NEW YORK—All over the country Tuesday, voters poured into polling places to elect Democrats challenging the Trump agenda, particularly the failure of the billionaire-owned Trump administration to deliver on promises of an economy in which the people can afford the necessities of life. Also critically important to voters was the responsibility many said they had to come out and save democracy from the autocratic and fascist elements in control of the federal government in Washington.
Proving a campaign of progressive ideas—and hope—can beat fear, loathing, and loads of campaign cash, Democratic Socialist state legislator Zohran Mamdani convincingly won the New York City mayoral race.
With 91% of the vote counted, Mamdani, 34, beat scandal-scarred ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo with an outright majority, 50.4%-41.6%, and by 181,056 votes out of 2.056 million cast. Cuomo had lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani by more than 10 percentage points but ran in the general election as an independent.
The big story of the Mamdani win was how he energized New Yorkers, especially younger voters. Some 78% of those under 30 cast their ballots for him. On Election Day, he had a volunteer army of more than 100,000 people, many of them union members from the United Auto Workers’ large contingents on the city’s college campuses. The campaign reported that it had knocked on over three million doors.
Cuomo, backed by Wall Street and running a campaign of fear of socialism and loathing of Mamdani’s Muslim faith, pitched his campaign to voters in the city’s outer boroughs. It fell flat. Cuomo carried only the least-populous and most-Republican of them, Staten Island, but got clobbered in Brooklyn, where precincts in Bedford-Stuyvesant went for Mamdani by 8-to-1 or better.
Mamdani shows Democrats how to win again
Pundits from the more conservative wing of the Democratic Party, nervous about Mamdani’s huge victory, were intent on emphasizing only the affordability issue which, of course, he campaigned on heavily.
They still don’t accept a big reason his campaign resonated was precisely because he challenged the political and economic system itself. One pundit on MSNBC said she hoped Mamdani would “stay in the five boroughs of New York since there is plenty for him to do there and leave other places across the country to more moderate Democrats.”
For the Mamdani voters, Cuomo was the face of that establishment, which either backed the former governor or, with few exceptions, sat on its hands. Leaders of the progressive wing of Democrats, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., among others, both strongly backed and campaigned with Mamdani.
Congressional leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both from Brooklyn, were tepid. Schumer never endorsed Mamdani but said he’d be glad to work with him. Jeffries endorsed Mamdani a week before the election, but said after Mamdani’s win that the two still have unspecified differences. Gov. Kathy Hochul backed Mamdani after the primary.
Some in the liberal media originally wrote Mamdani off for a variety of reasons, including his faith—he’s a Muslim-American—his support for socialism, and his outspoken stands on various progressive issues, including a rent freeze, free bus service, battling inflation, supporting Palestinian rights, defending LGBTQ equality, and battling President Donald Trump. Mamdani repudiated none of it. Instead, he reveled in it in his victory speech.
Unapologetically socialist and pro-worker
“I am young, I am Muslim, I am a Democratic Socialist, I am an immigrant,” he declared. “And most of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this!” Mamdani added.
He challenged the entire MAGA agenda and said that the multiracial working-class unity that his campaign was based on is “not just how we beat Trump, it’s how we beat the next one.” Speaking directly the White House occupant, Mandani said, “President Trump, I know you are watching and listening, so I have only four words for you: Turn the volume up!”
Turning to the ruling class efforts to block his campaign for City Hall, Mamdani declared:
“Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality…. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.
“They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.”
The new mayor also had a message for Democrats who shy away from the realities of the class struggle and end up surrendering to right-wing talking points when it comes to the economy and workers’ inability to get by.
“Too many young people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and many working people have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind,” he explained. His mission, and his message to the Democratic Party establishment, is that a campaign of hope and promises of progress can bring them back.
“We will put an end to the culture of corruption. We will stand beside unions because working people know that when working people have rights, the bosses who attempt to exploit them become very small…. And to President Trump, I say, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us!”
Mamdani also invoked labor history, and specifically Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union, a Socialist, and leader of the nationwide Pullman strike in the 1890s. Corporate Democratic President Grover Cleveland sent troops to repress it.
“Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,’” Mamdani told supporters at in Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater. “For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands, my friends.”
Losses for Trump and MAGA nationwide
Trump, who had endorsed Cuomo, attributed the Democratic wins on Tuesday to the fact that he “wasn’t on the ballot,” inferring that if this were a presidential election year that he would have carried GOP candidates to victory. That and the government shutdown, he said in a Truth Social post, were “the two reasons that Republicans lost elections tonight.”
