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ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S 5 LESSONS FOR THE DEMOCRATS  
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Waleed Shahid
October 21, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Zohran Mamdani does not operate by the same logic as the Democratic
Party establishment. Waleed Shahid explains five key aspects of how
Mamdani has broken through. _

Zohran Mamdani, [David 'Dee' Delgado/Reuters]

 

Democrats are not just losing arguments; they are often losing the
room. The problem runs deeper than messaging. It is a crisis of
attention and, beneath that, a crisis of credibility. Voters may still
tell pollsters they prefer Democrats, yet few believe the party can
change the cost of anything they will pay next week. That is a failure
of poetry and of prose: campaigns that no longer inspire and
governments that no longer deliver.

The party often defines itself by what it opposes — Trumpism,
“wokeism” — rather than what it stands for. It hesitates over
which communities to defend and which concrete struggles, from
childcare to antiwar to immigrant rights to housing, it has the will
to win. The deeper problem is a Democratic Party liberalism unsure of
itself, adrift at sea. Democrats have forgotten how to act as if they
know what they are for.

That uncertainty shows up in the stories they tell. Andrew Cuomo, like
Donald Trump, described New York as a hellscape — a city of crime,
decay, and failure that only he could redeem. Zohran Mamdani looks at
the same city and sees something different: joy, struggle, and the
desire to stay. Where others narrate decline, he sees a place worth
fixing. That is what Democrats too often miss. A politics built only
around fear or opposition cannot inspire; it can only react and
manage. What’s needed is a politics that treats people not as
victims of crisis but as coauthors of what can still be repaired and
built.

Mamdani unsettles that picture because he seems to operate by a
different logic than the party around him. To consultants, he looks
like a curiosity: a young democratic socialist with TikTok fluency and
diasporic ease, part of a new class of politicians who seem born to go
viral. But what sets him apart isn’t novelty; it’s conviction. He
carries himself like a happy warrior — alive to the absurdities of
politics, unwilling to surrender its possibilities. He speaks with the
assurance that politics can still make life less punishing.

What Mamdani is really testing is whether Democrats can still generate
attention through conflict on their own terms. The modern political
media landscape only amplifies what bleeds — culture wars,
celebrity-like feuds — while ignoring the conflicts that actually
define people’s lives: rent that keeps rising, childcare that drains
a paycheck, transit that doesn’t come. Most Democrats, wary of being
cast as divisive, retreat from confrontation altogether or get pulled
into the wrong fights.

Mamdani understands that attention is produced through conflict, and
that the answer is not to avoid it but to redirect it. He builds it
around affordability — who pays, who benefits, and how power works
— making economic struggle visible and emotionally legible. For him,
conflict isn’t a distraction from governing; it’s the entry point
for persuasion. The goal is not to perform anger but to focus it, to
remind people that politics can still change the price of the things
that govern their days.

Mamdani’s appeal has little to do with just his youthful vibe. It
lies in his answer to two questions the party keeps ducking. Can a
Democrat hold attention without turning into a caricature? And once
attention is captured, can it be used to make politics legible as a
system that changes what people pay and how they live?

His method blends traditions that rarely coexist: Bernie Sanders’s
moral clarity, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s digital and movement
cadence, the “abundance” instinct to build and unblock, the
grounded competence of effective executives, and the narrative craft
of cultural workers who know how to reach an audience. The point is
not style for its own sake. It is persuasion as craft — showing that
Democrats can hold the stage on the economy again, speak plainly about
power, and still mean what they say.

1. Start With Substance

Mamdani begins by stating the problem plainly: New York is too
expensive. Then he names a remedy and a way to enact it. Freeze
stabilized rents through the Rent Guidelines Board instead of
approving another round of increases. Make buses fast and free rather
than charging $2.90. Fund universal childcare so parents don’t have
to choose between earning a living and raising a family. This is the
voice of someone fixing a system rather than describing a dream.
It’s a diagnosis, a solution, and a theory of power.

That is where most Democrats falter. Ask voters what Chuck Schumer,
Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden would do with more power
— what would change in their lives — and you get shrugs. The
party’s language is too often a fog of intention: “middle-class
security,” “opportunity for all,” “affordable housing.” None
answers the basic questions: What’s broken? What lever will you
pull? Who is supposed to move? In that telling, power is something to
be managed, not exercised.

2. Win Attention Through Conflict

In the current media environment, attention is rationed by conflict.
Culture wars, celebrity-like spats, and intraparty beefs get oxygen;
fights over rent or bus fares rarely do. Economic pain is constant,
which makes it less “newsworthy.” A $2.90 fare, a 6 percent rent
hike, a sixteen-minute response time — none of that beats a viral
clip about who insulted whom. That is the terrain Democrats have to
cross, and most haven’t figured out how. They either avoid clashes
altogether or get dragged into the ones that make bread-and-butter
issues all but invisible.

