[music]

Zohran Mamdani: We have won from Harlem to Bay Ridge.

[crowd cheers]

We have won from Jackson Heights to Port Richmond.

[crowd cheers]

We have won from Maspeth to Chinatown.

[crowd cheers]

We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford.

[crowd cheers]

Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian today. Now we'll take a closer look at the New Yorkers behind Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's big upset win in the Democratic mayoral primary last week. As of yesterday, we have the results of ranked-choice voting. In those results, we saw Mamdani defeat former governor, Andrew Cuomo, 56% to 44% with a margin of 12 points.

That's up from 5 points on primary night. Now the shockwaves are set. Now that the shockwaves are settling, many in the city and across the country are looking to understand just how Mamdani delivered this stunning upset. Last night, Spectrum New York1's Errol Lewis asked the Democratic nominee how he won big in this diverse city with his brand of politics. Here's about a minute of his answer.

Zohran Mamdani: It wasn't even just going to be the same electorate as 2021. This was going to be a new electorate, one that looked more like the city itself. That had long been a goal of ours because it is all too easy to say that democracy is only under attack from authoritarianism from the outside, when in fact it's also under attack from a withering faith from the inside as to its ability to not only relate but respond to the most pressing crises in working people's lives. Fewer and fewer New Yorkers have been participating in that democracy. We had looked at 2021 and how only 26% of Democrats had turned out at that time, and 74% stayed home.

One of our hopes was to get more New Yorkers to register to vote, to get more Democrats to come out and vote in a primary. Some of the most exciting aspects of these results were the fact that we changed the nature of this electorate. We brought so many more younger voters in. We brought so many zero prime voters as they're described. We even saw the voter registrations in the last 10 days of this primary, changing from about 3,000 to more than 30,000, and that being indicative of more people seeing themselves in our politics.

Brigid Bergin: What we've seen from the results tracks with Mamdani's analysis. Young voters came out for Zohran in droves. The largest voting bloc by age were 25 to 34-year-olds, according to our analysis here at WNYC and Gothamist. There's also a lot of first-time primary voters. Polls didn't really capture this Zomentum, but a few lonely voices did see it coming. I'll give a little shout-out to one of The Brian Lehrer Show producers who predicted this big surprise would come on election night. In the Gothamist and WNYC newsroom, we also saw some signals of what was coming after looking at that early voting data, particularly those big bumps in North Brooklyn.

Our guest was also an early predictor. He's also got the kind of intimate analysis about the demographics of every New York City neighborhood that really takes a lifetime of living in this city to build. Joining me now to talk about the Mamdani coalition, as he's identified it, is Michael Lange, New York City-based researcher, strategist, political organizer, and author of the newsletter, The Narrative Wars on Substack. He's got an opinion piece in The New York Times called The Anatomy of Mamdani's Political Earthquake, and he's here to dissect that anatomy with us now. Michael, welcome to the show. It's great to talk to you and not just DM with you on X.

Michael Lange: Oh, the pleasure is all mine. That was such a kind introduction. I don't know if I'm worth all that, but yes, the feeling is mutual. It's great to actually get to talk to you.

Brigid Bergin: Well, I'm so glad that we're going to get to dig in. Right before Election Day, you joined Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani on his walk from the tip to tail of Manhattan as he made his last-minute appeals to voters living in the borough. What did you encounter on that long walk that shaped your prediction of the outcome of this election?

Michael Lange: I'm a lifelong resident of Manhattan, and I've always wanted to kind of do the walk from Inwood all the way to Battery Park, but I had never done it. I thought that this was a unique opportunity because I've had the good fortune of knowing Zohran Mamdani for a number of years.

I was like, "This might be one of the last times I really get to spend time with him and things are relatively normal," because I was kind of trending in the belief that he would kind of do the impossible and win the Democratic Party primary the following Tuesday. I set out on this walk, and I am of that 25 to 34 year old age group that has certainly been swept up in the Zohran Mamdani momentum, as you said, that was part of people voting at rather unprecedented levels. I'm kind of in the Mamdani bubble, as you could call it already. He is ubiquitous on all of the mediums that I frequent, obviously working in and around politics.

He's everywhere. I was like, "I really want to join him for this walk," because particularly for that first 100 blocks in Manhattan, kind of from Inwood all the way down to the Manhattanville area, which, it used to be an industrial part of the city. Now it's more colonized by Columbia University. Those are very working-class parts of Manhattan. It's not really the part of the borough that when people hear the word Manhattan, that they kind of think of. I was like, "This would be good. I really want to see his reception outside of, maybe, his traditional base."

