The Democrats divided over populism

Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. He's a self-declared Democratic Socialist with a populist's platform. That's made some Democrats across the country nervous. Is populism the party's path forward?

Amit Singh Bagga, Democratic strategist. Worked as a deputy secretary and senior adviser to New York Governor Kathy Hochul from 2021 to 2024. Deputy director of the NYC Census under Mayor Bill de Blasio from 2019 to 2020.

Kate deGruyter, senior director of communications at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

Part I

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Together, New York, we’re gonna freeze the…?

CROWD: RENT!

MAMDANI: Together, New York, we’re going to make buses fast and…?

CROWD: FREE!

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Zohran Mamdani handily won New York City's Democratic mayoral primary last month beating out former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani is a 33-year-old state assemblyman from Queens. He's also a self-declared Democratic socialist with a populist platform.

MAMDANI: We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford.

A city where they can do more than just struggle. One where those who toil in the night can enjoy the fruits of their labor in the day. Where hard work is repaid with a stable life. Where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage. It is enough to keep the lights on. It is enough to send your kid to school. Where rent stabilized apartments are actually stabilized.

CHAKRABARTI: Mamdani now heads to New York City's general mayoral election in November. He will face off against current mayor Eric Adams, who is running in the general as an independent and against Curtis Sliwa, who is the sole Republican nominee.

By the way, Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, the famous nonprofit, unarmed volunteer crime prevention group created back in 1979 and known for their signature red berets. The Guardian Angels have expanded to more than 14 countries. So you know, New Yorkers will always have an interesting general election ahead of them.

Now back to Mamdani, even though he has not yet won the general election, even the simplest prospect of Mamdani becoming the next mayor of New York is making many Democrats across the country very nervous. Neither Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, nor Senator Chuck Schumer, both New York Democrats, have endorsed Mamdani as of this broadcast.

Here's Congressman Jeffries on The View earlier this week.

REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES: I'm scheduled to meet with him next week. And we'll have a conversation about his vision. He did run a campaign that was actually focused largely on affordability. And that was the right issue to focus on, because New York City's too expensive. America right now is too expensive.

So we'll sit down, we'll talk. I also want to talk to him about the importance of Democrats taking back control of the United States House of Representatives next year so we can have some balance in the country.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Now, why would a congressional leader want to talk with a man who hasn't even won a local mayoral general election yet? And why would he want to talk to him about the future of the national political party, especially in the House and especially since New York political observers say that general election is likely to be very close?

There's a practical reason to that, which we will get to later in the show. But New York Congressman Tom Suozzi, also a Democrat, called Mamdani, a "wake up call" to the party and "a bad example."

TOM SUOZZI: I'm a Democratic capitalist. I'm not a Democratic socialist. But you have to recognize that he tapped into something.

He tapped into the same thing that Donald Trump tapped into, which is that people are concerned that the economy is not working for them. Affordability and the economy is the number one issue in the country.

CHAKRABARTI: So what does Mamdani's primary win and the Democratic establishment's reaction to it tell us about the future of the Democratic Party nationwide? Is populism a path forward for Democrats or is it a pitfall?

Let's start with Amit Singh Bagga. He's a Democratic strategist and a principal at the group Public Progress Solutions. Amit, welcome to On Point.

AMIT SINGH BAGGA: Thank you so much, Meghna, and hello to you and your listeners.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, I should say, you are joining us from New York City and previously in your career you worked as deputy secretary and senior advisor to New York Governor Kathy Hochul from 2021 to 2024. You know New York politics very well, which is why I'm delighted to have you.

First of all, let me just ask you, that last clip that we played from Congressman Suozzi saying that Mamdani has tapped into the same thing that Donald Trump tapped into. How do you respond to that?

BAGGA: I actually think Tom Suozzi and Hakeem Jeffries are both right, which is that affordability is the number one and most acute crisis facing New Yorkers today.

New Yorkers simply cannot afford to live in their homes. They cannot afford to buy groceries, and they certainly cannot afford childcare, which in New York City costs an average of $5,000 per child per month. And so it does not matter if you are a Democrat, a Republican, if you have no party affiliation, if you can't afford your life you are going to be seeking a different path.

