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Guest Essay

By Sam Tanenhaus

Mr. Tanenhaus is the author of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.”

Whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani has the skills and good fortune to succeed in the so-called second-hardest job in America no one can yet say.

But at age 34, he is already a historic figure, beginning with his biography: Born in Uganda to Indian parents and raised in the rarefied atmosphere of Columbia University (where his father is a prominent professor), he identifies as Muslim, was a state assemblyman from Queens, is a member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America and is married to an animator and illustrator, Rama Duwaji, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker.

His résumé looks like a composite picture of urban America in the 21st century — and of the broad coalition Mr. Mamdani built when he swept to victory in November. His “strong showing across the city among most racial and ethnic groups and most income levels,” The Times reported, included impressive performances in precincts where the median registered voter’s age was 45 or younger. It was an electoral map that overlaps with President Trump’s winning coalition in 2024.

Indeed, of all the statistics being processed and fussed over in post-mortems of Mr. Mamdani’s victory, the most telling may be the number of Mamdani voters who previously supported Mr. Trump — some 60,000, according to data tabulated by CBS News. The parallels with Mr. Trump’s victory were not lost on the president’s ally Steve Bannon. “Modern politics now is about engaging low-propensity voters,” he told Politico in an interview. Mr. Mamdani’s ability to attract them, Mr. Bannon said, means Mr. Mamdani “is a serious guy” whose victory points to something new on the left. “This is kind of the Trump model.”

That model begins with an understanding that positions that only recently seemed extreme or fringe have gained wider acceptance. In a recent book, “Lost in Ideology,” the political philosopher Jason Blakely wrote of “liquid ideologies” that spill across the boundaries of left and right and sometimes can “combine in unexpected ways.”

One striking example is the growing consensus of opposition to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Many in both parties were unprepared for this,........

© The New York Times