I mean, this guy, well, number one, he walks very fast, which I should have seen coming. I was also thinking, I was like, "Well, at a certain point, he's gonna get hungry. I'm hungry. We're doing this walk till 2:00 in the morning. There'll be ample opportunities to stop for food, stop for water." Then I'm like, "Wait a minute. This is a guy who has been on a 12-day hunger strike before, who runs the New York City Marathon without really training.

Walking for a couple hours without food is nothing to him." I really got to see the hard worker, but also the physical endurance that has defined his five-borough campaign, and that I got to witness that relentless work ethic one more time up close. We were walking on St. Nicholas Avenue in upper Manhattan, also down Broadway. Some of these blocks, they're 75%-plus Spanish speakers. These are also very densely rent-stabilized areas. Again, fast walker, he could barely move a block without being recognized, younger people asking to have "their picture taken with the next mayor." Cars pulling over, rolling down their windows, honking their horns.

I think for as incredible as his reception was, as we got maybe into more of the younger, the more affluent parts of Manhattan, it was what I saw there that, again, I was hoping to get out of this Zohran Mamdani bubble. But it actually really reinforced maybe some of the priors or some of the trends that I was leaning towards, seeing that, "Oh, this is someone who can get a really raucous reception in all corners of the city. I think certainly last Tuesday, those results really bore that out.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, were you part of the great expansion of New York City's electorate? Was this your first mayoral primary election, or perhaps the first time you voted in a primary since 2012, a data point where we saw a real surge in our analysis of the early voting ahead of Election Day? Are you a young voter, an immigrant, or a person of color who voted differently than predicted by polls ahead of the primary?

What brought you around to the polls this time? If you voted for Mamdani, how did his campaign reach you? Was it the style of a fresh-faced candidate speaking in your native tongue? Did the policies focused on affordability secure your vote? Call or text us the number 212433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Michael, we have heard Mamdani talk about the thousands of volunteers who got involved with the campaign, their effort going door to door. How did that disrupt, from your perspective, what we think of as the traditional primary electorate?

Michael Lange: I think there was a tremendous enthusiasm gap between Mamdani supporters and Cuomo supporters. I mean, that, most bluntly, is borne out in some of the voter turnout that we saw. We saw that Zohran Mamdani's base neighborhoods, assembly districts, and whatnot, turnout went up 30%, 40%, in some cases 50%. Whereas in Cuomo's areas, particularly in middle-class Black communities, turnout either plateaued or decreased from four years ago.

I think that that was one where, as the returns are kind of pouring in, that was a very obvious symptom of that enthusiasm gap. Then, also, you can't not only put a price on what it means to having people volunteer their time because they believe in the candidate, and then just paying thousands of people to kind of just stand around and pretend that they care about a candidate when they themselves might even not be voting for that candidate. This is something that we've spoken about and that I've written about rather extensively. In New York, there's been a precipitous decline in institutional power of the time-tested forces that have shaped city politics for a very long time.

I think part of that is also an erosion of social fabric. I think Zohran Mamdani, one of the best legacies of his campaign, I was going to say this, whether he won or lost, was he really started to recreate a sense of civic political life, especially for younger people in the city. You have 30 to 50,000 volunteers. That is a community, in and of itself, of people who believe similar things, who are energized, who don't just canvas and then never talk to each other. Speak in group chats, they do picnics. There are social gatherings. There are all kinds of these events hosted by Zohran's campaign, but also New York City DSA in terms of debate watch, parties, gatherings, things like that.

It's bringing those tens of thousands of volunteers into some kind of year-round organizing apparatus. I think that type of building that level of community is something the city hasn't really seen in a long time. I think it's something that Cuomo's campaign was entirely lacking of. "Why have volunteers when you have $25 million in super PAC money?" This would be because, well, what last Tuesday showed is that, still, money can't quite buy everything.

Brigid Bergin: Let's get into the analysis that you wrote for The New York Times. You processed the results of last week's election, neighborhood by neighborhood, and grouped them into seven categories. Let's walk through those results and those neighborhoods now. You can take us on a tour of the city. I guess we will start in what you don, The Commie Corridor. Where would you place that on the map of New York City? Who are these voters, and what role did they play in Mamdani's coalition?

