires and Democrats in a panic. Here’s why

That deep-bass rumble you may have been hearing since June 24 is the sound of heads exploding on Wall Street and in certain Democratic Party smoke-filled rooms, provoked by the victory of self-described “Democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor.

Here’s my personal response to the handwringers over Mamdani’s convincing win: Now you know what some of us have been living through.

To be precise, they’re reacting to the sudden inversion of a political world they thought they had in hand; it resembles the feeling we’ve felt as Donald Trump runs rampant over political norms that have been in place since the 1930s, or longer.

There’s an important distinction between the Mamdani and Trump effects — Mamdani’s is based on his standing up for the middle- and working class, Trump’s on squeezing those people dry.

Partisan forces are already mustering to deny Mamdani what has been close to a Democratic birthright since 1945 — the New York mayoralty (with the exceptions of Lindsay, Giuliani and Bloomberg). The question is why? History offers some answers.

First, a quick look at some of the proposals Mamdani advocated during his campaign. They include a freeze on rents in the city’s million rent-stabilized apartments, paired with a commitment to build 200,000 new rent-stabilized apartments over time.

Mamdani proposed establishing city-owned grocery stores; that sounds like socialism, all right, but as John Cassidy explained in the New Yorker, Mamdani was talking about a pilot project of five stores, all to be located in “food deserts” — low-income neighborhoods that established supermarket firms don’t touch. Then there’s free bus transportation and free universal child care for families with children 6 weeks to 5 years old.

As for where the money for these initiatives would come from, Mamdani proposes a city wealth tax — 2 percentage points on individual incomes over $1 million — and said he would ask the state Legislature to increase the state corporate tax.

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With these plans on the table, Mamdani’s victory provoked the city’s billionaire class and its water carriers to rhetorical paroxysms, including forecasts of economic armageddon for the city.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, for example, pronounced himself “profoundly alarmed” by, among other things, Mamdani’s “Trotskyite economic policies.” Summers didn’t explain which policies he meant and what made them “Trotskyite.” I asked him for a clarification but haven’t received a reply.

What I learned from my professors of post-revolutionary Russian history, however, is that Trotsky advocated a policy known as “permanent revolution,” which meant spreading a culture of Marxism from the Soviet Union to other countries; this was a counterweight to Stalin’s ideology of “socialism in one country,” which was Stalin’s way of chickening out on conflict with countries outside the USSR.

In any case, the debate was settled in Stalin’s favor, not through reasoned debate but via an ice ax buried in Trotsky’s skull by an assassin in 1940. Anyway, the debate was over politics much more than economics.

The coalescing of the anti-Mamdani forces, especially the alliance between billionaires and machine Democrats, bears curious similarities to the attacks on another self-professed socialist running for public office as a Democrat. He was Upton Sinclair, who ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform he called “EPIC,” for “End Poverty in California.”

Sinclair had become world-famous with the publication of “The Jungle,” his bestselling expose of the meatpacking industry in 1906, when he was 26. He followed up with a series of investigative novels about the coal and oil industries and the Sacco and Vanzetti case, as well as militant tracts on religion, the newspaper industry, finance and education.

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He moved to Southern California in the 1920s and twice ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature as a Socialist. He came out of political retirement in 1934 in part because the long-running GOP domination of California politics looked to have run out its string — the colorless Republican governor, Frank Merriam, was detested for upholding a sales tax that overburdened the middle class and vetoing an income tax, thereby leaving the upper classes in full possession of their wealth.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had been left in disarray by their years in the wilderness. In the primary, Sinclair was opposed by seven challengers. But he was unique among the Democrats in speaking directly to the disaffected and dispossessed middle class. These voters “gravitated to Sinclair by default,” observed Carey McWilliams, that indefatigable chronicler of California politics.

Sinclair announced, in a campaign book titled “I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty — A True Story of the Future,” proposals that included replacing the sales tax with a progressive income tax and estate tax, and providing a state pension for seniors and the needy of $50 a month. “I say positively and without qualification we can end poverty in California … I will put the job through, and it won’t take more than one or two of my four years,” he wrote in the book.

