“No Kings” went to the polls

There isn’t much to explain about the result of the off-year U.S. election November 4. In virtually every election held in every district and every state, Democrats improved on their performance in the November 2024 presidential election. And in many places, they exceeded their most optimistic predictions.

“No Kings” went to the polls.

In New Jersey, expectations of a close election melted before Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikey Sherrill’s 13-percentage point victory. In New York City, Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani won the majority in a four-way race for mayor amidst the highest turnout in the city’s mayoral election since 1969.

The Democratic sweep wasn’t just confined to strongholds like New York City or California. Mississippi Democrats managed to break the Republicans’ supermajority in the state senate. Two Georgia Democrats won election to the state’s public utility commission, marking the first time in 20 years that Democrats won a statewide race to state office in 20 years.

Democrats turfed out local officials in conservative areas like Luzerne County, Pa., considered a bellwether county for a Trumpist future. The right-wing city council member who promoted the Trump-amplified lie that Venezuelan gangs had taken over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colo. received a well-deserved ejection from her seat.

The explanation for the Democratic rout is simple. Voters wanted to voice opposition to Trump, and to support Democratic pledges to improve affordability. That was the winning message for Democratic candidates, whether the messenger was a self-described moderate or a social democrat.

According to opinion polls, President Trump is more unpopular now than Joe Biden was when Democratic Party mandarins forced him out of the 2024 presidential election. Clearly, millions went to the polls to vote against Trump. Secondly, Trump’s 2024 promises to lower prices on necessities have not been fulfilled. Trump’s policies like his across-the-board tariffs and cuts to health care subsidies are raising prices.

The economic and political headwinds that pushed against Harris and the Democrats a year ago are now blowing against Trump and the Republicans. In 2024, it was “the economy, stupid” and in 2025, it still is. Only now, Trump and the GOP are the target for voters’ frustrations—like Harris and Democrats were in 2024.

In 2024, voters who took a chance on Trump could tell themselves that he would, as he said, “bring down prices on day 1” and that his deportation plan would focus on “violent criminals.” Since January, however, they have seen that Trump’s policies have served corrupt oligarchs and that federal goons are abducting day laborers and childcare workers off the streets. For these reasons, 2024 Republican gains with young voters and with Latinos have evaporated.

GOP “culture wars” couldn’t even save it. The Republican candidate for Virginia’s governorship spent millions on anti-trans ads. She lost by 14 points.

In California, more than 8 million voters turned out to endorse Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to provide Democrats the opportunity to win five additional seats in Congress in the 2026 midterm election. Newsom touted this measure as “fighting fire with fire” against the governments of Texas and other Republican-led states who are trying to gerrymander their congressional maps to insulate Republicans from a building wave to throw them out of office.

Liberals are cheering the overwhelming victory (by a margin of almost 2-to-1) of the Newsom-backed Proposition 50. To them, Newsom deserves credit because his partisan ruthlessness broke the usual mold of Democratic Party fecklessness against Trump and the GOP. But from a socialist point of view, a maneuver to elect more Democrats shouldn’t be a cause for celebration.

The Democrats remain a capitalist party whose dedication to the status quo laid the groundwork for the horrors that Trump is enacting today. In 2024, Kamala Harris touted her “tough on the border” credentials and defended the Biden administration’s abetting of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. A generation of Democratic Party support for the neoliberal policy agenda that destroyed labor unions and immiserated millions opened the way for Trump.

Even today, after their landslide victories, the “centrist” Democratic governors-elect in New Jersey and Virginia, won’t commit to basic policies to support working people. Mikie Sherrill, governor-elect in New Jersey, has yet to say whether she will extend the state’s law preventing its law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities. Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s governor-elect, has already said she won’t support repealing the state’s anti-union “right to work” law.

Electing more Democrats doesn’t guarantee support for democracy or for working people, any more than decades of Democratic supermajorities in California have produced affordable housing or single-payer health care. For all their election campaign rhetoric about “standing with working people,” the Democrats have no plan, nor vision, that can combat Trumpism’s appeal to cynicism for politicians who talk a good game but don’t do anything to improve ordinary people’s lives.

In this political wasteland, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York City, stands out as something different and fresh. It’s not just that he cited socialist hero Eugene Debs in his victory speech. Or that he ran a clever social media driven campaign that embraced New York’s immigrant diversity. Or that he dared Donald Trump: “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” It’s that he captured the hopes of millions who expect him to stand up for them against the billionaire oligarchs.

Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability in one of the U.S.’s least affordable cities inspired tens of thousands of volunteers to canvass for him, and to turn out for him against the decrepit Democratic Party establishment that couldn’t stop him.