Michael Lange: This was kind of funny. I was taking some flak for this name, and I just want to say this is not a derogatory name, calling it The Commie Corridor. It was a low-key joke of organizers and people kind of on the left. Now it is in The New York Times. It kind of blew up. These are the youngest neighborhoods in the city, concentrated in western Queens and North Brooklyn, kind of sloping down a little bit more to around Prospect Park. Most people rent, most people went to college, and they are relatively ideological in terms of preferring what you would describe as a progressive or even a socialist candidate that.

Four years ago, they made up an insignificant number of the vote, and a lot of that went to Maya Wiley. This year, turnout was supercharged and they formed, really the core of Zohran Mamdani support and delivered to him, I would probably say-- I think net from just a handful of these assembly districts, he banked almost 100,000 votes. That was definitely the core of his support, kind of came throughout there.

Brigid Bergin: Then the next neighborhood or group of neighborhoods you identified as "No Kings, No Cuomo." I'll let you identify these neighborhoods in your response, but tell us what you mean by No Kings, No Cuomo, and the people who live there.

Michael Lange: For sure. Yes. This is like your Park Slope, your Carroll Gardens, your Morningside Heights. I would say maybe somewhat of an older electorate, a little more Gen X and a few more baby boomers than you would have in The Commie Corridor in terms of very millennial, very Gen Z. These are people with, also, a little more wealth. Upper middle class, maybe even wealthy. These are folks who make up the grassroots Democratic Party donor base, you could call it that, but also are like very activist-y in terms of indivisible, the Working Families Party, DSA going to that No Kings march, which was very well attended, but also doubled as an anti Cuomo march in some respects.

I think that these are basically the highest information and most civically engaged segments of the electorate. The assembly districts with the highest turnout are also that trend towards liberal and progressive. Then we're very reticent in terms of supporting Andrew Cuomo. In some of these districts, Cuomo is getting 14%, 16%, 18%. If you're getting a really paltry number like that in a district where 40,000 people vote, you multiply out a couple neighborhoods, that is a devastating math equation that you will have to overcome.

I believe just from two of the brownstone Brooklyn assembly districts, Jo Anne Simon's and Robert Carroll's, Mamdani drew a greater vote margin from just those two districts than Cuomo was able to attain from winning the Bronx and Staten Island entirely.

Brigid Bergin: Which, of course, speaks to the turnout in the Bronx and Staten Island in a Democratic primary. Michael, I want to ask you, one might have assumed that voters in some of these brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods would have been natural supporters of Brad Lander. How did Lander perform there? Do we have any sense of what that cross-endorsement meant to voters in those areas? I will preface this by saying we've acknowledged that in the ranked choice results that we've seen so far, we haven't actually seen where the Lander voters shifted to. Just based on those first-choice results, what would you say about that?

Michael Lange: To be fair, Brad Lander did do relatively well in some of these neighborhoods. He outright beat Cuomo in a couple of them. I do think that, especially the cross-endorsement, that was the final maybe nail in the coffin in terms of framing this really as a two-person race. I think a lot of voters really acted accordingly.

Michael Lange: Bradley, actually, he made it into the double digits as I expected, but the other candidates totally collapsed. For the most part, it was viewed by voters across the city as just a two-person race. Why even I'm ranking another person? I do think once we have more finalized ranked choice voting numbers, hopefully next week, some of those Lander to Mamdani transfers in, again, some of these commie quarter or No Kings neighborhoods, the final margin for Zohran will be overwhelming. 75 to 25, 80 to 20. It's just, if you are Andrew Cuomo and you are losing those neighborhoods to that extent, you need to be putting up Eric Adams 2021 numbers across Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and that was just something that he did not do.

Brigid Bergin: Speaking of that, I want to go to Gregory in Harlem. Gregory, thanks for holding, calling us back. You're on WNYC.

Gregory: Thank you very much. This is great. I'm an older guy, but as your screener said, I'm a young 79 years old, and I just love Mamdani. I think he's going to do a great job for us. I was actually able to shake his hand as we walked on St. Nicholas Avenue up here. All my people, because my mom used to live in Rochdale Village over there in Queens, and I knew that they were going to vote for Cuomo, and I had to put Cuomo not on my five. Just old, young guy. Just saying.

Brigid Bergin: Gregory, a question for an old, young guy who mentioned southeast Queens, and you said, I think, your mother voted for Andrew Cuomo. Is that correct?