The similarities to the present-day Democratic Party are inescapable. Despite their narrow loss to Trump in the 2024 election, the Democrats, with their sclerotic leadership, appear to have little clue about how to regain voters’ favor.

Mamdani’s main rival in the primary was former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had resigned that office amid a miasma of sexual harassment accusations. Mamdani’s victory was so complete that Cuomo conceded before all the ballots were counted. Cuomo says he will stay in the race until the general election in November.

The Times, among other newspapers, lampooned Upton Sinclair’s “EPIC” gubernatorial campaign in 1934

(Los Angeles Times)

Sinclair’s primary victory unleashed an immediate backlash from establishment Democrats, who made common cause with Republicans and industrialists.

California’s movie industry, which was led by some of the state’s most reactionary businessmen, produced newsreels and still photographs depicting tramps and hobos surging over the state line to partake of EPIC’s generous pensions, much of the “documentation” drawn from feature films then in production.

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The daily newspapers, including the rock-ribbed conservative Los Angeles Times, lampooned Sinclair mercilessly. It was soon lost on nobody that his proposals, popular as they were, did not pencil out fiscally.

Sinclair lost the 1934 election. Merriam was reelected with a 49% plurality. Sinclair returned home to Pasadena to write his campaign memoir, which he mordantly entitled “I, Candidate for Governor — And How I Got Licked.” But he took solace in the fact that Merriam actually implemented some of his proposals, including replacing the sales tax with an income tax.

A similar wave may be building against Mamdani, a native of Uganda who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. (Trump has questioned whether Mamdani is a legal resident.) Establishment Democrats have seized on his appeals for fair treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and throughout the Middle East as though he is promoting antisemitism.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who represented an upstate New York district in Congress before moving to the Senate, accused him of having made references to “global jihad” and called on him to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada.” In fact, he never used either phrase. She later apologized for “mischaracterizing Mamdani’s record.”

Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, who represents a suburban Long Island district, accused him falsely of calling for “violence against Jewish people.” Neither of the two Democratic leaders in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, has endorsed Mamdani even in the wake of his primary victory.

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Mamdani said, in a June 29 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” during which anchor Kristen Welker pressed him to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” that “that is not the language I would use.” He talked of his “belief in universal human rights.... That includes the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that, to have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Among the differences between Sinclair and Mamdani — as Mark Twain is said to have observed, history doesn’t always repeat itself but it does rhyme — Mamdani can make a plausible case for covering the costs of his proposals through a wealth tax. His chief obstacle may be politics, chiefly the state Legislature’s resistance to the many proposals that require its assent.

Given that money is the mother’s milk of American politics, the greater threat to Mamdani’s candidacy may come from Wall Street’s denizens. “It’s officially hot commie summer,” billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb tweeted the day after the primary.

Others predicted that Mamdani’s election would drive wealthy people out of New York. Real estate executive Danny Fishman told the Wall Street Journal that Mamdani’s mayoralty “would be the death penalty for the city. And it would be the best thing to happen to Miami and Palm Beach since Covid.”

Yet others question whether anything like a Mamdani mayoralty would really provoke millionaires and billionaires to decamp. High-rise New York apartments have acquired totemic significance for the superrich. Residences in Florida can’t approach the bragging rights endowed by co-ops in the Manhattan clouds.

Mamdani’s overwhelming victory should give smart Democrats a road map to the way forward in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Plainly, he spoke to a deep-seated desire by voters for an escape from a domestic oligarchy’s domination of politics.

“Taken together,” 31 economists wrote in an open letter supporting his candidacy, “Mamdani’s responsibly costed economic policies form a coherent agenda that rejects austerity and embraces the city’s power to make life more affordable for New Yorkers.”

As Republicans in Congress move ahead with a budget plan that will raise prices for ordinary Americans on healthcare, housing, child care, and so many other aspects of daily life, is that really a message that Democrats can afford to ignore?