If there’s one person who saw yesterday’s repudiation of the right coming long before everyone else did, it’s Zohran Mamdani. In one way or another, he and the movement that created him are the architects of the Democrats’ victory.
Two years ago, the day after the 2024 election, the mood was grim; the future was bleak. Nobody saw the possibility for regrouping. What did Mamdani do? Just one week after Donald Trump’s victory, he went out and interviewed Trump voters all across the city. He spoke to white, black, brown, Muslim, Asian, but above all working-class men and women and, above all, in the Bronx and Queens.
Everyone now thinks of Mamdani’s victory a year later, first in the primary and then in the general election, as a foregone conclusion, a New York thing that had no meaning beyond New York. It wasn’t. The reason it wasn’t is that Mamdani understood something no one else understood: Trump voters had their reasons for going for Trump, and those reasons could be explained and understood. Not the hard-bitten right-winger, mind you, but the people who put Trump over the top. That reason was economic. Mamdani saw that, and he gave it a name: affordability.
And lo and behold, what did one Texas voter, who’s voted Republican all his life, say last night about how and why he voted for the Democrats for the first time?
No one can afford anything anymore. Our water and air is the dirtiest and our education is horrible.
Mamdani spoke to that sentiment with his use of the term “affordability.” It’s not just a strictly economic word; as this Texas voter suggests, it’s almost a spiritual term, a sense of the enshittification of life, the grinding worsening of material and therefore cultural conditions. Water is dirty; education is horrible; it’s all going to shit. That’s what Mamdani spoke to, and he said, “We can do something about that.”
So many politicians now use that word “affordability” that we forget it was Mamdani who, less than two years ago, made that the word. And what every other Democratic politician across the United States, whether they’re Democratic Socialists of America or not, saw is that those Trump voters, those swing Trump voters, are gettable — if you can speak about the economic and cultural catastrophe that has been visited upon ordinary citizens. Whether we’re talking about the Latino men who shifted right toward Trump along the border in Texas or the farmers in the Midwest who’ve voted Republican their whole lives till yesterday, or the Solid South.
Look at the voters who shifted from Republican to Democrat yesterday and the demographic trends. Remember those young people who voted Trump and were declared lost for a generation to the tradwives and the manosphere? They saw the largest shift left of any demographic group. Voters eighteen to twenty-nine years old saw a 32-point shift to the left. White noncollege voters, which is how this addled nation codes “white working class,” saw a 14-point shift to the left. Latino voters saw a 28-point shift to the left.
It took a Muslim socialist, born in Uganda, raised in New York City, to give the American heartland a new kind of language to wage political battle against the Right. Just as it was Jewish socialists a century ago, many of them immigrants and raised in New York City, who gave America during the 1930s and 1940s, in politics and culture, in the wake of one of the first anti-immigrant backlashes the country had ever seen, a new language for itself.
Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin.