And what Donald Trump was offering, what I think, and many think through a series of lies and manipulations, Zohran Mamdani is offering something similar, but through a very positive, credible, and specific vision of freezing the rent for rent-stabilized tenants, making groceries more affordable, and hopefully, finally, in partnership with the state, achieving universal childcare for New York's working families.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. First of all, for non-New Yorkers, let's talk about some terminology here. You said freezing the rent for rent-stabilized tenants. What does that mean?

BAGGA: Sure. So in New York City we have a system of rent regulation. The vast majority of our rentals are market rate, like they would be anywhere else in the country. But a large number and somewhere between a million to million and a half New Yorkers live in such apartments are either rent controlled — which is a small portion — or rent-stabilized, which means that the rents can go up, but they can only go up by a certain percentage every year.

And that percentage is set by a city-run entity known as the Rent Guidelines Board. And the mayor appoints the majority of the members of the Rent Guidelines board. And those units, they are somewhere between rent control and market rate in terms of how much they cost. But there's a limit to how much a landlord can raise your rent.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, we had many years of 0% rent increases. Under Mayor Eric Adams, we've had multiple years of very significant increases, and that has placed an enormous amount of pressure on New Yorkers' wallets. New York City has experienced more inflation between 2020 and 2024 than any other city in the United States, and that has led chiefly by housing. We have only a 1.4% vacancy rate in our rental market, which just gives you a sense of how difficult it is to find and maintain housing in New York.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Because that leads me to wonder, you said that Mamdani's proposal here would potentially have a positive impact on a million New Yorkers, but that leaves what, seven and a half million other New Yorkers, for whom rent stabilization or a rent freeze simply would not apply and they would still be paying market rate rent?

So what does this policy — how does that policy have any impact on making housing affordability greater for them?

BAGGA: That's where you turn to the issue of housing construction, right? And the Mamdani campaign has put out an ambitious goal of building several hundred thousand units of housing.

We have a lot of red tape in New York. Our city charter, which is akin to our city's constitution, has many constraints on how you can quickly and easily build. There are state laws and rules that implement some constraints as well. And I have to say, there are a number of proposals that have either been passed by the city council in the last year or are currently under review through something called the Charter Revision Commission that would make it easier to build in New York City.

And I want to just give you, in the example of Austin, a city which for many years saw enormous amounts of economic and population growth. As a result, the average rents in Austin rose very much. Austin is blessed, unlike New York City, to have more room in which to spread out and build. They went on an aggressive building spree and rents dropped 20%.

Now, we may not be able to do that overnight the way Austin has been able to do, but that is an approach we need to take. And I think you now see that across the ideological spectrum within the Democratic party in New York, everyone is focused on building as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So within New York City, because you also said that some of these changes, the cutting of red tape would require buy-in from state government. And let me just be perfectly frank with you: I don't want this to be an East Coast-based conversation. But since I am based out of Boston, I am quite familiar with what happens when cities want to make major changes but a lot of those changes are subject to state government approval.

For example, the mayor of the city of Boston, she wanted to actually impose a rent freeze, essentially, a kind of rent control again, that went nowhere. Once it met state government here in Massachusetts, that just wasn't gonna happen.

You know the current [New York] governor really well. What makes you think that people in Albany are gonna be like, "Sure, go ahead, make all these changes. We're gonna cut all this red tape, we're gonna help freeze rents?" I'm not sure there's the appetite for that. So at the state level, so has Mamdani promised something that in reality is going to be hard, if not impossible to achieve?

BAGGA: The freezing of rents for rent-stabilized tenants is something that is pretty much essentially within the mayor's purview here in New York City. That power was devolved to the city many decades ago, and so that is something he can achieve with respect to building.

We do have the question of state tax credits, state various types of investments and incentives. It is in the state legislature's interest as well as the governor's interest to spur housing construction in New York. And so I think that is an area where we will find that there are certainly opportunities to collaborate.

