The group is endorsing Claire Valdez, a State Assembly member from Queens and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in New York’s 7th Congressional District. Valdez launched her campaign last week alongside Mamdani and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, two of her highest-profile backers, in a signal that the race could prove divisive among the most influential figures in the Democratic Party’s left flank.

Several prominent New York City groups and progressives, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Council Members Sandy Nurse and Lincoln Restler, are endorsing Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a longtime ally and disciple of Velázquez who announced his candidacy to replace her early last month. 

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Reynoso and Valdez may appear difficult for voters to distinguish on many fronts. They share several stated policy priorities — like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and ending U.S. military support for Israel —  and both have backgrounds in labor organizing. Reynoso served as a city council member from 2014 to 2021 before being elected borough president in 2021. Valdez was first elected to the State Assembly in 2024. Prior to that, she worked in visual arts at Columbia University and was an organizer with UAW.

“We need a Democratic Party with a real agenda for the working class — one that organizes to govern and governs to deliver,” Valdez said in a statement to The Intercept. “Justice Democrats have helped show what’s possible when we fight alongside working people and raise expectations about what politics can be. I’m proud to have their support as we keep building a movement that takes on the billionaire class and wins real power for working people.”

Valdez is the ninth congressional candidate Justice Democrats has endorsed so far this cycle in what the group, which rose to prominence backing fellow New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, describes as a national campaign to end the Democratic Party’s submission to corporate PACs and billionaire donors.

“At a time when working class communities nationwide are being screwed over by corporations and billionaire bosses, we need leaders like Claire in Congress who will bring the whole might of organized, worker power to Washington DC,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “With her experience in both the labor movement and State Assembly, this is a real opportunity to transform Congress from a corporate establishment that exploits labor into a tool for workers to take their power back from the billionaire class.”

Reynoso’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The 7th District encompasses some of the city’s most left-leaning neighborhoods in North Brooklyn and Queens, and Valdez’s DSA membership could bolster her candidacy among an emboldened socialist bloc. Mamdani’s decision to buck some of his progressive allies in the city drew attention when he endorsed Valdez, especially after the then-mayor-elect declined to support City Council Member Chi Ossé’s short-lived primary against House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, urging the local DSA chapter to do the same.

Valdez’s campaign has pledged to reject corporate PAC money and is centering her campaign around her background as a labor organizer. Asked about differences between her and Reynoso, Valdez has pointed to her early leadership on Palestinian human rights issues amid the genocide in Gaza.

“I look forward to hashing out our differences over the course of this primary. What I want to bring to Congress is the experience and perspective of a union organizer and proud democratic socialist who’s been a longtime leader in the movement that elected Zohran Mamdani as our Mayor,” Valdez said. “And I’ve been a vocal and consistent opponent of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the system of apartheid that denies freedom for all Palestinians.”

The post National Progressives Side With Mamdani in House Race Splitting NYC Left appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday night, early votes had already been cast in their many thousands for Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who leads the prominent Central Synagogue in Manhattan, took the occasion to slander the democratic socialist candidate, purportedly in the name of Jewish New Yorkers.

“Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” Buchdahl said.

Mamdani’s alleged antisemitism? Pointing out, in 2023, the established fact that the Israeli military has trained hundreds of members of the New York Police Department, and that the NYPD and Israeli forces have intelligence sharing agreements. The rabbi also decried Mamdani’s “false claims of genocide” in Gaza — claims shared by leading genocide scholars, and every major international human rights organization.

That is, Buchdahl didn’t — and couldn’t — cite any actual antisemitism on the newly elected mayor’s part. Her problem, as was the case for the array of establishment Jewish voices who spoke out against Mamdani, was his criticism of Israel.

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Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City is a victory — or at least offers promise — for so many of the city’s working-class constituents. For our immigrant neighbors, trans siblings, and every New Yorker struggling to pay rent, eat, and access care in this punishingly expensive, brutally unequal place.

It is a particular bright relief that base Islamophobia — entrenched since the September 11 attacks, supercharged during the Gaza genocide, and drenching every campaign against Mamdani — did not prevail.

Antisemitism Smears

Mamdani’s win marks a rejection of the consistently Islamophobic weaponization of antisemitism. I hope it is a turning point, from which other New York institutions learn. Diehard support for the Zionist project is, finally, not a sine qua non of New York City leadership.

If Mamdani’s victory was a victory over Islamophobia and false antisemitism allegations, it was not quite a total one. The significant support for the attacks against the mayor-elect, and the purchase they found with converts to disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was jarring.

It was depressing for this Jewish writer to see significant numbers of particularly older Jewish voters back the slanders against Mamdani. The explanation, however, is simple enough: The very same Jewish figures and groups have been organizing their political lives around support for a genocidal ethnostate.

With the genocide in Gaza raging, weaponized claims of antisemitism, launched by pro-Israel forces have won the day in this city for over two years. Students, workers, and other protesters stood up to decry their institutions’ complicity in Israel’s onslaught.

At every turn, Democratic leaders bolstered and enforced calls for expressions of Palestinian solidarity to be censured and punished. Mayor Eric Adams sent police to raid Columbia University campus protests at the direct behest of pro-Israel business leaders. Baseless accusations of antisemitism went wholly unchecked.

It was a lesson in cowardice and complicity, which has only served President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim immigration crackdowns.

Setting an Example

The fact that the majority of young Jewish New Yorkers expressed support for Mamdani, as did some of the most powerful Jewish politicians in the city and the country, should have long ago served to mute the attacks against him. Yet there will be no reasoning with a worldview that treats support for Palestinian freedom, and criticism of Israel, as a threat to Jewish life.

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Mamdani, however, did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election. He did not have to pander to the endless false claims of antisemitism directed at him at every debate and most every mainstream press interview.

Mamdani did not have to sacrifice Palestinian solidarity to win this election.

And, when he is the mayor, there is every reason to demand that he uphold commitments to Palestinian solidarity, including ending municipal partnerships with the state of Israel as it continues its campaign of mass slaughter, displacement, occupation, and apartheid.

I have no doubt that Mamdani will live up to his vows to support and protect New York’s Jewish communities; there were never any justified grounds to believe otherwise. His mayorship, among so many other things, should set an example of how supporting Jewish New Yorkers can be paired with a refusal to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election,” said Mamdani Tuesday night, addressing his supporters in Brooklyn, after being declared the next mayor of New York City.

The post They Tried to Smear Zohran Mamdani as an Antisemite. Voters Saw Right Through It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Another writer once told me that she never, ever apologizes. How unenlightened and abrasive, I thought at the time. This was circa 2019, when the specter of cancellation loomed large, where old tweets were being dug up, and public apologies abounded.

I like to think we’ve come out on the other side a bit more canny. The era of overcorrection converted me to the idea that, with few exceptions, you should not publicly apologize, and you should not retreat.

I’ve been thinking about this again in the wake of former FBI Director James Comey’s second indictment stemming from a dumb joke he literally wrote in the sand. While on a beach vacation last year, Comey spelled out the words “86 47” and posted the photo online. For this limp act of resistance, he’s been charged with threatening to kill the president and transmitting the message via interstate commerce, i.e., Instagram.

For those who’ve never worked a service industry job and are not unruly, public drunks — which would make for an interesting Venn Diagram for members of this administration — “86” is slang for removing someone from an establishment. It’s ludicrous to imagine this being read as a threat on Donald Trump’s life, but that was hardly the point.  

What matters is that Comey made a critical misstep: He deleted the post and retreated, giving his detractors exactly what they so richly desired. “I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said at the time.

Now, some necessary caveats: There is great value in addressing specific wrongs to the specific people you’ve wronged. This is best done in private. If you find yourself apologizing to a large group of unspecified people for hard-to-pin-down or ever-evolving wrongs, it should give you pause, ditto if you start by opening up your Notes app. Consider who is asking you to apologize and their motivations for doing so. Are they trying to exert control over you? Do they want to gain leverage for future use?

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Comey’s de facto apology not only didn’t matter to its intended audience, but it also telegraphed the former FBI director as weak. Announcing himself as willing to capitulate only chummed the water further, the sharks circled, and he bent the knee to the worst actors rather than stand his ground. Deleting the post, in the modern era, ends up looking like an admission of guilt — or, at least, an admission that the bad guys got under your skin, which means they can do so again, at will, in the future.

Once you start apologizing to appease the nameless, faceless ombudsmen looking to catch you out, you might find it’s impossible to stop. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is experiencing this firsthand. Early in March, the right-wing website Jewish Insider thought they were onto the scoop of the century when they published a story blaring: “Zohran Mamdani’s wife liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 attacks.” That premise was hardly borne out by the posts that Rama Duwaji, an interdisciplinary artist, had “liked” — which included such incendiary phrases as “Systemic change for collective liberation” — but the damage was done. A Mamdani spokesperson responded to the report with a conciliatory statement: “Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.”

It’s safe to say this apology was not accepted, and bad actors in the media doubled down on attacking Duwaji. One week later, a gotcha reporter manufactured outrage with a story for the conservative Washington Free Beacon about one of Duwaji’s illustrations running alongside a collection of essays edited by Susan Abulhawa about the indignities of living under Israeli occupation — in this case, a Gazan woman’s search for something as simple as a bathroom. The publication attempted to hold Duwaji accountable for everything the editor has ever said, none of which was contained in the piece itself, which was actually written by Diana Islayih.

Mamdani apologized for the editor, saying, “I think that that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” But the mayor’s critics were quick to seize on what was left unsaid, with an Anti-Defamation League leader crediting his apology with one hand while offering with the other: “However, we have not heard from [Duwaji]. Does she have a problem with the author and her statements? We just don’t know.” (Abulhawa, for her part, nailed it in a withering response to Mamdani’s apology: “You succumbed to forces that seek to pick away at you, at your talented, beautiful wife, and at your work, clawing harder with each apology or concession you make.”)

It wasn’t over, and we likely haven’t heard the end of it. The Free Beacon doubled down on its intrepid reporting by advanced-searching up some of Duwaji’s off-color tweets from when she was a teenager. This seemed to break the dam, and New York’s first lady publicly apologized earlier this month in an interview on the art site Hyperallergic.

“I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it,” she told the site. “I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.” 

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This all comes after Mamdani was only a few months off his historic win in an election where the most votes were tallied since 1969 — one in which he overcame wave after wave of Islamophobic fearmongering and political opponents smearing him as “antisemtic” for refusing to roll over on supporting Palestinian liberation. He stood up for something people believe in and was rewarded for not backing down, which makes it all the more mystifying that he would start apologizing now.

But Mamdani and Duwaji are far from alone. Years back, Rep. Ilhan Omar was famously disciplined for her “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which suggested, apparently quite controversially, that money was involved in lobbying. (After being tarred as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, Omar tweeted, “I unequivocally apologize.”) The attacks on Omar — again, brought by bad actors — have not stopped since then.

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The door on all this apologizing only swings one way. You’ll never get an apology out of Donald Trump, AIPAC, or the vast majority of elected Republicans. This should force you to consider that, just maybe, your opponents weren’t actually offended in the first place; they were exercising power over you in a way you’ve already proven works. It’s akin to political blackmail: If you prove you’re willing to pay the bad guys off once, there’s nothing to stop them coming back again and again for another pound of flesh.

Being involved in public life — and politics in particular — means offending people. It means making enemies of the types of people who strenuously fight against everything you stand for. What the left should stake out is the courage to stand on principle and be willing to have the bad people dislike you. Because without a spine, an elected lefty is just another politician.

The post Never Apologize appeared first on The Intercept.

New York City is on the cusp of an election in which what once looked impossible has begun to seem inevitable. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist member of the New York state Assembly, is heavily favored to beat Andrew Cuomo, New York’s onetime Democratic governor and a former icon of the party establishment, in a race for mayor that has become among the most-watched in the nation.

Cuomo and Mamdani articulate two vastly different visions for New York City — and where the Democratic Party is going overall. This week on The Intercept Briefing, Akela Lacy speaks to people hoping to see each of those two visions fulfilled.

“Traditionally, we’ve thought about politics as left, right, and center,” says Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist who has worked on local and national campaigns. “Zohran offered a message that was less about ideology and more about disrupting a failed status quo that is working for almost no one.”

Cass, who worked on Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign in 2021, isn’t working for Mamdani but says his candidacy indicates “that Democrats can win when we have ideas.”

In the view of Jim Walden, a former mayoral candidate who is now backing Cuomo, those ideas are “dangerous and radical policies.” He says Mamdani’s popularity is an indication that “there’s going to be a flirtation with socialism and maybe some populist push” among Democrats. 

But “ultimately,” Walden says, “the party will come back closer to the center.”

Chi Ossé, a City Council member who endorsed Mamdani, sees Mamdani’s success as evidence of the opposite. “We could have gone back to or continued this trend of electing centrist, moderate Democrats,” Ossé says. Instead, he thinks that New Yorkers want “someone who ran as a loud and proud democratic socialist who has always fought on the left.”

While New York City is preparing for a general election, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa is unlikely to win — turning the race almost into a second Democratic primary. “The party is now confronted with a choice,” says Lacy, “between a nominee who has become the new face of generational change in politics and a former governor fighting for his political comeback. The results could reveal where the party’s headed in next year’s midterms and beyond.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy. 

There’s less than two weeks left before New Yorkers elect their next mayor. The race has drawn national attention — both from President Donald Trump and from observers who see it as a reckoning over the future of the Democratic Party. 

PIX11 News: Zohran Mamdani continues to hold an insurmountable lead over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the race for New York City mayor, as long as Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa stays in it. 

AL: Even though New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani decisively won the Democratic primary in June, the general election has pretty much boiled down to a contest between two candidates trying to claim the Democratic mantle. There’s Mamdani — the party’s nominee — and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations that he now denies and has been chasing the mayoralty as his political comeback. Since he lost the primary, Cuomo’s running on an independent ballot line called “Fight and Deliver,” but he’s still pitching himself as a Democrat.

There’s also Curtis Sliwa — the founder of the Guardian Angels, Republican candidate, and a thorn in the side of those who want him out of the race to clear a lane on the right for Cuomo. That’s the position of billionaires like John Catsimatidis and Bill Ackman, who have been pushing to get Sliwa out. 

Curtis Sliwa: Come on Ackman, stay in your lane. Does he know anything about politics? No. Does he live in New York City? No. He lives in Chappaqua, the whitest suburb of America, where even the lawn jockeys are white. 

AL: It’s also the position of President Trump. 

Donald Trump: We don’t need a communist in this country. But if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully, on behalf of the nation. 

AL: The Trump administration already got its wish when current New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race last month, and the conventional wisdom was that many Adams supporters would flock to Cuomo. But after a federal corruption indictment that disappeared when Trump swept into office — remember that? — Adams’s support was already plummeting. And with Sliwa unlikely to become mayor himself, the race is really seen as a contest between Mamdani and Cuomo.

Now, Mamdani and Cuomo represent two possible paths the Democratic Party could take: a democratic socialist who was once deemed too far to the left to pull off a primary and is now heavily favored to win the general versus a former Democratic governor who can count the Republican president in his camp. What does the saga say about the state of Democratic politics across the nation?

That question is facing Democrats at a time when the national party is still finding itself after a crushing loss that returned Donald Trump to the White House. 

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Two years before that, a humiliating performance in the 2022 midterms threw the New York state Democratic Party into crisis, when Democrats in the state lost congressional seats and helped hand Republicans control of the House of Representatives. In the state that gave us both insurgent leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the two top Democrats in Congress — Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries — the party is now confronted with a choice between a nominee who has become the new face of generational change in politics and a former governor fighting for his political comeback. The results could reveal where the party’s headed in next year’s midterms and beyond.

So today, we’re going to talk to people hoping to see each of those two visions fulfilled. First, we’ll hear from a City Council member backing Mamdani and a Democratic strategist who’s been following the race but isn’t working for any campaign. And after the break, we’ll hear from a former mayoral candidate who dropped out and endorsed Cuomo, saying he doesn’t want to see the Democratic Party veer toward socialism.

Joining me now is Chi Ossé. He’s the Council Member for New York City’s 36th District. He endorsed Mamdani in April.

Welcome to the show, Council Member Ossé.

Chi Ossé: Thank you so much for having me on.

AL: Also joining us is Alyssa Cass, a Democratic media strategist based in New York City and partner at Slingshot Strategies. She served as an adviser to top elected officials, candidates, and causes at the national, state, and local levels.

Welcome to the show, Alyssa.

Alyssa Cass: Hi. It is so good to be here. 

AL: We’re speaking on Wednesday, October 22nd. [Editor’s note: On October 24, Politico reported that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will be endorsing Zohran Mamdani.]

And just a note, we are not endorsing any candidate on this podcast, and we’re focusing on the pressures building both locally and nationally on the Democratic party.

To start, especially for our listeners outside of New York, why has Mamdani’s campaign become a national story? You have Fox News running wall-to-wall coverage, Trump calling to deport him — what exactly is bringing so much national attention to this race? Chi, we’ll start with you. 

CO: Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, I believe that it’s one of the biggest races that we’re seeing post-November of 2024. And after Republicans secured levels within Congress as well as the presidency, people are looking at the Democratic Party and seeing how we respond to that especially within the New York City mayoral race.

You know, we could have gone two ways. We could have gone back to or continued this trend of electing centrist, moderate Democrats — or we could have gone with Zohran Mamdani, someone who ran as a loud and proud democratic socialist who has always fought on the left, who speaks up about Palestinian rights and sovereignty. And this race showed that the party is accepting and willing to move to the left. 

Zohran ran a very creative, loud race that was centered around affordability and did so without being tied to the financial institutions and entities that usually elect our mayors here within New York City. And made a lot of noise during the campaign, galvanized a lot of people, and made some history in terms of how the campaign was run. So with all of that, it made this a historic race, one that has caught the ears of many and has skyrocketed Zohran into the place where he is today.

