Mychal Denzel Smith is the author of Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign struggled to win “the Black vote.”
That was part of the narrative that emerged after Mamdani’s surprising win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Though Mamdani, a state assemblymember, decisively triumphed over his chief opponent, disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the young democratic socialist’s performance in majority-Black precincts proved to be a weak spot.
Mamdani’s weak showing wouldn’t be cause for much concern to his campaign if he were only running in the general against perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. In addition, however, Mamdani will be facing two erstwhile Democratic candidates: disgraced incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and, again, Cuomo. In past elections, they have both relied on Black voters as a crucial bloc of support.
Mamdani’s campaign could show us a different side of politics in New York.
Last month’s results in some 15 percent of voting precincts with majority-Black populations, though, don’t tell the whole story. Rather than being a race about a mythically monolithic “Black vote,” Mamdani’s campaign could show us a different side of politics in New York — one that speaks to Black voters based on their material needs.
Staying on message about affordability was Mamdani’s route to victory in the primary, and it could hold the key in the general, too. If he can win over some Black voters — rather than the “Black vote” — he may yet again shock political observers and land himself in the mayor’s office. His foes, however, are already seizing on his primary performance.
Younger Voters
It’s true that Mamdani struggled with Black voters. Cuomo won more than half of the votes in majority-Black precincts, while Mamdani got about 34 percent. In those areas with more than 70 percent Black residents, Mamdani did even worse.
In the general election, though, Mamdani stands a chance to perform relatively well among Black voters. With both Cuomo and Adams running, their historically strong numbers in Black precincts may be split: The most recent polling shows Cuomo with 32 percent support among Black voters, and Adams trailing with 14 percent. Mamdani currently leads with 35 percent.
Either Adams or Cuomo could consolidate their Black support if the other drops out, but Mamdani’s position speaks to something else that commentators almost never talk about.
There is no singular “Black vote.” Not even with the Democratic Party, and certainly not in New York City, where the Black population is a wildly diverse mix of native-born New Yorkers, transplants like me, immigrants from the entire diaspora, radicals, conservatives, queer people, church-goers, Muslims, and older and younger residents.
The so-called Black vote, in other words, doesn’t need to shake out the way it frequently has in the past; all indications are that it won’t.
Mamdani is the candidate that has shown he can seize on young voter enthusiasm — and with young Black voters, themselves no monolith, offering Mamdani an opening. True, some of these younger voters are moving toward the Republican Party, but it’s also true that young Black Democrats are more likely to hold more progressive views than their older counterparts.
Indeed, young Black voters appear to have gone decisively for Mamdani in the primary. According to one primary exit poll (with a small sample size), about 70 percent of Black voters under 50 voted for Mamdani citywide. There’s no reason to think he will lose that support in the general, and if he can continue to increase young Black voter turnout, he may not need the older ones.
The Latest Attack
This is something Mamdani’s adversaries don’t want to talk about — which is why they’re so insistent on boosting the narrative that he had a poor showing among Black voters.
Shortly after Mamdani’s primary victory, the first opposition research attack showed how his opponents plan to go after him: by seeking to diminish his support among Black New Yorkers.
The salvo came in a recent New York Times report on Mamdani’s 2009 application to Columbia University. The then-17-year-old had checked racial identification boxes for both “Asian” and “African American.”
Mamdani was born in Uganda, as was his father, an Indian Ugandan, and was raised there and in South Africa until coming to the United States when he was seven years old. He told the Times: “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background.”
It’s not much of a scandal: A college applicant with a background that does not neatly fit into U.S.-defined racial categories attempted to use those categories to accurately describe his identity.
The story was more remarkable for how it came to be: a hack of Columbia’s records, intended to show that the school was still pursuing race-based affirmative action admissions. The information was then fed to the Times reporters through Jordan Lasker, who has supported eugenics, to whom the Times granted anonymity and described merely as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about I.Q. and race.”
In the end, checking the boxes didn’t help Mamdani; he didn’t get into Columbia, despite his father’s professorship there.
The attack is of a piece with the Democratic Party establishment’s playbook for winning over Black voters. While some Democrats forgo actual policy talk and appeal to cultural signifiers — think of Bill Clinton playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show — others play up any real or imagined racial grievance.
The Adams campaign has already pursued this approach. In response to the Times story, it tried to paint Mamdani as a fraud — a fraud who attempted to personally benefit from the hard-won gains of Black political struggle.
What’s Actually Happening
Mamdani has acknowledged this lack of enthusiasm among some Black voters and has noted that he must do more in terms of direct outreach. He has already appeared several times alongside Reverend Al Sharpton and is hitting the Black church circuit.
Mamdani, in other words, is seeking to build his support among those who typically constitute what we refer to as the “Black vote” — frequently older, often church-going, and used to dealing with the Democratic establishment.
Democratic leaders have for years courted the “Black vote” with an old playbook. It includes a brand of retail politics where a select number of power brokers have served as intermediaries and representatives of the greater Black community — and often engage in a sort of transactional politics with the party.
What’s notable about Mamdani’s appeals to traditional Black stakeholders in New York politics is that he’s not sticking to this playbook.
And here, young Black voters have a chance to do some remaking of their own. What the last decade-plus of black-led movement politics has shown is a disdain among millennial and Gen Z Black people for this version of top-down political organizing — the media’s attempts to brand figures like DeRay McKesson and Shaun King as new age leaders be damned.
If young Black voters can play a deciding role in a Mamdani win come November, it may be a sign that the old playbook is no longer the only game in town. Politicians may have to do something they haven’t considered for decades: treat Black voters like they are people with real, material interests — informed by their experience of race and racism in the U.S., but material interests nonetheless.
Mamdani’s affordability program offers direct benefits to young black New Yorkers eking out a living.
This is where Mamdani has been consistent from day one, focusing on issues of affordability: more direct government intervention in housing, transportation, childcare, and groceries. These are the “kitchen table” issues Democrats say they would like to focus on, though we have seen little of it. Instead, the party focuses on cultural appeals and fearmongering about public safety.
Mamdani’s affordability program, however, offers direct benefits to young Black New Yorkers eking out a living in a city of rising rents and depressed wages. If implemented, this agenda could make it easier for young Black New Yorkers to stay in the neighborhoods Black people have historically called home.
Rewriting the rules is never easy. The attack on Mamdani over his Columbia application appears not to have legs, but it will not be the last attempt. A concerted effort on the part of young Black voters to resist the tired old politics, as well as Mamdani’s push to address their real concerns, may be enough to not only overcome the old guard, but spell its ultimate demise.
