Abstract

Following Gramsci, the text cautions against romanticizing Mamdani's NYC mayoral victory and conceive of it as a viable template for a national electoral strategy. The paper critiques the left's recurring assertions that electoral breaches represent revolutionary opportunities, only to face disappointing reversals. Instead, Gramsci's "war of position" demands patient hegemonic power-building over spontaneist state assault. Mamdani's narrow victory (50.4%) relied on a unique coalition that centered on young, college-educated renters and professional middle class cultural elites. The class basis of the coalition produced high percentages of white voter support. This part of the electoral coalition is unique to big cities with large sectors of the “knowledge economy”, like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Seattle. The geographically uneven distribution of his core electoral bloc means that the replication of NYC would only yield the similar outcomes in areas with similar social conditions. Nationally, this coalition lacks scale; in the absence of this uniquely urban voter bloc, Mamdani or a similar candidate would need to make serious in-roads with homeowning white middle class voters in ex-urban and rural areas.

In terms of achieving transformative change in New York City, this paper suggests that a long game of position taking through the regions civic and governmental trenches is necessary. Expectations of transformative possibilities should be tempered because remnants of the establishment regime continue exercise control over key levers of power and will likely exercise veto points throughout the local state apparatus. The paper finishes by drawing lessons on the inroads and reversals of a DSA-like coalition in Minneapolis during the late 2010s.

Introduction

Soon after Zohran Mamdani won the election for New York City’s mayoral office, we witnessed a deluge of analyses from comrades on the left who immediately used this victory as a template for a socialist coalition on the national stage.

Such analyses follow a similar pattern: short on empirics concerning complex electoral dynamics in NYC, quick to flatten the US and render it homologous to Brooklyn, impatient with desire to launch a frontal assault on the state, and ideologically furious against any skeptics of overreaching, over-spontaneist, and underthought plans.

Each small breach in the capitalist state's outer walls—whether due to a a seemingly seismic political win, inspiring social movement, or economic crisis—prompts left analysts to exclaim that the time has finally arrived. Occupy, BLM, Bernie I and II, George Floyd, and now Mamdani. Each advance, whether illusory or not, was held up as the beginning of a shot at a socialist tomorrow. When reading such materials, I am reminded of the US left's infatuation with variants of the "war of maneuver", on the one hand, and spontaneist tactics to mount the assault on the capitalist state, on the other.

And when each small opening is followed by restoration, either through neoliberal Democratic Party elites, or worse, MAGA, there are howls of despair and angry claims of betrayal (betrayal in class war? (as if the bourgeoisie had ever made promises of fair play while waging battle over hegemonic power).

And again, I expect we will see the same. The weakened bourgeoisie and their political representatives remain entrenched in most strongholds of governmental power in NYC, and they will work tirelessly to stifle Mamdani's agenda and restore their previously uncontested power. We have seen bourgeois sabotage in other progressive cities; masters of leveraging a myriad of veto points throughout the legislative and bureaucratic apparatuses of the local, regional, state, and federal levels of government. I expect we will see the same in NYC.

If Mamdani outflanks the old guard that is “gaining time and preparing a counter-offensive,” then we will all be very pleased that I am wrong (Gramsci 1971: 172). However, if I am right, the howls will return to fill the chambers of social media with authentic disappointment, ever outraged that winning an election does not mean automatic cessation of fire from political enemies.

The calls for taking the NY strategy national, the conviction that a breach in the state is a revolutionary breach opening the way to the seizure of state power, the surprise when restoration comes, the howls of moral outrage at unfair play, appeals for socialists to go it alone (without the Democratic Party coalition), predictions that a strong socialist message without much political work is sufficient to build a successful socialist movement—all such propositions presume social and political conditions that simply do not exist. Proclamations come and go with each round of hope and despair, reconfigured sometimes to seem like a new thought or just verbatim repasting from an old file, locking the imaginary of the intellectual left in an eternally returning discursive loop of political fantasy (Zizek 1989).