AL: Alyssa, I want to bring you in. I mean, you worked on the 2021 mayoral race, you’ve worked on national races. What’s your perspective on what is making this resonate with people outside of New York or have the potential ramifications that go beyond the city? 

AC: I think about that question in kind of two primary buckets. The first is, why is this so interesting? One is, I think that it offers us a view of politics and the contours of politics that’s actually more realistic or how actual people think about it. Traditionally, we’ve thought about politics as left, right, and center. And I think that the major fault line in politics now, or how people think about it, is that the status quo is not working for almost anyone.

And if we don’t reform the status quo, we are going to break it. And Zohran offered a message that was less about ideology and more about disrupting a failed status quo that is working for almost no one. And that approach to the race offers Democrats a really powerful path forward. And as we think about how do we reconstitute winning coalitions — and that’s something I think has been a little under appreciated about Zohran’s win — he fundamentally reconstituted the electorate.

If you live in New York City — if you are working class, middle class, or even upper middle class — New York City is not working for you. If you are anyone who interacts with public services on a daily basis, if you’re sending your kid to public school, if you’re taking the bus, if you’re riding the subway, New York City life is really like — hard. 

AL: You can say the f-word, it’s OK. 

AC: It’s really fucking hard. And he was able to put together a coalition of, frankly, almost everyone, just other than the very wealthy. And frankly offer an optimistic view of politics that brought us together about what unites us: that no one’s having an easy time. Obviously there are different degrees to that, but these parallel crises of affordability for almost every American tapping into that is the path forward for anyone who wants to win. And I think that those two reasons: of one, seeing the electorate not in these ideological terms that I think mostly people like us think about, but normal people don’t, and the ability to rebuild a democratic coalition, is exactly what people are talking about, and it’s not done through, like, big focus groups about what men are thinking or what words we’re saying, but how to build a coalition of people for whom the status quo isn’t working, which is almost everyone. 

AL: We’re speaking on the morning after a shocking immigration raid in Manhattan’s Chinatown where federal agents arrested multiple people.

New York has sanctuary city laws that forbid cops and other local officials from coordinating with federal immigration enforcement. And as of this recording, Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD say the city had nothing to do with the raid.

Both Cuomo and Mamdani have put out statements condemning the raid. But more specifically in a moment like this, how should a New York City mayor respond? Chi, start with you. 

CO: Absolutely. Well, I don’t believe a word that comes out of Eric Adams’s mouth. And he is an accomplice if not a lapdog to Donald Trump. So in terms of the statements that were shared, I do not believe him.

A mayor, and hopefully the next mayor, will uphold our sanctuary laws and also work with the NYPD and use his authority to make sure that all people who live here in New York City are protected regardless of their immigration status when it comes to federal agents infringing on the rights of the land here in New York.

AC: Yeah, I think something we saw last night, but we’ve seen kind of throughout the past few months, are reminders of, is that Donald Trump is coming for New York City regardless. And what New Yorkers want is not someone who is promising to work with Trump, or can manage Trump, or who has a history of negotiating with Trump. That we’re actually seeing that like that doesn’t matter.

We really need someone who is principled, incredibly disciplined in saying, “Donald Trump, hands off New York.” And we’ve actually seen this dynamic, I think, play out in a really interesting way throughout this general election. I think that you saw, at the end of the primary, you saw Cuomo beginning to try to socialize with New Yorkers. “If Donald Trump’s coming after New York, you want someone who can give him a call and talk him down.” We’re seeing that like that’s not possible, was never possible.

There was so much coverage about New York City’s shift to the right, the increase in New York City voters who voted for Trump. They were voting for Trump, I think what we’re seeing now is not because they wanted ICE raids that destroy communities, destroy our economies, and rip our New York City neighbors from their schools and their homes — they wanted someone who was listening. So the best way to actually fight Trump and to rebuild a Democratic Party is not through compromise, but really through a pursuit of our principles and our values.

AL: And I want to draw this out to the national level too, because this is extremely parallel with the criticisms, you know, facing national Democrats — Chuck Schumer, et cetera, Hakeem Jeffries in Congress — and this idea that at the beginning of Trump’s term, national Democrats really were sitting back and saying, “Is there a world in which we can play nice with Trump and have some leverage, some negotiating, leverage some power? Something to bring to the table.” And it quickly became obvious that that wasn’t going to work. But also that was extremely infuriating to voters. And I think that’s why you’re seeing Democrats pivot with this shutdown strategy. Whereas back in March, they were saying, let’s try to work with Republicans where we can.

But I think what you’re saying, Alyssa, is that that is not something that voters have the patience for anymore. And I think that’s not just a New York City thing, that’s a national thing. 

AC: Yeah. I think part of why Donald Trump won or why you’ve seen Democrats struggle is that when the status quo isn’t working, bad ideas beat no ideas. And we’ve often been the party and had candidates that are “no ideas.” And what we are seeing is that Democrats can win when we have ideas. Zohran is a case study of that. So when trying to manage or handle Trump, the idea isn’t to go along or get along. That’s a “no idea.”

We need new ideas and preparedness. I think one of the biggest tasks of the future mayor is getting prepared for an escalation in the assault on New York City. We know he’s coming. I think we have every reason to expect National Guard or federal troops and making sure we’re prepared, right? Making sure we are setting the rules of the road with NYPD and other agencies and cooperating with that sort of incursion. And that will be like day one after the general election, the real work of the mayor-elect.

AL: Chi, do you want to add anything on the tail end of that?

CO: I absolutely agree with Alyssa’s point. I also do want to note that on the topic of national Democrats and them wanting to work with Trump and at least see if there’s a middle ground — Trump doesn’t give a fuck, right? And his whole modem operandi is to embarrass Democrats and has been doing so both with Chuck and Hakeem.

In addition to that, our leadership in the Democratic Party somewhat ushered this type of behavior in. Back when Mahmoud Khalil was disappeared right here in the city, both of those individuals were very quiet, if not timid, on making statements and being very loud about their statements in the disappearing of people and disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil. They kind of set the precedent for this to happen, especially here in this city.

So to have a mayor-elect and future mayor who’s going to speak truth to power and stand on business when it comes to how evil ICE is, right? And call-out how un-American and Gestapo-like that ICE is, is going to be something that I believe will resound with New Yorkers. And that New Yorkers want to see their elected officials, their mayor, their Democrats fighting for, right?

AL: So jumping back in time a little bit, shortly after the primary, there was a ton of reporting on how New York’s wealthiest business leaders were working to defeat Mamdani, including offering to help Adams find a private sector job if he dropped out. One of the city’s biggest real estate developers was floated as an option at one point. But last week, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he would support Mamdani if he won. What’s your reaction to that? If Mamdani wins, Alyssa, what sorts of roadblocks can he expect from the city’s elite? 

AC: Mamdani’s done a lot of work to assuage and do a charm campaign with the business community. 

AL: Right. 

AC: Not because he’s going to betray his agenda, but because it’s a savvy observation that they’re actually pretty easy to pacify, right? And is avoiding, I think, some of the missteps that Bill de Blasio did. Bill de Blasio got pretty beat up immediately by the business community. But the business community is actually easy to charm, right?

The thing that they care about the most, that most materially impacts them — like, let’s say raising taxes — a mayor of New York City actually doesn’t have much, doesn’t have any control over. So when it comes to the business community, I think that a little bit of engaging, showing that you’ll pick up their calls — which Bill de Blasio was unwilling to do — goes a long way.

And that ultimately, the mayor of New York City is not materially impacting these people who are really out for themselves. And that actually creates an environment where [it’s] easy to give them a little face-time and then I think they shut up. 

AL: To your point, you said he’s meeting with these people not because he is going to betray his agenda, but that is what some people are concerned about. 

AC: I think you want to like — Listen, being mayor is really fucking hard, and you have a very limited runway before everyone is going to start shitting on you and be very critical. And it’s hard to implement your agenda.

Clearing the decks from a chorus of haters or trying to lessen them a bit is not kowtowing. It’s just paving the way for an easier time, because there are going to be actual crises to deal with. So I think it’s clearing a smoother runway for when you’re actually sworn in. And there’s so much out of your control — like there could be a snowstorm that becomes a disaster — that you want to clear the decks, shut up the haters by dishing out a little sugar. That’s savvy, not being compromised.

AL: I want to put this to both of you. How can we expect those same people to react to a Cuomo win? Chi, we’ll start with you. 

CO: The business people? 

AL: Yeah. And you know, the elite of of New York, the people who, you know, originally were partnering with Bill Ackman to try to figure out how to— 

CO: Yeah. I mean, I think they want Cuomo to win, obviously.

I do believe that a majority of the elite want Cuomo to win. I think it’s more about what Zohran means for politics, right? He was able to win without the backing and being tethered again to these financial institutions. And many of these elite folks want elected officials that they can control. And if someone can win as mayor of New York City without being tethered to their power, what could that mean for city council, state Assembly, state Senate, and even some of our congressional seats? 

AC: Yeah. And like, here’s my thing through all of this, when Bill Ackman throws a temper tantrum, or John Catsimatidis, which I think that’s the right pronunciation, throws a temper tantrum, I think people see that and it moves people toward Zohran. Like, wasn’t the whole point of Zohran’s election is that people are sick and tired of people like Bill Ackman paying little in taxes and having a massive apartment and having the influence that they do, right?

Like that status quo that these people are screaming about that Zohran is going to disrupt is the very thing people don’t like. So yeah, I’m sure they’re going to have a meltdown. And they are welcome to move to Boca, and we will be thrilled to convert their brownstones and mega penthouses into multifamily dwellings to further make a dent in our housing crisis.

AL: Going back to Cuomo. I know that some members, some city council members, were stripped from their roles in budget negotiations after backing Cuomo. Chi, what is the mood toward Cuomo among city councilors right now? 

CO: There’s a higher definite chance that Zohran becomes the next mayor, and regardless of where people fall within that politically ideological spectrum, I think people do want to be on good terms with the mayor, right? So I do think that there has been a vast distancing from Andrew Cuomo.

AC: And the councilman makes a great point. And I think that is revealing of a bigger dynamic that I think is worth pointing out. People who are really watching New York politics are like, this is not like a real race, right? It is being treated as a very competitive general election for reasons that are divorced from the mechanics and the central dynamics of the race. 

Zohran had a winning message and a winning coalition, and Andrew Cuomo did not. None of those dynamics have changed. And you see the rest of the political class in New York very much understanding that. And we are thrilled for the attention and continue to go along with the ruse that Andrew Cuomo would like us to believe that this is still a competitive election and that he somehow has a path, but he does not.

AL: So far, only five Democrats representing New York City in Congress have endorsed Mamdani, the party’s nominee: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nydia Velázquez, who both endorsed him before he won the primary; Adriano Espaillat, Jerry Nadler, and Yvette Clarke, who endorsed him after he won. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James got on board. Notably absent are Democrats’ top two leaders in Congress — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom have addressed this in the last week or so and said they are still planning to weigh in. [Editor’s note: On October 24, Politico reported that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will be endorsing Zohran Mamdani.]

Many other Democrats have backed Cuomo, others whose candidates lost in the primary haven’t endorsed anyone else. What’s happening here? Are there two Democratic Parties? 

AC: So what is happening here is that the leaders, the elected leaders of the Democratic Party look so fucking stupid, I’m sorry.

Honestly, it would’ve been better for them to just like, never endorse him and say like, “I’m just not going to make an endorsement in this race. I didn’t in the primary,” and like, move the fuck on. This is really the worst of both worlds. And just the message it sends. You hear from both of those leaders that we are a big-tent party, but apparently not so big if you have certain concerns about certain issues. 

The biggest discomfort with Zohran seems to be around foreign policy issues that have nothing to do with fucking New York City and also are so out of the mainstream of where the median Democratic voter is in New York City or beyond, it further reveals that there is a gap between the people who are calling all of the shots and regular voters. It only serves to put them, to make them seem more out of touch and more beholden not to rank-and-file Democrats but something else. 

AL: Chi, do you want to add anything? 

CO: Sure, yeah. Their donors won’t let them.

AL: Who? Which donors? Who are we talking about? 

CO: All of them. 

AL: Can you say more? 

CO: Yeah. Probably BlackRock, the largest landlord in this country, probably AIPAC.

Yeah, I think those donors will not let them endorse Zohran Mamdani for mayor. 

AC: Those sorts of donors give way more money at this point to the Republican Party and to Republican elected officials. Like, we are getting very little out of this. It shows a very — a view of politics and where to get money that is really out of date.

CO: Yeah. It’s the same donors that don’t let them fight against Donald Trump, right? 

AL: Alyssa, you brought up the foreign policy thing, and Chi, you’re mentioning AIPAC too. Mamdani has also faced criticism from his left and much on his right, particularly on this Israel–Gaza issue.

Related

Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats How Not to Take the Bait

Last week, he was asked during the mayoral debate about the ongoing saga around this phrase Mamdani himself has never used — “globalize the intifada” — but which many Democrats and pro-Israel critics have urged him to denounce. This is a phrase that many pro-Palestine advocates say simply calls for the end of the Israeli occupation – “intifada” is an Arabic word meaning uprising or resistance. But many pro-Israel Mamdani critics have turned it into a political cudgel to spread this fear that Mamdani won’t keep Jewish New Yorkers safe.

I wrote about this last week, and you can find the story at The Intercept. Mamdani has drawn criticism for similar comments, including that he threw the movement for Palestine under the bus or that he’s a Zionist. Is there a “right” way for Dems to play this? Chi, I’ll start with you. 

CO: I don’t necessarily see it as a right way for Democrats to play this. I think Mamdani has 38 percent of support from the Jewish vote to Andrew Cuomo’s 42 percent. That’s basically equally matched. I believe for this issue, this is something that Jewish voters are definitely taking a look at, and a sizable amount support Mamdani and his efforts.

AL: Alyssa, is there a right way for Democrats to play this issue? 

AC: So it seems to me that his approach of not ever endorsing or supporting the flattening of Gaza was the right approach. This is an issue where you will never please everyone, but the majority of Jewish Democratic voters believe there there’s a genocide that’s been happening in the Middle East. 

AL: Right.

AC: Are uncomfortable with the current no-strings-attached relationship with a radical right-wing Israeli government. And to me, when you’re looking at where’s the right place to be, I’m not sure it’s that hard. Because what is popular and what is morally righteous are the same position right now. 

AL: I’m going to switch gears a little bit and go back to early this year, January, February. It’s cold out. The mayoral race is just beginning. Everyone’s wondering if Eric Adams will even run again because he’s still under indictment.

There are whispers about Cuomo, the assumption is that if he does jump in, everyone else might as well pack it up and go home. Why was he considered such a shoe-in? 

CO: Cuomo did a really good job at creating this paper tiger effect on the political establishment. And it was very unclear as to what was going to happen within this mayoral race, especially with the amount of candidates that were jumping in and was able to secure some union endorsements from the get-go.

There is this notion within our prior understanding of the New York City electorate, that a lot of voters who turn out in these elections — usual voters who turn out in these elections — will vote for the name that they know. And, you know, Andrew Cuomo was a name for older Black voters and Latino voters and outer borough voters, which was a strategy that Eric Adams used to win in 2021. So it created this effect that really galvanized a lot of the New York City press corp as well, right, political press corp to aid in Cuomo’s efforts of making him seem as unstoppable as he appeared.

What was not taken into account was — and frankly could not be taken into account — was the movement that Zohran and New York City DSA were able to put together. It energized thousands, tens of thousands of new voters, folks who usually don’t come out and vote in New York City mayoral races.

AC: Actually, when I look back, Zohran ran the most big-D Democratic campaign of any of the candidates in the primary. While many of us political consultants had our heads up our own asses, myself included, feeling very fearful, seeing the red wave that had happened in New York City and thinking — We forgot that this is a deeply Democratic town, and a liberal or progressive one at that.

While the rest of the field was modulating on public safety or bringing in a more moderate tone to everything those campaigns were doing, Zohran ran a proud Democratic campaign, about making this city work for New Yorkers that was definitely democratic and the best sense of what being a classic Democrat was. And also understood — like they did something so well, but it was a very basic premise — that talking all of the time about the thing that people are thinking about and are keeping [them] up at night and are telling people is their number one concern is smart. The basic concept was not rocket science. And everyone else overcomplicating shit, created a real pathway for an insurgent candidate like Mamdani.

AL: Thank you Council Member Chi Ossé and Democratic strategist Alyssa Cass, we really appreciate you joining us on the Intercept Briefing. 

CO: Thank you so much for having us. 

AC: Thank you. 

[Break]

AL: We’re continuing the conversation about how the New York City mayoral race is shaping the future of the Democratic Party with Attorney Jim Walden. He’s endorsing Andrew Cuomo. Walden was running his own independent bid until early September, when he dropped out. His name will still be on the ballot in November — but he says he doesn’t want it there.

Jim, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Jim Walden: Thank you Akela. Thanks for having me. 

AL: We’re speaking to Jim on Thursday morning

So we have been talking about the future of the Democratic Party. There’s been a lot of discussion in this past year since Kamala Harris lost the presidential election about a desire for a fresh start in the party. How does Cuomo fit into that future?

JW: To the extent that the future of the Democratic [Party] as there’s a socialist future in there, I don’t think that Andrew Cuomo would ever be pushed that far. At the end of the day, he is a free market guy. He believes in the private sector. He believes that it’s critical for building, which is so important to the future of New York City.

And so I think that it’ll be super interesting from the perspective of someone who’s been a long time independent to see across the country and in particular in New York, where the party goes. My guess is that there’s going to be a flirtation with socialism and maybe some populist push but that ultimately the party will come back closer to the center.