I also want to put this in a political context, which is that Governor Hochul is going to face a very competitive reelection bid next year. Republicans have made significant inroads in New York over time. She's going to face what it looks like now, either Elise Stefanik or Mike Lawler. And in order to generate enthusiasm among the very same Democrats that just propelled Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York City — which is a portion of the state she's going to need to win resoundingly -she's also going to need to be able to point to some very specific wins that she has delivered that resonate with that very same group of voters.

So when you look at issues such as universal childcare — which is something that, again, benefits everyone, no matter what your party affiliation is — I think there are some real opportunities for collaboration and certainly when it comes to the legislature, we do have both chambers that are controlled by Democrats. The state Senate in particular is more progressive. And I think that when Mamdani makes it clear, if he eventually wins, which I presume he will, that there are wins to be had and shared among the legislature, the governor and the city, things may start to shift.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let's listen to a second to some of the things that Mamdani himself has said. Here he is with CNN's Erin Burnett, who asked him last month how his proposed plans for say, city run grocery stores would work.

MAMDANI: I’ve proposed a pilot program of one store in each borough. These are five stores in total. The total cost of this is $60 million. This is less than half the cost of what the city's already set to spend on a subsidy program for corporate supermarkets that has no guarantee of cheaper prices or collective bargaining agreements or even accepting taxes.

ERIN BURNETT: So you're not looking at some like, Soviet Union, grocery stores on every corner that are gonna be run by the government?

MAMDANI: No. What I'm looking at is how to solve the very clear twin crises of affordability when you go to the grocery store and food deserts.

CHAKRABARTI: He also explained to Erin Burnett how he plans to pay for some of his other proposals, including free city buses and free childcare for New York children under the age of five.

MAMDANI:  These are things that cost around $700 million and let's say about five or $6 billion. Significant amounts of money.

BURNETT: Huge amounts of money.

MAMDANI: But have to be understood in the context of a $113 billion municipal budget, a $252 billion state budget.

BURNETT: Yep.

MAMDANI: And we put forward a plan to pay for these and more to start Trump-proofing our city through two major revenue streams.

BURNETT: Yep.

MAMDANI: Increasing the top corporate tax rate of New York to match that of New Jersey. That raises $5 billion. And increasing income taxes on the top 1% of New Yorkers who make a million dollars or more a year by 2%. Both of these things, after they come to fruition, you're still paying less than you did before Trump.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm gonna bring in another voice here in just a second, but again, just to get a sense of a greater reality of what needs to happen politically in New York, let me ask you: When Mamdani talks about increasing the corporate tax rate in New York and increasing the income tax rate amongst New York's top earners, is he referring to New York City there specifically? Or is this yet another thing that would have to be approved by Albany, by state government?

BAGGA: Any changes to our tax structure would definitely need to go through Albany. There's no question about that. And there are question — serious political questions about the level of appetite that exists.

I think you will see that there is a degree of appetite in the legislature. Maybe with the governor, you'll find that there is a tiny bit more opposition or there are more questions. But at the end of the day, I think specifically when you are talking about New York's top earners, we are the wealthiest place in America. We're one of the wealthiest places in the world. The percentage by which Mamdani is proposing to raise the top income tax rate for top earners is really a rounding error for most of these folks.

And this notion that we're going to all of a sudden lose our tax base, I think is just not tethered to reality. New York City's population has continued to grow every single year after 2022. We had a very brief dip during the pandemic. We're now back at 8.5 million people. The fact that we have such a low housing vacancy rate that we talked about earlier is proof that people want to live in New York City, and that is people that have come from all over the country, people who have come from all over the world.

And it includes the wealthiest people in America who have long chosen to make New York City their home and continue to do so. And the reason for that is because we are the world's most dynamic and engaging city, and that is not gonna change. And yeah, I think what Zohran is saying is let's make it a little bit easier for the millions of people that actually make the city, that make the economy of the city run, be able to stay here.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, no, point well taken. But you also earlier had said that that very low vacancy rate in part is due to not enough housing in New York City.

