What made a Mamdani win possible? Demography and normalizing antisemitism
Jonathan S. Tobin
The media and a Democratic Party that moved the Overton Window to treat the call for Jewish genocide as an idea worthy of debate helped elect a Marxist mayor of New York.
Supporters at the Brooklyn Paramount n the Brooklyn borough of New York City celebrate after Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman, is announced the winner in the city’s mayoral race on Nov. 4, 2025. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
In the end, the last four and a half months of arguments and desperate appeals meant nothing.
The New York City mayoral race was essentially decided on June 24, when New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani decisively won the Democratic Party primary over second-place finisher Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York. All efforts to stop Mamdani from winning in November went essentially for naught. In deep-blue New York City, with the support of the Democratic Party and almost all of the nation’s liberal mainstream media outlets, coupled with the poor alternatives on the ballot, the chances of preventing him from winning the general election were always negligible.
There were good reasons to worry about the consequences of electing not only a Democratic Socialist who will bring a laundry list of Marxist patent nostrums to City Hall, but someone whose political career has been defined by his obsession with opposing Israel and the Jewish people. In the end, though, the main obstacles to the campaign to mobilize the city’s moderate voters and Jews to do everything they could to defeat him were not so much the reluctance of many to vote for Cuomo or Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
The liberal ecosphere
The real problem is the qualities that should have rendered Mamdani an implausible choice in the eyes of a majority of voters—and therefore unelectable—were no longer seen as disqualifying. Being a Marxist and a supporter of anti-Jewish positions should have relegated Mamdani to the margins of the political spectrum. But among Gotham’s Democrats, that’s no longer true.
In the current liberal political ecosphere, the mayor-elect’s ideology and record had been normalized in the past decade.
In the not-so-distant past, someone like Mamdani would have never stood a chance. But in 2025, a man who had trafficked in blood libels about Israel and the Jews being responsible for New York City cops targeting African-Americans or endorsed chants calling for Jewish genocide and the destruction of Israel (“From the river to the sea”), in addition to terrorism against Jews everywhere (“globalize the intifada”), was not merely acceptable but acclaimed as a breath of fresh air.
The long march of progressives through American institutions over the past decades, during which they have made toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism a new orthodoxy, has taken its toll on society. Along with their imposition of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that exacerbates racial divisions and labels Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors, their conquest of not merely academia, but much of the nation’s political and cultural establishments prepared the way for accepting Mamdani.
American political liberals of the past century would never have accepted for a minute the idea that a Mamdani could represent them or their party. But if The New York Times is already routinely publishing antisemitic articles calling for Israel’s destruction and falsely labeling it as an “apartheid” state and guilty of “genocide,” it’s obvious that the Overton Window of acceptable discourse has moved to make Jew-hatred kosher in the public square. Why, then, would one expect an electorate dominated by contemporary political liberals to treat a mayoral candidate who did the same as out of bounds?
In the face of that fact, nothing the anti-Mamdani coalition could do could put the genie of antisemitism back into the bottle.
A changed New York
There’s also the plain fact that the electorate of New York City has changed dramatically in the last generation.
The New York that elected Republican Rudy Giuliani twice to the mayoralty in 1993 and 1997—a choice that signaled a remarkable revival of the city both in terms of its economy and livability—and then elected moderate Independent Michael Bloomberg, who is Jewish, in 2001, 2005 and 2009, simply doesn’t exist anymore.
In the last quarter-century, much of the city’s working-class population, including white ethnics and others who shared their values, has left New York for the suburbs or for sunnier, better-governed places such as Florida. That shift was accelerated by the decline set off by the left-wing policies of Bill de Blasio, followed by the incompetence and corruption of Eric Adams, which sent the city into a tailspin.
The increase of Muslim voters, especially those from South Asia and the Middle East, where discriminatory attitudes toward Jews, such as those that Mamdani has exemplified, are normative, has become a major part of that change. They gave him an edge that may have offset any outrage about him from the majority of the still-significant Jewish population in the five boroughs, even as a leftist minority of Jews who have lost touch with any sense of Jewish peoplehood embraced him.
Still, the particular set of circumstances that led to this result came about due to a combination of factors.
Dismal opposition
The first of these is that Mamdani was fortunate in his opponents.