AL: What are the policies that he’s running on right now that you see as emblematic of his potential to step into this leadership role at a critical moment in Democratic politics?

JW: Housing in New York City, I can’t stress this enough, is central to solving the affordability crisis. And just today there was a number of press reports that came out that talked about the fact that the market for rent-stabilized housing, which represents about a million units across the city, that landlords are in financial distress and 1 in 5 buildings is underwater and they’re delaying things like repairs. And that is having a very, very significant impact on particularly Black and brown tenants who make up a significant portion of the rent-stabilized portfolio.

So Andrew Cuomo is someone that has very close relationships with developers. He’s taken a lot of flack for that. But you know, when you have a fire, you’re calling firefighters. When you have a criminal running down the street, you call the cops. We have a housing crisis that if we can’t solve it, it’s going to have collateral consequences across our economy.

AL: So when you were running for mayor, you pitched yourself as the business community candidate, a reasonable moderate who knows how to work with the city’s elites and navigate the complexities of city government. And also as an outsider, who was someone who wasn’t a technocrat, someone who could appeal to some of the frustrations I think that people have had with the Democratic Party. What do you say to critics who might argue that the city’s billionaires are the people who most want Cuomo to win, and that this is a strategy to maintain the status quo?

JW: That is an incredibly important question. And let me just double down in a show of self-awareness. I’ve said quite clearly that Andrew Cuomo getting into the race was one of the reasons that I decided to run because I thought that we needed change and we needed new leadership. So I’m not running away from any of my prior positions.

Unfortunately, we have the candidates that we have, and I’ve said as clearly as I can that I think that they are all challenged candidates for different reasons, whether it’s experience, whether or not prior scandals and the like, but it was an uncomfortable choice that I had to make.

But I made that choice, Akela, a long time ago. But it is actually really surprising to me that [Mamdani] has taken off the way that he has. And as I saw him ascend, I was actually one of the first people that predicted— I had run a whole Monte Carlo simulation before the Democratic primary in four of the 10 simulations, Mamdani won, and those were predictably accurate. And as I saw him rise, I saw him in some ways embrace more what I think are, you know, dangerous and radical policies.

Akela Lacy: Yeah. So I want to go back to this idea of the status quo because — and I hear what you’re saying about your calculation both in jumping into the race and then removing yourself from the race because of the writing that you saw on the wall. But do you see Cuomo as a potential extension of that status quo? And if not, can you explain why not? 

Jim Walden: Status quo is, maybe we can sharpen that a little by saying that he’s an institutionalist, right? So I believe that it’s fair to say that, I’ll speak about me. I’m an institutionalist in the sense that for 23 years I’ve been bringing pro bono cases attacking city, state, and federal government for a lot of bad things that they’ve done to people. That doesn’t mean that I don’t support the institutions of democracy and our government. I do. And I believe that Andrew Cuomo is very much of the same ilk, although he may be more of an institutionalist because he’s been part of the governing elite, if you will. But at the same time I think that he will talk about changing the status quo, I think he’s going to change the status to quote completely when it comes to housing.

I know for sure that his plan is — and again, to be clear, I’m not in the Cuomo campaign. I did this as a matter of my own personal politics and my own belief in what was the best for the city. I know that he’s going to do everything he could possibly do to start building things right away. And that’s what we need. I mean, if you think about the most recent data on housing, right? 2024 is the most complete picture that we have. Mayor Adams, to his credit, oversaw the building of about 25,000 rent-stabilized apartments. That’s great. That’s that’s a big bump from where we’ve been. The problem is that we lost 11,000 of older units that were being warehoused. And so 25,000 come on, 11,000 go off. We need somewhere between, depending on whose estimate you look at — My best estimate was 50,000 rent-stabilized units a year.

Zohran Mamdani plan is only going to build 20,000 rent-stabilized apartments a year if it works. That’s something where I do trust Cuomo.

AL: We have some breaking news as we’re speaking. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is endorsing Cuomo for mayor after joining him courtside at the Knicks game on Wednesday night. Can we get your reaction to that, Jim?

JW: Yeah. So Adams endorsing Cuomo is really no surprise. You know, this kind of is a testament to again, all of the ways in which our political system is broken and in some ways dysfunctional.

Eric Adams, whatever it was a month ago, said that Andrew Cuomo was a snake and a liar, and then they’re sitting at the Knicks game together, and then there’s an endorsement the next day. You know, I think that those sorts of things turn off people. They turn off voters. How can you have a positive reaction to that?

But at the same time politics is politics, and at the end of the day it comes down to numbers. And with Cuomo and Sliwa in the race, Mamdani’s got a huge advantage. Just the math is the math. I mean, I’ve said this a million times and I don’t know how many people are listening to me on it.

AL: You mentioned Adam doing this turn toward Cuomo after calling him a snake, but you had similar words for Cuomo in May. You described him as “a tired snake oil salesman, who’s on his last leg.” What is it about his policies that have made you change your mind?

JW: So Cuomo while, I have deep, deep disagreements with him on a number of the things that have happened during the course of his career. He is a person that we need right now. Why? If you look at any projection — it doesn’t matter whether it’s inside the government or outside the government, unless some amazing, wonderful thing happens to the city — the minimum deficit that we’re going to have next year is $5 billion. And some of the estimates go up to something like nine, just next year. In the two years after that — again, unless there’s some sort of magic ointment that someone applies to our business community — the deficits are going to get much higher.

And in that environment when we need so much, and we are already in a distressed situation with tax revenue, there’s going to have to be bold moves that pay the bills for all the things that we need to do.

Related

Zohran Mamdani Won’t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway.

And Zohran Mamdani, he has said more times than I can count that he wants to dismantle or defund the police. And then he’s running on a platform that he says “I’m not trying to defund the police,” but he is trying to defund the police. And this is one of the things that’s so frustrating to see low-information voters bite on this hook. Which is, he’s saying he’s going to keep the current level of police the same. We are down — depending on whose estimate you want to look at — the range is somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 cops. No one’s really looking at the rate at which senior officers and detectives are filing for early retirement.

And there hasn’t been an enormous push to recruit. I think that at the end of the day, at the end of the year, if we end up flat, I think we’ll be lucky. But we need more cops. And he’s not being honest about the fact that he really is defunding the police by holding the current headcount.

And earlier when he was describing his community, his department of community safety, I was standing next to him at a full mayoral forum where he said he was going to fund that by taking $1 billion out of the NYPD overtime budget. I was standing right there. And then when he put the PRO plan out, maybe after getting some initial criticism and feedback, he claims that he’s going to pay for it by raising taxes, both corporate and individual. 

So I believe that he wants to defund the police, and I believe everything that he’s been saying for years about his perspective on NYPD, you know, he said he was going to apologize. He then pivoted and said, well, I’m going to do it privately with individual officers. I’m not going to issue a blanket apology. 

You know, I have a lot of cops who are friends and I can’t tell you the number of times, Akela, that cops have said to me, “Listen, if he’s going to be mayor and he’s going to change the CCRB, so the police commissioner has no power over choosing discipline for officers, I’m out of here.”

So and those are two of the key reasons that cops are leaving the city is because the CCRB, it always was a broken agency. I had planned to get rid of it with something that was much more effective in terms of getting at the bad apples in NYPD and not victimizing cops that were trying to do their jobs and got into bad situations that they tried their best to control, but still had a complaint filed against them.

So the CCRB, the extent to which they’re now being forced into overtime shifts that are akin to a indentured servitude at times, and lower starting salaries than is being competitive with other states outside of New York. That’s why we’re losing active-duty officers because it’s like, I don’t need this anymore. So that’s one example of a policy that I think is dangerous.

AL: There’s more that I can talk about but we’re getting close to time. So, Jim Walden, thank you so much for joining us on the Intercept Briefing. Really appreciate your time.

JW: Thank you for having me.

AL: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

We want to hear from you. 

Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts at the intercept dot com. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn and Maia Hibbett. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And tell all of your friends about us. Better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy. 

Thanks for listening.

The post The Struggle for the Future of the New York Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign struggled to win “the Black vote.”

That was part of the narrative that emerged after Mamdani’s surprising win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Though Mamdani, a state assemblymember, decisively triumphed over his chief opponent, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the young democratic socialist’s performance in majority-Black precincts proved to be a weak spot.

Mamdani’s weak showing wouldn’t be cause for much concern to his campaign if he were only running in the general against perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. In addition, however, Mamdani will be facing two erstwhile Democratic candidates: disgraced incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and, again, Cuomo. In past elections, they have both relied on Black voters as a crucial bloc of support.

Mamdani’s campaign could show us a different side of politics in New York.

Last month’s results in some 15 percent of voting precincts with majority-Black populations, though, don’t tell the whole story. Rather than being a race about a mythically monolithic “Black vote,” Mamdani’s campaign could show us a different side of politics in New York — one that speaks to Black voters based on their material needs.

Staying on message about affordability was Mamdani’s route to victory in the primary, and it could hold the key in the general, too. If he can win over some Black voters — rather than the “Black vote” — he may yet again shock political observers and land himself in the mayor’s office. His foes, however, are already seizing on his primary performance.

Younger Voters

It’s true that Mamdani struggled with Black voters. Cuomo won more than half of the votes in majority-Black precincts, while Mamdani got about 34 percent. In those areas with more than 70 percent Black residents, Mamdani did even worse.

In the general election, though, Mamdani stands a chance to perform relatively well among Black voters. With both Cuomo and Adams running, their historically strong numbers in Black precincts may be split: The most recent polling shows Cuomo with 32 percent support among Black voters, and Adams trailing with 14 percent. Mamdani currently leads with 35 percent.

Either Adams or Cuomo could consolidate their Black support if the other drops out, but Mamdani’s position speaks to something else that commentators almost never talk about.

There is no singular “Black vote.” Not even with the Democratic Party, and certainly not in New York City, where the Black population is a wildly diverse mix of native-born New Yorkers, transplants like me, immigrants from the entire diaspora, radicals, conservatives, queer people, church-goers, Muslims, and older and younger residents.

The so-called Black vote, in other words, doesn’t need to shake out the way it frequently has in the past; all indications are that it won’t.

Mamdani is the candidate that has shown he can seize on young voter enthusiasm — and with young Black voters, themselves no monolith, offering Mamdani an opening. True, some of these younger voters are moving toward the Republican Party, but it’s also true that young Black Democrats are more likely to hold more progressive views than their older counterparts.

Indeed, young Black voters appear to have gone decisively for Mamdani in the primary. According to one primary exit poll (with a small sample size), about 70 percent of Black voters under 50 voted for Mamdani citywide. There’s no reason to think he will lose that support in the general, and if he can continue to increase young Black voter turnout, he may not need the older ones.

The Latest Attack

This is something Mamdani’s adversaries don’t want to talk about — which is why they’re so insistent on boosting the narrative that he had a poor showing among Black voters.

Shortly after Mamdani’s primary victory, the first opposition research attack showed how his opponents plan to go after him: by seeking to diminish his support among Black New Yorkers.

The salvo came in a recent New York Times report on Mamdani’s 2009 application to Columbia University. The then-17-year-old had checked racial identification boxes for both “Asian” and “African American.”

Mamdani was born in Uganda, as was his father, an Indian Ugandan, and was raised there and in South Africa until coming to the United States when he was seven years old. He told the Times: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.”

It’s not much of a scandal: A college applicant with a background that does not neatly fit into U.S.-defined racial categories attempted to use those categories to accurately describe his identity.

The story was more remarkable for how it came to be: a hack of Columbia’s records, intended to show that the school was still pursuing race-based affirmative action admissions. The information was then fed to the Times reporters through Jordan Lasker, who has supported eugenics, to whom the Times granted anonymity and described merely as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.”

In the end, checking the boxes didn’t help Mamdani; he didn’t get into Columbia, despite his father’s professorship there.

The attack is of a piece with the Democratic Party establishment’s playbook for winning over Black voters. While some Democrats forgo actual policy talk and appeal to cultural signifiers — think of Bill Clinton playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show — others play up any real or imagined racial grievance.

The Adams campaign has already pursued this approach. In response to the Times story, it tried to paint Mamdani as a fraud — a fraud who attempted to personally benefit from the hard-won gains of Black political struggle.

What’s Actually Happening

Mamdani has acknowledged this lack of enthusiasm among some Black voters and has noted that he must do more in terms of direct outreach. He has already appeared several times alongside Reverend Al Sharpton and is hitting the Black church circuit.

Mamdani, in other words, is seeking to build his support among those who typically constitute what we refer to as the “Black vote” — frequently older, often church-going, and used to dealing with the Democratic establishment.

Democratic leaders have for years courted the “Black vote” with an old playbook. It includes a brand of retail politics where a select number of power brokers have served as intermediaries and representatives of the greater Black community — and often engage in a sort of transactional politics with the party.

What’s notable about Mamdani’s appeals to traditional Black stakeholders in New York politics is that he’s not sticking to this playbook.

And here, young Black voters have a chance to do some remaking of their own. What the last decade-plus of black-led movement politics has shown is a disdain among millennial and Gen Z Black people for this version of top-down political organizing — the media’s attempts to brand figures like DeRay McKesson and Shaun King as new age leaders be damned.

If young Black voters can play a deciding role in a Mamdani win come November, it may be a sign that the old playbook is no longer the only game in town. Politicians may have to do something they haven’t considered for decades: treat Black voters like they are people with real, material interests — informed by their experience of race and racism in the U.S., but material interests nonetheless.

Mamdani’s affordability program offers direct benefits to young black New Yorkers eking out a living.

This is where Mamdani has been consistent from day one, focusing on issues of affordability: more direct government intervention in housing, transportation, childcare, and groceries. These are the “kitchen table” issues Democrats say they would like to focus on, though we have seen little of it. Instead, the party focuses on cultural appeals and fearmongering about public safety. 

Mamdani’s affordability program, however, offers direct benefits to young Black New Yorkers eking out a living in a city of rising rents and depressed wages. If implemented, this agenda could make it easier for young Black New Yorkers to stay in the neighborhoods Black people have historically called home.

Rewriting the rules is never easy. The attack on Mamdani over his Columbia application appears not to have legs, but it will not be the last attempt. A concerted effort on the part of young Black voters to resist the tired old politics, as well as Mamdani’s push to address their real concerns, may be enough to not only overcome the old guard, but spell its ultimate demise.

The post Zohran Mamdani and the “Black Vote” appeared first on The Intercept.

But in order to implement his sweeping agenda, Mamdani will have to confront an establishment that tried to keep him out of office and tackle one of the key issues it sought to leverage against him: the New York Police Department and its powerful union.

Related

Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo in Victory for the Left in NYC Mayoral Race

As Mamdani’s opponents seized throughout the race on his past criticism of police, his public safety pledges on the campaign trail reflected an attempt to thread the needle between the NYPD and its critics — strengthening the power of the department’s civilian oversight board, keeping NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in her job, and building a Department of Community Safety to “ensure that no New Yorker falls through the cracks of our social safety net.” Together, the proposals simultaneously aim to make it harder for police to escape accountability, preserve one of the department’s institutionalist leaders, and take certain responsibilities away from police as a way to lighten their load. 

The Department of Community Safety, Mamdani’s marquee public safety proposal, would do violence prevention, crisis response, and mental health work by deploying non-police personnel throughout the city. The idea, successfully modeled in other cities, is to free police officers from spending time on those issues and let them focus instead on responding to the most violent crime.

According to Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, police have “mixed feelings” about the proposal. On one hand, rank-and-file cops largely don’t want to be in the business of responding to mental health crises. On the other, they’re part of an establishment coalition that may not want to support Mamdani for political reasons. 

The city’s influential police union, which represents 50,000 retired and active police officers from the New York City Police Department, has said Mamdani’s plan won’t make a dent in their workload. “The NYPD responds to roughly 180,000 calls involving an emotionally disturbed person each year, out of roughly 9 million total 911 calls,” said NYC Police Benevolent Association spokesperson John Nuthall in a statement to The Intercept. “That means that mental health emergencies constitute less than 2% of calls the NYPD responds to.” 

“We are really focused on a positive vision for change New York City,” said Grace Mausser, a co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, at the Mamadani campaign’s election night party at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. “We know governing is going to be complicated, we knew it when we ran for mayor that it meant electing someone who was going to be in charge of the NYPD, but we can’t let complications stop us from taking power. Certainly the oligarchs don’t, so the working people can’t either.”

The Mamdani administration will also have to determine who will run the agency, who will staff it, how it might affect the next round of police union contract negotiations, and what relationship it will have with the NYPD and its oversight body, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. That, according to Mac Muir, a former CCRB investigator, represents “a serious bureaucratic and infrastructural challenge ahead.”

While Muir said the new department seems “designed to succeed,” he noted that it’s never been tested on New York City’s scale — or with a police force as big and influential as the NYPD. “It appears very clear that that entity could only succeed with an effective relationship with the NYPD,” Muir said.

Even if rank-and-file officers get on board with Mamdani’s plan, his administration will likely confront obstacles from department and union leaders.

“His biggest issue, in my opinion, is going to be the extreme recalcitrance and push back from the rank-and-file members of the department and their union leaders to change and to reform,” said Sarena Townsend, the city’s former deputy commissioner for intelligence and investigation. Townsend was pushed out of city government under Mayor Eric Adams after she refused to dismiss a backlog of use-of-force cases in city jails, and she’s currently leading whistleblower lawsuits by former NYPD officers who say they were forced out after reporting alleged corruption and misconduct within the department.

“In situations where the rank and file don’t trust the mayor or the decision that the mayor is making, or their leadership,” Townsend said, “the rank and file just won’t do the things that they’re being asked to do, or they’ll revolt in other types of ways.”

