What can Zohran Mamdani teach Democrats?

The self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" knows something about winning low-engagement and young voters

There are currently two factions battling for the soul of the Democratic Party. On one side, centrists argue that moving toward moderate positions will attract swing voters. On the other hand, progressives insist that bold, transformative policies are essential for energizing the base and defining what the party stands for.

People are trying to force Zohran Mamdani's recent upset victory in the Democratic primary for NYC mayor to say something about this debate. To one side, he shows what's possible when candidates pick bold, progressive messages to appeal to new voters. To the other, he embodies everything wrong with the Democratic Party's activist "groups." Here are some examples.

However, I don't think Mamdani's win fits this ideological divide. In my analysis, the primary was less about moderation and progressivism, and more about issue prioritization and the candidates themselves. Through this lens, Andrew Cuomo represented an old and out-of-touch status quo — Cuomo is the definition of the Democratic Party that New Yorkers have been moving away from — whereas Mamdani offered a new path focused on affordability and authenticity. He turned out a bunch of new voters, especially young ones.

Ultimately, Mamdani’s success says less about ideology and more about engagement.

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The engagement divide

My mind keeps coming back to this one chart about the 2024 election. It shows how different groups of people would have voted, broken down by how much attention they pay to the news. The more you follow the news, the more Democratic-leaning you are, this poll says:

According to this chart, Kamala Harris would have won the election if only the people who pay the most attention to news voted in the 2024 election. If the election were re-run with those who pay little or no attention to the news, Trump would have won a victory larger than Ronald Reagan's in 1980.

The point of this chart is to show that today, how you vote is in large part predictable not just from what news you read, watch or hear, but whether you consume political information at all. There is an engagement divide in American politics that is just as powerful as some other divides the media talks about. The 25-point gap between Harris's vote margin among people who pay "a great deal" or no attention at all to news is larger than the divide over age, gender, and income.

The engagement gap is (currently) a problem for Democrats. And the trend has been moving against them for a decade. In 2012, predictive models showed that low-engagement voters favored Democrats by 14 percentage points, 57% to 43. But by 2016, their lead had dropped to just 6 points, 53% to 47. And by 2024, low-engagement voters flipped to supporting Republicans on net, 55 to 45 (source):

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