In a New York Times op-ed this week, Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. This is an endorsement that comes as Mamdani’s victory increasingly seems like a done deal, with the young Assembly member leading by an incredible 21-point margin in the latest poll (the gap narrows significantly in a one-on-one matchup with former Governor Andrew Cuomo, but Mayor Eric Adams and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa have both stated forcefully that they have no intention of dropping out).
Some in the Mamdani camp see Hochul’s endorsement as a better late than never effort by the governor to start building a working relationship ahead of the arrival of the almost-certain next mayor of the state’s economic powerhouse, especially given that she is not from the city and has always had a somewhat uneasy relationship to it. Still, it’s a significant development, one followed quickly by an endorsement from state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. The moves only further highlight who hasn’t endorsed Mamdani yet. That now notably includes both Democratic congressional leaders (Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who both happen to be from New York City) and other local Democratic members of Congress, including some, like Rep. Laura Gillen of Long Island and Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who are both actively opposed to Mamdani.
I want to make a quick point here about what the endorsements mean. I wrote during the primary cycle that endorsements could actually be pretty important at that stage, because there was a relatively crowded field that did not feature the incumbent mayor and instead had as a key figure an obscure assembly member who powered his campaign through a strong ground game and online presence. There was, I think, some subset of the voting public that wanted to look to trusted community voices as a sort of confirmation that Mamdani was not only catchy but somehow for real — that he was a serious political player.
I don’t think that’s the case at all anymore. Love him or hate him, Mamdani is now a globally recognizable figure and everyone knows what he’s about. The inexperience question I think is still a valid one, but the people for whom that’s a dealbreaker decided that a while back, and those who support him do so in spite of (or in some cases, because of) his lack of a decades-long political track record. All of that is to say that endorsements landing now say less about the candidate than about the elected officials making them – or not.
Where these endorsements really matter is in a broader struggle within the Democratic party itself. That was evident in Hochul’s own endorsement, which was in large part about her own policy preferences and how they can often clash with Mamdani’s: While her op-ed noted that both she and Mamdani were single-minded about affordability, she said three separate times that they don’t agree on everything. The piece read as much like a rationalization as an endorsement – conceding that centrists lost this one but promising to keep an eye on the young mayor-to-be.
This intra-party fight has been going a long time now, arguably tracing back to the Occupy movement that sprang up after the Great Recession. It feels more acute now than ever, in the sense that the clash between Democrats and the contemporary Republican Party has moved well beyond policy disagreements and into a realm that many in both camps describe as an existential struggle.
I don’t say that hyperbolically: In the aftermath of the assassination of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump has started talking openly about using the powers of the federal government to break the back of what he calls “radical groups” and oppositional civil society groups like think tanks and the media, as have Vice President JD Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff (and de facto prime minister) Stephen Miller, who both spoke about what they called “terrorist networks.”
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said this week.
This is a man who’s previously called the entire Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” As I’ve written before, part of the strength of Trump and his allies depends on society falling for their bluffs that they have the capacity and support to do a lot of unpopular and often illegal things. But beyond that bluffing they certainly do have the power to do a whole lot of damage right now to perceived ideological enemies, as their open threats are making clear. That’s why the Hochul endorsement also focuses to some extent on Trump, with the governor writing that “we must never allow Mr. Trump to control our city like the king he wants to be.” (She also tossed a not-so-subtle barb at Adams, whose corruption indictment was dropped by Trump’s Justice Department, by adding that “anyone who accepts his tainted influence or benefits from it is compromised from the start.”)
Against the backdrop of a potential Democratic (and democratic) catastrophe, all of this endorsement business is a signal from Democratic leaders about who is going to be at the forefront of rebuilding a shaken party, and how. Mamdani is not running for an office that technically puts him in much direct policymaking conflict with Trump, but this is also about the rhetorical leadership against the greatest threat to the integrity of the nation since the Civil War. To zoom out even further, I think this endorsement battle is a signifier of the extent to which structural Democratic leadership can harness some of the roiling rage and consternation from their own voting base, versus being merely overwhelmed by it.
Mamdani’s popularity is to a large extent about hope and joy — the reason his campaign video style of man-on-the-street electioneering paired with unscripted interactions with regular people has been so successful is the way it depicts people who love living in New York City and are genuinely happy to see him run. The flipside, though, is that it’s also a campaign about discontent. The subtext of all of these interactions and the anchor message of Mamdani’s platform is that all of these people are also concerned about their ability to continue living in the city that they love, whether that be due to untenable rents, decrepit transit, an aggressive, encroaching federal government or some mix of those things and others.
During the primary campaign, I heard a good amount of talk about how the main distinction between the Cuomo and Mamdani campaigns was whether they were focused on hope or fear, and while I think that is a useful lens, I also think that Mamdani’s secret sauce has hinged at least partly on both. He is trying to present a hopeful vision for the future that also allows his constituency to channel some of the anger and disappointment that they have at a political establishment they feel has either chipped away at this future or, at best, stood by inertly while others did. My sense is that institutional leaders like Jeffries don’t quite know what to do with this energy and are fearful that it’s unsustainable, unstable or can’t be directed politically. Maybe they just wish they could put the genie back in the bottle.
