The 2008 global crisis cracked open the foundations of neoliberalism and the bipartisan Democratic–Republican regime. The Democratic Party, in particular, struggled to contain the surging dissent: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders insurgency. Zohran Mamdani’s 2020 victory for NY State Assembly, running on a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) explicitly socialist platform, against a corporate-backed incumbent in a heavily working-class, immigrant district, was yet another expression of this ongoing political rupture—one where union drives grow, Palestine solidarity holds steadfast, and youth radicalization deepens, as seen in the recent wave of direct action in Los Angeles.

With Trump’s second victory months ago, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party redoubled its efforts to scapegoat the left, particularly the Palestine solidarity movement, hoping again to seal the cracks in its containment strategy. This would mean using last month’s (June 2025) Democratic Party primary election in NYC to shut down DSA’s attempt to expand a left-wing realignment within segments of the Democrats’ base, such as youth, multilingual immigrants and racialized working-class communities most exposed to the failures of neoliberalism; and shifting leftward. But the establishment’s favoured candidate, Andrew Cuomo, disgraced for his sexual harassment and COVID-era scandals as a once popular governor, faced a resounding defeat by Mandani.

Unlike Kshama Sawant—who after multiple victories as an independent socialist in Seattle is now running for Congress—DSA’s electoral strategy accepts the difficulty of breaking the two- party system in the U.S. It uses the ballot line of the very party it criticizes, hoping to expose the limits of the bipartisan regime from within, while canvassing working class communities and agitating around demands establishment Democrats fear, such as free childcare, rent freezes, free busing, and city-run grocery stores. While DSA has long been subject to the charge of insufficient class independence, Mamdani’s run for mayor–a citywide executive position–presents additional contradictions to even DSA’s supposed transitional terrain of partial class independence.

Once outspoken about demilitarizing the NYPD and using slogans like “defund the police,” Mamdani has already softened these positions, campaigning instead to be a “mayor for all”—including billionaires in the global capital of finance. This retreat parallels Jeremy Corbyn’s trajectory in the UK, whose concessions to Labour’s right wing paved the way for his defeat.

Mamdani has already stated that his campaign platform is not DSA’s platform. And DSA, for its part, has historically avoided executive offices precisely because they expose the limits of partial independence from capital. DSA does not have the organizational capacity to discipline or remove electees, even in small state-level races, let alone a mayor. Some pundits are now erasing the socialist groundwork of his win altogether, chalking it up to savvy use of social media and “digital native” branding—ignoring the 30:1 financial disadvantage he overcame against Cuomo, backed by billionaires and pro-Israel Political Action Committees (PACs).

Still, the campaign raised real demands based on listening to NYC’s working class, something Mandani even showed in his social media videos. As a result he, along with DSA, built a structure that drew upon over 20,000 volunteers, a signal of the working class’s desire—locally and globally—for a political alternative, something the second article of this three-part series will explore further. This was despite fractures within the labour bureaucracies’ endorsement processes, with some throwing their weight behind Cuomo, others abstaining, and few moving to the left to respond to their membership’s enthusiasm for Mandani.