Mamdani doesn’t run from confrontation; he redirects it. When Cuomo
swung with “experience,” Mamdani didn’t argue biography. He
turned the line into a renter’s test: “If my rent is too low, vote
for him; if your rent is too high, vote for me.” When Fox called
free buses “chaos,” he forced a fiscal choice — almost a billion
dollars for Elon Musk’s tax credits or roughly seven hundred million
to make transit free — and then attached ordinary consequences:
safer drivers, quicker trips, fuller routes. Even on Gaza and
immigration — the topics consultants label “do not engage” —
he engaged, showed judgment, and then returned to governing ground.
The confrontation created the audience; the frame created
understanding.

That’s why his clashes don’t feel performative. Moderates tend to
duck and hope the storm passes; the activist left often treats
conflict as a performance for the already convinced; class-first
rhetoric collapses every dispute into capital-versus-labor and misses
the service design that actually changes a day. Mamdani fights to
clarify trade-offs — who pays, who benefits, what changes — and he
does it in the language of prices and service, not posture. In a press
culture that rewards outrage, he uses outrage to make economics
legible. That is how you generate attention for material politics when
the feed is telling you to talk about anything else.

3. Let Style Serve Substance

Mamdani projects the kind of steadiness politics used to prize:
the _happy warrior_ spirit — serious about the fight, light on
bitterness, confident that persuasion is still possible. He smiles
easily, but never cheaply. His tone is even, his humor dry, his
patience visible. It’s the opposite of the influencer pose that
dominates modern politics, where every gesture is branded and every
emotion calibrated for effect. He sounds like someone trying to win
people over, not impress them.

That quality of openness has an old name: _availability._ In
nineteenth-century politics it meant a candidate broad factions could
live with — present, usable, open to being claimed by a majority.
Mamdani carries a modern version of it. He’ll sit for Fox News
without apology, walk into rooms that don’t start friendly, and
leave having made the same argument he makes everywhere else. He
doesn’t sand down his views to fit the audience; he trusts that a
politics built on rent, transit, childcare, and safety can travel
across boroughs and backgrounds.

It’s a contrast with nearly every Democratic archetype.
The ESTABLISHMENT pol — the Schumer or Jeffries style — mistakes
fluency for meaning. The MODERATE version of caution tries to manage
politics like a brand, saying little for fear of offense. The ONLINE
LEFT burns energy performing authenticity for its own corner of the
internet. Mamdani’s version of presence is simpler: be legible, not
performative; confident, not curated. He makes seriousness inviting
rather than dour, turning the “happy warrior” from a relic into a
strategy.

4. Meet Culture With Competence and Conviction

In our attention economy, “culture war” fights are often less
about policy than about vibes. Media and political professionals use
hot-button questions to read a candidate’s religion — are you
ideological or pragmatic, tribe or coalition? The point isn’t
resolution; it’s provocation. Step on the rake and the clip writes
itself; dodge the rake and you look evasive. You’re damned if you do
and damned if you don’t. Mamdani’s move is to treat politics as a
tool rather than a creed. He meets the test head-on, shows moral
clarity, and then turns the conversation back to New Yorkers.

Gaza is the cleanest case. Substantively it’s not a “culture”
issue; in practice it’s played as one by our political media.
Mamdani didn’t tiptoe. He condemned the mass killing of Palestinian
civilians, spoke directly to Jewish fear of antisemitism, affirmed
Palestinian humanity, and rejected the liberal habit of carving an
“except Palestine” loophole in one’s values.

The clarity mattered, but the method mattered more: pass the
competence test under pressure — own a truth unpopular with the
political establishment, explain it without rancor — then return to
costs and services. As opinion shifted away from the
Jeffries–Schumer line on the issue, what consultants marked a
liability became proof that he could hold a coalition together while
saying what he thinks.

The same pattern held in distinct ways on immigration and policing.
When Mamdani confronted Trump’s border chief, Tom Homan, over the
arrest of a green-card holder, he wasn’t straying from the economic
debate, as some Democrats fretted; he was showing that he’s willing
to fight when others flinch. In a party that often treats moral
confrontation as a distraction from “kitchen-table” politics, he
understood that courage itself is part of credibility. By challenging
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in public, he made the point
that government cannot claim to stand for working people while
cowering before cruelty.

On crime and public safety, he showed the same shrewdness — knowing
when to drop a losing slogan while carrying forward the substance of
the 2020 George Floyd protests. Rather than defending “defund,” he
took the criticism, apologized, and still acted on one of the racial
justice movement’s core demands: stop sending armed officers alone
to handle mental-health crises. It was a masterclass in translation
— stripping away the rhetoric that scared voters while keeping the
substance that could balance safety, reform, and justice. And like
much of his agenda, it loops back to affordability: the police
shouldn’t be the answer to a broken social safety net.

In both cases, he turned what others feared were culture-war traps
into demonstrations of competence, proving that conviction, handled
practically, is a tool for governing.

