In just a few months, Mamdani, a 34-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Socialist, has gone from a long-shot fringe candidate to a national figure — securing an upset win in the June primary, where voters 18-29 had the highest turnout of any age group.
Now, on the cusp of Election Day — where polls show him the clear frontrunner over his closest rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Mamdani is counting on that youth coalition to show up again. But his pledge to address rising costs appears to be resonating with young people far outside of the five boroughs. It’s a message that many Gen Z and millennials say speaks to their most pressing concerns at a time when many feel hopeless about their leaders and yearn for new voices willing to break with political norms.
“When a candidate is able to speak to the concerns of the populace and validate those concerns … I think that that has a big impact, especially when it comes to young people,” said Ruby Belle Booth, who studies young voters for the nonpartisan research organization CIRCLE.
On the one hand I’m farther to his left and am critical of some of his campaign decisions, and am not optimistic about his abilities to overcome the capitalists through purely electoral means.
On the other hand I’d be happy to see him prove me wrong.
Oh wow.
‘Mandani isn’t left enough for me.’
What planet are you from?
.ml users tend to be Marxist-Leninists (hence .ml), so when they complain that someone is not “left enough”, it’s a code to mean is that the person is not a Marxist-Leninist/communist who wants to instigate an armed revolution, overthrow the system, and then seize the means of production. The thing is, many Americans could distinguish the difference between communists and socialists. Even the Fox news survey showed most young people support socialism, while only few support communism. I imagine ML clutched their pearls as hard as the conservatives upon learning of the survey.
Actually I think Marxist-Leninists and Black Maoists and anarcho-communists all have good ideas.
I’m really a centrist if you think about it.
Who says he has to do it through purely electoral means? Why would you even assume that’s the plan? He’s a politician. The electoral part is where he fits in. That doesn’t mean he expects the rest of us to sit back and watch once he gets elected It’s never this approach or that, it’s everything.
It’s the only thing I see him doing. I don’t see him organizing workers or tenants and helping them unionize. I don’t see him distributing mutual aid. I don’t see him engaged in mass education. I don’t see him arming the poor and training a people’s army.
The electoral part is the only part I see him doing, and the only part I see his supporters doing.
Again, I’d be happy to see him prove me wrong.
One man doesn’t have to do everything. He is making space for those things to happen. Rent freezes and free transportation are at least cousins to mutual aid by my estimation, and they help free up resources in the community for members to do more. Again, one man, one role. Activists don’t make very effective politicians, and visa versa.
He’s not just one man. There’s an entire team of people behind him and an army of volunteers, and they all seem to be solely focused on the election. What I want to see is for him to focus on his role as merely the electoral front of that larger organized effort, he focuses on the election and the rest of the people around him have plans that extend beyond and outside of elections. That’s not what I’m seeing.
My expectation is, once the election is over, they’re going to go home and forget about politics.
We’ll see.