Zohran Mamdani on why he won

“We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus on an economic agenda,” Mamdani told me. “And when I asked those same Democrats who voted for Trump why they did it, what they told me again and again came back to rent and child care and groceries and even the $2.90 that it costs for a MetroCard, which is now out of reach for one in five New Yorkers. And the manner in which we have to respond to this is both to acknowledge it and actually put forward policies that would resolve it.” Mamdani channeled the same sort of outrage as Trump did but spoke in what he called “the language of affordability,” bargaining that voters would respond to his optimism by believing he would actually deliver.