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Under Bill de Blasio, a progressive and vocal Mamdani supporter, the police union battled the former mayor to such a ferocious extent that he largely backed down from many attempts at police reform. 

If the cops don’t like Mamdani — whether on the grounds of his specific ideas or the leftist policies he represents — they can attempt to stymie him in a variety of ways, Vitale pointed out.

“Mamdani is going to have to dismantle a lot of phony task forces and committees,” he said, “and also deal with a workforce that may not share his vision on public safety.”

The Mamdani campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

While police present a challenge for Mamdani within New York City’s political establishment, advocates for reform are skeptical about the way he’s distanced himself from some of his past criticism of police and his promise to keep Tisch in place as commissioner.

Tisch, Adams’s fourth appointed NYPD commissioner, has pushed police to more aggressively go after so-called “quality of life” crimes — which Mamdani has said he would divert police away from. 

“We’ve seen that Commissioner Tisch and perhaps Mayor Mamdani have serious distinctions in their political perspectives,” Muir said. “Can they sit down and identify mutual interests and work together?”

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Zohran Mamdani Won’t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway.

To many political observers, Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch looked like an attempt to navigate a mainstream political climate that has become openly hostile to calls to rein in overpolicing and ballooning police budgets, and to placate detractors who warned his leadership would trigger a crime wave. His public safety plan largely focused on taking certain powers and responsibilities away from police, including getting rid of the NYPD’s controversial protest response group, and he was the only candidate in the general election who didn’t call to increase the size of the NYPD. 

But Mamdani didn’t really run on the police reform agenda voters have seen proliferate in the post-2020 campaign era, Vitale said. That strategy was a response to largely failed liberal efforts to rein police over the last several decades. 

“He didn’t discuss accountability, training oversight, all the kinds of procedural reforms that have dominated liberal discourse around policing,” Vitale said. “We’ve been trying it in various forms for 10 years, and we really don’t have anything to show for it. Why waste political capital on symbolic superficial reforms that the police department is going to be up in arms about?”

That tack largely kept the police union out of the race, Vitale said. The union endorsed Adams in 2021 and did not endorse this cycle. 

While Mamdani did say he wanted to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s decisions binding — rather than letting the commissioner have an effective veto on police discipline — he didn’t make it a central plank of his campaign. “If Mamdani had spent a lot of political capital talking about doubling the size of the CCRB and creating new accountability mechanisms and forcing more training, I think that might have pushed them into the race more forcefully,” Vitale said.

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Strengthening the CCRB’s power would require dealing a blow to Tisch: As NYPD commissioner, she currently has the power to overrule many of the avenues that will become available for Mamdani to enforce oversight and police accountability. While Tisch has taken police accountability and discipline seriously in some cases, she also shielded a lieutenant from an NYPD disciplinary judge’s CCRB-backed recommendation that he be fired after he shot and killed a man during a traffic stop.

”Am I excited about Tisch? Not super,” said Mausser, the DSA co-chair. “But there also was not a socialist police commissioner waiting in the wings. So if Tisch is committed to working with Zohran, committed to doing things like building a Department of Community Safety, then we’re gonna be open to working with that department to make it happen.”

These dynamics leave substantial room for pressure from reform advocates, who said they’ll be watching Mamdani’s administration closely for who he picks to lead his Department of Community Safety and how he responds to the next challenges facing the city, whether it be a National Guard deployment or a police shooting.

“If Mamdani comes into office and does not follow through on his promises, yes, we will protest outside of City Hall, just like we did again with de Blasio,” said Jeremy Saunders, co-executive director of the grassroots advocacy group VOCAL-NY. VOCAL supported de Blasio early on in his administration and put stronger pressure on him when he shied away from some police reform proposals, including making it a crime for police to use chokeholds and not policing fare evasion on the subway.

But ultimately, Saunders said, he’s concerned about bigger forces outside New York City.

“What are we going to do when the federal government is denying us our tax dollars or deploying the military or the National Guard here?” Saunders said. “I think we have less to worry about right now from a Mayor Mamdani than we do from the people who want a Mayor Mamdani to fail.”

Update: November 5, 2025, 8:50 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include comments from NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mausser.

The post Zohran Mamdani Avoided Campaigning Against the Police. Will They Work With Him? appeared first on The Intercept.

“What I saw during that election was that so many young people were hungry for a change and that they have a clear-eyed view of the problems we face and how to fix them,” Velázquez, D-N.Y., told The Intercept. “That helped convince me that this was the right time to pass the torch.”

Velázquez, a native of Puerto Rico who has served in Congress for more than 30 years, announced her retirement Thursday, in the early days of what is sure to be a frenzied 2026 midterm season across the country and in several solidly Democratic New York districts. She was not facing a notable primary challenger, unlike her House colleagues Hakeem Jeffries, Ritchie Torres, and Adriano Espaillat: three younger New York congressmen who are all considered firmly in line with the Democratic establishment, and all facing challenges from their left.

“She could be in that seat as long as she wants,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a longtime ally whom Velázquez once described as one of her “children.” “Nydia is at her peak. So that she would go out like that — it’s so Nydia.”

Velázquez is known as something of a den mother for a generation of younger progressive politicians in Brooklyn. She is overwhelmingly popular in her district but made few friends in the local establishment’s clubby machine politics. As Brooklyn’s electorate shifted left over the decades, she built up a formidable stable of protégés in key roles.

“My goal was never to build a machine,” she said. “My goal was to build a bench of strong, independent, progressive public servants who understood who they work for.”

That will likely set up a competitive race to succeed Velázquez in her left-leaning 7th Congressional District, which includes Mamdani’s home base of Astoria, Queens, and solidly progressive Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Clinton Hill. The district’s progressive profile means it’s poised to become a hot contest for candidates on the left — and may distract from the controversial candidacy of City Council Member Chi Ossé, who’s waging a long-shot challenge against Jeffries that has mired the city’s Democratic Socialists of America in debate.

Velázquez declined to say who, if anyone, she favored to become her replacement.

“I could leave today and know that the district will be in good hands,” she said.

Velázquez is bowing out at a moment when the “G word” — gerontocracy — can be heard frequently on cable news, and not just on the lips of younger political hopefuls frustrated by an aging party leadership. She joins fellow Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who announced his decision to retire in September and who has already kicked off a wild, 10-way primary fight in his Upper West Side district.

“She told me she wanted to send a message to Democrats across the country that it is time for the next generation,” said City Council Member Lincoln Restler, a protégé. “Still, every elected official I’ve spoken to is just sad that we’re losing this remarkable moral leader.”

Velázquez saw Mamdani’s promise so early in the mayoral race that she was predicting his win well before many of her younger acolytes did, Reynoso told The Intercept.

“Nydia was always like ‘Zohran is the one, and I think he can win,’” Reynoso said.

At Mamdani’s victory celebration on November 4, Velázquez was happy to flaunt her prediction. When one supporter joyfully asked if she could believe it, she replied: “I believed it a year ago.”

Velázquez, 72, was first elected in 1992, unseating a nine-term incumbent in the Democratic primary to become the first Puerto Rican woman to serve in Congress. At the time of her primary victory, the New York Times offered readers a guide to the phonetic pronunciation of her name.

“When Nydia Velázquez was first elected to Congress, it was her against the world,” said Restler. “She took on the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the entrenched political power in Brooklyn was entirely against her.”

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In 2010, Restler said, “she told me she felt genuinely lonely in Brooklyn, that she had so few allies that she could count on. Fifteen years later, essentially every single person in local and state elected office across her district is there because of her validation, her legitimization, and her support.”

In the wake of her announcement on Thursday, praise for Velázquez poured in not just from her mentors and close ideological allies, but also from establishment figures closer to the center as well. On X, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the outgoing congresswoman a “trailblazer” — a hint perhaps at the stable of potential left-wing contenders Velázquez has helped take the playing field over the years.

The post Nydia Velázquez Hears Calls for Generational Change, Setting Up a Fight on the Left in New York appeared first on The Intercept.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Hochul wrote that she and Mamdani shared priorities like making the city more affordable and ensuring strong leadership of the New York Police Department. She also took an oblique shot at Mamdani’s two main competitors: current New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who President Donald Trump’s team has reportedly pushed to drop out of the race, and Andrew Cuomo, who would have a better shot at winning if Adams did so. The former governor lost the Democratic primary by just under 13 percentage points to Mamdani in June. 

“In light of the abhorrent and destructive policies coming out of Washington every day, I needed to know the next mayor will not be someone who would surrender one inch to President Trump,” Hochul wrote. Trump, apparently displeased with the endorsement, called it “a rather shocking development.”

Hochul’s support for Mamdani followed nearly three months of hand-wringing from the de facto leader of New York’s Democratic Party, who has expressed skepticism of Mamdani’s policy proposals that would require tax hikes on the wealthy and more public spending. Now, Hochul’s endorsement sets her apart from the top two Democrats in Congress — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — who have both declined to weigh in on the most heated race in New York City.

As a result, New York’s Democratic establishment remains split over whether they should rally behind Mamdani, Cuomo, or — seemingly – no one. 

Nearly three months after the primary, only four members of the Democratic congressional delegation representing New York City districts have endorsed Mamdani: Reps. Nydia Velázquez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerry Nadler, and Adriano Espaillat. Only Velázquez and Ocasio-Cortez backed Mamdani before his primary win.

“We have a Democratic nominee,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters earlier this month. “Are we a party that rallies behind their nominee, or not?” 

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Many members of New York City’s financial elite, set on edge by Mamdani’s promises of a freeze on stabilized rents and other measures to lower the city’s cost of living, have been plotting to keep him from securing the mayor’s seat in November.

Democratic Reps. George Latimer, Ritchie Torres, Gregory Meeks, and Tom Suozzi have endorsed Cuomo. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Reps. Dan Goldman, Grace Meng, and Yvette Clarke have not made endorsements in the race.

Urging her fellow New York Democrats to back Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez has pointed to her support of President Joe Biden during the 2024 presidential election even though he was not her preferred candidate. 

“We use our primaries to settle our differences and once we have a nominee, we rally behind that nominee. I am very concerned by the example that is being set by anybody in our party,” Ocasio-Cortez said earlier this month. “If an individual doesn’t want to support the party’s nominee now, it complicates their ability to ask voters to support any nominee later.”

Outside the city, Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat who represents a swing district in the Hudson Valley, endorsed Mamdani last week. Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, a moderate from Long Island, was the first Democrat to publicly denounce Mamdani’s campaign after his win but has not endorsed a candidate in the race. 

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Jeffries pointed to a statement he made to reporters last week: “I certainly will have more to say about the New York City mayor’s race in short order.”

Offices for Schumer, Gillibrand, Goldman, Meng, and Clarke did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Nadler, who announced this month he will retire at the end of the current congressional session, addressed his change of heart toward Mamdani during an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer on September 5. During the primary, Nadler said he would not back Mamdani because of his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and what Nadler called Mamdani’s lack of experience. Nadler told Lehrer his decision to endorse Mamdani after he won the primary was a no-brainer. 

“First, he was the Democratic nominee,” Nadler said. “Second, what are the alternatives? You have the mayor, who’s a crook, and you had Andrew Cuomo, whom I had said should resign from the governorship because he was a repeat sexual predator.”

Goldman, whose Manhattan district Mamdani won in June, endorsed state Sen. Zellnor Myrie before the primary and has said he has spoken with Mamdani but won’t endorse him without “concrete steps” to assuage fears from Jewish New Yorkers about hate crimes in the city. It’s not clear what further steps Goldman wants to see — Mamdani has repeatedly said he takes concerns about antisemitism seriously and that he would take steps to protect all of his constituents — Jewish and otherwise.  

Clarke endorsed New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams before the primary. Meng, who did not make an endorsement prior to the primary, congratulated Mamdani on his win in June and a campaign that she said “built coalitions & mobilized underrepresented New Yorkers!” But she stopped short of endorsing Mamdani.

Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, which supports Mamdani’s campaign, condemned the party establishment for neglecting to rally behind Mamdani.

“Establishment Democrats have no plan to support the workers targeted by Trump’s agenda,” Gordillo said. “If establishment Democrats refuse to get behind Zohran, they’re not just rejecting the vision of an affordable NYC — they’re rejecting the 500,000 voters and counting who are behind Zohran.”

The post Kathy Hochul Endorsed Zohran Mamdani. Will Top Democrats Join Her? appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, Mamdani revoked all executive orders issued by Adams after his federal indictment on September 26, 2024.

“That was a date that marked a moment when many New Yorkers decided politics held nothing for them,” said Mamdani during a Brooklyn press conference on Thursday, alluding to accusations that the Adams administration was tainted by his efforts to cozy up to President Donald Trump to avoid prosecution.

Mamdani’s new executive order revokes the Adams administration’s adoptions of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It also ends an Adams-era ban on city agencies boycotting or divesting from Israel. Mamdani kept the mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism in place.

The Israeli government lashed out at Mamdani over his order, painting it as both antisemitic and anti-Israel.

“On his very first day as @NYCMayor, Mamdani shows his true face: He scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel,” posted the Israel Foreign Ministry on X. “This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.”

Other pro-Israel Mamdani critics posted similar denouncements.

“Mamdani @NYCMayor just UNDID previous executive order which adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” wrote Inna Vernikov, a Republican councilwoman from Brooklyn on X on Thursday night. “IHRA protects from discrimination Jews who believe in self determination and provides clarity on the definition.”

Accusations of antisemitism are nothing new for Mamdani, who made history on Thursday by becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York. Coverage of his campaign, and now his administration, has repeatedly fixated on his relationship with Israel, despite his insistence on focusing on local issues like grocery prices, housing, and transportation.

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Despite those criticisms, many New York civil liberties groups argue Mamdani’s orders are an important step in restoring freedom of speech.

“Mayor Mamdani was right to revoke Mayor Adams’s executive orders that adopted a flawed and far too broad definition of antisemitism, and that prohibited city agencies from boycotting Israel,” wrote New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman, in a statement to The Intercept. “Both orders seem to have been designed to suppress speech Mayor Adams disagrees with, but that is protected by the First Amendment.”

The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been widely criticized for stifling political speech over Israel and manufacturing consent for its treatment of Palestinians by classifying criticism of Israel’s actions and of Zionism as inherently antisemitic.

CAIR-NY, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization, lauded the decision to revoke the IHRA definition and the ban on boycotting Israel.

“This unconstitutional, Israel First attack on free speech should have never been issued in the first place,” CAIR-NY executive director Afaf Nasher wrote in a statement. “We applaud Mayor Mamdani for immediately overturning it.”

Aside from the orders themselves, Nina Smith, a Democratic political strategist, said that Mamdani was showing New York voters that he is sticking to his campaign promises.

“Mr. Mamdani campaigned on having a direct and authentic relationship with the people he serves in New York, with New Yorkers,” said Smith. “The Adams administration was marked by controversy and corruption, as was outlined in the indictments. And so, it’s not like he’s doing this out of spite. He’s doing this because he wants to have a clean and authentic relationship with New Yorkers going forward.”

The former mayor was indicted for allegedly taking bribes and soliciting illegal campaign contributions from “wealthy foreign businesspeople” and Turkish officials. The Trump Justice Department later dropped the charges. Adams has denied all wrongdoing.

Multiple prosecutors resigned in protest over the decision to squash the corruption allegations, with one alleging that Adams had been “rewarded” for “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.”

The post Israel Accuses Zohran Mamdani of Antisemitism for Reversing Orders Adams Gave Under Indictment appeared first on The Intercept.

The choice presented itself when Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state assembly member, swept to an apparent victory on Tuesday in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor. 

The city’s political class and the state Democratic Party had long since written off Mamdani due to his professed democratic socialism, and his victory came as a shock even to his campaign’s supporters. Results in the ranked-choice election won’t officially be called until next week, and the presumption was that unless any one candidate’s margins were big enough, New Yorkers would have to wait anxiously for voters’ second, third, fourth, and fifth choices to be counted.

On Tuesday night, however, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, considered the front-runner from before he entered the race until the votes started pouring in, did something he has always been loath to do: concede.

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“Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won,” Cuomo said, with a frankness and candor that was absent from his responses on the campaign trail about the 13 women who accused him of sexual harassment or his administration’s falsified reports of the Covid death toll in nursing homes. Though he didn’t sound optimistic, he left the door open to continue on with his previously planned third-party run in November. “We’re gonna take a look, we’ll make some decisions.”

As Cuomo conceded, another mayoral hopeful’s intentions were unambiguous: Eric Adams, the current New York City mayor, quickly began dropping campaign logos and attack posts implying that Mamdani, on a path to become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, is antisemitic.

Readers would be forgiven for forgetting that Adams, who nine months ago was indicted on federal corruption charges, is indeed running for reelection. 

The mayor has kept a relatively low national profile since Donald Trump barreled into office and his Department of Justice ordered Adams’s charges dismissed. The case conveniently dematerialized with the heavy implication that Adams would need to help the Trump administration with its brutal deportation regime.

Being out of the limelight, however, didn’t keep Adams away from work: kicking journalists out of press conferences, scrapping plans for affordable housing developments, and aligning his administration with Trump border czar Tom Homan to grease deportation operations in the supposed sanctuary city of New York.

Adams skipped the Democratic primary on the grounds that he was “abandoned” by the party — whose top state-level official twice declined to remove him from office. Like Cuomo, Adams announced months ago his plans to run third-party in the general election.

If both or either of these candidates remain set on running in November, the power center in New York’s Democratic Party will have to choose whether they’d rather carry Adams’s or Cuomo’s political baggage than follow the will of their primary voters to embrace a new face.

What’s the issue with a popular young candidate who has energized city voters like no one else in decades? Mamdani is known for political faux pas like calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and refusing to fold to the pro-Israel lobby. 