But with that thought in mind, let me bring Kate deGruyter into the conversation. She's senior director of communications at Third Way. It's a centrist democratic think tank, and she joins us from Washington.

Kate, welcome to On Point.

KATE deGRUYTER: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Free buses, free childcare, more affordable groceries, and perhaps more practically speaking, potentially more rent control for at least one out of eight New Yorkers. What's so scary about that, Kate?

deGRUYTER: I think for a lot of Americans, especially when you get out of these deep blue places, the prospect of a Democratic party that is wrapped around a Democratic socialist platform, and embracing some of these far-left ideas, runs directly counter to what we saw voters wanted in the last election.

And as you look at what is going to help the party be successful in our primary focus over the next couple years, which is not turning blue places bluer, but turning red and purple places blue.

And so we have a very specific goal that we need to be focused on, and there is actually zero evidence that this kind of approach is going to work in the places that Democrats are going to have to win back, starting first in the midterms. And then when we look ahead to the next presidential cycle.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm gonna ask you for the why you say there's zero evidence in a second. But, to be frank, more affordable childcare, you just said that that's like a far left idea, but I would say it's pretty bipartisan desire amongst the American people. I don't know about lawmakers, but the American people, to have childcare more affordable, it's not that far left.

deGRUYTER: Sure. But a lot of the other ideas that are a part of — the knock against the Democratic party for a long time is that we are the party of handouts, that we don't reward hard work and that we aren't focused on economic growth and economic opportunity. That is something that I will credit that the Mamdani campaign did a better job of talking about affordability. Too often Democrats have let that languish as a middle tier issue. And we know that it is vital for the party.

But when we look at what is going to resonate in the kinds of places outside of deep blue areas, when you look at the trade-offs that are going to be necessary to implement — Let's just talk about city-run grocery stores, for example. The very real likelihood is that the kinds of businesses that are going to be most impacted are not Whole Foods and large established corporations. It's going to be small mom and pop shops that are going to be facing new competition and a struggle to compete.

And so we have to have some clear eyes about what is gonna be feasible, what is actually gonna deliver results. And for too long, voters have not felt like Democrats have been able to deliver on the kind of economy and the kind of opportunity that's gonna help them get that new truck, that's gonna help them afford a house in places where the structure is gonna be very different than what we saw in the New York race.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so here's another way of looking at it. Kate, you are by definition looking at the Democratic party nationwide. And Amit, you're looking at the impact of Mamdani's proposed policies in New York City. I actually still think there's a quite a bit of overlap in terms of what we can — what the lessons we can draw from one to inform the prospects of the other.

And here's an example. I wanna talk for a second about who Mamdani's actual voters were in this democratic mayoral primary. For example, he was on Jen Psaki's show on MSNBC just last month. It was his first interview that Mamdani gave after winning the New York Democratic mayoral primary. And Psaki asked him what he thought his victory means for the rest of the U.S.

MAMDANI: It is part of a larger referendum on where our party goes. One of the hopes that we had from the very beginning of this campaign was to move our political instinct from lecturing to listening. At the national level, after the presidential election, we saw that New York was actually the state with the largest swing in the country towards Donald Trump.

And I went to those neighborhoods. I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens. And I asked those New Yorkers, the vast majority of whom were Democrats, why they voted for Trump and what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic party. And again, what I heard from them was cost of living.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Amit, Mamdani there mentions the Bronx. I was looking at voting results from various New York boroughs. Andrew Cuomo still took the Bronx by 18 points. So Mamdani might say he visited the Bronx and listened to the people there, but the voters in the Bronx didn't buy it. Why do you think that is?

BAGGA: I would say that needs a little bit of exploration and teasing out, which I'll do in a second, but I also just want to respond to something Kate said. Here in New York I was very proud to be part of the team that ran Battleground New York last year. It was a brand-new super PAC that was focused on flipping a number of House seats that we had lost in 2022 back to the Democrats in 2024.

We had a laser focus on affordability. That is what we talked about. We knocked 820,000 doors, registered 24,000 voters, and we flipped four seats in red and purple parts of the state. People have to remember, New York is a very purple state. It is not a deep blue state, by this laser, by having this laser focus on affordability.

