New Yorkers – and others – celebrated a stunning victory following the count that is sure to make Trump and his pals see red. Shabbir Lakha assesses the situation

Zohran Kwame Mamdani has been elected the Mayor of New York in a historic victory. He has become New York City’s first Muslim, first South Asian and first avowedly socialist mayor. He won with an outright majority with 50.4% of the vote in an election with the highest voter turnout since 1969.

The election gained international prominence during the Democratic Party primaries, where Mamdani successfully defeated the party establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo. His victory over Cuomo a second time has been celebrated by the left and working people across the world.

While polls have put Mamdani in the lead for a while, the scale of the upset can be measured by the huge resources pitted against him. Tens of billions of dollars were donated by billionaires in both the primaries and the mayoral election to support Andrew Cuomo. The average donation to Cuomo’s campaign was nearly $600 compared to $98 for Mamdani. Cuomo received the endorsement of senior Democrats and Republicans, including Trump, and had the backing of most of the mainstream media, most notably the New York Post which has suffered a total meltdown.

There are lessons to be learned for the left from Mamdani’s victory. Mamdani is a very talented orator who skilfully got his message across in every debate and appearance. He and his team also ran a phenomenal social-media campaign that undoubtedly played a role in inspiring so many. More importantly, however, was the politics and the defiance. Already, politicians in the US and internationally are trying to emulate Mamdani’s videos and manner of speaking and jumping on TikTok trends. This is to miss entirely the central plank that made his campaign effective.

Mamdani ran an insurgent campaign focused on one central message: the cost-of-living crisis. He ran on four main policy positions: rent controls, free buses, free childcare and city-owned grocery stores, with a plan to fund them through increased taxation on the richest 1% of New Yorkers. It was a campaign that brought class politics to the fore and championed the working class.

But he also remained vocal in his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and he was out on the streets opposing Trump’s Ice raids against migrants.

He remained defiant through the onslaught he faced as a result. He refused to back down in the face of smears of antisemitism and reiterated his defence of the Palestinian people. He was attacked with the most blatant Islamophobia and red-baiting and confronted it head on. One cartoon depicted a red plane with his name heading for the twin towers, Ted Cruz called him a ‘communist jihadi’, and Republican members of Congress have launched attempts to have him deported.

While we rightly celebrate the victory and seek to replicate the successes of the campaign, we should be clear about the challenges ahead. Mamdani will face serious obstacles from the billionaires who have threatened capital flight to prevent him achieving his program, from Trump who has threatened to limit federal funds to New York City and to send in the national guard, and from the Democratic party itself.

The Democratic Party is a party of US capital which has repeatedly shown that it would prefer to lose to Trump than to win with a socialist that threatens the profits of capital in any way. Since the rise of Bernie Sanders ten years ago, the party has been at war with the left in its ranks. It successfully quashed Sanders’ attempts to become the presidential candidate and has sidelined figures like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib (the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress, representing Minnesota and Michigan, respectively).

Benefiting from Trump’s growing unpopularity, the Democrats won a number of elections along with the New York City mayor on Tuesday night. These include governor races in New Jersey and Virginia where the candidates were run-of-the-mill centrists. There is no doubt that the party leadership will apply huge pressure on Mamdani and any other socialist candidates not to rock the boat.

This pressure will inevitably come from progressives themselves. Bernie Sanders endorsed both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden after the party thwarted his campaign and sold out the Palestine solidarity movement while Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was a leading light of the left when she won her seat in the House of Representatives has been a bitter disappointment who has capitulated consistently ever since. Responding to Tuesday’s results, she said:

‘At the end of the day I don’t think that our party needs to have one face… In some places, like Virginia, for the gubernatorial seat, that’s going to look like Abigail Spanberger. In New York City, unequivocally it is Zohran Mamdani.’

During his campaign, Mamdani held a rally together with both Sanders and AOC, and did an extended feature with the even more right-wing Elizabeth Warren. It does not bode well for the prospects of him withstanding the pressures from his own party to blunt his radicalism and toe the line.

Any hope there is of Mamdani sticking to his principles and taking on both the Trump administration and his own party lies with the mass of working people that he has enthused. While Mamdani was able to mobilise them for mass canvassing and phone banking, that won’t automatically translate into organisation from below and independent of the Democratic Party, to take the struggle forward.

But that is exactly what is needed to drive through Mamdani’s programme, confront the obstacles and go further. The urgent task for socialists in the US is to develop this independent organisation and mobilisation on the streets that can do that.