Democratic voters want their leaders to stop running from Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani hadn’t been Regina Weiss’ first choice for mayor of New York City. She’d ranked city comptroller Brad Lander number-one on her primary ballot in June, and told me she wished that the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblymember brought a bit more experience to the job. But Weiss, who volunteers with Indivisible, was happily supporting the Democratic nominee now, and expected to begin canvassing for him soon. What she couldn’t understand, she told me, as she waited for the candidate to take the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders at the “Fighting Oligarchy” town hall in Brooklyn on Saturday, was why some of the biggest names in her party weren’t doing the same.

“I’ve never seen this before—I’ve never seen the Democratic leadership not endorse the Democratic candidate,” she said. “It’s so ugly, it’s so cowardly, it’s so stupid. The Democrats are basically in the crapper when it comes to enthusiasm. You’ve got this guy—the Democratic candidate for the biggest city in the country—and they’re not endorsing him.” 

Weiss put her hands to her face in frustration. She’d been reading happily before I came along.

“Sorry, I’m very angry about this,” she said. “What is it? Is it like they’re afraid? I mean, I guess they’re afraid, but my God!”

Two months out from one of the biggest elections since Trump won the presidency, most Democratic voters in New York City are on board with their party’s nominee. After defeating disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits in the primary, Mamdani leads him comfortably again in four-way general-election polls. Scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa are barely visible in the distance. Mamdani has raised the maximum amount allowable under the city’s matching-funds system, maintained a relentless schedule of campaign appearances and media hits, and even talked privately with Barack Obama. His support among elected officials is real. Four members of the city’s congressional delegation have publicly endorsed him—including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he’d appeared a few hours before the town hall. Along the side wall of the packed auditorium at Brooklyn College, city council members and state legislators milled about, mingling with Mamdani’s top advisors and the omnipresent former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (who has cut an ad for the candidate, brought Mamdani to a Wu-Tang show, and co-hosted a community event for him in the South Bronx).

But it was hard to ignore who hadn’t gotten on board. Even as Trump threatened to unleash hell on New York City, and the president dangled an ambassadorship to lure Adams out of the race, some of the most powerful Democrats in the city and the state have been deafeningly quiet. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who helped force Cuomo’s resignation as governor, is publicly agnostic on whether Mamdani or Cuomo should run America’s largest city. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, after previously avoiding questions about the race by insisting that he does not endorse in primaries, has still not made an endorsement more than two months after the primary. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has thus far avoided backing Mamdani while egging on criticisms of his housing policy. Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, junior Democrats with outsized national profiles, have withheld thei support, while suggesting that the nominee has not done enough to condemn anti-semitism.

That Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose Long Island district includes parts of Queens, told a TV interviewer Mamdani should leave the party is not so surprising. That Rep. Greg Meeks—the chair of the Queens Democratic Party—is still holding out is a bit more glaring.

For the party’s left-wing, often accused by more moderate factions of hampering Democrats’ big-tent efforts, Mamdani’s nomination poses an obvious question: What kind of “big tent” party doesn’t have room for the party’s own candidate and the majority of its voters? 

As Ocasio-Cortez recently put it, “Are we a party that rallies behind our nominee, or not?”

For the most part, the rally at Brooklyn College, a brisk walk away from Sanders’ childhood home in Midwood, was an upbeat affair. Sanders has been holding these “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies since February, and in always-unsaid ways they’ve sometimes felt like a passing of the torch. Mamdani told the crowd about gathering signatures for his first assembly campaign outside a Sanders rally in 2019, and of building out a volunteer base by inviting people to the senator’s debate watch parties. He spoke in some detail about Sanders’ tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—evidence that a socialist can run a city pretty well, but also, that a socialist running a city still feels pretty banal much of the time. (He “took on a broken property tax system,” Mamdani said, and worked “to transform the Lake Champlain waterfront.”) A few protestors tried to spoil the fun, but never to much effect. At one point, a man with a Cuban flag on his shirt stood up to call the candidate a communist. 

“Brother, I’m here with another Democratic Socialist,” said a smiling Mamdani, referring to Sanders.

But the lack of support from high-ranking Democrats was an unavoidable topic. During the Q&A portion of the event, a guy from Canarsie stood up to express his fear that history was repeating.

“I just look at this campaign and it reminds me a little bit of what happened a few years ago in Buffalo,” he said. 

The man was referring to that city’s 2021 mayoral election, when India Walton, a 29-year-old nurse, defeated the incumbent mayor in the primary—only to lose to the same candidate in the general election. Billionaire donors’ support for Cuomo, and the party’s tepid response, was giving him “deja vu.” “How do we make sure that something like like this doesn’t happen again?” he asked. 

Mamdani’s response was fairly diplomatic. “We have to beat Andrew Cuomo one more time,” he said, because, “This is a man who does not understand that no means no.” He urged the crowd to continue volunteering and organizing.

But Sanders sounded like he had been waiting for something like this. And like Weiss, the woman I spoke with before the town hall, he was fired up.

“I want to, if I might—I want to add a point to that very good question,” he said, standing up from his chair and walking toward the front of the stage. “It may be a little bit out of place here, but I want to do it. I find it a little bit strange that when we have a candidate who competed very hard, as did a number of other people in the Democratic primary—” 

He turned to Mamdani. 

“My understanding is you won that primary. Is that correct?” Sanders asked.

Mamdani nodded. 

“My understanding is you are the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of the city of New York. Is that correct?”

Mamdani nodded again. 

“Now, apropos that question: I find it hard to understand how the major Democratic leaders in New York State are not supporting the Democratic candidate,” Sanders continued. “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in the polls gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, Democratic leaders would be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’”

The senator seemed to be saying what everyone else was thinking. The response from the crowd was surpassed, perhaps, only by Sanders’ earlier condemnation of American weapons sales in Israel. And the two sentiments are not really unrelated—in the case of both Israel and Mamdani, high-profile Democrats are substantially out of step with Democratic voters, and well-funded attempts to weaponize Mamdani’s criticism of Israel in the primary only served to underscore the qualities that made him appealing to voters.

That moment, and the two Democratic Socialists’ presence on stage together, was a reminder of both how much and how little had changed since I’d last checked in on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour last spring. At the time, it felt like a post-election low. While elected Democrats had, individually and in small groups, sought to demonstrate their opposition to Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage through Washington, the party had little to show from those first few months. Senate Democrats had just caved to approve a Republican funding measure and avert a government shutdown. Purportedly ambitious figures seemed to prefer litigating wokeness to putting out the fire in their house. And Democratic voters were watching this and going, what the hell? Covering Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for two stops in Arizona, I had been struck by just how un-Bernie-like the crowds were; the normie Democrats were showing support for the Democratic Socialists, because the Democratic Socialists were showing up for them when so many powerful people and institutions were not.

Fast forward to today, and the party’s leaders in Washington seem ready to cave on another shutdown fight this month. A lot of people still sound more comfortable complaining about trans rights than fascism. It’s not too simplistic to say that the leadership that can’t unite behind Mamdani now is the leadership that made Mamdani possible—a cynical and bloodless and compromised liberalism that’s hovering tentatively by the focus groups while real popular movements takes shape on their own.

Sanders started holding these events, he explained earlier this year, because to his surprise, no one else was. For Trump’s opponents, this shift toward autocracy represents both a challenge and an opportunity—one that Sanders has laid the foundation for, and Mamdani and his movement have now seized. When no one else is coming to save you, you have to save yourselves.