So we know that this message actually does resonate with people across the ideological spectrum. And in fact, our candidates, by the way, including Tom Suozzi, outran Kamala Harris in those districts because of the message that we had focused on, which was affordability. The proof for me is in the pudding, which is that affordability is a winning message even in places that are ideologically diverse.

But just going back to the Bronx for a second, New York City is a very diverse place. Every single borough is very diverse and every neighborhood is different from the next. He talks specifically about Fordham Road, which is now a very heavily Latino area. He talked about Hillside Avenue in Queens, which is very heavily South Asian.

He won South Asians and Latinos handover fist, right? So yes, the Bronx --

CHAKRABARTI: But he did not win Black New Yorkers. We'll get to that in a second. But go ahead.

BAGGA: Yeah, he won young, Black New Yorkers, but not older Black New Yorkers. And the nature of who votes in the Bronx and certainly who turned out to vote this time is that the proportion of the electorate in the Bronx that was older Black voters, was larger than other demographics which I think points a little bit to Cuomo's win, but let's just set the stage.

CHAKRABARTI: Are we gonna brush aside what the views and priorities and values of Older Black Bronx New Yorkers are though? That plus 18, the plus 18 is a big number. It's not plus one, plus two. It's plus 18 for Cuomo.

BAGGA: Yeah. So let's talk about that, right, for a second.

You are talking about someone who won 565,000 votes, the most that have been won by any Democratic primary nominee in history. The scale of this win is truly unprecedented, but there is no question that there is more of work to be done to build support amongst older Black voters. That is a portion of the electorate that gets smaller and smaller with every cycle, right?

Asians and Latinos now constitute 50% of New York City's population. The last time Andrew Cuomo lived in New York in 1990, that number was about 30%. But part of that has to do with, I think, the overall sort of place, the overall home, ideological home where a lot of Black vote, older Black voters live, which is a little bit more in the center.

There's, many older Black voters in New York are also folks who are homeowners or have come up through municipal and state government. I think the notion of more universal programs is something that is sometimes a little bit of a difficult sell, but these are also communities where affordability, just like every other part of the city, is a number one issue.

Now for some older voters that have been able to build generational wealth over time, because they were able to lock themselves into rent stabilized housing decades ago, or buy homes when they were much more affordable. We saw a 70% increase in the average home price from 2010 to 2024 in New York.

Many of these folks have owned their homes for decades.

Some of those messages are not gonna resonate, but younger Black voters. Voted for Zohran Mamdani in huge numbers.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me just give Kate a chance to reply here because I want to, I wanted to ask you about that, Kate, about, okay.

So there's a generational aspect to this as well. And certainly Democrats have to be sensitive and aware of that nationally. They need young Democrats to turn out in elections, which there's some evidence in 2024, they did not in the numbers needed, obviously for Vice President Harris to win the presidential election.

So what do you think about that?

deGRUYTER: I think that there's a couple things. One, I think we're in agreement about the importance of affordability, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about a far less populist agenda. And certainly, some of the candidates who ran, Suozzi, for example, it was not somebody running on a populist platform last time around.

And you're seeing some of the folks who are representing some of those frontline districts, who are speaking pretty loudly to put some very clear distance between themselves and some of the ideas associated with the DSA platform and some of Mamdani's campaign ideas, and that's because those are the folks that are going to be absolutely necessary to win back the House.

And they know what it takes to win in some of these communities. And when we think about the Black community, for example, let's think back to what we saw in South Carolina. It was moderate voters and Black voters in South Carolina who stood firmly for a mainstream approach that explicitly rejected the sort of populist, far left agenda that was on offer in the last campaign.

And I think that's really important to keep in mind. And we're heading into our next midterm election. We have had in the Trump era, dozens and dozens of center left moderates who have flipped red House seats blue. That was what happened in 2018 in Donald Trump's first midterm where we saw 33 moderates who handed Nancy Pelosi the speaker's gavel and put a check on Donald Trump.

