Zohran Mamdani Rejected by the Black and Poor Voters He Claims to Represent

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

 

Although he was the socialist, anti-Zionist candidate for mayor of America’s financial capital and the most Jewish city in the country, Zohran Mamdani didn’t really campaign on those issues. Sure, he’d let the mask slip on occasion — blaming the Jews for their slaughter on October 7, for example, or allowing himself to ponder the penumbra of innocuous meaning within the phrase “Globalize the Intifada.” But for the most part, he styled himself as champion of two underserved groups of New Yorkers: black residents and the poor.

 

That was the impetus for Mamdani’s plan to abolish prisons and to defund the New York City police, replacing that force with a collection of mediators and social workers — the impervious assumption that the city’s black population is terribly vexed by local law enforcement. The plight of the city’s black population was also the basis for the candidate’s plan to freeze all rents. “Right now, a majority of New Yorkers give over more than 50 % of their paycheck each month to either a landlord or a mortgage lender, and we know that this crisis is at an even higher point when it comes to black New Yorkers,” Mamdani told the New York Amsterdam News in March.

 

For lower-income residents, the candidate promised to abolish bus fares and establish a network of state-run grocery stores. Municipal-run grocers would be “focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit,” the candidate’s campaign literature stressed. As our own Jeff Blehar observed, his mayor, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, launched a pilot program to see if the city government could competently run a Soviet style “grocery initiative.” It was a colossal failure. Mamdani is likely to cite tiny Erie, Kansas’s experiment with publicly funded grocers, which hasn’t gone under, but still loses thousands of dollars annually and depends on the support of private volunteers and donors to keep the lights on.

 

You might expect actual low-income voters and black residents to be intimately familiar with their own causes and needs. If they were inclined to respond to these overtures, we should have seen it in the returns from last night’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor. But we didn’t.

 

According to preliminary analyses of the city’s Democratic primary electorate, Mamdani won his surprise victory with the support of New York City’s white, Hispanic, and Asian voters. But not its black voters. Andrew Cuomo won in the city’s majority black precincts by nearly 20 points. It was not nearly enough to push Cuomo past the finish line. As The Hill’s analysis observed, Mamdani “performed decently” in “mixed black-Hispanic areas” and kept his “losses in black areas to smaller amounts than expected.”

 

Indeed, these results reflect a dynamic forecast this week by New York Times reporter Maya King, who observed that the flight of black residents from the city’s historically black neighborhoods to more affordable climes was likely to reshape the city’s politics. Indeed, “Just under half of black New Yorkers identify as Latino, multiracial, foreign-born or some combination of all three,” she observed. This might account for some of what we’re seeing in last night’s results. Regardless, the will of the voters in the city who identify as black was not reflected in the outcome of that primary race.

 

As for poorer New Yorkers, they, too, backed Cuomo by 13 points while middle- and higher-income residents supported Mamdani by double digits. It is important to remember that, in New York City, “middle-income” (which the Times defines as an annual income of between $62,800 and $117,600) is a modest sum. And yet, the New Yorkers experiencing real penury (by city standards) rejected Mamdani’s sops in large numbers.

 

These demographics seem to occupy so much space in progressive imaginations, but only as abstractions. Progressives anoint themselves the champions of the poor and darker-skinned, project onto those demographics their own political priors, and insist that all their opponents neither understand nor care about the oppressed and downtrodden whom they claim to represent. Progressives’ rejection by the very people to whom they cater almost never inspires any self-reflection. If the left asked itself why its program of racial equity and income redistribution seems to appeal primarily to wealthy white people — some of whom seem as desperate for a non-white avatar to lead them as the alabaster remnants of the Symbionese Liberation Army — it might inspire some cognitive dissonance. We certainly can’t have that.

 

“To me, Democratic socialism means that everyone has what they need to live a dignified life,” Mamdani once said of his mid-20th-century political philosophy. And yet, the people who believe they will experience the full brunt of Mamdani’s policies — a sound assumption given how often they are told as much — aren’t buying it. That should tell us something.