That stance sets him apart from all four of liberalism’s familiar
ruts. He isn’t a “woke” culture warrior obsessed with language
over outcomes. He isn’t a moderate who waters down conviction to win
approval from pundits — he builds a broad “we” around New
Yorkers who expect government to work. He isn’t a class-reductionist
who sees only economics and misses how race, gender, and immigration
status impact people’s experiences. But he also isn’t captive to a
form of identity politics that forgets the universal. His focus on
rent, transit, and care builds common cause across difference — a
shared fight over what’s owed to everyone, not just what’s
recognized about anyone.

At a moment when “anti-woke” politics has hardened into book bans,
ICE raids, censorship over remarks about Charlie Kirk, abductions of
immigrants and activists, and open hostility toward trans people,
Mamdani stands in the space that public opinion itself has begun to
reopen. The thermostat has shifted: many Americans who once rolled
their eyes at “woke” now recoil from the cruelty of its backlash.
In that context, being “woke” is no longer a performance of virtue
but a stand against authoritarianism. Mamdani channels that shift by
tying inclusion to belonging and moral clarity to material competence.
Trump’s extremism made that connection obvious; Mamdani’s task —
and the Left’s — is to sustain it once the outrage cools, to keep
proving that solidarity, practiced well, is a form of strategic
competence.

5. Keep the Loop Small Enough to Echo

Discipline is the habit that holds everything else together.
Mamdani’s message loop — _rent, buses, childcare, affordability,
cost of living _— is short enough to remember and broad enough to
fit almost any question. Nearly every argument, every exchange,
circles eventually back to those words. If an answer can’t connect
to the loop in a sentence. He treats the loop like a tether: stretch
too far and you risk snapping the thread that keeps the message
coherent. The farther a Democrat drifts from that core, the weaker the
pull back to what matters. A politics people can remember, like a
rhythm line in a song. Mamdani can riff, but the melody has to come
back. The farther a Democrat strays from a refrain, the more likely
they lose the beat.

The loop was clearest on Fox. The host spent ten to fifteen minutes on
foreign policy — Hamas, hostages, Benjamin Netanyahu, the
International Criminal Court — topics a New York mayor doesn’t
control but that can swallow any interview. It’s the classic
culture-war test: if you engage, you look obsessed with distant fights
instead of city work; if you dodge, you look evasive or inconsistent.
Then came the elite-reassurance check: Would he credit Trump for a
ceasefire, promise to court Wall Street, or concede that modest
top-rate changes would spook JPMorgan or Goldman?

Mamdani handled each cleanly — answer, then pivot — and returned
to the job he’s actually running for: make New York affordable and
safe. On “how do you pay,” he stayed in the loop. On buses, he
brought receipts from the city’s pilot — no rise in homelessness,
fewer assaults on drivers, faster trips — and tied them back to
riders’ days. Pressed to prove he’s “pro-business,” he flipped
the frame: the city that works for workers — cleaner streets, safer
subways, shorter response times — is the same city firms want to
invest in.

That’s what discipline looks like in an attention economy built to
reward outrage, conflict, and distraction. Most Democrats scatter
under pressure — either trying to appease their interrogators or
overexplain themselves into oblivion. Mamdani does neither. He keeps
the loop small enough to echo and strong enough to hold. Culture wars,
pundit traps, shiny objects — everything tries to knock him off
rhythm. But every time, he finds the same anchoring refrain.

Across these five habits runs a single idea: politics regains power
when it is concrete, confident, and collective. Mamdani turns
affordability from mood to mechanism, conflict from noise to
education, style from branding to presence, culture from division to
coalition, and discipline from spin to trust. That is how he differs
from most Democrats’ mode of technocratic caution, from class-only
analyses, from moderates who trim their social commitments, and from
activist culture wars that exhaust the middle.

To many voters, Mamdani feels like an antidote — not only to
Trump’s authoritarian corruption but to the Biden–Harris defeat
and the listless standing of Democratic leadership among their own
voters. What matters is less the novelty of the face but the method: a
way for a democratic socialist to once again steady liberalism through
purpose, as they did from the 1920s through the 1960s:

I know that since we won on June 24, there have been some who have
questioned whether what we aspire towards is possible. Whether the
young people they speak of as the future could also be the present.
Whether a Left that has critiqued could also be the Left that
delivers.

To that, my friends, I have a very simple answer: yes.

And to those who doubt, who cannot quite believe, who share our vision
but fear allowing themselves to hope, I ask you: When has dignity ever
been given? . . .

In an age of darkness, New York can be the light. And we can prove
once and for all that the politics we practice need not be one of
either fear or mediocrity. That power and principle need not live in
conflict in city hall. For we will use our power to transform the
principled into the possible.

_Waleed Shahid is the director of the Bloc and the former spokesperson
for Justice Democrats. He has served as a senior adviser for the
uncommitted campaign, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman._

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