That is something everybody in the Democratic Coalition is absolutely laser focused on right now. In that same period and even larger, if we expand the network, let's just say in the last decade, the far left has not flipped even one single red seat. And so I think that there's a lot that we need to be very cautious about when folks are suggesting pretty vigorously right now that this is the model for how Democrats are going to win going forward.

That is not what we have seen played out, and it's not because they haven't tried.

CHAKRABARTI: They're suggesting and there are voices in New York amongst the progressive wing who are suggesting that not only is it the way to go forward, but that Mamdani's win have empowered them to even threaten to primary folks like Congressman Jeffries.

deGRUYTER: Absolutely. And that is exactly what clearly the Jefferies team is not at all threatened by this. They're very confident in how they're pushing back. But to this point, I wanna just restate, I have zero interest in trying to turn blue seats bluer. I want to take a map that has gotten increasingly red and a party that has become increasingly isolated to the coasts and make it a party that is competitive nationally and across the heartland. That is how we are going to win the White House. That is how we are going to have sustainable majorities. And I think that is explicitly not what we see the populist approach can deliver for Democrats.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I want to play a little bit more of tape from another New Yorker, but who is a national level Democrat. This is New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was asked about Mamdani's win last month, and she said the people of New York City are sending a message to the Democratic Party.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Particularly in the fact that the entire Democratic establishment, when given a broad range of candidates to support across all sorts of different ideas, still decided to stubbornly choose Andrew Cuomo. Who is a leader, who has been a leader for a very long time, when the people are clearly asking for generational change.

I think it speaks to the fact that I think a lot of those lessons do need to be learned.

CHAKRABARTI: Amit, Representative Ocasio-Cortez there talking about the Democratic establishment. And stubborn, sticking with establishment candidates like Andrew Cuomo. I wanna go back to who that establishment in New York City is.

Because even in the media when we use that term, the knee jerk presumption is, okay. It's like older white, New Yorkers. But the New York Times did an analysis of districts where Mamdani won and where he didn't win and they found that Andrew Cuomo dominated in precincts where at least 70% of the New Yorkers are Black.

That was more than double Mamdani's support in those same precincts. And that really kinda turns on its head, the kind of presumptions that Kate was talking about earlier about the centrality of Black voters in Democratic politics. But on the other hand, the New York Times says, quote, it also highlights tensions between older and more moderate Black vote voters and the parties' most strident, progressive wing typically anchored by wealthier white voters.

I want you to talk about that, respond to that.

BAGGA: Sure. Look, I think that nationally, and certainly this has been true in New York and Andrew Cuomo is the example of this. The Democratic establishment has been, I would argue, suicidally clinging to a version of power that we no longer have. And in doing so, we have walked ourself as a party and potentially our entire democracy to the brink of extinction.

I think we must evolve or we are going to die. And the hand wringing and the amount of attention that is being spent on how to now potentially defeat Mamdani in the general. It's like the establishment is too busy trying to eat the left for dinner. Meanwhile, the MAGA right is feasting on all of us is for lunch, and the MAGA right is feasting on all of us for dinner.

And so I think we really need to ask ourselves the question, if we expect Democrats to win in New York and nationwide, what are the two things we need to accomplish? The first is that we need to expand the electorate, which is something that Democrats have been talking about for decades, but have not been successful in being able to do.

And two, we need to be able to win back voters that have either stayed home or abandoned us for Trump. And Zohran Mamdani's victory proves that you can do both of those things by having a platform that is hyper focused on people's most basic needs. It's actually not about --

CHAKRABARTI: That's not true. Forgive me, but respectfully, I don't buy that because we just spent several minutes talking about his total failure to win in the Bronx, and those were people that he identified voted for Trump.

So his message did not resonate for them.

BAGGA: That's actually not true. So he won many neighborhoods across the city that had gone for Trump or where people had stayed home. Specific examples include hillside Avenue in Queens, which we talked about. There are many South Asian neighborhoods and East Asian neighborhoods.

