The Art of Winning: Zohran Mamdani

The first chapter of an extensive look at the greatest left-wing electoral victory of our lifetimes.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

On the night of February 11th, 2020, the American left walked headfirst into a waking nightmare.

You would be forgiven if you did not notice this. Across the span of the 2020 Democratic primary, that February 11th came nowhere close to being the most emotionally devastating day for those who supported Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president. It was the day he won the New Hampshire primary and launched himself into the frontrunner status he enjoyed until a panicked field consolidated against him on Super Tuesday. That Tuesday—not the one three weeks prior—is the one that is still remembered so bitterly by those of us on the left. So why do I mention it?

The reason is the way in which Sanders eked out his narrow plurality victory in the Granite State. While his vote share was ultimately enough to garner a much-needed victory amidst a then-divided field, it brought with it a legion of red flags and warning signs that would end up haunting him and his allies for both the rest of the primary and the years that followed. In the final count, he lost more than half of his support from 2016, which was bad enough by itself. But what made this dropoff so extraordinarily concerning was where it happened. While Sanders lost support across the board, his decline was at its most precipitous in his old base: the rural, working-class areas where he had blown Clinton out in 2016.

Over the following weeks and months, this pattern repeated itself across the rest of the country, and it brought a devastatingly early end to his run. Those opposed to the left could not have come up with a more memorable, damning, and simply amusing result if they tried. Here was a movement that had thundered onto the stage with its self-righteous claims to represent the working class, one that had charged any and all of its opponents as sellouts who didn’t understand what the people wanted. Now, here it was being rejected in the most profound way possible by the actual proletariat the second that it didn’t not have the fortune to face Hillary Clinton. It perfectly fit the age-old champagne socialist stereotype, and it kept happening again and again and again over the following years. By the time Trump won his second term, the faction was the butt of every joke, casually written off as a top-down fluke of a “movement” that had only been sustained by artificial forces and elite self-hatred.

But then, on a hellishly hot summer day in New York City, all of these smug assumptions were shattered. What made that June Tuesday so stunning was not just that Zohran Mamdani, an unabashedly left-wing DSA member, secured a smashing victory that few pollsters and analysts predicted. It was the way in which he won. Unlike Sanders’ pyrrhic 2020 victory in New Hampshire, Mamdani’s victory wasn’t just because of success in college students and leftist enclaves. He won because of breakthroughs in the nonwhite working class areas that past leftist candidates had consistently failed to win. He won because his campaign completely remade the entire New York City electorate, a feat no past left-wing candidate, Sanders included, had come even close to accomplishing.

He found practically every Holy Grail of left-wing politics on the way to his 12-point win, and he made it look easy while doing so.

How the fuck did he do it?

To find out, I got some help. With me to analyze Mamdani’s feat is Michael Lange of Narrative Wars, an associate of the Mamdani campaign and the sole analyst in New York City to predict Mamdani’s victory. Together, we will go over how the socialist beat the odds, why his win is somehow even more stunning and encouraging than it seems, and the path the Mamdani model provides for the left over the next three-and-a-half years of Trump 2.0.