Zohran Mamdani has done Democrats a huge favor by exposing those who need to go | Opinion
Voting is the pickleball of civic participation — an old person’s sport. Many have tried to push younger Americans to Pokemon Go-to-the-polls but failed.
Which makes Zohran Mamdani’s dominant win over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, turning an electorate anchored by 60-somethings into a race defined by historic turnout from millennials and Gen Z voters, all the more astounding.
Mamdani’s focus on delivering straightforward, ambitious solutions to pressing economic concerns didn’t require a false truck-toting tough-guy cosplay. He didn’t have to abandon the diverse cultural makeup that his party feared it was losing to win support from literally every corner of the city. Even Cuomo’s campaign manager, Rich Azzopardi, acknowledged that Mamdani expanded the electorate “in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture.”
Some might be tempted to see Mamdani’s emergence as a gift for a political party in existential crisis after suffering a decade of losses. But not the Democratic Party!
Mamdani’s chief opponent, the incumbent Eric Adams, openly flirted with switching to the Republican Party and developing an apparent quid pro quo relationship with President Donald Trump in his efforts to escape the consequences of a federal investigation into illegal campaign contributions from the Turkish government. (For his part, Trump said Wednesday that he “helped out” Adams.)
Had Trump lost the 2024 election, Adams would be worrying more about prison time than pulling his polling from the bottom of a septic tank. And yet, numerous top Democrats, both in New York and elsewhere, have been reticent to endorse Mamdani. That includes New Yorkers who lead Democrats in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jefrries.
Mamdani’s rising profile has captured the attention and ire of Trump, who threatened Wednesday to deport New York’s likely next mayor, and of the Republican Party, which relentlessly mocks and fearmongers about his faith and culture. Even worse, Democrats are joining their opponents with ignorant interpretations of his unwavering support for Palestinian rights.
One congressman, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, called Mamdani a “little Muhammad” who needed to be deported so he doesn’t “destroy the great City of New York.” New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand falsely claimed Mamdani supported a “global jihad” — which she apologized for after a week of criticism amid defensive tweets from her staff. The rhetorical daylight between the two is minimal, but the former at least represents the opposing party, not Mamdani’s supposed allies.
Mamdani presents another gift for the party and its most likely voters — a chance to clean house of everyone who got us here. As policy consultant Ned Resnikoff said from his Bluesky social media account, the likely mayor “is like a honey trap for Democratic officials who need to get primaried out of a job.”
Start with the wings of the party falsely claiming antisemitism over Mamdani’s phrase “globalize the intifada,” a term derived from the Arabic word for resistance and uprising. In 2023, University of Virginia linguistic scholar Daniel Lefkowitz told the Jewish publication Forward that intifada, in the minds of most Palestinians, “was a metaphor of effective claiming of a voice, presenting a situation to the world’s audience, but not engaging in the spectacular violence” of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Still, Lefkowitz acknowledged that some intifadas have included violent resistance, which “quite reasonably calls up different meanings,” particularly for Israelis and Jewish people across the diaspora.
If what Lefkowtiz said sounds familiar, that’s probably because Mamdani has largely said the same thing, over and over.
“My concern is, to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible, takes me into a place similar to that of the president, who is looking to do those very kinds of things, putting people in jail for writing an op-ed, putting them in jail for protesting,” Mamdani said on The Bulwark’s podcast, inadvertently igniting the ongoing backlash. “It is language, I understand, there are concerns about, and what I will do is showcase my vision for the city through my words and my actions.”
Mamdani has since repeated a version of this explanation in repeated interrogations on “Meet the Press” while reiterating on “Late Night with Steven Colbert.” that he was committed to protecting Jewish constituents from antisemitism
Whether Democratic leaders will accept it or not, Mamdani proved that American Jews and Muslims don’t have to live in constant hostility and distrust of each other, but can instead form a winning coalition while working out their differences. Not only did he win the second largest share of Jewish voters in the city, he formed a downright bromance with Brad Lander, New York City’s top-ranked Jewish official.
Which makes the tolerance or advancement of rhetoric that Mamdani is a terrorist in training particularly morally perverse and politically foolish. Why do people who aren’t Arab or Muslim or have any fluency in the language get to insist how the world must interpret Arabic words, phrases and politics? What kind of message does that send to Muslim and Arab Americans?
To me, neither Muslim nor Arab but a former middle schooler in class a few miles from the Twin Towers when they fell, it provokes memories of our country’s post-9/11 hostility to Arabic and Islamic life. Mamdani, an Indian Ugandan immigrant who arrived to the US at seven years old, remembers this country, too. As a Bowdoin College student, Mamdani recounted trimming his beard to avoid an unwanted political association and his actions to the survival tactics of his American home.
“I felt like one of the countless brown-skinned citizens and residents of the United States who, in the weeks after September 11, traded in their beards for razors, their pagdis for dreads, Mamdani wrote for his student paper. “Except that by ‘War on Terror’ standards, Egyptians on all sides of the conflict would have been suspect in America.”
Show me a Muslim, Arab or even brown-skinned American over the age of 25, and I will show you someone who knows exactly what Mamdani felt here, mocked by his peers or community as a latent threat. It’s an America neither of us want, but have never escaped. Twenty-three years after the towers fell, the Democratic National Convention would not even allow a Palestinian Democratic lawmaker endorse Kamala Harris on the main stage. Activists rightly saw it as a form of erasure.
Flash forward to June 2025. Where was that rejected lawmaker, Georgia’s Ruwa Romman, as Mamdani made his improbable rise to the top of the mayoral race? In New York City, door-knocking for a campaign that included her.
For everyone else who tolerates or advances the Trumpian skepticism of Mamdani’s identity –thank you for outing yourselves as someone ill equipped for the politics of today! Keep rejecting a fundamentally positive, inclusive message that reaches the constituencies you’ve siphoned dramatically. But watch what happens when that coalition who you’ve rejected does when it’s your turn to get out the vote.
This story was originally published July 7, 2025 at 5:28 AM with the headline "Zohran Mamdani has done Democrats a huge favor by exposing those who need to go | Opinion."
