Zohran Mamdani walks on stage to speak at a mayoral election night watch party, on Tuesday, in New York.Yuki Iwamura/The Associated Press
Nancy Pelosi, the long-reigning mother superior of the Democratic Party, announced this week that she will not be seeking re-election in 2026, ending a four-decade career in Congress during which she rose to become the first woman speaker of the House of Representatives.
Few Democrats in the modern era have been as influential as Ms. Pelosi. She sealed former president Joe Biden’s fate when, in 2024, she publicly urged him to come to a decision about running again after he had repeatedly said that he intended to do so. Her refusal to take his “yes” for an answer was a classic Pelosi move – and brutally effective.
Still, for all her formidable political smarts, Ms. Pelosi could not outsmart the march of time.
It may just be a coincidence that the 85-year-old announced her retirement the same week that 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani swept to victory in New York’s mayoral election. But it is impossible not to sense a generational shift in the works that could soon sweep out other aging Democratic hangers-on in Congress.
Mr. Mamdani drew young New Yorkers to the polls like no candidate since Barack Obama, who, incidentally, was so taken with his campaign that the former president reached out to offer his counsel. He got more votes than any New York mayoral candidate since 1969, as millennial and Gen Z voters turned out in unprecedented proportions.
Fully 70 per cent of voters between 18 and 44 cast their ballot for Mr. Mamdani, an avowed socialist who won the Democratic mayoral primary in June by toppling former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. The 67-year-old Mr. Cuomo ended up running for mayor as an independent, only to see Mr. Mamdani wallop him once again in Tuesday’s election.
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“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” Mr. Mamdani offered in his victory speech, before driving the knife even deeper. “But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.”
That kind of ruthlessness, couched in the revolutionary language of class warfare, is what made Mr. Mamdani such a sensation on the campaign trail. He spoke to the frustrations of ethnic working-class New Yorkers who juggle multiple jobs, and young entrants into the labour market who cannot afford the city’s exorbitant rents.
In his victory speech, Mr. Mamdani quoted both Eugene Debs, an American socialist icon who ran repeatedly for president in the early 1900s, and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister after the country achieved its independence from Britain in 1947. He promised a “new age” for New Yorkers, one that would inverse the city’s longstanding power pyramid.
“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” Mr. Mamdani told his ecstatic supporters gathered at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, a borough he carried with 57 per cent of the vote.
The ripple effect of Mr. Mamdani’s election is still being felt across the United States. While centrist Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger handily won gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, respectively, neither of them created the kind of excitement that Mr. Mamdani generated in New York. And the excitement factor will matter in next year’s mid-term elections, when U.S. President Donald Trump will be far more active on the campaign trail than he was in Tuesday’s off-year elections.
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Of course, some Democrats are terrified of what could happen if New York’s socialist mayor-elect emerges as a leading voice in the national party. After all, what sells in progressive Brooklyn, or on the ultra-liberal Upper West Side, might not fly in the Rust Belt suburban swing districts Democrats need to win to retake the House in 2026. Mr. Trump, who has called Mr. Mamdani a ”communist lunatic,” is no doubt betting on that to ensure Republicans maintain control of Congress. He may even see Mr. Mamdani as a gift.
Still, Democrats will need to give voters a compelling reason to go the polls next year, and counting on growing disaffection toward Mr. Trump may not be enough to do it. The President’s MAGA supporters will be more motivated to turn out next year, because the stakes will be higher for their leader and his legacy. Democrats may need to offer voters more than the promise of sober, no-drama governance that Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger ran on.
Mr. Mamdani hinted as much on Tuesday, saying “if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.”
As a foreign-born American, Mr. Mamdani cannot ever become president. But he might yet take one down.