This marry go round of clichéd proclamations of DNC skullduggery and knowing the true truth of radical politics may certainly help some cope with the realities of looking into a complex and contradictory world, mired in the muck of trenches with no apparent beginning or end.

Gramsci was very critical of using analysis to fulfill desires or cope with a dreary future. Confusing desires for advancement with real analysis is a mistake that can cost the movement resources, time, lives, and freedom:

"One's own baser and more immediate desires and passions are the cause of error, in that they take the place of an objective and impartial analysis—and this happens not as a conscious 'means' to stimulate action, but as self-deception. In this case the snake bites the snake-charmer—in other words, the demagogue is the first victim of his own demagogy" (1971: 179)

What Does Gramsci Have to Say about the Current Conjuncture?

A century ago, Gramsci argued that historical conditions then were no longer suitable for a war of maneuver because the structure of the state was too complex and resilient to be impacted by its attacks. Instead, "the war of maneuver must be considered as reduced to more of a tactical than a strategic function…" (220). He goes on to explain:

The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defense which was still effective (225)

A war of position is a long war for political hegemony through the civic and political trenches. This requires insurgent subaltern groups to win "support from the groups which actively or passively assisted them" through forging a universalizing and resonant worldview, winning broad legitimacy for such a vision and for themselves as its bearer, and forging a series of alliances and compromises with those supportive groups.

This is a process of ideological and relational bridging. But it does present a dilemma as the subaltern insurgent's power becomes bound to and necessarily dependent on the continued adhesion to many other groups and their ideas. Here, Gramsci tells us, only the Party has the discipline and foresight to guide us through the tangle of relations and ideas.

Gramsci wrote as much about revolution as he did about restoration, addressing the various quagmires and complications in between (interregnum, passive revolution, Caesarism, etc.). Reversals, stalemates, and fascist backlashes are all a function of launching a war of maneuver when the context does not allow for it or when the political development of insurgent forces has yet to reach maturity. And he was critical of Rosa Luxemburg's 1905 argument that a mere crisis was sufficient to provide the needed opening to capture the state. In 1919, Luxemburg mounted another war of maneuver, but in that fateful year, political failure coincided with the loss of her life. This and many such examples are the consequences of theory leading us astray.

In terms of socialist strategy, we are structurally locked into war of position and must patiently build hegemonic power across the civic trenches until we have sufficient strength to launch an attack if and when an opportunity opens:

The decisive element in every situation is the permanently organised and long-prepared force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favourable (and it can be favourable only in so far as such a force exists and is full of fighting spirit). Therefore, the essential task is that of systematically and patiently ensuring that this force is formed, developed, and rendered ever more homogeneous, compact, and self-aware (185).

For comrades on the left, the temptation to embrace the "political fantasy" that every breach is an opportunity for the final battle should be seen precisely as that, fantasy. The principal reality we face requires us to build a “permanently organised and long-prepared force” that can be put into action when the time and place are right.

One Trench Is Not a Battlefield: The Long Slog Ahead

We now turn to the Mamdani election to assess if there are any signs of hope for a socialist offensive.

Mamdani's embrace of socialism, steadfast criticism of US policy toward Palestine, embrace of the multi-ethnic working-class tapestry of NYC (all welcome), and opposition from within his own Democratic Party resulted in an outright majority. He received the largest number of votes ever cast for a socialist candidate, a clear indicator of promise.

But Mamdani also had major advantages, including extremely weak opponents, excellent and constant media coverage, massive turnout, and a $4 million funding advantage over Cuomo by the end of October. Tales of Democratic Party failure to support him are not true. Mamdani secured approximately 85 elected official endorsements, 12 labor union endorsements, and 15 organizational endorsements, while Cuomo received 7 elected official endorsements, 6 labor union endorsements, and 3 organizational endorsements.