Pro-Israel Attacks

Mamdani’s stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially, are sure to draw ferocious attacks against the presumptive nominee. 

Israel has loomed over the race since before it began. Cuomo spent his time in the political wilderness burnishing his pro-Israel bona fides, last year going so far as to join the legal team defending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from international war crimes charges. And Adams, for his part, is eyeing a ballot line for a party named “EndAntisemitism” — playing on the right-wing strategy that falsely conflates criticisms of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

And the plans for pro-Israel attack against Mamdani have been falling into place for months. 

In the run-up to the primary, he was pressed repeatedly on whether he believed Israel had the right to exist as a Jewish ethnostate or whether he would condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He responded, repeatedly, that he wanted to prioritize a politics of humanity for everyone that would leave people of all faiths safer from hateful attacks. 

This refusal to capitulate drew the ire of pro-Israel donors like billionaire Bill Ackman, who poured funding into a pro-Cuomo PAC, but the full weight of the Israel lobby has not yet been seen.

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While the flagship national pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, hasn’t involved itself directly in New York’s municipal elections, the city and state have a pro-Israel spending group of their own: Solidarity PAC, which poured money into key, competitive New York City Council races ahead of the primary — and lost its highest-profile contests. Just days before the primary, the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel put out a statement urging voters to reject Mamdani.

These pro-Israel forces, along with the same major donors who propped up the former governor’s lackluster primary campaign, will almost certainly flood public airwaves with anti-Mamdani ads in the coming months.

Centrists for Mamdani?

In national political commentary, New York is both hailed and panned as a left-wing utopia divorced from the rest of the country’s political reality. The truth, however, is that New York’s Democratic leadership — and, the conventional political wisdom goes, much of its voter base — is firmly centrist. 

Can those leaders, who insist again and again that one of the world’s wealthiest places can’t pull a little more out of its top tax tier for its poorest residents, stomach welcoming a redistributionist like Mamdani into their ranks?

There are signs they might. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who once worked for Cuomo and, more recently, refrained from removing Adams from office, posted a congratulatory message for Mamdani last night. New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, said on cable news that Mamdani had “outworked, outorganized, and outcommunicated” his competition. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined in Wednesday morning.

But it’s too early to know if the party apparatus will throw its weight behind Mamdani’s campaign. Congratulating a candidate is not the same as endorsing them. And the discomfort is palpable from some of New York’s swing-district Democrats, like Rep. Laura Gillen of Long Island, who declared Wednesday that “socialist Zohran Mamdani is too extreme to lead New York City.”

Declaring victory on election night, Mamdani projected an optimistic future of unity between the Democratic Party establishment and his more radical campaign.

“An hour ago, I spoke with Andrew Cuomo about the need to bring this city together as he called me to concede the race,” Mamdani told his supporters, raising a hand to quiet their boos at the former governor’s name. He thanked New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a mayoral competitor who cross-endorsed with Mamdani, and credited their unified strategy for his success. “Together we have shown the power of politics of the future, one of partnership and sincerity.”

The rest of the party now has to decide if that’s their future too.

The post N.Y. Dems Face Choice Between Voters’ Chosen Candidate and Disgraced Adams, Cuomo appeared first on The Intercept.

The critiques almost perfectly contradict the flack Mamdani has gotten from the political establishment to his right, long considered the biggest barrier in the Queens assembly member’s path to Gracie Mansion. His closest competitor, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, attacked Mamdani in a debate Thursday night on the grounds that he “won’t denounce ‘globalize the intifada,’” claiming the phrase meant “kill all Jews.” 

Mamdani has been hailed as a uniquely talented political communicator, but it’s his response to the invocation of that protest cry that has repeatedly drawn ire from his left and his right as he attempts to toe the line.

“I learned that this phrase evokes many painful memories,” Mamdani said Thursday night. “And in hearing that and the distance between that impact and the rationale that some use of saying it, of speaking about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, is why I said that I would discourage this language, language that I do not use.” 

After Mamdani made similar remarks to Al Sharpton on MSNBC last month, one user wrote on X that he had thrown the movement for Palestine “under the bus.” “Zohran is a zionist,” commented another. Some have said they’d rather see Cuomo win than Mamdani get elected and let them down. 

While Mamdani’s most outspoken critics on the left likely represent only a tiny share of the local voting base, they help illustrate the ongoing identity crisis within the Democratic Party, where a party establishment long beholden to Israel struggles to adjust to its supporters’ overwhelming opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

He has drawn ire over his reported remarks to a room of Jewish leaders in New York that he would not condition employment in his administration on a person’s stance on Zionism. A New York Times magazine profile characterized him as “not anti-Zionist.”

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Still, the mayoral candidate has staked out a position far more critical of Israel than almost any Democratic politician with his level of prominence and — likely — success. When Cuomo slammed Mamdani Thursday night for invoking Israel’s occupation of Palestine, he responded that “the occupation is a reference to international law and the violation of it, which Mr. Cuomo has no regard for because he signed up to be Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense team during the course of this genocide.” (Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate in the race, chimed in with praise for President Donald Trump in brokering the recent ceasefire in Gaza, reminding the moderators: “It’s a debate of three, do we acknowledge that?”)

The concerns from the left are symptomatic of a movement that has grown understandably disillusioned with electoral politics. Some of the critics are likely worried that New Yorkers who turned out in droves to support Mamdani this summer have been hoodwinked by another Democrat voicing sympathy for the Palestinian cause when it’s politically convenient while trying at the same time to please his pro-Israel detractors. But they may also be urging him toward a political posture that baits his biggest critics in the mainstream.

“I believe it is a very small collection of very principled people on the internet combined with bots,” said a Democratic strategist in New York. While the strategist dismissed the significance of the criticism, they also requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

Mamdani could respond more forcefully to the criticisms from his right: by insisting on protesters’ rights — now increasingly under attack by the Trump administration — to use the phrase to call for Palestinian freedom. Had he done so, he would likely have invited another news cycle focused on his refusal to address a phrase he had never uttered, along with fears that some Jewish New Yorkers say they harbor about his potential election. He would have given New York Democratic leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries a tempting reason to further delay their support. 

Mamdani’s responses, though, have reinforced the frustrations of many pro-Palestine advocates on the left — that ceding ground on what constitutes acceptable speech on Palestine puts the entire campaign to end both Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its genocide in Gaza at risk.

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Mamdani’s path to success as mayor of New York City rests on far more than how people perceive his stance on Israel, and he has more to worry about than how he’s perceived online. He is being tested as a new standard bearer for the Democratic Party — earning the endorsements, while Schumer and Jeffries hold out, of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the de facto leader of the state party, and Attorney General Letitia James, a high-profile Trump foe now fighting an indictment by the federal Department of Justice.

The question of whether a rising star like Mamdani can effectively stake out a pro-Palestine stance while succeeding in mainstream electoral politics is high on many Democrats’ minds. A growing part of the party’s base is refusing to support candidates who cave to pro-Israel pressure campaigns. And a growing number of Democrats, including recipients of money from the country’s leading pro-Israel lobby, are calling on the U.S. to stop sending offensive weapons to Israel. 

If a candidate like Mamdani — who authored a bill to stop New York nonprofits from sending money to Israeli settlements; warned in 2023 that Israel was on the verge of committing genocide in Gaza; and is considered a generational political communicator able to galvanize scores of new voters — can’t land the message on Israel, can anyone? 

The post Zohran Mamdani Has Pushed the Liberal Consensus on Palestine. The Left Isn’t Satisfied. appeared first on The Intercept.

Boy does it feel good in New York City. On Tuesday night, just over 30 minutes after polls closed, Zohran Mamdani won the election to become the city’s next mayor. To do so, he overcame substantial political headwinds: The man who will be our first Muslim mayor was constantly tarred as an antisemite and, as too often seems to follow, was subject to an undercurrent of Islamophobic attacks about “sharia law” and “global jihad” throughout the race. Mamdani also faced the city’s ruling class of millionaires and billionaires, who engaged in some heartwarming class solidarity by spending tens of millions against him and vowing to flee the headquarters of global capital if he won, which perhaps motivated ordinary New Yorkers to turn out to support the mayor-elect. In other words, the New York assembly member stared down the ruling class and still won.

In a stunning turn of events, many of those high-class naysayers have come right back around to offer a helping hand in governing the city, effectively bending the knee to the man they cast as an existential threat.

Chiefest among these converts is billionaire hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman, who famously contributed nearly $2 million of his own money to efforts to kill Mamdani’s candidacy and warned on social media that the city would “become much more dangerous and economically unviable” after Mamdani routed former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June Democratic primary. In that same Twitter tome, Ackman promised there were “hundreds of million of dollars of capital available” if the right candidate would simply throw his hat in the race, and reduced the democratic will of the people to a plug-and-play scheme where this mythical person would be able to defeat Mamdani simply by running Michael Bloomberg’s “how-to-win-the-mayoralty IP.” (It’s well worth noting that New York saw the highest turnout in a mayoral election in more than 50 years.) As a result, it was with no small measure of glee that I read the Pershing Square Capital boss’s tweet on Tuesday night at-ing Mamdani: “congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.” A rival billionaire hedge fund guy responded by calling this olive branch “gimp-like.” If that’s what it takes, so be it!

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Elsewhere in the world of high finance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who previously called Mamdani “more a Marxist than a socialist” and slammed him as pushing “ideological mush that means nothing in the real world,” is also offering his help. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Dimon urged Mamdani to call up the outgoing mayor of Detroit for advice because “that’s the way you learn,” which is more than a little bit condescending. The billionaire also said he left a message for Mamdani the day after the election and selflessly offered to meet with him: “If I find it productive, I’ll continue to do it.” (The mayor-elect, for his part, responded that he’d take the CEO up on the offer, despite not agreeing across “every single issue.”) With all due respect, New York City is not Detroit, a city that was hollowed out by corporate flight, and Dimon, whose bank has invested $2 billion in that city’s recovery, seems to know this full well. Detroit “wasn’t like New York, which is kind of healthy,” he told CNN. That’s a real understatement, especially for the ultra-wealthy.

Elsewhere, the crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz urged his countrymen to reach out to Mamdani. “Once he’s the mayor, we’ve got to be sure he’s successful in keeping New York a thriving community,” he told Bloomberg News on Wednesday, a “community” for whom Novogratz did not say. “He’s tapping into a message that’s real: that we’ve got a tale of two cities in the Dickensian sense, to a degree we haven’t seen since we’ve been alive, and can you address the affordability issue in creative ways without driving business out.” The crypto industry might mourn the booster it had in the outgoing mayor, but something tells me “business” at large is going to be alright.

This isn’t to say everyone at the top has gracefully accepted the results. Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, whose company was severely affected by new city rules limiting short-term rentals and who donated $2 million total to two anti-Mamdani super PACs, hasn’t publicly reacted to the news. Bloomberg, the former mayor who poured $5 million into fighting the red menace, has also stayed quiet. Crashouts abounded lower on the tax bracket as well.

It remains to be seen how Mamdani will govern and how big business will respond. Many onlookers have been eager to point out that the facts of governance and the world as it exists today will likely involve compromises and, as a result, disappointments. I’m sure many New Yorkers would love for Mamdani to leave these billionaires on read for all eternity, but New Yorkers are not known for their naiveté. It’s still a giddy feeling to see the masters of the universe sweat and prostrate themselves, if only for now. Our lame-duck, court-jester mayor got at least one thing right during his tenure: The haters truly do become your waiters at the table of success.

The post New York’s Billionaires Are Bending the Knee to Zohran Mamdani appeared first on The Intercept.

On Tuesday, voters in Virginia, New York City, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Mississippi overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates and ballot initiatives.

In New York, despite facing racist opposition from both Republicans and much of the Democratic establishment, Zohran Mamdani sailed to victory. The new mayor-elect won over 50 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

And in Virginia, Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won with an even greater margin over her opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, whose campaign weaponized transphobia in a vain attempt to defeat Spanberger.

In California, as of Wednesday, nearly two-thirds of the vote favored redrawing the congressional map to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas.

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The Intercept Briefing spoke with Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of the PAC Run for Something, and Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, to discuss what lessons Democrats and progressives should take heading into the midterm elections.

Mitchell pointed to Mamdani’s and other Democrats’ success last night at driving home a positive economic message for working-class voters as an important roadmap for next year.

“There’s elements of [Mamdani’s] victory that are very particular to New York, that are very particular to him, but the politics and the conditions that are a part of the victory are happening all across the country,” said Mitchell. “It’s clear that this was a wave election. And inside of that wave are a number of independent, progressive-minded folks who didn’t wait their turn, who are willing to fight for working people.”

Similarly, Litman argued that Democrats need to embrace a big tent that includes progressive voices. “You need candidates who know what they believe, who know how to communicate, who love the place they’re running, and who can articulate why voters should want them to win,” she said.

Litman continued, “Does every candidate need to have the exact same ideological profile? No. But also, the person who’s running and winning a seat on the Iowa City Council is probably not a good fit for the New York City Council, and vice versa. And that’s OK. To be a party that can win everywhere, which is what we need to be in order to stop authoritarianism and stop what the Republican Party has done, we need to have a big tent.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

On Tuesday, voters in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Mississippi cast their ballots, in an early test of where the public stands ahead of a midterm election that could fundamentally reshape the political landscape.

The New York City mayoral election, in particular, has captured national attention — with both Republicans and establishment Democrats largely painting Zohran Mamdani as “dangerous” and weaponizing his Muslim identity to gin up post 9/11 levels of Islamophobia.

But Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor-elect, capturing more than 50 percent of votes in a three-way race as of Wednesday.

In Virginia, Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won by even greater margins.

And in California, voters overwhelmingly passed a proposition to redistrict the state in favor of giving Democrats more congressional seats and counter Republican states’ gerrymandering efforts.

Now, as Democrats eye trying to reclaim Congress in the midterms, they’ll have to figure out which strategies to take from this election — and which ones belong in the political trash heap.

Joining me now to discuss are Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of the progressive PAC Run for Something, and Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.

Amanda and Maurice, welcome to the show.

Amanda Litman: Good morning.

Maurice Mitchell: Good to be with you.

JW: Amanda. I’ll start with you, the million-dollar question: Did the results of Tuesday’s selection tell us anything about where the Democratic Party is headed, or at least where it should be headed?

AL: I think it told us lots of things about where the Democratic Party should be headed — which is that it needs to be heading in lots of different directions.

Run for Something had 222 candidates on the ballot yesterday. We’re still waiting for results in about 100 of them or so, but we’ve already had 94 wins, including red-to-blue flips in all kinds of places. The thing that I think we saw with our Run for Something candidates — with the New York City mayoral, with the New Jersey and Texas and California and Virginia — is that Democrats are, or voters, rather, are pissed at Trump. They don’t like this economy. And they want candidates who can speak to their issues in a way that makes sense to them. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that every candidate is going to be fully aligned on every policy, but every candidate is fully aligned on values, and they are connected to their community.

So when we look forward to what the Democratic Party needs to do going into 2026 and, honestly, beyond. I don’t want to say like I’ve been right for a long time here, but we need to keep doing what Run for Something has been doing, which is finding great candidates who can connect to their voters, who understand the issues folks care about, who keep it hyper-local, and who can communicate it in a way that makes sense to them.

It is not complicated. It is hard work, but it is not rocket science.

JW: And Maurice, I want to get your thoughts.

MM: We have a slightly different perspective when we ask and answer this question at the Working Families Party because we are building a separate third party that is labor community-backed from the ground up.

But a lot of my assessments align with what Amanda said. So I think there’s two driving forces here: the affordability crisis that Americans — regardless of their race or their region or their religion, or anything else — are feeling in a very, very deep way. It’s a crisis, and it’s going in the wrong direction. And people’s deep concerns and antipathy and fear of MAGA and Trumpism — at a time when there’s a government shutdown.

And those are two animating forces that I think are affecting the electorate writ large. But the other thing I want to say is that in June, when Zohran Mamdani won focused on affordability. There were Democratic Party strategists that were ripping up their playbooks and recognizing that in 2025, if you wanted to secure victory, you had to tell a story about affordability.

JW: Right, he won the Democratic Primary in June.

MM: And so the Democratic Party and the pro-democracy movement writ large, that we’re a part of — even as we’re building our own party and our own brand with our own candidates — it’s a complicated united front that includes a lot of different factions with different opinions, different ideologies. But the question of who’s leading the united front, I think, is clear.

The leaders of the united front, I think, are the folks that took a chance on the idea that working people deserve — in the richest country in the history of countries — deserve a dignified life. I think everybody in all the factions are learning from the people that are often called the “left” or the “progressive” faction of that coalition.

And so even candidates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger and many, many candidates around the country that are considered “moderates” — they ultimately were running on affordability. And I think Zohran’s victory in June had a huge impact on how the Democratic Party in general is seeking to secure victories and to compel working people, many of whom left them, to vote for them.

JW: I want to dive deeper into the New York City mayoral election. That is the election that has arguably garnered the most attention of any of Tuesday’s races. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa on Tuesday with 50 percent of the vote. Now that he’s won, do you think Democrats can take lessons for his victory, or does a candidate like Mamdani only work in a place like New York City?

And Maurice, I want to start with you on this.

MM: I think when we zoom out, the answer is pretty clear to us. Yes, Zohran was able to secure a victory in New York City. But what isn’t as touted is the fact that WFP-aligned progressives that built a labor and community coalition around them won in the cities of Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany. Also, we had an upset victory in Dayton, Ohio, for a mayor’s race that wasn’t top of mind for a lot of people — but I think it suggests that what’s happening is much deeper than a unitary phenomenon.

