At this point last November, Zohran Mamdani was a largely unknown state assemblyman, and the Democratic Party’s brand in New York City was at rock bottom.
In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump picked up about 100,000 more votes in the city than in 2020; Kamala Harris fell more than half a million votes shy of Joe Biden’s total. And some of the most dramatic shifts in the entire country could be found in immigrant neighborhoods in Mamdani’s home borough of Queens.
The party’s outer-borough collapse mirrored the party’s national crack-up; as it spent millions to court college-educated voters in the suburbs, Democrats were losing ground with the sorts of working-class, non-white voters in blue cities who traditionally helped form the backbone of the party. The term you kept hearing over and over was “realignment.”
When we chatted with residents and elected officials this spring, in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona, we found deep-seated frustrations with Democratic governance—and concerns about crime, immigration, sex-workers, poor services, and the cost of living. Many people brought up the pandemic, which had hit the area hard and damaged people’s faith in the social contract.
“The former governor, Andrew Cuomo, never stepped foot in Corona, even during the pandemic,” Democratic state assemblywoman Catalina Cruz told us. “I had to fight him to get a vaccination site in my district because while we were the epicenter, because my community was undocumented and immigrant, we were the last ones to get help.” Corona, she said, was what you get “when the government ignores its community.”
Mamdani’s victory on Tuesday over Cuomo was the product of a relentless campaign that united a broad multi-racial coalition with a focus on affordability. But it was also a test of how well the Democratic Party was recovering in the places where it has suffered the most.
This outer-borough collapse, clustered most intensely in working-class Latino and Asian communities, loomed over the New York City mayoral race from the start. Mamdani soft-launched his candidacy by talking to Trump voters and non-voters in outer-borough neighborhoods about what it would take to win them back.
So: How’d he do?