Flushing, Bensonhurst, Corona, Latino neighborhood, where you saw anywhere from a 10 to 30 point swing towards Donald Trump, or in some cases like Ocean Parkway, Kensington, and Brooklyn, where you saw a 30 to 40 percentage point drop in turnout because people were simply not turning out to vote.

And so no, he has actually won many neighborhoods that were won by Trump, and he expanded the electorate. The perfect example of that is there are 400,000 voters who voted in this primary that were between the ages of 18 and 39, versus 245,000 in 2021. Neighborhoods like Little Yemen in the Bronx, Jackson Heights, and Jamaica Hills and Queens, Bay Ridge and Brooklyn. Turn out, these are heavily South Asian neighborhoods.

Muslim neighborhoods, turn out juiced anywhere from 100% to 200%. And this is proven in the fact that he won 565,000 votes, which is the most of any Democratic nominee.

CHAKRABARTI: Lemme ask you another question. And I do not wanna sound, I'm gonna risk sounding like I'm about to ask an offensive question, but I would ask this of a white analyst, of a white candidate, okay?

If he's winning so many votes among South Asians and South Asian New Yorkers, and Muslim New Yorkers, is part of that identity, given who he is.

BAGGA: There's no question that identity plays a role here. But I think that speaks to the issue of having the right candidates with the right message delivered through the right medium in memorable ways to activate voters.

So he has, he did do videos in Spanish, in Hindu, in Bangla. And he leveraged powerful cultural devices like trying to explain rank choice voting using mango lassi or Bengali sweets. These are cultural devices that people identify with. And specifically in the context of a New York City mayoral election, New Yorkers want to feel like they have a personal connection with who their mayor is.

And for too long, Democratic candidates in New York have actually not understood what the complex demographic fabric of the city is. And by the way, that's not unique to New York City. Cities like Houston, cities like Atlanta, cities like Los Angeles, cities like Chicago, right? These are places all over the country that are incredibly diverse.

Houston is one of the largest, by proportion, Asian American populations anywhere in the country. So I think what we need to ask ourselves in a nation that is increasingly diverse, and that includes red states and blue states and purple states, what, who are the candidates that we are choosing to cultivate?

The Democratic establishment chose long ago not to work with candidates like Zohran Mamdani. How are we choosing to support them and bring them into the Democratic fold. And what are the messages that we are together collectively working on to win votes?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So Kate, let me bring you in here. When Amit recognizes the true, wonderful diversity of places like Houston, Houston's a wonderful example.

I'm also still in my mind what's echoing is your phrase of not wanting, not being worried about turning blue places bluer.

deGRUYTER: Yeah, I think this is a really important moment. To your point, the Cuomo campaign was disastrous and still yielded the results that we're talking about in some of these most diverse parts of New York City.

And so I think when we look at what the model should be, we've got some really dynamic figures in the Democratic Party to look to who are walking the walk in the places that Democrats have to win. So the two big races of this year, we've got rock stars from that class of 2018 who were the first to put a check on Donald Trump.

We got Abigail Spanberger running for governor in Virginia. We've got
Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, both of whom are a new generation of dynamic, centrist women. We've got folks in the United States Senate, Elissa Slotkin, Ruben Gallego, who are among those winning some of those states that frankly went red and were able to outperform the top of the ticket.

And they did so explicitly by talking about how they are going to deliver for voters who are deeply concerned about costs, and doing so in a way that is pushing back against the extremes on the left.

We did a survey to try and understand how did all this happen and we focused on the battleground states after the last election.

And one of the things that we asked voters was, which party do you think is more extreme? And as a Democrat, my hope and assumption is that they would say, absolutely the Republican party today, heralded by Donald Trump is absolutely far and away. And that is not what we found. What we found was that 44% said it's the Democratic Party that is too extreme.

And 41% said the Republican Party. Now that's in the margin of error, but that gives me absolutely no comfort as a Democrat, thinking about how we are going to become a competitive party nationally. And so I think as we are looking for models, there is a whole generation of new folks. You've got Angie Craig, who is going to be running in my home state of Minnesota for Senate, who represent that dynamic face of the Democratic Party.