I think it’s true that Zohran is a singular talent. I think he’s a brilliant communicator, and we couldn’t be more proud that he built this movement in New York. And there’s aspects of the victory that are very particular to New York, are very particular to him. But the politics and the conditions that are a part of the victory are happening all across the country.

And we’re still counting votes in Seattle. There’re other places we’re still counting votes, but I think it’s clear that this was a wave election. And inside of that wave are a number of independent, progressive-minded folks who didn’t wait their turn, who are willing to fight for working people.

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But also, when you’re fighting for working people that can’t just be performative. You actually need to fight against corporations. You need to fight against the establishment politics that have held back the possibility of a dignified life for everyday working people. Those candidates that did that were rewarded.

And so I think that there’s a story that includes Zohran and includes New York, but it portends to politics that are much deeper and broader than the politics of New York City.

JW: Amanda, it looks like you have something to say. I want to hear your thoughts on this as well.

AL: I think there’s two distinct components to Zohran’s victory.

Some are replicable, and some are not and shouldn’t be. He deeply deeply held his values. He was very principled. He clearly knew who he is, what he believes, and why it should matter to the voters of New York City.

He was really able to answer the question, which is what Run for Something asks every candidate thinking about running for office: not why do you want to win, but why should they want you to win? Why should your community want you to win? What is going to feel different in their lives? What are you going to do for them? He had a such clear answer for that. In fact, he had three, and there’s a reason people could recite his platform back to him. They could see it, they could picture it.

He also really loves New York City and loves New Yorkers. Like, loving the people you are trying to lead — it feels so obvious, but we have seen, the alternative is someone like Andrew Cuomo, who doesn’t live here but also doesn’t like New York City, does not like New Yorkers, campaigned against this place as a hellhole he wanted to try and save from the trash of the street. That vibe is very different. You cannot organize people you do not respect and care for. I think Zohran’s ability to do that is really powerful.

He campaigned with deep joy. He took the work seriously, but not himself. He showed deep respect for voters. And he communicated them to them and to us as a New York City voter where we got our information. You could not escape your social media feed, your news feed, your “For you” page without seeing him. Not just talking to the press, but talking to creators, to influencers, to other New Yorkers.

When he was bopping around the city, going to all these clubs, I saw literally hundreds of videos of different perspectives of him in these clubs, talking to folks where they are. And then more from him campaigning with cab drivers outside LaGuardia Airport at midnight on a Saturday night.

Now all of that, if not the exact specifics, are replicable in other places. You need candidates who know what they believe, who know how to communicate that, who love the place they’re running, and who can articulate why voters should want them to win.

Does every candidate need to have the exact same ideological profile? No. But also the person who’s running and winning a seat on the Iowa City Council is probably not a good fit for the New York City Council, and vice versa. And that’s OK. To be a party that can win everywhere, which is what we need to be in order to stop authoritarianism and stop what the Republican Party has done, we need to have a big tent.

Now, I think this is where you get some of the tension here, which is, there is one side of the Democratic Party that seems to understand this, and the other that does not. And the one that does not thinks that Zohran needs to be pushed out, that the tent should not be big enough to include him and candidates like him. And that is where I think some of our problem currently lies.

JW: Maurice, I want to start with you and follow up on something that you said. And then Amanda, also, this is something that is very clearly following up from what you’ve been saying, but what about what Mamdani did is replicable within a red state area within the South, within places that are not as liberal as New York City?

MM: There’s a number of lessons that we could take from his victory. Number one, organizing gets the goods. And it’s accurate that he’s a wonderful communicator and he leveraged new media and he leveraged social media in an expert masterful way. I think there’s some lessons here, but organizing gets the goods.

So I was at the victory party yesterday, and the campaign’s field director touted a number that’s just, on its face, incredible: 104,000 individual volunteers. If you’re interested in building a movement candidacy, you need to figure out how to organize that grassroots energy of your people, your neighbors actually being involved in a deep way in the race, so it’s bigger than you. It’s actually a movement. You could repeat that anywhere. Actually considering how we’re building this organizing forward, people forward.

But the second thing is connecting that organizing, like Amanda says, I agree, to a compelling story that everyday people are actually hungry for. Which means not just speaking — listening. That’s organizing 101. I’m a trained organizer, and we talk about 70/30, 80/20: 80 percent listening, 20 percent talking. One of Zohran’s early videos was him just listening to his neighbors, many of whom voted for Trump. And so actually concerning your community, concerning your potential constituents in how you tell the story of your campaign, that is replicable.

I think the other thing is, look, not waiting your turn. We need more and more people willing to run for local office. And I’m happy that the Zohran story is about local office because that’s where the goods are at. Like at the Working Families Party, just in this election cycle we have close to 700 candidates that we’ve endorsed. Most of our candidates in any election cycle, including the big presidential cycle, are local candidates. If we’re serious about governing, then we have to think about how we’re recruiting folks to run for city council, to run for mayor, to run for state legislature, because that’s where the governing happens and that’s how you build a pipeline.

That’s how you build the ultimate ability for folks to have governing chops so that they can run for these higher offices. All of those things can be replicable and could be systematized — in some of the ways that our friends on the right-wing have systematized their pipelines for governance, right?

And then the laser-like focus on what working people have been telling us again and again. Like in 2024, we were screaming from the rafters, “It’s affordability. Tell a story about affordability and also name names of the villains.”

I think Zohran was an expert in running not just against Cuomo, but also running against the MAGA billionaires and the other billionaires that spent more than $20 million against him. That’s a excellent contrast, and those are excellent villains. It turns out that it’s true that those are the folks that are actually making it hard to afford living in New York City.

And that focus, that commitment to those principles and to the issues of affordability, we’re able to build a bigger “we” — where people across religion, race, ethnicity, were able to see themselves in the race.

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Then the last thing is that, even though he focused on affordability, no matter how much people tried to detract him, no matter how much there were bad faith messages, no matter how much at the end, there was so much blatant racism and Islamophobia — he was willing to and able to hold onto his values.

He didn’t shirk from having it be known that he was going to support trans rights because that is a core value of who he was. He didn’t shirk from letting it be known that he was a proud member of the Democratic Socialist of America and that he was a proud Working Families Party candidate. And he also made sure that in telling that, he was telling a story about who he was as a person, but ultimately, it had to come back to what he was going to do for you as a voter.

JW: Maurice, I want to touch on something that you said about local being king and this idea of we have to focus on local races, but obviously we also live in the Trump era where his hands are in everything. And so I wanted to ask you, can Zohran Mamdani get his agenda across if Trump is threatening to withhold federal funds? How does this — and I don’t want to even say his issues, I think Trump’s issues with Mamdani would be more accurate — but how does that play into being able to actually get his agenda across?

MM: I actually think that in some ways, like in union organizing, they say the boss is the best organizer. Trump being so fixated with Zohran both helped Zohran and our movement electorally because Trump and MAGA actually is being repudiated and was repudiated electorally.

But when it comes to governing, I think one of the arguments that Cuomo was trying to make was like, “Trump is fixated on Zohran, so you should ultimately vote for me because I’m closer to Trump.” But what people have seen is that Trump is a mercurial authoritarian, and there’s no way to get on his good side and stay on his good side.

So ultimately what you need is a fighter, right? And the governing project is gonna rely on Mamdani’s ability to use this tremendous mandate in order to negotiate with Kathy Hochul, the governor, as well as his colleagues, his former colleagues at the state legislature, to draw down revenue in the state budget.

But the reality is that always was going to be true for any blue state. In every blue state, they’re having those conversations in their legislatures where they’re going to need more revenue because the federal government is abrogating its responsibility. That’s not a Zohran phenomenon, that’s the nature of America under MAGA authoritarianism.

And what we need are bold leaders that are going to have to in state legislatures figure out where we get the revenue. And of course we believe that means taxing corporations, taxing billionaires and the ultrawealthy in order to fill the gap where the federal government is leaving us behind.

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But also, we can’t just fill the gap. We have to be bolder and invest in programs Zohran run on mandate to make real in New York, like free buses, like childcare. Those are going to cost money. And I think we’re in a really good position because, again, it wasn’t just Zohran’s victory in New York. For example, the fact that we won in Syracuse, Buffalo, and Albany, and the fact that the Onondaga County Legislature flipped. There’s all types of things that took place in New York and around the country that are going to reset our politics that will make it easier to argue for revenue and to argue for progressive revenue — a billionaire’s tax of some form, some sort of corporate tax in the New York State legislature because of the nature of the victories.

And no serious person could claim that the victory only happened in New York. There was a wave that took place all across New York state, and Kathy Hochul is up for reelection next year, and she’s thinking about her politics.

JW: Amanda, I want to have you come in and speak to this. How does Mamdani deal with Trump and get his agenda across? What does that look like in the next year or two years going forward?

AL: I think the strength that Zohran has is that he is able to communicate what’s happening to New Yorkers in a way that can help explain the challenges he’s going to face.

Not every politician has the skills he has where when they run into roadblocks, like people won’t get it. He has the platform and the capacity to create transparency into how things will be going. So I think it’s going to be hard. It would’ve been hard even without Trump. I also think he has already proven he can build really good relationships with people who are not fully ideologically aligned with him.

Lik,e he’s out there with Hochul eating wings at the Buffalo Bills bar in Astoria, and bringing aboard state legislators and city council members who maybe are not fully with him on every issue. Knowing that he has a clear goal. And I think that’s actually the benefit of his clarity of agenda, which is that he is clear-eyed about what he wants the outcome to be and has already proven during his campaign.

You can see over the course of interviews over the last six months, he’s flexible on tactics. Because it’s not really about how he gets there, but what he gets done. So I am cautiously optimistic that by the end of his hopefully second term, but by the end of his leadership, he will have been able to deliver on the things that he has promised in at least some meaningful way.

And if he’s not, it’s not going to be because he didn’t try hard enough, which I think for a lot of elected leaders, it’s often because they didn’t feel like they could spend the political capital to try and swing for the fences. At this point, the status quo is so clearly not working that you gotta appreciate someone who’s willing to take a big swing.

MM: And to your point, I feel like Zohran has rescued pragmatism from the status quo. And I’ve had a problem with the idea that being “pragmatic” somehow couldn’t mean that you were aligned with your values. Pragmatism just means getting things done, operationalizing things.

And I think he’s shown that pragmatism in very principled ways in how he was able to broaden the tent during the general election. He was able to communicate different messages to different audiences, while maintaining his core values and not turning himself into a pretzel in order to reach those audiences.

And we’re going to need that type of pragmatism in order to govern and to bring together the largest coalition to make the governing aspirations and experiment of the Zohran Momdani coalition real, and that’s very exciting. A pragmatic progressive that has vision — like that’s exactly what we need in cities like New York.

[Break]

Jessica Washington: I want to switch gears over to the Virginia race because we obviously had a bunch of races yesterday. Something that stuck out to me about the race between Abigail Spanberger and Winsome Earle-Sears was the really blatant use of transphobia from the Republican side in this campaign.

I honestly couldn’t tell you how many advertisements — I live in D.C. — that I saw attacking Spanberger for her support of trans youth. After the presidential election, some more conservative Democrats, like Rep. Seth Moulton, were making the case that the party will continue to lose unless they back away from advocating for transgender rights.

But in this election, those attacks didn’t seem to land. Why do you think that is? And what does this tell you about how Democrats should handle anti-trans bigotry heading into the midterms? Amanda, I want to start with you.

AL: I think it’s clear it didn’t land. They spent something like $30 million on anti-trans ads. I think it was the biggest topic of Winsome Earle-Sears’s advertising campaign. Most people aren’t thinking about trans kids in sports, day in, day out. They’re thinking about the fact that Trump just laid off huge numbers of federal workers, especially Black women across Northern Virginia and across the Commonwealth. They’re thinking about the fact that the federal government is currently shut down, and they’re not getting paid. They’re thinking about the fact that he’s trying to build data centers or the folks are trying to build data center, not Trump, but that there are big corporations trying to build data centers that are making their energy prices skyrocket.

In the list of things that people care about, this is not high on there — especially given everything else that’s happening in this moment. And I think voters are smarter than we give them credit for. They know this is a bullshit argument. I am glad to see that Spanberger was very clear on her values here and kept refocused on the issues that really affect people’s quality of life.

And also, we shouldn’t let the federal government bully kids. Which is what they’re trying to do here. So I think that is really the place where people need to stay strong: We know this is a distraction, we know this isn’t about your quality of life, we don’t want them to bully kids, we don’t want them to make kids feel unsafe.

We need to focus on the things that matter to you and your ability to live where you want to live and have the kind of life you deserve.

JW: Maurice, I want to get your thoughts.

MM: Yeah, I just think that there’s a set of people — and this is one of the reasons why we built the Working Families Party — there’s a set of establishment politicians and consultants that read polls and believe that polls are somehow determinative for the future prospects of politics, right?

And polls are one way to get a sense of where people might be at any given point. But I think those anti-trans ads in 2024, in as much as they were effective, they were only effective in the context of a larger story about Democrats abandoning working people. And those anti-trans ads had less to do with trans people because they don’t care about trans people. Trans people are simply a cudgel for them to make the larger argument about Democrats not caring about you.

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Our politics have transformed significantly. When you look at where people are with immigration. There were a number of Democratic elected officials that totally swung and basically aligned with the anti-immigration position based on that signal, right? And what ends up happening is that you have a set of elected officials that have no center. Have no moral core, have no vision, have no clarity chasing the pulse, chasing the culture instead of setting the culture.

If you want to learn from the right wing, is the right wing was clear about setting the culture. And you’re either telling the story or you’re in somebody else’s story. And instead of trying to figure out how they tell a more compelling story, they were simply seeking to figure out how best they can manage inside of the Republicans’ anti-trans story, and that’s not how you win, and that’s not leadership.

And ultimately what that looks like to most voters is weakness. There’s a reason why, again and again, when voters, when they talk about the attributes of the Democratic Party, one of the attributes is weakness. Because ultimately people don’t need to agree with you, but they need to believe in you, and you can’t believe in somebody who one day is pro-trans, and then after an election, another day, it turns out that they’re anti-trans. One day they’re pro-immigration, and then it turns out after a bad election, then they’re anti-immigrant. Whether or not I agree with you, I don’t believe in you.

And I’m happy to see the results and hopefully this is a lesson to a number of those consultants that swung wildly to the right. And days after November’s really hard showing, they were jumping over each other to prove who was the hardest on immigration, who was the hardest on gender. And I think this is a rebuke of many of those folks inside of the Democratic Party that thought that’s how anybody wins in this moment.

JW: I want to switch gears again over to California. As you both know, California had a very important proposition on the ballot, Prop 50, which allows for the use of new congressional maps until 2030. This is meant to counter gerrymandering of Republican states to add congressional seats. It won by a resounding majority.

What does this tell us about the appetite to fight against Republicans and the Trump administration? Amanda, I want you to go first.

AL: People are hungry to do literally anything they can to show Trump that they do not like what is happening. They do not like what the Republicans are doing. I think Trump won the popular vote by what, like a point and a half in 2024, and everyone seemed to think that indicated a massive vibe shift, and we are a reactionary country. We’re not. People don’t like this. He’s not popular. I hope that more institutions and business leaders and Democratic senators understand that, that if they fight back, the people will have their back. And the reverse is also true.

The people are fighting back. They are using every possible lever they can. It is one of the most frustrating narratives I’ve seen over the last year is, “Oh, the resistance is dead.” No, it’s not. Run for Something had 72,000 young people raise their hands to say they want to run for office in the last year. That is more than we had in the entirety of Trump’s first term. People are pissed. They do not like this. The powerful are cowards, but the people are brave and they are willing to push back.

I am, I think, comforted to see that even in this moment where no, it’s not great, gerrymandering is bad. People understand that we have to fight fire with fire. We have to neutralize what they’re doing. And I think the results from this week really tell us that the Republicans may be overplaying their hand here, because if you just took a bunch of Trump plus-10 districts and turned them into Trump plus-5 in order to create more Republican areas, that may not cut it in a wave election in 2026.

JW: Maurice, what did you make of the gerrymandering vote?

MM: I couldn’t agree more. The California Working Families Party was very much a part of the Prop 50 vote. And what we saw on the ground was incredible. People are looking for meaningful avenues to push back against authoritarianism. I see it every single day. I criss-cross the country. I’m in sometimes rural communities. I’m in suburban communities. I’m in urban communities. I’m in Black communities. I’m in Latino communities, I’m in white communities. There is a through line through all of these communities. Most everyday people have completely rejected MAGA and the Trump policies. It’s exhausting to them. This includes people who are self-identified progressives and activists. It also includes people who don’t really attach themselves to politics in the way that people who are more ideological are, and people who identify as independents.

There was an opening for Trump to actually deliver on his populism, and he failed because he was always the self-interested con man that he’s always been. And people see it for what it is and are looking for any avenue to demonstrate their displeasure with Trump and MAGA. And that’s what this vote was about. That’s what that’s what this vote was about. That’s what the more than 7 million people that came together during the No Kings rallies was about, and it’s growing. The momentum is growing and I couldn’t agree more, I think we’re looking towards a wave election in 2026. And you could only gerrymander a district so much. And they might be surprised with the outcomes, despite their best efforts at gerrymandering and engineering a majority for themselves.

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Solidarity Forever: Building Movements Amid Today’s Crises

I think they might be overwhelmed by what’s coming. Because I don’t see any indication as the economy continues to fail, as Trump administration officials continue to signal that there will be a recession as prices go up, as Trump continues to operate in the chaotic fashion that he operates, and as we know when he becomes more desperate, when he is more in a corner, when he recognizes that his grip on power is becoming more fleeting, then that’s the version of Trump that is the most chaotic.

