As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the promise of democracy feels increasingly hollow. Voter suppression, billionaire influence, partisan gerrymandering and executive overreach have exposed how power — not people — often decides outcomes. In The Democracy Illusion, a new Analyst News series, we examine how American democracy is being dismantled from within. Each story looks at a different front in that erosion — beginning in New York City, with the campaign of Zohran Mamdani.
On Nov. 4, Zohran Mamdani is poised to be elected the first South Asian Muslim mayor of America’s largest city. If the betting markets are any indicator, it’s a 92% certainty. The latest polls all have Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, leading disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits.
It’s a rise that’s been nothing short of meteoric. When Mamdani launched his Democratic primary bid for mayor of New York City in October 2024, he was virtually unknown — a state assemblyman from Queens with little name recognition. An Emerson College poll from February showed Mamdani polling at 1%, versus Cuomo’s 33%. That was a mere four months before his Democratic primary victory.
The numbers didn’t deter him. Driven by a relentless focus on affordability in the most expensive city in the country, Mamdani built a rare level of grassroots support through a remarkable door-knocking campaign and a passionate group of 90,000 volunteers — roughly the population of Trenton, New Jersey. His success is in no small part due to an exceptional ability to communicate that has observers calling him a generational talent.
On June 24, Mamdani won the Democratic primary decisively, garnering the most votes of any candidate in New York City primary history. Early voting in the general election has begun, and record turnout numbers indicate good news for Mamdani.
The very real prospect of a Mamdani victory has captivated the country and energized many progressives at a time when the Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet. Mamdani’s rise has underscored the central idea of democracy: voters speaking, mobilizing and choosing — even if the odds are stacked.
Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University, observes that Mamdani won not by algorithmic magic but by talking to a diverse group of New Yorkers — “which should not be underestimated.” In other words: a normal democratic path to power.
Resistance to Mamdani has exposed the hollowness of American democracy — a system that celebrates popular participation in theory, but punishes it in practice.
And yet his candidacy has triggered incredible resistance from across the political spectrum all over the country, the media and even the Democratic establishment, which has sought to derail his campaign even as popular support among New Yorkers continues to grow. The strategy of actually speaking to voters and building grassroots support has been treated as transgressive, especially when the winner’s ideology and identity disrupts entrenched interests.
This resistance has exposed the hollowness of American democracy — a system that celebrates popular participation in theory, but punishes it in practice. It doesn’t matter that voters can deliver a decisive mandate. If it doesn’t suit them, the elite and moneyed class, media gatekeepers and bipartisan power structures will move swiftly to contain it.
Mamdani’s sweeping primary victory should have been a triumph for new ideas and faces in the Democratic Party; instead, it has triggered bipartisan panic, anti-Muslim racism and a full-scale attempt to obstruct his candidacy at every level.
The billionaire panic
From the start, the media and moneyed class has been suspicious of Mamdani’s rise, acting as gatekeepers intent on keeping him out of power.
In a healthy democracy, the marketplace of ideas should include hard criticism and policy debate. But rather than acting to inform readers, major editorial boards moved swiftly to delegitimize Mamdani. The New York Post urged readers to “keep menace Zohran Mamdani completely off your NYC ballot.” The New York Times — which had said it would stop local endorsements — reversed course to warn against him, even while acknowledging Cuomo’s corruption.
If Mamdani can win here, others like him might win elsewhere.
But no group has railed harder against Mamdani than the billionaires who have poured millions of dollars into stopping his meteoric rise — in some cases, as Mamdani has wryly noted, spending more to stop his billionaire tax cuts than he has actually proposed to tax them. At an Oct. 13 rally, Mamdani named them directly: “Billionaires like Bill Ackman and Ronald Lauder have poured millions of dollars into this race because they say that we pose an existential threat. I am here to admit something: They are right.”
New York’s public-financing system was designed to level the playing field, but billionaire-funded political action committees (PACs) have found ways to bend election financing rules. Mamdani’s campaign has become a referendum on whether small-d democracy can survive big-money interference.
The money trail speaks for itself. A recent analysis by Forbes found that 26 billionaires and members of billion-dollar families across the country have spent more than $22 million into defeating Mamdani through mailers, ads and other opposition messaging. Just 16 of those billionaires actually live in New York. The rest don’t even have ties to the city — they simply recognize the influence that a campaign like Mamdani’s could have on the rest of the country.
If Mamdani can win here, others like him might win elsewhere.
The party that fears its own voters
It’s no secret the Democratic Party has been in crisis since the 2024 election cycle, when their candidates were crushed across the country, ultimately losing the House, Senate and the presidency. A CNBC poll from August found that favorability of the Democratic Party sank 32 percentage points, with just 24% of registered voters giving it a positive rating — the lowest of any party since 1996.
Given such abysmal numbers, one would think a young, charismatic, overwhelmingly popular politician running on the Democratic ticket would energize the party. Mamdani made affordability the defining issue of his campaign; even though early polling had suggested safety was the key issue in this election, his conversations with New Yorkers showed that cost of living was the underlying crisis. It worked — he brought together young progressives, working-class people and even peeled off disaffected Trump voters to build an astonishing coalition.
But when Mamdani won his primary, the party’s reaction was dread. Instead of treating his victory as proof of a living democracy — where new ideas and new faces can earn mass support — Democratic leaders have behaved as though voters had made a mistake to be quietly corrected.
Instead of treating Mamdani’s primary victory as proof of a living democracy — where new ideas and new faces can earn mass support — Democratic leaders have behaved as though voters had made a mistake to be quietly corrected.
Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York Democratic Party, outright refused to endorse, citing Mamdani’s stance on Israel and his Democratic socialist beliefs. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer stayed silent, while New York Gov. Kathy Hochul waited until last month. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries finally endorsed Mamdani on Oct. 24, days before the general election — after spending months resisting support. The delay signaled that a nominee with a mass mandate must first negotiate with elite anxieties before he can be treated as legitimate.
The pattern is familiar. Mamdani’s insurgent rise mirrors what the national party does to nearly every candidate that channels grassroots momentum, like it did to Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. This is the paradox of the Democratic Party — it claims to celebrate diversity, but only as long as diverse voices don’t buck the status quo.
As Sanders himself noted at Mamdani’s final rally, this election has implications far beyond the question of who controls trash pickup and bus routes in New York City. If Mamdani wins, he says, it gives permission for ordinary people in both parties to begin asking deeper questions about the American political system.
“Why are we in the United States the only major country not to guarantee health care to all as a human right?” he asked. “Why aren’t we paying our teachers the salaries they deserve? Why, in the richest country on earth, aren’t we ending homelessness … and why don’t we have a foreign policy that does not spend billions of dollars on a Netanyahu government starving children in Gaza?”
Islamophobia, from both aisles
Muslims in American politics have always dealt with racist attacks, and a Muslim who speaks up for Palestinian rights is met with extra suspicion. Though it has never been the centerpiece of his campaign, Mamdani’s views on Israel — consistent with international law and the human-rights consensus — have been treated as radioactive.
His call for an end to U.S. complicity in occupation and for equal rights for Palestinians has triggered bipartisan hysteria and a wave of bad-faith accusations of antisemitism. Critics have endlessly derailed interviews and debates by bringing up the subject — then accused him of being “obsessed” with Israel.
For both parties, Mamdani’s victory would signal that Americans are finally willing to challenge the decades-long bipartisan consensus on Israel, a possibility that has terrified the establishment. For a political class deeply invested in maintaining the status quo, a Muslim mayor who speaks plainly about human rights represents not a threat to Jews, but to power itself.
Drawing on their time-tested playbook, the usual suspects on the right have worked to smear Mamdani based on his Muslim identity: comparing his candidacy to the 9/11 attacks, calling for his denaturalization, labeling him a jihadist, posting an image of the Statue of Liberty cloaked in a burqa. The list goes on.
Anti-Muslim racism has become the last bipartisan permission structure. Trafficking in blatantly Islamophobic attacks results in no political capital lost, whether on the right or the left.
But in Mamdani’s case, some of the most shocking anti-Muslim vitriol has come from his own party. Two days after the primary, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand went on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show to accuse Mamdani of “glorifying Hamas” and supporting “global jihad.” It was an astonishing invocation of racist and Islamophobic tropes — and an outright lie. Though she later apologized under pressure, she has remained distant from his campaign.
The Cuomo campaign too, in desperation, has seized on the anti-Muslim racism tact with fervor. A pro-Cuomo super PAC (“Fix the City”) circulated an altered image that lengthened Mamdani’s beard and darkened his skin in a mailer — a tactic Mamdani called “blatant Islamophobia.” Cuomo’s campaign also posted and quickly deleted an AI-generated video full of racist and Islamophobic stereotypes.
Even more egregiously, on a conservative radio show, Cuomo appeared to laugh at a remark suggesting: “God forbid, another 9/11 — can you imagine Mamdani in that seat?” to which the host answered: “He’d be cheering.” Cuomo’s response: “That’s another problem.”
Current New York Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race several weeks ago, officially endorsed Cuomo (whom he’d earlier called a liar and a snake) and urged New Yorkers to not let the city become like Europe, comparing Mamdani to violent extremists.
It’s clear: Anti-Muslim racism has become the last bipartisan permission structure. Trafficking in blatantly Islamophobic attacks results in no political capital lost, whether on the right or the left. And in this election, it has fused with the weaponization of false antisemitism claims — a tactic meant to police the limits of debate on Israel and Palestine.
The rituals of democracy
Here’s a candidate who played by all the lower-case-d democratic rules: building a movement from the ground up, inspiring record turnout and winning a primary decisively. Rather than being celebrated, he’s been met by suspicion and slander.
Mamdani’s story reveals something that many of us would prefer to look away from: that there is an invisible line between the democracy America claims to have and the kind it actually allows. That line is maintained by money, narrative control and fear — fear of losing power and fear that an electorate might actually choose something transformative if given the chance.
We hold elections, we listen to speeches, we count the votes. But the scope of acceptable politics remains tightly controlled by those who already hold power, capital and control of the public narrative. Americans can vote, it seems, but only for choices that don’t unsettle that order.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, Mamdani’s campaign raises a question that stretches far beyond City Hall: Can people really choose, even when the system says no?
At his final election rally on Oct. 26, speaking before an audience of 13,000, Mamdani called on his supporters to take to the polls to defeat that power. “When the power of the people overwhelms the influence of the powerful, there is no crisis that government cannot meet,” he said to applause.
If Mamdani does not win, many Americans and international observers will read it as the ultimate sign that — despite Mamdani’s overwhelming popular support — the moneyed class will always triumph over the will of ordinary people.
As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, Mamdani’s campaign raises a question that stretches far beyond City Hall: Can people really choose, even when the system says no? If democracy means anything, it must mean that the governed get the final word. Otherwise, what we have is a mere illusion of democracy — a performance staged to look like consent while power stays exactly where it is.
