New York City voters shook the Democratic establishment on Tuesday, choosing as their party’s mayoral candidate a young progressive legislator over a veteran former governor with virtually universal name recognition.
Four years after electing a moderate Democrat in Mayor Eric Adams (D), city voters opted in the primary for a candidate backed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Alarmed by Zohran Mamdani’s (D) late momentum, Andrew Cuomo’s (D) campaign relied on establishment figures such as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who contributed heavily to a Cuomo-backing super PAC, and former President Bill Clinton, who endorsed Cuomo just days before the election.
As the nation’s largest city, and the hub of America’s media industry, New York mayoral contests generate more attention than any other. While pundits and strategists will view Mamdani’s election through the lens of his progressive ideology, other Democrats already running for office are emulating the same tactics that set him apart from Cuomo’s focus on management and fiscal prudence.
“We are live here in the most expensive city in the United States of America,” Mamdani, a state assemblymember, said at a mayoral debate this month. “I am running to be your next mayor to make this city affordable. I will do so by freezing the rent for more than 2 million rent-stabilized tenants, by making the slowest buses in the country fast and free, and by delivering universal child care.”
Cuomo, asked how he would make New York more affordable, pivoted to what he called a city in crisis.
“I’m running for mayor because I think the city’s in real trouble. I think we have a management crisis,” Cuomo said. He ran out of time before he could list strategies to bring down costs.
As voters in Virginia and New Jersey consider candidates for governor this year, the Democratic nominees in those states — former U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) — are talking up some of the same themes Mamdani embraced. Spanberger and Sherrill are hardly cut from the same Democratic Socialist cloth as Mamdani, but both are centering their campaign on affordability.
“Everywhere I travel I hear from Virginians that the costs at the pharmacy counter, when they get their electric bill or in the housing market are just so high,” Spanberger said in a recent television appearance. She is in the middle of a 40-stop tour rolling out what she calls her “affordability agenda.”
Sherrill has her own affordability agenda. In the first ad her campaign launched, ahead of this month’s primary, Sherrill pledged to “drive down costs for housing, health care and utilities.”
Rebecca Kirszner Katz, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked for U.S. Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), along with Mamdani, pointed to more moderate Democrats such as U.S. Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), who won swing districts by pledging to bring down costs.
Mamdani won “by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability,” Katz wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
Polls overwhelmingly find voters care most about the rising costs of goods, spurred by the first inflationary crisis anyone under the age of 50 has endured. Last year, President Trump carried voters who said the economy was the most important issue to them by a whopping 81%-18% margin over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Politics isn’t a classroom, it’s a kitchen table. If you’re not talking about what’s already on it, you’re not getting heard,” said Jesse Ferguson, a New York City-based Democratic strategist. “If you try to make it about what you care about, you just remind [voters] that they don’t think the status quo works. You have to make it about what they care about.”
Mamdani still faces a challenging race ahead. Cuomo has secured a spot on November’s ballot as the nominee of the Fight and Deliver Party, though it was not immediately clear if he would continue his campaign. Adams and former assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Walden are both on the ballot as independents. And Republicans nominated Curtis Sliwa, who won 28% of the vote against Adams in 2021.
So too do Spanberger, who faces Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R), and Sherrill, who is running against former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R) in November. No reputable surveys have been published since the four candidates secured their respective nominations, but Democrats and Republicans alike see both races as competitive.
But in Mamdani’s win, and in early messaging from Spanberger and Sherrill, Democrats have adopted a message they will carry into November — and into next year’s midterm elections: The affordability crisis that carried Trump to the White House is now a cornerstone of the opposition party’s appeal to voters.