And so when he builds this culture of chaos, it actually creates an opportunity for solidarity and more and more Americans across all types of difference are coming together. And so when I look at what happened in California, that’s what I see. People wanted a meaningful action to demonstrate that they do not support the Trump agenda and they want to fight back.

JW: Now that we’ve spent so much time talking about the lessons from this election, I want to get into the future of the party. Are there any emerging Democratic or progressive leaders that you’re watching out for as we head into midterm season? Including those whose names aren’t even on the ballot yet?

Maurice, I’d like to hear from you first.

MM: I continue to be inspired by congressional leaders like Greg Casar, like Summer Lee, like Delia Ramirez who started off running on the local level. They governed, they secured things for their people. They built coalitions that were multiracial, that included labor and community, and now they’re representing us in Congress.

And they’re arguing for a working class politics. And they’re arguing it in a way that is something other than just a sectarian or ideological means. Summer has been on the front line talking about accountability for the victims of [Jeffrey] Epstein. And that has won her popularity with a whole new group of people who are not necessarily progressives, but want accountability too.

Greg has been an excellent communicator on the issues of affordability and focusing like a laser on the issues of working-class people, and has reached out to colleagues that don’t fit within the narrow confines of what you think of as a progressive.

So not only are they leading in ways that are focusing on the working class, challenging the corporate agenda, but they’re also bridge- builders — those are the leaders that we’re going to need in the future. The very clear, very sharp young progressive voices that are interested in building a bigger “we” and interested in building a coalition of all types of people.

I couldn’t be more excited about the politics to come. And the other thing I’ll say is that those politics are going to be about what we’re fighting for, what we’re willing to vote for, not simply based on all the horrible things that MAGA and Trump have to offer. Like at a certain point, American people are like, “Yes, we understand Trump’s brand. We know it’s bad. Tell us what you’re going to do for us.” And I think those are the leaders that are best positioned to tell that story.

JW: Amanda, your organization focuses on recruiting progressive candidates. Who should we keep an eye out for?

AL: I am so excited about so many of our alum who, you know, as Maurice noted, started on the local level because Run for Something exclusively works with candidates running for local office and are now running for higher office going into 2026.

I’m pumped about Christian Menefee, who just moved into the runoff in Texas for the open congressional seat there.

Aftyn Behn, who’s running for a special election in Tennessee: incredible progressive organizer who’s been fighting especially for reproductive rights in an open election, special election, for Congress in Tennessee next month.

I’m excited about James Talarico in Texas, a state legislator, pastor, former teacher who really speaks the language of faith and can connect his progressive values to how it really translates to Texans all across the state.

I’m excited about Ruwa Romman, who’s running for governor in Georgia, a state legislator, a young Muslim woman who’s been a fierce and strategic thinker, really centering working families there.

Francesca Hong, running for governor in Wisconsin. Francesca’s a single mom, a restaurateur, another union organizer who’s been an incredible leader in the state assembly there — running for governor.

Alexis Hill, who’s running for governor of Nevada. My buddy Zach Wahls, who’s running for Senate in Iowa. Anna Eskamani, who’s running for mayor in Orlando. She’s a state rep down there who’s flipped a seat red to blue back in 2018 is now running to be the executive there. That’s actually a 2027 election. So looking even further ahead.

We have so many amazing leaders who Run for Something has been working with now for years. We’ve built this incredible bench of candidates who are so deeply connected to community, who have the receipts of delivering for folks in these local offices, and are now moving up the ranks — I wouldn’t say to better jobs, but more prominent ones for sure. I’m just really excited for the country to get to know them because I think they, much like Mamdani can give you hope that actually a better way of politics is possible and that we don’t have to constantly be disappointed by our leaders or by choosing from the lesser of two evils — that actually one of them doesn’t have to be evil to begin with.

JW: We’re going to leave it there, but you both have shared such great insights into this election and what’s going to happen moving forward, so I really appreciate you both for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

AL: Thank you.

MM: Thanks, good to be with you.

JW: That does it for this episode of the intercept briefing.

We want to hear from you. What do you want to see more coverage of? Are you taking political action? Are there organizing efforts in your community you want to shout out? Shoot us an email at podcasts@theintercept.com. Or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278.

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post Democrats Swept Tuesday Night’s Election. Now What? appeared first on The Intercept.

The 26-page letter — directed to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and the state and city comptrollers — took aim at Israeli bonds, a financial instrument that invests in the Israeli government for a set period and then is paid back with interest.

Israeli bonds have emerged as a crucial source of funding for the Israeli government, with money from bond sales flowing into the country’s coffers and allowing it to continue its genocidal campaign in Gaza and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.

“There’s no complicated analysis needed here: New York is using taxpayer money to finance a military the entire world has watched commit war crimes and crimes against humanity for years,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director. (Mamdani, City Comptroller Mark Levine, and the other elected officials named in the letter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.)

On top of the financial risk of holding Israeli debt and the moral imperative of ceasing to fund the Israeli government, divesting from Israel bonds would simply put New York more in line with the opinions of its own citizens, said Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, DAWN’s director for Israel and Palestine.

“Where you put your money — that means something,” Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. “We’ve seen a massive shift in public opinion over the past few years as a result of the Gaza war. The political class hasn’t necessarily caught up yet, but support for Palestinians and disapproval for Israel’s behavior, actions, and policies is at an all-time high.”

New York State’s Common Retirement Fund held $352 million worth of Israel bonds as of March 2024, making it one of the largest holdings in the U.S., according to DAWN. And while former City Comptroller Brad Lander allowed the bonds held in city-controlled portfolios to lapse in 2024 — earning DAWN’s praise — the city’s new comptroller, Levine, has pledged to reinvest.

“Brad Lander understood this and divested,” said Jarrar. “Mark Levine’s promise to reinvest is a promise to keep funding Israel’s war machine with New Yorkers’ money.”

DAWN pledged to explore legal action against the state for its investment should it decline to divest in the bonds, as well as against the city should Levine’s plan move forward.

Levine’s announcement of his intent to purchase Israeli government bonds put him at odds with Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel whose campaign did not shy away from a continued support for Palestinians despite continuous attacks smearing him as an antisemite.

“There’s a potential conflict coming up,” said Schaeffer Olmer-Man. “I hope that Mamdani holds his ground and exerts whatever influence he has to ensure these imprudent and arguably illegal investments do not renew.”

So far, Mamdani has held fast and signaled his opposition to Levine’s plan.

“I’ve made clear my position, which is that I don’t think that we should purchase Israel bonds,” Mamdani told reporters in an unrelated press conference on January 21. “We don’t purchase bonds for any other sovereign nation’s debt, and the comptroller has also made his position clear, and I continue to stand by mine.”

The standoff between the mayor and comptroller is an exact reversal of the dynamic that existed between former Mayor Eric Adams, a staunch supporter of Israel and bonds backer, and Lander, the former comptroller who allowed the city’s investment to lapse. At the time, Lander — a self-professed liberal Zionist who has been outspoken in his criticism of the genocide in Gaza — said he as simply doing his job as the steward of the city’s investments.

“We consulted our guidelines and made the prudent decision to follow them, and therefore not to continue investing in the sovereign debt of just one country,” said Lander in a July 13 letter penned in response to an ally of Adams critical of the move to wind down the city’s bonds position. “You appear to be asking that the City’s pension funds treat Israel better than all other countries. That would also be politically motivated, and inconsistent with fiduciary duty.”

The post Zohran Mamdani Wants NYC to Divest From Israel — But New Comptroller Pledges to Buy War Bonds appeared first on The Intercept.

Elmina Aghayeva, a neuroscience researcher and influencer from Azerbaijan, took to social media to thank her supporters hours after her arrest caused an uproar on campus.

“I am so grateful for everyone of you,” Aghayeva wrote in an Instagram story posted on Thursday afternoon. “I just got out a little while ago. I am safe and okay.”

A spokesperson for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani confirmed Aghayeva’s release, which came after Mamdani discussed the issue in a meeting with President Donald Trump earlier in the day. Mamdani said on X that Trump had called him following the meeting to say that Aghayeva was set to be released.

“The Mayor’s Office on Thursday morning asked that ICE not move her out of New York City, so she could have her day in court here, and ICE cooperated with the request,” the spokesperson told The Intercept. “Mayor Mamdani then raised the issue directly with the President at the White House, and shortly after their meeting, the President informed him over the phone that Aghayeva would be released.”

Federal agents detained Aghayeva at university housing early on Thursday morning, according to interim Columbia President Claire Shipman. In an email to the university community, Shipman wrote early Thursday that agents with the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia residential housing building and detained the student at approximately 6:30 a.m.

“​​Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person,’” Shipman said in her email.

Students rallying to get the student released collected information about the detention and, in a letter to New York City Council Member Shaun Abreu, said they had learned from a security guard at the building that federal agents represented themselves as members of the New York Police Department and Columbia security officials. 

“From what was relayed to us, the individuals who arrived were presented as NYPD alongside Columbia Public Safety,” the students wrote in the letter to Abreu, which was obtained by The Intercept.
At a protest outside the gates of the university on Thursday afternoon, Abreu alleged that the agents had masqueraded as NYPD cops.

“I consider it to be very much confirmed that they pretended to be NYPD officers in search of missing persons,” Abreu told The Intercept. “So they used false pretenses and they used straight-up lies to get the person they were looking for.”

In post on X, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal said,
“ICE used a phony missing persons bulletin for a 5 year old girl.”

“The fact is that this student’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when ICE entered this building under false pretenses and engaged in criminal conduct,” Hoylman-Sigal went on. “We have clear evidence that this was a criminal operation. They are the secret police.”

The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Columbia security guard declined to comment.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested Aghayeva, who is Azerbaijani, for not having a proper student visa. 

“The building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment,” the Homeland Security spokesperson told The Intercept. “She has no pending appeals or applications with DHS.”

The students who wrote the letter to the City Council also said they spoke with the detained student’s roommate, who said the agents did not present a warrant.

“According to the roommate, the individuals who entered did not present a warrant to the occupants,” the students said in the letter, whose contents The Intercept was unable to independently confirm. “She could not confirm whether a warrant existed, but stated that the officers or agents allegedly misrepresented themselves or the circumstances in order to gain entry into the apartment.”

Shipman implored members of the university community to not let unidentified people into campus buildings without a judicial warrant.

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“​​It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing,” Shipman wrote. “An administrative warrant is not sufficient.”

The Department of Homeland Security, New York Police Department, City Hall, and Shipman’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The incident took place a day after students rallied on campus to demand protections for international students as well as calling for the release of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who has been in federal custody since her arrest by immigration agents nearly a year ago.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The post Zohran Mamdani Kept Columbia Student in New York — Then Phoned With Trump to Secure Her Release appeared first on The Intercept.

Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was not just a win over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but also over a set of Islamophobic smear tactics that have become all too familiar — and will continue to dog him in the run-up to November. 

In the days before the primary, Mamdani was asked repeatedly about the slogan “globalize the intifada” on the assumption that because he has spoken out against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, he should have to answer for the protest cry. He said that he had not used it himself, but he didn’t cede rhetorical territory to the political establishment by condemning the phrase. Rather than take the bait, Mamdani made clear that many take “globalize the intifada” as a call to demand Palestinian equal rights, and that he doesn’t see it as his role to police speech. 

Mamdani, who grew up in New York City and was just shy of 10 years old on September 11, 2001, may well have heard in the question the same ominous soundtrack that has haunted Arab and Muslim people in the United States for decades — and reached a fever pitch after the 9/11 attacks. We have watched bad faith actors routinely demonize Arabic language and Islam day in and day out. Lost all too often is any grasp of what the language actually means.

What Does “Intifada” Mean?

As an Arabic speaker, I can delve into the linguistics. In Arabic, just as with its semitic sibling Hebrew, words are largely derived from three-letter roots. These three-letter roots then act as building blocks for a wide range of associated words, and they are modified into 10 different awzan, or patterns, to create transitive, causative, passive, and reflexive forms of the root. 

The root n-f-d is the verb “to shake” or “to shake off.” Think of tapping the ashes off the end of a cigarette or shaking the dust out of an old rug. One of the awzan of the root that converts it into its passive form is iNtiFaDa, which means “a shaking off.” When this word is used to describe a singular historical occurrence, it means a popular uprising — in other words, a peoples’ shaking off of oppression. 

This is not only the meaning of the word in a Palestinian context. Arabic language texts discussing various uprisings across history, and on any continent, would use the word intifada because that is simply what the word means. 

This exercise feels at once obligatory and unnecessary. What is at issue here is not simply what the word means, but who gets to define its meaning and who gets to have their intentions and the validity of their concerns defined by others. This fundamental dynamic, which is an all-too-common theme in a post-9/11 America where Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism shape so much of our discourse, is precisely what Mamdani was refusing to play along with — and good on him for it. 

Of course, intifada is but one example of this. Whether it is English-language phrases or slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” or Arabic-language words or phrases that are constantly defined as suspicious or threatening, the words’ actual meanings and their speakers’ genuine intentions end up being far less important than how bad faith actors with larger platforms want them to be understood. 

An Era of Being Exogenously Defined 

On a nightly basis after September 11, 2001, so-called terrorism experts who knew next to nothing about the language, religion, or cultures of the region would appear on news broadcasts — indoctrinating our friends, neighbors, classmates, and coworkers to treat our language as suspicious.

I remember hearing an Arab-American elder once explain to a curious neighbor, “In Arabic, God is in every conversation.” At the time, I thought it was a bit overdramatic. It is undoubtedly true that it is hard to imagine an Arabic conversation where Allah is not uttered. Whether in our bismillahs, alhamdulillahs, mashallahs or inshallahs or our yallahs or wallahs, God makes routine appearances. But these are not necessarily religious conversations at all. Even the non-religious use these terms; it is just the nature of how we communicate in our language due to its historic ties to faith. It is also one of the many things that makes the Arabic language beautiful.

And yet we watched as those subtle, innocent, beautiful nuances of our tongue were twisted into indicators of suspicion. In an American discourse so heavily imbued with anti-Palestinian racism and so rife with Islamophobia, Palestinians or those who dare see them as human are not allowed to have legitimate intentions or legitimate grievances. They are to be constantly seen as suspicious. Even if they speak of human rights, equality, dignity, they can never really be trusted to mean those things because of who they are — sneaky shapeshifters with deeply held, murderous, ulterior motives. It is quite remarkable how much this echoes antisemitism throughout history, and that should surprise no one. All forms of racism are connected. 

A Shoe on the Other Foot

Imagine for a minute subjecting words or phrases in a different language, or about a different people, to the same unfair treatment. Consider the Hebrew phrase Am Yisrael Chai. The literal meaning of the phrase is “the people of Israel live,” and there are plenty of instances where the use of this phrase is mundane. However, the phrase is routinely chanted by murderous Israeli settlers as they engage in mob violence against Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Recently, it has been shouted by Israeli soldiers as they commit heinous war crimes in Gaza and shared widely and proudly by those same soldiers on social media. Thus, one could argue that Am Yisrael Chai is a genocidal slogan and must be banned, and that all those who use it or have used it must be criminalized and viewed with deep suspicion.

Surely, this is absurd. And yet this is the absurdity Palestinians and those who support their freedom are constantly subjected to. Still, too many cannot see the glaring double standard. 

In her raving Islamophobic diatribe against Mamdani, for which she has since sort of apologized, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York accused Mamdani of calling for “global jihad.” This is, of course, not something Mamdani ever did, but accuracy has never been the hallmark of these sorts of smears.

More revealing, though, were other parts of Gillibrand’s comments. Referring to “globalize the intifada” she said, “It doesn’t matter what meaning you have in your brain, it is now how the word is received. When you use a word like intifada, to many Jewish Americans and Jewish New Yorkers, that means you are permissive for violence against Jews.” She went on to explain that if you “talk to our LGBT community, you talk to our Black community, you talk to our Hispanic community, there are words and there are imagery and there are things that are said that they will hear and feel it as a dagger to their throat.”

Here Gillibrand shows she is capable of thinking about how words are received by other communities. But her choice of examples leaves one wondering: Has she ever thought about how people in the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities receive certain words or imagery? How does Gillibrand think these communities hear her Islamophobia? How does she think we receive the ritual regurgitation of phrases like “Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state” — which, to Palestinians, means that Israel has a right to ethnically cleanse us and deny us rights and equality. 

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How our communities receive things doesn’t seem to matter much to Gillibrand, and it is probably easier to just pretend we do not exist — especially when the top contributor to her campaign in the last five years was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which gave her nearly half a million dollars between 2019 and 2024. Gillibrand is of course not alone in this, but rather representative of a political class where the erasure of Palestinian concerns and security is entirely normalized. Not all throats are created equal. 

Good Bye to All That

It feels as if Mamdani’s election victory is a turning point away from the dominance of that very political class. He could have played the game exactly as they did. Condemn the phrase and those who say it, just as Gillibrand and others would have wanted him to. He would have been wrong to do so if he did. Not only would it reinforce the very policing of Palestine-related speech that is at an all-time high at this moment, but it also wouldn’t have helped him politically at all. 

There is nothing Mamdani can say that would silence the bad faith actors losing their minds over a Muslim millennial socialist’s obvious edge in the New York City mayoral race. Most of them are purely interested in trying to maintain a quickly evaporating pro-Israel consensus. If Mamdani condemned the phrase, they would say he is being deceptive and demand he condemn something else, forcing him to choose between perpetually being on the defensive or perpetually appearing to equivocate. 

Perhaps worse, he’d be selling out the very voters who made the foundation of his campaign. This is not to say that most Mamdani voters use the phrase “globalize the intifada.” I’d bet many had never heard it before the last few weeks. But I do think they are capable of identifying bad faith smears aimed at taking down candidates that challenge the establishment. That’s why the smears aimed at Mamdani didn’t just fail, they backfired. 