Despite these advantages, Mamdani's majority was razor-thin (50.4%), 6% less than Kamala Harris in 2024. He did not win a majority of votes in Queens (hew, despite large investments of time spent canvassing and money spent on advertising. Mamdani won a plurality in the borough and does not appear to have converted many Trump voters. This was not a blowout or an overwhelming mandate.

The Social Foundations of Mamdani's Coalition: The New Urban Socialist

Mamdani's winning coalition reflects trends that have powered other DSA and DSA-affiliated candidates into city councils seats across the United States. Mamdani is certainly among the most talented of the DSA elected officials and most profiled. And most importantly, he is the first DSA member to have won a mayoral race in a large city:

1. One core constituent of the electoral bloc consisted of middle-aged, middle-class homeowners employed in different sectors of the cultural industry (old gentrifiers, but youngish in age). The latter are cultural elites impelled to vote on the basis of status distinction, aesthetic preference, and ideology. Though the economic policies of Mamdani are not aligned with their interests, they vote for a socialist anyway..
2. Another even more important constituent was well-educated, young (mid-30s and below), whitish, and upwardly mobile gentrifiers, who, importantly, are mostly renters (Brooklyn, Lower East Side, Brooklyn-adjacent Queens), on the one hand. His strongest bloc of supporters was college-educated renters under 35 who had recently moved to the city and earned between $50,000 and a salary somewhere topping $200,000 annually.
3. As a socialist candidate who organized with the taxi workers union, centered working-class residents discursively and in terms of policy, and won endorsements of 12 unions (over Cuomo's seven), Mamdani split the low-income vote with Cuomo, lost the no-college vote, and lost the most affluent homeowner vote.
4. Mamdani put together a broad multiracial coalition that consisted of 60% of white voters, 90% Muslim voters, 52% of Black voters, and 60% of Latino voters. Inter-racial support appeal allowed him to win four of five boroughs. The exception to this broad support was Jewish voters. He suffered a decisive defeat despite large investments in this community, capturing only 31–33%. A 29-point deficit among Jewish voters was the most significant gap in his rather diverse coalition.
5. In terms of party affiliation, Mamdani won almost two-thirds of the Democratic vote compared to Cuomo's 30%.

What Is to Be Done?

Mamdani's victory was inspiring and points to a better future for socialists in the United States. Looking at the trends, we return to the central question: What is to Be Done? Using Gramsci as our guide and not our ideological desires and political fantasies, the answer should be clear: war of position and not maneuver.

First, this was a very narrow victory with almost no margin for error at the national level.

• Alienating even the smallest fractions of one constituent group would have resulted in losing the majority and winning by plurality. In national elections, where there are typically two-candidate races, Mamdani could not afford losing even one percent of this configuration of voters, which is much more difficult to replicate in places like northern Wisconsin than in Brooklyn.

Second, at the national level, there will be major losses in shares of key voting blocs.

• The two most important blocs of voters (young renting gentrifiers, middle-aged homeowning cultural elites) have provided the foundation to his electoral coalition. Outside large, global cities like New York and Los Angeles, shares of both blocs are much lower.
• 60% of white New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, around 20 points higher than white national voters did for the Democratic candidate in the 2024 election. It is unrealistic to believe that Mamdani perform as well with this demographic on the national stage.
• To nationalize Mamdani, the candidate would have to account for the loss of white voters and the diminished shares of gentrifying youth and cultural elites.

Third, he would have to significantly improve his margins with Black, Latino, and working-class voters.

• He should have had a decisive victory among the working class, but challenges clearly remain. As the share of the working class in the United States skews white, especially in swing state areas, it is unclear whether Mamdani will resonate with a constituency of non-university, homeowners, and that skew ideologically to the right.
• He won a majority of the Black vote, but he did not rack up margins as large as past candidates in NYC. However, given the general antipathy of the Black electorate toward the MAGA coalition, it is not hard to imagine such support.
• More concerning is the Latino vote and the lower margins than Harris in 2024. Moreover, the share of Latinos supporting a Democratic candidate has dropped by near 10% every election, including during Mamdani's election for mayor. It is not clear if he can offset losses of other key voting blocs (white in particular) by increasing margins with Latinos.

