Mara Gay writes:

The instinct to treat Zohran Mamdani as a local New York City phenomenon ignores the reality of the American voters behind his historic win. Most of the people who voted for Mr. Mamdani for mayor are at the heart of the Democratic Party coalition, not at its fringes.

Black voters in particular swung hard toward Mr. Mamdani in the general election. In precincts where Black residents make up a majority of the population, Mr. Mamdani outperformed Mr. Cuomo by 26 points. In Hispanic-majority areas of the city, Mr. Mamdani beat Mr. Cuomo by 20 points. Mr. Mamdani also won every single precinct in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Canarsie, which is majority Black and working and middle class.

In last year’s presidential election, some voters in these areas shifted toward President Trump, igniting a debate about whether the Democratic Party had veered too far to the left. The willingness of many of the same Americans to vote for Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, on Tuesday raises the possibility that many Black and Hispanic voters — and plenty of other Americans — simply no longer see their interests and aspirations in what much of the political establishment and its gatekeepers are offering.

Mr. Mamdani’s political talent helped enormously. Some of his promises may be difficult to achieve and to pay for, especially with a hostile president vowing to thwart them at every chance. And in a large, polarized and complex country, this kind of campaign might look and sound different in different places.

But dismissing the political earthquake in New York City as an exception to America’s political rules would be a mistake. Mr. Mamdani won by bringing together working-, middle- and upper-middle-class people across racial and ethnic backgrounds. Years ago, Barack Obama united a similar group of Americans. Democrats who follow Mr. Mamdani’s example and lead with the politics of basic human dignity have a chance to win over strapped Americans in communities that bear no resemblance to Manhattan or Queens. In the first elections of the second Trump administration, voters were hungry for a dramatically different vision of what America should be. [Continue reading…]