Zohran Mamdani’s lead in first choices in New York City’s ranked choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he’ll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation’s largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November. 

Mamdani, 33, is a three-term state assemblyman who calls himself a Democratic Socialist. He has backed a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses, putting homeless service centers in the subways, a $30 minimum wage, defunding the police, and replacing police with “community safety” officers. 

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His tweeting history includes “NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #Defund the NYPD”, “Queer liberation means defund the police” and “Defunding the police is a feminist issue.”

Why did Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo, who, like his father, was elected three times as governor? One reason: he’s a likeable candidate with clever, memorable ads and a vigorous personal campaigner who inspired thousands of volunteers. He undeniably has charm, something hard to define but easy to spot: think former Presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. 

He’s also capable of the seasoned politician’s slippery evasion. Asked by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller if he was troubled by the slogan “global intifada”, he said he considers it “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He doesn’t note the clear meaning: mass murder of Jews, everywhere.

Mamdani was also helped by the weaknesses of Cuomo, 67, who resigned as governor in 2021 in response to 13 charges of sexual harassment and backlash to his ordering of COVID-19-infected patients back to nursing homes. He jumped into the mayor’s race in response to other candidates’ weaknesses, after not having lived in the city for nearly 30 years. His campaign style is abrasive, even by New York standards. 

Cuomo’s defeat is further evidence that the Democratic Party is having trouble producing a new generation of non-radical big-city politicians. Another example is the 2023 election of teacher union honcho Brandon Johnson, 49, to be mayor of Chicago over former school board head Paul Vallas, 72.

As the New York Times’s exquisite graphic maps of the election results show, Cuomo carried the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn, which are full of affluent white college graduates who are an increasingly dominant force in the national Democratic Party.

Cuomo also carried large black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens and Hispanic areas in the Bronx, though not by large margins, and won the city’s scattered white ethnic areas more robustly. When his father, Mario Cuomo, ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor in 1977, carrying those blocs, even narrowly, would have guaranteed victory. There weren’t that many other voters. 

It’s different now. Mamdani won by huge margins from the same constituency that cast the critical votes for Brandon Johnson in Chicago. It’s the same constituency that in 2021 in New York was the base of Maya Wiley, who won slightly more first-choice votes than Kathryn Garcia, whose base was affluent Manhattan, but fewer than the winner, incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose base was blacks in Brooklyn and Queens.  

That constituency is mostly, but by no means totally, white. It tends to have higher levels of education than income, and it skews young — Millennials and Gen Z. If you’re under 30, one Mamdani ad explained that Andrew Cuomo hasn’t lived in New York City since before you were born. 

I have called this constituency the “barista proletariat,” made up of people with temporary jobs in service industries, non-profit organizations or media, perpetual grad students or adjunct lecturers who supplement their incomes often by gaming welfare systems and working off the books. You could see them as economic parasites on Manhattan’s rich finance and media wealth. They prefer to see themselves as cultural rebels against the larger society’s complacency and intolerance. 

Geographically, these voters are concentrated in formerly ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods connected to Manhattan by subway lines, such as Astoria, Queens, where Mamdani won his Assembly seat by beating an incumbent in 2020, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn. The Chicago equivalent is the far North Side, reachable by the L but distant from the Loop and the Lakefront.

Many such New York neighborhoods emptied, especially in the high-crime and civic-bankruptcy 1970s, as white ethnics fled to Long Island, the Jersey Shore, and Florida; the city’s population fell by nearly 1 million people. 

Since then, the hugely effective policing policies of former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg prevented the kind of devastation you see in much of Detroit and St. Louis and, ironically, made these outer borough neighborhoods safe for the barista proletariat, while the state’s rollback of rent controls that incentivized landlords to maintain livable structures. 

But for the barista proletariat, those achievements are part of a past that is not forgotten but which is not known to have ever existed — no more familiar than the hustling entrepreneurs who erected their neighborhoods’ buildings in the early 20th century or the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and black families that lived and raised families in them in the pre-air-conditioned days of what I have called the Midcentury Moment. 

The counting of second, third, fourth, and fifth choices in New York’s ranked choice system will continue into July, although Mamdani’s nomination is certain and already makes nonsense of ranked choice-voting advocates’ claims that it favors centrist candidates. 

Certainly, Mamdani seems the favorite to win in November. Cuomo is obviously a spent force, and Mamdani is clearly a much smarter and more attractive figure than Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, whose job approval is just barely in the double digits. 

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But Adams is running as an Independent, and despite a now-dismissed and bizarre federal indictment, he might try to cobble together a constituency of Cuomo-voting Democrats and Republicans in a city where President Donald Trump’s percentage of the vote rose from 18% in 2016 to 30% in 2024. One possible tactic is to promise to keep his popular police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.

The barista proletariat has established itself as a significant and sometimes decisive constituency in Democratic primaries. But its agenda may prove disqualifying in larger arenas.