Fourth, uncertainty regarding the left message:

• Strident left positions drive high turnout in large, global cities, especially among young gentrifiers, but may repel centrist voting blocs in suburbs and rural areas.
• Strong and honorable commitment to a critical position on Israel and the genocide cost the candidate a large share of the Jewish vote. This is a high-turnout, large voting bloc in NYC and could have cost the election had he not racked up such large margins with young renting gentrifiers. Gentrifiers effectively enabled him to sacrifice such a large and impactful constituency.
• Strong embrace of socialism and polarizing policies such as rent caps (which I personally applaud) resonated with the youth vote, but he lost the homeowner voter, many of whom are ideologically conservative Latinos and immigrants. Mamdani racked up large margins with renters but lost homeowners. In NYC, this trade-off worked because the share of renters in the city is nearly 50%. At the national level, the split is 70:30 in favor of homeowners.
• These two positions that I admired about the candidate in NYC may likely repel certain voting blocs while offering only limited reservoirs from which to extract new voters or increase margins among existing voters. Mamdani will face declines in shares among white, gentrifier, and cultural elite blocs and cannot afford to alienate others on the basis of ideology.

Changes in Urban Hegemony: Learning from Minneapolis to Understand New York

We have studied leftward political shifts in Minneapolis and believe they reveal a fundamental transformation in urban politics directly relevant to NYC. The neoliberal regime that dominated cities since the 1980s (a compromise between developers and white middle-class homeowners) is crumbling. Yet no new coalition has emerged with sufficient legitimacy to replace it. This suggests that cities are experiencing what Gramsci described as an "interregnum," where "the old is dying and the new cannot be born."

This political conjuncture opens up opportunities for socialist-leaning candidates, whether DSA or not, but remnants of the old regime can still target veto points within the state to block a socialist agenda from moving forward. This has made exerting leftist authority, let alone domination, difficult and has made our cities increasingly ungovernable, with housing battles producing temporary victories but no durable solutions for working people.

For decades, American cities operated under a stable class coalition: developers received designated areas for profitable construction, while white homeowners secured low-density neighborhoods with rapidly appreciating property values. This compromise relied on containing Black and Brown communities through exclusionary zoning and selective incorporation of middle-class minorities.

But structural contradictions eventually emerged. As housing became unaffordable, a new and younger generation of middle-class professionals found themselves priced out of homeownership. Meanwhile, working-class communities of color faced displacement from both exclusion and gentrification.

Housing became the central issue that introduced intra-middle-class conflict—both economic and political—within a class that had demonstrated high levels of unity and cohesion since the 1980s. The younger generation of the middle class found themselves blocked out of the housing market largely because the older homeowning middle class had hoarded urban space, ensuring that zoning restrictions would block the expansion of housing supply in the city.

Middle-class homeowners also ensured that no rental housing would be built in their wards. Limited supply of housing enabled middle-class homeowners to capture the value from fast appreciating homes and ensure highly desirable amenity and density mixes that drove further demand in these areas.

The younger generation of the middle class were raised in many of the neighborhoods they could not afford because of resource hoarding behavior. This conflict over the distribution of housing opportunities also interrupted the dreams of young adults. They had been socialized to believe that they would become homeowners and believed it to be a constituting element of their class identity. Deprived of this opportunity, they were deprived of wealth and what they believed to be the natural progression of class. Intra-generational class conflict precipitated a splitting of the urban middle class into three divergent political forces:

• NIMBY: The dominant fraction, whose imposed land-use regulations made their areas into a bourgeois utopia. As conflict over land escalated, this fraction held firm.
• YIMBY: One fraction embraces market-based housing expansion as their path to homeownership.
• DSA: Another fraction abandoned these aspirations altogether, aligning with the working class and calling for non-market solutions like rent control and social housing.