Mamdani focused his campaign on a simple set of promises, including pledges to freeze rents, make buses free to ride and to open city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s message resonated widely especially among younger and immigrant voters in New York.

What can we expect from his administration? JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Mamdani a “Marxist” “pushing the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.” In fact, Mamdani’s transition team relies on professionals who have worked in the last three New York City administrations.

Despite all the ridiculous rhetoric branding him as a dangerous radical, Mamdani’s proposals are modest. Mamdani and his supporters in DSA openly embrace the early 1900s’ model of “sewer socialism.” This moniker originated as a put-down of Socialist Party city officials who eschewed radical politics in favor of humdrum provision of city services.

But the reformers who implemented it—especially in Milwaukee, Wis., the bastion of some of the most conservative Socialists—chose to embrace “sewer socialism.” To them, “socialism” meant running “clean” (not corrupt) governments that delivered public services. This type of city administration is clearly preferable to corrupt cronyism, but it’s hardly the stuff of the transition to socialism.

Moreover, Mamdani endorsed policies, like loosening regulations on small businesses and land use, that dovetail with so-called “abundance” agenda that is all the rage with “centrist” neoliberal Democrats. Last September—before he announced his run for mayor—he met with Kathy Wylde, a leader of the city’s business elite. Wylde told the Wall Street Journal that “[Mamdani] said, ‘Look, I’m not in favor of government taking over your business.” . . . “He made clear that he’s not anticapitalist in that sense.”

Two of his proposals—appointing members of the city’s Rent Stabilization Board committed to his pledge to freeze rents and fare-free buses—are within his power to implement as mayor. In fact, the previous liberal Democratic Mayor Bill deBlasio implemented similar rent-stabilization policies. His plan for city-owned groceries is a pilot project aimed at providing one store in each borough as a “proof of concept.” In a city of more than eight million, this is hardly a threat to the retail grocery sector.

His more ambitious proposals, such as universal pre-kindergarten education, will require approval from New York state for the taxes to fund them. But here’s where Mamdani’s agenda will run up against other forces in the Democratic Party determined to co-opt him or to break him.

In his runs for office, Mamdani has always run as a Democrat. This may provide DSA-backed candidates with a more ready-made electorate, but it also makes them captive inside a capitalist party. Not wanting to be ostracized from people who hold influence over their agenda or their advancement leads candidates to make concessions to the mainstream that undercut their independence or even their ability to deliver for their supporters. This process helps to turn nominal socialists into “regular old Democrats.”

We’ve already seen that process taking shape with Mamdani. Social democrat Eric Blanc may consider Mamdani’s rejection of “defunding the police” (a goal that Blanc called “performative ultraleftism”) as a brilliant stroke to avoid having to answer multiple “gotchas” from reporters and pro-cop trolls. But it’s not going to help him deal with the NYPD, a resource-sucking army that will declare war on him the minute he tries to take any action to curtail its abuses.

In a meeting with executives in the Partnership for New York, the city’s de facto chamber of commerce, Mamdani said he was open to retaining the current police commissioner, Jessica Tisch (daughter of Leow’s billionaire CEO James Tisch). At the same meeting, he also pledged to discourage activists from using the slogan “globalize the intifada,” a phrase which has been the pretense for multiple attacks on him, even though he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t use it.

What will hold Mamdani to fulfill his promises to working-class supporters, especially when he faces opposition from Wall Street, the police or establishment political forces? His supporters look to the army of canvassers his campaign mobilized. As Liza Featherstone put it, “the mass movement that elected him must be prepared to help him succeed, as the ruling class (especially the real estate industry), the Trump administration, and the police make every effort to make his mayoralty a failure.”

While this is theoretically possible, it has almost never happened. There are too many differences between the mechanics of an electoral campaign and a social movement needed to win reforms. Marxists have long contended that elections are the “lowest form” of politics that don’t require the type of political commitment or mobilization that a true social movement entails.

There’s also the compromised position that someone like Mamdani, as chief executive officer of a city and boss of hundreds of thousands of city workers, will face. First, he will have to staff an administration, undoubtedly pulling many grassroots activists into the government. That means many who could be pressuring the government from the “outside” will be on the “inside,” defending the mayor’s agenda instead.

Will the nominal boss of the NYPD use his office to mobilize protests when the police brutalize or murder someone on his watch? Will the CEO and employer of teachers and other city workers support them if they strike against austerity? Will his administration arrest and prosecute Trump’s immigration goons for civil rights abuses? To ask these questions is to be clear-eyed about developments that will put Mamdani’s brand of “municipal socialism” to the test.