The president has previously threatened a military takeover of New York and renewed his promise to eliminate all federal funds to the city in the wake of a “communist” Mamdani triumph.
From coast to coast, though, Election Night was a disaster for the president and MAGA.
“Trump took a butt-whoopin’ last night,” Communist Party USA Co-chair Joe Sims said Wednesday morning. “I’m talking about a butt-whoopin’ up and down the street and around the corner—in New York, in Jersey, in Virginia, in sunny California.”
Sims said that democracy, change, and affordability won and that “racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-immigrant hate, and the attempt to red-bait people” had all lost.
Right-wing losses Tuesday were indeed national in scale. In addition to the New York mayoral race, also extremely important were two off-year gubernatorial races, in Virginia and New Jersey. Both turned into Democratic routs.
In Virginia, protecting a woman’s right to an abortion, in the last state south of the Potomac River that still has it, was a key issue.
Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who moved left while in the U.S. House while her district did the same, beat Trump supporter Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by 57.5%-42.3% in the Old Dominion. It was such a landslide that even the controversy-plagued Democratic Attorney General nominee Jay Jones unseated GOP incumbent Jayson Miyares, 53.1%-46.5%. And the State Senate went from 21-19 Democratic to a projected 10-seat majority.
That’s important because the Virginia legislature this year passed a congressional redistricting bill, along party lines. Such measures must pass in two consecutive years and then go before the voters in a referendum. Since legislatures from coast to coast are redrawing lines in the middle of the decade—prodded by Trump, who fears losing his slim U.S. House majority—that would give progressives and Democrats a chance to add a seat or two to their 6-5 Virginia margin.
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., the Democratic nominee there, made Trump a central issue in her campaign. It worked. She beat MAGA Republican Jack Ciattarelli, 56%-43%.
California votes to save democracy
Landslide support for California’s Prop 50 produced a 65% to 35% margin at the polls in a direct rebuke to Trump. California used a non-partisan redistricting commission to redraw the state’s congressional map after the 2020 census and it produced an enormous Democratic edge of 43-9.
But after Trump ordered Republican-ruled Texas to wipe out five Democratic districts Newsom got Prop 50 on the California ballot. Its map would flip at least three but possibly as many as five GOP seats.
Voters, including immigrants from Mexico, told reporters they braved the long lines at polling places because they had to do what they could to save freedom and democracy in America.
The California AFL-CIO, local central labor councils and many unions all backed Prop 50. They included the statewide affiliates of the Teachers, AFSCME, the Carpenters, the California Nurses Association, the state’s Pipe Trades Council, the National Union of Healthcare workers, the Service Employees, the United Domestic Workers, the United Farm Workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers’ western states council.
“For 10 months, we’ve watched Trump go after federal workers, healthcare, infrastructure jobs, immigrants and everything labor stands for,” the state federation tweeted on X. “Enough is enough. With Prop 50 passed, now begins the work of electing people who will put Trump in check and stand up for the working class,” it joyfully concluded, looking towards next fall’s election.
Looking to 2026
Two other elections were also notable for worker activism, insurgent anti-establishment candidates, high turnout, and their future political impact.
The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO went all-out in retention races for three state Supreme Court justices, and all won. That preserves the court’s 5-2 progressive majority. Trump was indirectly an issue in that vote, where voters had to vote “yes” or “no” on whether to keep each judge. Had the three progressives been ejected, it would have given the GOP the power to rewrite and unbalance state election laws—important for 2026 and 2028.
In the Minneapolis mayor’s race, incumbent Jacob Frey led another Democratic Socialist—and Muslim-American—Omar Fateh, 42%-32%. Fateh won the local DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor) Party endorsement at its convention, but the state party forced a retraction and a switch to Frey. Both Minneapolis and St. Paul have ranked-choice voting, so the final outcome will depend on the second-choice (and lower) votes from the 26% who put other candidates first.
As in all elections, whether they’re won by progressives or right-wing reactionaries, the work of the labor and democratic movements doesn’t stop once the ballots are counted.
“The question now is what will happen next,” the CPUSA’s Sims said Wednesday morning, “and that depends on us.” He urged people to “continue fighting to build from the grassroots up. Join an organization. Get involved. Keep on fighting, keep the pressure on.”
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