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Mamdani’s campaign represented several things at the same time: a break from the cynicism that has dominated our politics, a political underdog aiming at the very centers of power, and a youthful turn away from the politics of an older generation of leaders. To condemn the phrase would signal a betrayal of the principles his campaign represented. 

But Mamdani isn’t just standing up for what he believes in; he is also reading the political winds correctly. The Democratic electorate today looks very different on the issue of Palestine than it did back in 2009, when Gillibrand was first elected to the Senate. CNN’s Harry Enten summed up the sea change recently as he discussed polling data on views toward Israelis and Palestinians. Democrats overwhelmingly sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis today. Some of us have been identifying this shift for years, but it is more pronounced today than ever before, and there is likely more to come. 

The Israeli government’s rightward shift and the exposure of its constant abuses against Palestinians have driven this turn for years. But the last 21 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza are unlike anything we have ever seen. If the 1967 war implanted the image of Israel as the underdog against the Arab Goliath in the American mind, Israel now as the genocidal criminal in Gaza will be one of the defining ideas for an entire generation of Americans and will shape their views about Israel for decades to come. And Americans are not merely tired of seeing the horrors the Israeli military is inflicting on the civilians of Gaza — they are also increasingly tired of being told they are antisemitic for speaking up about it. 

As public opinion shifts, efforts to maintain a pro-Israel U.S. policy will increasingly involve repression and policing that will only seem more ridiculous and desperate over time. Voters who have shifted significantly on Israel will angrily wonder why their elected representatives echo pro-Israel lobby groups more than their own constituents. In short, Mamdani’s politics will be seen as more welcomed and more authentic among Democratic voters than those of the Gillibrands or Cuomos of the world. 

It’s about time that more politicians took a note from Mamdani: Stop taking the bait.

The post Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats How Not to Take the Bait appeared first on The Intercept.

Mamdani defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by eight points, drawing 50 to his 42 percent of the vote with 98 percent of ballots reported. Guardian Angels founder and perennial gadfly Curtis Sliwa came in a distant third at seven percent.

“We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible,” Mamdani told a crowded room at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn on Tuesday. “And we won because politics is no longer something that is done to us — now it is something that we do.”

“Years from now,” he said, “let our only regret be that this day took so long to come.”

Campaigning on a core platform of affordability, Mamdani went from little-known assembly member to household name as he criss-crossed the city, popping in at churches and nightclubs, supported by an army of volunteer canvassers.

The race has been unlike any other in recent memory in New York. Minutes before polls closed, the New York City Board of Elections announced that 2 million people had cast ballots — the highest number since 1969.

When the AP called the race for the democratic socialist, the Paramount exploded in cheers.

Mamdani press chief Andrew Epstein gave another man a bear hug, while New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who easily won his reelection race Tuesday night, jumped up and down.

“We shook up the world baby!” Williams yelled before wrapping New York Attorney General Letitia James in a hug.

“Unreal,” James said.

Cuomo, who lost the primary to Mamdani in a stunning upset in June, billed himself as the best man to stand up to Donald Trump — an argument that was complicated Monday when the president endorsed him, pledging to slash federal funding to the city if Mamdani were to win.

Trump’s endorsement was by then effectively a formality: The right had already coalesced around New York’s former Democratic governor, with the president and other members of his party pushing Sliwa, the Republican candidate, to drop out and let Cuomo face Mamdani head-on. On social media, Trump warned: “A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani.”

New York City comptroller and former mayoral candidate Brad Lander, a key Mamdani ally since the primary, rebuked Trump at the Paramount for a recent social media post in which the president said that any Jew voting for Mamdani was “stupid.”

“When Andrew Cuomo earlier in the race tried to tell Jews how to vote I cursed at him in Yiddish, so I guess I’ll do the same,” Lander said. “Gay kaken ofn yam — Go shit in the ocean, Donald Trump!”

In addition to making history as an avowed socialist, Mamdani — who is of Indian descent and was born in Uganda — will be the city’s first Muslim American mayor. For many Muslims in New York who lived through the Islamophobia, racism, and pervasive NYPD surveillance of the post-9/11 years, Mamdani’s success on the campaign trail has been deeply personal, urban historian Asad Dandia told The Intercept.

“It means a great deal to me as a Muslim New Yorker, but also as a native New Yorker who doesn’t know how to live anywhere else,” said Dandia, who was involved in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s targeting of Muslim communities. “To see someone who looks like he could be my brother or my cousin, that’s a powerful testament to the possibility of New York and to people’s power.”

In the June primary, South Asian voter turnout surged by 40 percent from the 2021 primary, thanks in part to a surge in new voters, according to the New York Times.

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But Mamdani’s identity as a Muslim and his committed support for Palestine came into play in an ugly fashion too. Cuomo’s allies repeatedly attacked Mamdani with claims that he did not sufficiently denounce the Palestinian liberation protest cry “globalize the intifada,” which Cuomo translated, inaccurately, as “kill all Jews.” As the general election drew closer, Mamdani’s opponents engaged in naked Islamophobia by calling him a “jihadist” and a “terrorist sympathizer,” while congressional Republicans mused about having his citizenship revoked.

Despite efforts to tar him as an extremist outsider, Mamdani proved immensely popular, both in polls and on the street, where videos show him routinely being stopped by enthusiastic passersby.

Mamdani’s success was not limited to Muslim or South Asian communities, or to the so-called “Commie Corridor” of progressive, college-educated voters in north Brooklyn and Queens who have made up the primary basis of support for candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.

In the primary and in the months that followed, his campaign worked aggressively to build a coalition of support that cut across ethnic and class lines. According to a recent poll published by the Hispanic Federation, 48 percent of Latino voters favored Mamdani — 36 percent indicating “strong support” — with just 24 percent of Latinos supporting Cuomo and 14 percent picking Sliwa.

Cuomo’s hopes laid with the traditional Democratic base of Black voters in the city, but Mamdani had been making headway on that front as well, with weekly visits to Black churches and a recent appearance with Al Sharpton.

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Ultimately, Dandia said, it was Mamdani’s core message of affordability that broadened his support far beyond committed leftists and South Asian and Muslim voters.

“He wasn’t running on his identity — he was running on a platform that appealed across so many communities,” Dandia said. “His success has shown the value of embodying what it means to be a humanistic person, justice-oriented person, and that’s equally as important if not more so than his identity.”

Those who worked on the Mamdani campaign weren’t surprised that voters came out in historic numbers to back their candidate. “For those of us who have been on ground, it’s amazing but it’s not really shocking when you’ve been out there knocking on doors, hearing how people are feeling,” said Annaliese Estes, a campaign field lead since April.

Celebrating Mamdani’s win, an attendee at his party asked Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y.: “Can you believe it?”

“I believed it a year ago,” she said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

The post Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo in Victory for the Left in NYC Mayoral Race appeared first on The Intercept.

“I am not running to defund the police,” Zohran Mamdani said in late July, after visiting with the family of the slain police officer Didarul Islam. It was consistent with the stance he’s maintained throughout the New York City mayoral race. His campaign has remained focused on his signature issue—the city’s affordability crisis—and he has not run, in either his successful Democratic primary or the upcoming general election, on a platform of defunding the police.

This fact has not stopped Mamdani’s opponents, chiefly former Governor Andrew Cuomo (whom Mamdani defeated in the primary) and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams (for whom the Trump administration has reportedly dangled job opportunities as incentives to leave the race) from dredging up his past support for the defund movement. In 2020, at the height of the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, Mamdani posted to social media that the NYPD was “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” and that we needed to “#DefundtheNYPD.” At the time, he was running for his current seat in the New York State Assembly. 

That he no longer supports defunding the police is not surprising; it has never been a popular position. Even in 2020, when the fervor around Floyd’s murder was its highest, support for reducing police funding only stood at twenty-five percent of the public nationwide; that dropped to fifteen percent by the next year. It would not be savvy to run on such a platform at this time. 

Mamdani’s opponents understand that defund is toxic, which is why they want to tie the mayoral frontrunner to his previous stance. As the Cuomo and Adams campaigns struggle to gain momentum, while Mamdani continues to max out his campaign contributions, they need Mamdani to appear too extreme for the general public. Cuomo has called Mamdani’s previously expressed views around policing “dangerous, literally dangerous.” Mamdani, backing away from those views, has called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.”

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Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats How Not to Take the Bait

It would be easy to become cynical about Mamdani’s backtracking, to see it as simply another example of a U.S. politician muting voices of dissent to gain foothold within electoral politics. And it is that. Mamdani should not have to back off from his previous — and well-founded — position to make himself electable. Police budgets are the only consistent growth areas in many local budgets, and their constant inflation does siphon resources from other important areas of civic life, while also creating a police state that terrorizes non-white, poor, and queer citizens. Reducing police budgets and allocating those dollars elsewhere is a modest request. Mamdani should be free to say as much. 

He is not, though, if his goal is to be elected mayor, since there is still no wide-reaching support for defunding the police as a policy. But if you look at his actual platform (not what Cuomo and Adams would have you believe is his platform), you’ll find that his goals for public safety still align with the goals of defunding the police—just without the defund part.

While his detailed platform does say “Police have a critical role to play” with respect to public safety, his proposals do not mention much of a role. There are sections on mental health, gun violence, hate violence, and victims’ services that outline things like violence interrupters, restorative justice models in schools, creating crisis residences, and other interventions that do not involve the police at all. The need to bolster those resources has been a major part of the message of the defund movement from the start: police are tasked with solving social problems that they are not equipped to handle, so instead of increasing their budgets and the purview of their duties, allocate those resources to more effective ideas. This model has shown significant results in places like Baltimore and Chicago, which have in the past year experienced historic drops in violent crime. It’s also been conveniently overlooked by the defund movement’s critics.

The rhetoric may not be there, but the substance of what the defund the police movement is after is alive in the Mamdani campaign. It would be nice if he were in position to run explicitly on that message, but he’s not in the world as currently constructed. However, even on this, I’m not ready to give myself fully over to cynicism. Think of one of Mamdani’s other controversial positions—his unwavering support of Palestinians, and an end to the genocide and apartheid to which Israel has subjected them for nearly eighty years. Even five years ago, holding such a position publicly might have barred him from getting elected to any office; now, it is a major factor in his appeal. 

That would not have happened without the decades of movement building that preceded this moment, and that is the main takeaway here for the defund movement: Present Mamdani may not be able to run a successful campaign now by calling for defunding the police, but push hard enough, and a future Mamdani absolutely will. 

The post Zohran Mamdani Won’t Defund the Police. The Movement Can Grow With Him Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

The race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in New York’s 7th Congressional District has put major progressive organizations and figures at odds. Hoping to capitalize on growing national frustration with conservative Democrats and lingering momentum from Mamdani’s win in November, national progressives and their counterparts in New York are fighting to succeed Velázquez with an ally in Congress.

They just haven’t agreed on who it should be. 

Sanders, the Vermont independent, is giving a boost to the socialist wing behind Valdez’s campaign, which includes Mamdani and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the campaign shared with The Intercept.

“Claire Valdez is a union organizer who worked minimum-wage fast food jobs and understands firsthand how this economy fails working people,” Sanders said in a statement to The Intercept. “In my view, Congress needs more voices who come from America’s working class. Claire has the experience and vision we need to take on the oligarchy and fight for unions, Medicare for All, and affordable housing. I’m proud to endorse her campaign for Congress.”

Velázquez has endorsed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Valdez’s main competitor. Reynoso also has backing from leading progressive officials and groups in New York City like Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and the New York Working Families Party. 

Already facing losses this cycle in races where competing progressive candidates did not consolidate their support, national progressives like Sanders are picking sides in the battle to define the future of the electoral left under Mamdani.

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Velázquez endorsed Reynoso shortly after Valdez launched her campaign in January standing alongside Mamdani and United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. Some local observers saw Velázquez’s move as a rebuke of the mayor and a harbinger of a fight between factions of New York City’s left, endangering a relationship Mamdani and Velázquez had built since she became the first member of Congress to back his mayoral campaign.

Velázquez left little room to speculate on that question in comments she made to the New York Times in January, when she said Mamdani had opened up conflict between groups in his coalition by involving himself in primaries; that she was unfamiliar with Valdez, who is originally from Texas; and that she was skeptical of newcomers to the city who think they know who should represent New Yorkers in office.

In a statement to The Intercept, Valdez named Sanders as a key inspiration for her political beliefs and career.

“Three things made me a democratic socialist: shitty jobs, the labor movement, and Bernie Sanders’ runs for president,” Valdez said. “His political revolution changed my life — and showed millions of Americans what’s possible when working people organize. I’m grateful for this endorsement and ready to join the fight in Congress against the oligarchs and for economic democracy.”

On Wednesday, the Valdez campaign announced that it had raised $750,000 from 11,200 donors in the filing period that just ended, though the Federal Election Commission has not yet processed and verified the figures. Reynoso had raised just over $317,500 by the end of 2025, before Valdez launched her campaign, according to available FEC data. His campaign has not yet announced its most recent fundraising figures and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Valdez’s endorsements include PAL PAC, the new pro-Palestine group opposing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; Justice Democrats; Leaders We Deserve PAC; Jewish Voice for Peace Action; attorney and political advocate Zephyr Teachout; Democratic New York state Sen. Jabari Brisport; and several members of the New York State Assembly.

Reynoso’s backers include Make the Road Action; New York Communities for Change; several powerful local unions including 32BJ SEIU and DC-37; Attorney General Letitia James; New York Democratic Reps. Jerry Nadler and Pat Ryan; and several New York City Council members. 

The post Bernie Sanders Backs Claire Valdez in NYC House Race Dividing Left and Progressives appeared first on The Intercept.

The Great Israeli Real Estate Event — a showcase that advertises its services in helping people in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. purchase land in Israel and the West Bank — hosted the event at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Tuesday. The expo helps potential buyers navigate taxes, education concerns, and other issues that arise during relocation to Israel.

Ahead of the event, Mamdani spoke out against the possibility of potentially illegal land sales being facilitated within the city.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” said Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for Mamdani, in a statement to The Intercept. “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”

The website for the expo includes a reference to Gush Etzion, a cluster of some 20 settlements in the West Bank, southeast of Jerusalem, that are considered illegal under international law. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said the inclusion of Gush Etzion was a telling reminder of the claim made on all of the Occupied Territories by the pro-settlement movement.

“Gush Etzion is the Israeli term for an area of the West Bank located south of Jerusalem on which, under international law, all Israeli construction, all Israeli communities are considered illegal under international law,” Friedman said. “The pro-settlement movement around the world, and most Israelis, do not make any distinction between Israel and the West Bank. The idea is that all of this is Eretz Yisrael” — Hebrew for “the land of Israel” — “and it belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them.”

The Intercept attended the event Tuesday. Just inside the synagogue, a large welcome sign specified that the event was for “information purposes only.” More than a dozen tables advertised the services of real estate companies, most of which promoted glitzy luxury buildings in Tel Aviv, Netanya, and other cities inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

At least one company, Harey Zahav, displayed a map of properties in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Brochures at the Harey Zahav table offered detailed looks at properties in these settlements.

Past Discrimination Allegations

The expo is being sponsored by a group called Home in Israel, but it isn’t the only organization putting on events of this sort. In recent years, real estate fairs put on by similar groups have popped up in New York and other North American cities, including Baltimore, Montreal, and others, including at synagogues.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are widely considered to be open only to Jewish residents. At one real estate event in suburban New Jersey in 2024, protesters said they were explicitly asked about their religious affiliations when they tried to register for the fair, potentially implicating anti-discrimination laws. The New Jersey Civil Rights Division reportedly questioned realtors about their practices. (The New Jersey Civil Rights Division not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Pal-Awda, a pro-Palestine group, announced plans on social media for a protest on Tuesday outside the Park East Synagogue.

“We will not be silent as ethnic cleansing is being actively promoted in our neighborhoods,” the group wrote.

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Self-proclaimed supporters of the synagogue have circulated a flyer on social media announcing a counter-protest. “All members of the Jewish community need to come out and protect the synagogue,” says the flyer. Though it includes the social media handles of the synagogue, the call for a counter-protest did not appear to come from Park East Synagogue itself. (A spokesperson for the synagogue declined to comment.)

Past events have led to sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and counter-demonstrators.

In light of the dueling protests planned outside Park East Synagogue, Raskin, the mayoral spokesperson, called for both the safety of eventgoers and respect for the free-speech rights of the protesters.

“Our administration has also been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship,” he said, “and that such access never be in question while all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Protests at Park East

Park East Synagogue has already been the site of one anti-Zionist protest that raised hackles in New York.

In November, Pal-Awda organized a demonstration against an event hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that facilitates migration to Israel, sparking howls of protest from then-Mayor Eric Adams and other political leaders in the city.

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That protest, along with others across New York City, were part of the impetus behind a bill introduced this year in the City Council aimed at creating a so-called buffer zone to keep demonstrators at a distance from any house of worship.

Despite the opposition of free-speech advocates, a version of that bill — requiring the New York Police Department to provide a plan for protecting houses of worship but without the buffer zone provision — passed in March and became law on April 25 after Mamdani declined to sign or veto it. The bill gave the New York Police Department 45 days to provide a proposed plan of action and 90 days to give a final plan, meaning it is not yet in full effect.

A related bill proposing buffer zones for universities and other educational institutions passed the City Council but was vetoed by Mamdani, who criticized the bill as overbroad and a threat to free speech.

Update: May 5, 2026, 6:45 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include reporting from inside the Great Israeli Real Estate Event on the promotion of property for sale in Israeli settlements that are considered illegal under international law.

The post Mamdani Condemns NYC Expo Promoting Property Sales in Israeli West Bank Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.