Speaker E: No, no, my mother used to live there. She's no longer with us. I know that neighborhood very, very well, and I knew that they were going to go all out for Cuomo as they did for Eric. I just left. They were not in my five and would not be on my five. I also voted for Adrienne Adams because I believe we need a woman up in here. We need a woman somewhere in politics more than we have.

Brigid Bergin: Gregory, thank you for that. Thank you for your call. We really appreciate it. We want to get through the rest of these neighborhoods with you, Michael. We'll go a little bit quicker, but let's skip to Cuomo land. Since Gregory mentioned it, where were these neighborhoods? I think part of Cuomo land includes Southeast Queens.

Michael Lange: Yes. I boil down "Cuomo land" to middle-class and lower-income Black neighborhoods, Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish areas. Your assorted white ethnic outpost. Northeast Queens, southern shore of Staten Island, as well as some of the more Dominican neighborhoods in the Bronx. I think Cuomo, as predicted, performed relatively well here, with some pretty strong margins in his favor. As I mentioned earlier, other than in Orthodox Jewish areas, turnout either plateaued or decreased, and he was combating a surge in the Mamdani coalition that they were very ill-equipped for.

Cuomo spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, in his defense, he keeps saying, "Oh, well, we got more votes than Eric Adams. We got the votes that we needed. It was just Mamdani kind of blew us out of the water by changing the electorate." I think that's a pretty weak excuse, really. They kind of fundamentally misjudged not only what the electorate was, but also what it could be, because votes changes dramatically based on macro political conditions-- we're now in Trump 2.0, but also based on who the candidates are.

They should have had a better understanding that Zohran Mamdani was really turbocharging a cadre of young voters of all races and classes, and also South Asian Muslim voters. He made really phenomenal inroads with Hispanic and Asian voters, and that turnout would reflect that. I think that the broader thesis of the race is that generation mattered. All due respect to our previous caller, that the generation really shaped the outcome because it wasn't Zohran just doing well with the younger, urban, professional, gentrifying class.

Hispanic and Asian voters who are younger than the Black electorate, which is among one of the older electorates in the city. His most pronounced working-class inroads came there. That was, I think, primarily a function of just that electorate is younger because of some of maybe the realigning towards the Republican Party, you have taken maybe a couple more conservative elements just out of the Democratic primary election.

Brigid Bergin: Michael, a listener sent a text that said, I'd love Mr. Lange's take on Lower Manhattan City Council District 1 overwhelming support for Mamdani youth vote. I'm a Mamdani voter in this district, but a little older.

Michael Lange: Let me look at the map real quick before I just completely [unintelligible 00:22:06]

Brigid Bergin: I'll let you look at that.

[crosstalk]

We'll go to Jack and Bed-Stuy while you check that out. Jack, thanks for calling WNYC.

Jack: Hi, how's it going? My sister just texted me to call you guys, so now I'm here. Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergin: What do you want to say about your vote in the primary?

Jack: I guess just a general context of the political moment within my own community. I'm 28, I'm an animator. I found out about Zohran because Electronic Music festival endorsed him. That was maybe six weeks ago. Then we just had this floodgate of support that climaxed last week. Why I voted for him was because he's an anti-establishment Democrat. AOC and Bernie endorsed him, two people I really believe in.

I think that we need a Green New Deal in America. I think that Zohran is running on affordability and a really crystal clear message. He's a young guy, so I'm really excited. Another thing is, it just made me think, when he won, when was the last time that we had some good news? That was a really special moment. Just made you want to put your fist in the air and say, "There's still hope and we need leaders."

Brigid Bergin: Jack, thank you so much for that call. Michael. I want to give you a chance to both answer the text question I asked you before and react to that, and we still have to get through your neighborhoods, and we're running out of time, so just your quick reaction.

Michael Lange: I know. I think what the caller just described was how a lot of people felt. Also, Andrew Cuomo really very neatly embodied kind of that atrophying Democratic establishment that so many people are just increasingly fed up by. He was uniquely radioactive to younger voters. I think, if elected, he would have been the oldest mayor in New York City history.

He has a lengthy list of scandals, and I think there's no way to discount how much that hurt him. To answer the text question, in terms of Lower Manhattan, Cuomo won the areas that maybe you would expect, like some of the wealthiest parts, like Tribeca, Battery Park City. Youth vote for sure, because even in those areas, he didn't really win by as much as I thought he would. That was another obvious sign of him hemorrhaging ground. I think Mamdani did really well in the Financial District, but especially in Chinatown. I don't know if this quite counts as Lower Manhattan, but Alphabet City, the East Village, those were overwhelming precincts for him.