Cuomo was his most plausible alternative; however, convincing people to unite behind a man with a record of thuggish authoritarian rule as governor, costly COVID-19 pandemic blunders, and who was chased out of office in disgrace by charges of sexual harassment and bullying was always a heavy lift.
Sliwa, the founder and leader of the Guardian Angels, was a gadfly candidate of a minority party that commands the support of a fraction of the city’s voters, whom few outside his devoted friends and followers could envision as mayor.
Could they have joined forces with incumbent Mayor Eric Adams to create a fusion ticket that would have defeated Mamdani?
Perhaps that might have been possible if they had done so immediately after the June primary. Yet delusions about what would happen in the general election, as well as egos and hard feelings between them, prevented it. That was unfortunate since it was clear from the start that no one but the former governor had a chance of catching Mamdani. Even if they had, it might not have altered the outcome since Mamdani appears to have won a narrow majority rather than a plurality.
Ironically, the withdrawal from the race of Adams, who chose to run for re-election as an Independent rather than as a Democrat after being saved from corruption charges by President Donald Trump, and his subsequent endorsement of Cuomo, who also switched to run as an Independent after losing in June, may have actually helped Mamdani. Without an African-American or other minority opponent in the field, Mamdani apparently did far better in the general election among blacks and Hispanics than he did in the primary.
Mamdani also benefited from being the most anti-Trump candidate in a city where the president is deeply unpopular.
Ignorant and indoctrinated youth
It’s also true that for a lot of voters, the 34-year-old was a fresh face running against two older men who have been public figures in New York for decades. Young voters liked his Marxist promises of lower rents, cheaper groceries and free bus rides, even if they are unachievable in the largest and overall most expensive city in the country. Apparently, every generation needs to learn the lesson for themselves that socialism doesn’t work. But that is even truer for those who get their information about the world from TikTok and other social media. They may well have also been indoctrinated into believing woke myths about the world by an American education system that is in desperate need of the sort of reform that Trump is attempting to enact with his efforts to rid higher education of DEI and antisemitism.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that New Yorkers have now elected an individual whose entire public career has been largely driven by his opposition to the existence of the State of Israel and the belief that supporting those who seek its destruction is the key to a better world.
This will mean, as he has promised, the implementation of policies targeting Israel and Jews in ways that will be deeply consequential for Jewish New Yorkers. How will this impact their lives?
His election-night promise to oppose antisemitism, which has surged to unprecedented levels in the two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, is nothing more than gaslighting, as it was accompanied by his claim that he will also fight the mythical menace of Islamophobia. Since almost everything that is defined as “Islamophobic” is nothing more than drawing attention to the Jew-hatred that is normative among American Muslims and Arab-Americans, his pledge to defend Jews is meaningless.
In Mamdani’s New York, no Jew should think that they can count on the city to protect them. And that is on top of the fact that his pro-criminal policies and hostility to police will make the city less safe for everyone.
Mamdani’s triumph and the support that he’s getting from the country’s liberal establishment will also make the already uphill struggle of moderate and pro-Israel Democrats to keep their party from heading even further to the left even more difficult. At a moment when Democrats are primarily motivated by their hatred for Trump, normalizing Mamdani may seem natural, and perhaps, even inevitable. While that may ultimately harm Democrats in future national elections, there’s no avoiding the fact that it will fuel the increased normalization of Jew-hatred throughout the party, as well as the liberal cultural and media worlds that the left dominates.
A tragic day
Whatever the ultimate political consequences for Democrats, Mamdani’s victory must be marked as a tragic day in the history of American Jewry. Not in living memory has someone who harbors such hostility to this religious minority won high public office in the United States while at the same time being treated by mainstream media as a national political star.
It is the culmination of a process by which vile lies about Israel and the Jews became acceptable public discourse rather than the sort of thing that was confined to the fever swamps of the far left and far right. Conservatives are at least struggling to fend off the efforts of Jew-haters like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and even more hateful figures on that end of the spectrum to establish themselves and their ideas as legitimate on the right. Liberals, however, have effectively surrendered their party to Mamdani and other woke progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and the rest of the antisemitic, progressive “Squad” in Congress.
The result is not just a tragedy for New York Jews, but a milestone in which the efforts of all decent Americans to marginalize antisemites became that much more difficult.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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