F. Andrew Wolf, Jr. ——Bio and Archives--November 26, 2025

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Clearly, he defied the odds, defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier this month, becoming mayor in an election that saw 2 million voters cast ballots.

Just months ago, when Mamdani entered the race, he was polling in the single digits and few believed he could defeat Cuomo.

In the end, Mamdani defeated him twice.

And in a year when Democrats have largely been floundering, there is no shortage of pontifications about why the young NY Assemblyman fared so well: affordability tops the list; his message was consistent; experience didn’t matter; he flooded the zone; Mamdani harnessed the energy on the left.

While some of these “reasons” may have played a role in Mamdani’s victory, it is something much more fundamental operating at a deeper level that provided the intellectual impetus behind his defeat of the New York establishment--especially the Democratic party’s version of that moiety. The new mayor-elect of New York knows who he is and what he stands for--the people who voted for him know neither.

Zohran Mamdani, 34, is a self-professed democratic Socialist. He was elected with just over 50% of the vote in a 3-way race with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

How did New York City, arguably an archetypical metaphor for capitalism, elect a democratic Socialist--some have employed the term Communist--mayor? If one takes issue with the word Communist, consider Mamdani’s comment during the campaign that democratic Socialism must “seize the means of production.”

Mamdani ran on a

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