I think even in some of these older cooperatives that have a little bit more NIMBY politics in Lower Manhattan, Cuomo's barely winning some of these, even losing them. I just think by the end, his coalition was so reduced from where he started. I know he got 36%, but you compare that to 2018, the last time he was on a Democratic primary ballot in New York City, he got 67%. This is the worst 36% I've ever seen. That was a significant falling off from his apex, not that long ago.

Brigid Bergin: Michael, let's talk quickly about the other neighborhoods. If we could rattle them off. There's the Zomentum neighborhoods, which is where and who are those voters?

Michael Lange: South and East Asian neighborhoods where the voting base is younger, again, traditionally, a little more overlooked by the political establishments. Zohran made a big bet in reaching those voters both on the ground and also in their native languages. I think it paid off very handsomely, specifically in these South Asian and Muslim corridors.

Brigid Bergin: What are the gentrifying battlegrounds? Where are those neighborhoods?

Michael Lange: This is a big one. Central Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, Flatbush, Crown Heights, but then also Upper Manhattan, which is very close to me. Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood. These are areas of the city that have been gentrifying in the last 10 years, that are just increasingly young. Where it was a test of the youth movement versus Cuomo's coalition of Black and Hispanic seniors.

Mamdani just swamped him in both Upper Manhattan and central Brooklyn. He won Bedford Stuyvesant by 45 points, which is-- that's a thrashing. Again, if this was just the coalition of the young urban professional, Mamdani wouldn't be winning these precincts in Ocean Hill, Brownsville, in these parts of Bushwick that are adjacent to the cemetery. He really made pronounced inroads with Black and Hispanic millennials, Generation X, to the point where Cuomo's coalition, by the end, he was only winning public housing developments.

Some of the lowest-income voters, most, maybe, inclined to trust the known commodity, and senior centers. That was it. Cuomo's coalition, really, by the end, entirely collapsed. You have to criticize Cuomo for running a God awful campaign, but also give credit Zohran Mamdani for running an excellent campaign, on the contrary.

Brigid Bergin: The final neighborhood, you've touched on it a little bit, but you referred to Bloomberg's base, which I think is the Upper West and Upper East sides, down to part of the Financial District, to maybe dipping into where that texter was asking about. We know that Michael Bloomberg poured, I think about $9 million into Cuomo super PAC, Fix The City, as Mamdani looked increasingly viable. Where do you think these voters fit into the primary electorate? Really, then, more importantly, how important will they be in the general election?

Michael Lange: Great question. These are also areas that Kathryn Garcia did really well in last time. I think if there was a world in which Zohran Mamdani did not win, it would be because he struggled here. Again, he struggled a bit more in the Upper West Side than I thought. I would probably attribute that to some of the Globalize the Intifada fallout. He did really well in Hell's Kitchen. He's winning precincts in like SoHo, Gramercy Park. He swept Stuyvesant Town.

He did well in Yorkville on the Upper East Side, which is a much younger, more renter-focused part of the neighborhood than very wealthy areas on Park and Madison Avenue. Your question, looking ahead to the general, this, really, is the whole ball game because what made Michael Bloomberg be able to win three times is that, despite being a Republican, he was able to break into and win in Manhattan. I think in the Trump era, I think it would be very hard for any Republican or anyone not on the Democratic Party ballot line to do that.

Particularly when you look at the field in November.

Eric Adams, four years ago at his political apex, was still radioactive in many parts of Manhattan, performing at 25% or less versus Garcia. I think so long as Mamdani can hold this vote Blue no matter who, Manhattan cohort, and you layer that onto his base and combine that with the Democratic Party ballot line, he should be totally fine no matter who faces him in November, Cuomo, Adams, or Sliwa.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Michael, I know that you and I could look at individual election districts and parse the turnout for hours more, but we're going to leave it there for today. My guest has been Michael Lange, New York City-based researcher, strategist, political organizer, and author of the newsletter The Narrative Wars on Substack. He's got an opinion piece in The New York Times. There's a really cool animation with it as well. It's called the Anatomy of Mamdani's Political Earthquake. Michael, thanks so much for joining me today.

Michael Lange: Oh, the pleasure is all mine. It was so great to be on. Thank you for having me.

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