These divisions reflect the contradictory class position of young urban professionals caught between upward and downward mobility. Raised with middle-class expectations but facing precarious economic prospects, they oscillate between defending class privileges and forming solidarities with the working class.

Between 2010 and 2021, Minneapolis's City Council underwent a dramatic ideological shift, with progressives rising from three to eight seats. This transformation was driven by gentrifying neighborhoods with concentrated populations of university-educated millennials, inspired by Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign and the resurgence of democratic socialism. The electoral bloc most responsible for the political surge of left-leaning candidates were young renting gentrifiers and fractures within the millennial middle class.

As the new generation of middle-class renters gained increased political power, the political power of the older generation of homeowning middle-class residents diminished rapidly. This enabled the left flank of the middle class to enact policies to facilitate housing production and ensure that much of that housing would be allocated to renters.

Despite the sweeping nature of the measure and its nearly unanimous support on City Council, the old middle class used its resources and mobilization capacities to block it through a number of veto points, planning offices, county jurisdiction, as well as courts and the legislature. What this meant was that despite the fact that the new left has official political power, that power has been effectively neutralized, stopping one of the most important and progressive housing bills from being enacted.

For national politics, we see very similar patterns happening in Minneapolis as in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities where we see a rising democratic socialist movement in America. And we also see that the coalitions driving them are precisely the coalitions we find in Mamdani's election. However, there are limits to that coalition as a national strategy.

The social class constituting it is unique. Given that highly educated upwardly mobile middle-class young people are more likely to obtain homeownership when living in suburbs or rural areas, the issues expressed by progressive gentrifiers do not resonate with them. It is a specific class interest restricted to those who largely live in big cities. However, regarding how those cities operate, there is great interest in the fact that the old hegemonic bloc has been shattered and that the central class constituting the old hegemonic bloc has been divided into three, ultimately limiting its power collectively while also providing working-class folks opportunities to advance their voice. How this plays out, we'll see.

Until a political bloc emerges capable of bridging these divides and building genuine cross-class alliances, urban governance will remain volatile and ineffective. The Minneapolis case reminds us of that technical policy solutions—even progressive ones like upzoning—cannot resolve fundamentally political problems due to the lack of hegemony. What is needed is a transformative political project that unites diverse constituencies around the city as a common good. For DSA chapters, this means organizing across class and racial divides to create coalitions capable of challenging the commodification of housing at its root; not just winning individual campaigns but building durable political power.

Beware of Thermidor

Trump’s local coalition largely stayed in place. Queens and Staten Island anchor it, and the demographic groups making up the coalition will likely anchor the MAGA electorate in in the next midterm election. coalition and will locally and nationally. The common demographic denominator of both boroughs was homeowning middle class homeowners. In Staten Island, the electorate veered predominantly white and upper middle class. In Queens, the electorate veered predominantly immigrant and lower middle class, working class, and self-employed. In 2024, it appears that Latino voters hailed from the same class position as Cuomo voters did last nicht. I wonder (out loud) had a hypothetical generic candidate run, would

Cuomo's coalition represented the city's more established, older, and affluent residents. These voters were seeking continuity and traditional governance over transformational change. His strongest supporters were non-college-educated homeowners over 45 who were born in NYC, earned over $200,000, and prioritized experience and public safety. This profile reflected a defensive coalition attempting to preserve existing power structures against demographic and generational change.

The coalition's weakness lay in its inability to compete for the groups driving New York's electoral future: young voters, renters, recent arrivals, and the broad middle class earning $50,000-$200,000. While Cuomo's emphasis on experience and realistic policies resonated with older, wealthier, and more established New Yorkers, it proved insufficient against Mamdani's message of affordability and change in a city where two-thirds of residents rent their homes and median household income sits around $80,000.