Mamdani’s Wrecking Ball and the Rise of Anti-Migrant Vigilantes

**Rory Stewart** (0:00)
How does an opposition party define its identity after it loses? That's the question hanging over American politics this week. Zohran Mamdani has suddenly become much more than a mayor. Every congressional candidate he endorsed won, including two who unseated incumbent Democrats. Some people think it's proof that the Democratic Party is now moving decisively left.
But I think the more interesting question is whether New York is telling us anything at all about voters and the midterms. And this week, one of the questions we've received is whether Mamdani is the future of the Democratic Party or in reality a gift to the Republicans and Trump. The answer could determine the future of the United States.
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**Alastair Campbell** (2:24)
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

**Rory Stewart** (2:27)
And with me, Rory Stewart.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:28)
And we're going to be talking about Zohran Mamdani and what he says about the future of the Democrats in the United States. We're going to be talking about whether there might be a new party in Australia. We're going to talk about some horrible stuff happening in South Africa in the treatment of their undocumented immigrants there. And we'll maybe have to touch a little bit, I think, at some point, Rory, upon the World Cup. But let's start with Mamdani. Katherine in New York.
Mamdani can't run for president himself, that's because he was born in Uganda, not the US. But is he effectively already running a shadow presidential campaign through the candidates he's backing? And if the Democratic Party establishment keeps dismissing New York as a one-off, aren't they making exactly the same mistake they made with Trump in 2015?

**Rory Stewart** (3:12)
First thing is what Mamdani did in New York. It's amazing. And people who haven't been following it.
What effectively happened is that he backed three candidates against the Democratic Party establishment.
Against, in fact, sitting members of Congress who were Democrats. So I don't know whether people can reach for a British analogy, but it would be as though, I don't know. Sadiq Khan suddenly decided he was going to run his own MPs against sitting Labour MPs and ran them from the far left. And he achieved these incredible results. So Claire Valdez came in in Brooklyn. Brad Lander defeated Dan Goldman. Dan Goldman is a Levi-Strauss-air, very, very wealthy man, two-term incumbent congressman, backed by AIPAC, pro-Israeli. And he beat him by a 30-point margin, 30-point margin.
But perhaps most dramatically of all was the New York 13 And the reason why we're talking about the primaries is that these are such safe democratic seats that whoever wins the Democratic primary goes on to enter Congress. Was Dariel Azchivalier, who's 33 years old, defeated a five-term incumbent congressman, Adriano Espayat, who is the congressional chair of the Hispanic caucus. And these are happening in very, very different areas. That's the other thing. It's very difficult to generalize. One of them, Brad Lander's victory, was in one of the wealthiest districts in New York, median income, about $120,000 median income and 61% graduate. Whereas Dariel Laza Chevalier's victory was in a place where the median income is $52,000. So one of the poorest areas of New York. And in both cases, Mamdani brought in figures who did many things. I mean, they talked about cost of living, but they were most dramatic because they were radically critical of Israel. These are people very comfortable talking about genocide in Gaza.