And are showing that the left does not have a monopoly on folks who are ready to fight for change, and to do so in a way that is resonant outside of deep blue places.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So let me ask you, you say as national Democrats look for models, you're going to laugh when I say this. But I think maybe, isn't it possible that there's something about Donald Trump that could serve as a model for national Democrats?

And here's what I mean. You talked about the fact that even as Democrats say they're going to deliver like economically on the national level for people, for some reason, that isn't necessarily translating itself into electoral wins. There's also been a lot of studies that say liberalism in and of itself doesn't actually work.

That people vote on something more fundamental. They vote on values right? Now, some of those values Democrats might think are quite odious when it comes to the values that Donald Trump espouses on the campaign trail. But can't we make the argument that Mamdani in a certain sense followed a Democratic version of that path, talking about the value of being able to live an affordable American life, of being able to achieve the American dream, as he put it, which is stability.

That's a value. And not necessarily we're gonna deliver X, Y, and Z to you. I wonder if national Democrats are thinking about or should think more about when they talk about messaging, really talk about values.

deGRUYTER: Yeah, and I think talking about the value of hard work and earning a good living, that is something that far too many voters think that Democrats don't care about.

They think that we don't care about economic growth and opportunity. And for a lot of folks, including, Black and Latino populations, these are entrepreneurial folks, the small business engine of our country, these are folks who are seeking the American dream, and too many of them think that Democrats revile success rather than celebrate it. And are working to create the conditions to help them live the American dream.

It's not new to suggest that Democrats are fighting against kind of the billionaires and oligarchs. That's something that we've actually heard over a long period of time. But they don't know that we want them to succeed. They don't think that we want them to achieve the American dream, and that's a huge opportunity for us to course correct and we've got to do.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Amit, I wanna turn back to you. Because again, there's this thing I struggle with about how much of this is, forgive me for putting it this way, but college seminar politics. Because we were looking at old tape of Mamdani talking about seizing the means of production. And I'm seeing here some political strategist, Trip Yang was quoted by Bloomberg as saying his win is the climax of a tenure long progressive populous struggle based on class and energizing new voters.

But while that might be nice to say, I'm seeing here again, like in terms of the primary, some of New York's poorest voters who would stand to benefit most from a class-based approach to politics did not vote for Mamdani. There are people like, or staffers or Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who are talking about Mamdani and his supporters as team gentrification, that they don't actually stand for the poorest new Yorkers who need support and a voice in politics.

BAGGA: I wanna push back on some of the notions that he hasn't won. Poor New Yorkers. Let's just lay out who he exactly he did win. There's no question that there is a universe of his support that has come from wider wealthier pockets, but he also won renters, hand over fist, people who rely on public transportation, hand over fist.

A lot of the folks that voted for him are actually a little bit, excuse me, that voted for Cuomo are more middle-class home owning folks who depend more on cars than they do on public transportation. In parts of the city that are lower density, right? That are not necessarily neighborhood by neighborhood as racially or ethnically diverse.

And the notion that you should be able to afford the home that you live in, that you should be able to put food on your table, that you should be able to take care of your children without going bankrupt. To me, nothing about that says college classroom politics. That says, what are the material challenges that you face that I as a mayoral candidate am saying to you that I'm going to be focused on addressing, and actually in a way that does not seem dissimilar to me then a lot of the messaging that's come out of the candidates and the elected officials that Kate has mentioned.

I think it is true that broadly speaking we as Democrats have now come to understand that we need to be laser focused on affordability. Now, maybe the exact methodology of what we're going to do, how we're going to do it is going to differ from place to place.

That makes sense. New York City is not exactly the same place as Detroit and is not exactly the same place as Richmond, Virginia. And so of course we're gonna have a slightly different set of policies and approaches. But if the central issue is that the American dream for working and middle-class people, for immigrants, for strivers is now falling further and further out of reach.

Mamdani's messaging is not saying that he wants to create a government that's going to just simply prevent you from being able to access that dream. He wants it to create a set of policies that make it easier for you to access that dream.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.