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A seasoned veteran of Chicago politics once told me that it often takes Democrats a couple of four-year cycles out of office before they can pull their fractious factions together into a winning coalition.

There's a lot of truth in that, and that's why I am not surprised to see the off-year energy and enthusiasm well up around the neophyte campaign of relatively unknown New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Politics will often amaze you. Who would have expected in a time of wars in the Middle East, and reverberations of those conflicts across the United States, that a young Muslim American would have a fighting chance of becoming mayor of the country's largest city?

Yet in New York, along came Zohran Mamdani to pull ahead of the pack in the Big Apple’s Democratic mayoral primary.

As Mamdani moved up through the stages of the city’s ranked-choice voting from “Zohran who?” to new prominence as a rising star among next-generation Democratic leaders, I was reminded of young, relatively unknown Barack Obama campaigning through Illinois corn country on his way to winning a hotly contested Democratic U.S. Senate primary back in 2004. Obama won the Senate race that year, and four years later he followed the same meteoric path to win the U.S. presidency.

As Obama was, Mamdani is a conventional-wisdom longshot who has risen up against a racial-ethnic glass ceiling. A gregarious and jovial 33-year-old state assembly member and self-declared democratic socialist, Mamdani also may be the first major candidate to include “rapper” on his resume.

Early handicapping favored Andrew Cuomo, 67, to prevail in the primary. Cuomo, you may recall, dominated New York‘s politics for a decade as governor before resigning four years ago amid corruption and sexual misconduct allegations.

But despite Cuomo's boatload of campaign money and endorsements by a pantheon of establishment Dems, Mamdani emerged the clear winner, confounding many regular Democrats, including some Jewish party faithful who see in the young candidate an implacable foe of the state of Israel.

Many centrist observers bemoan the fact no better consensus candidate than Cuomo had entered the race. Even Cuomo’s allies complained that he didn’t seem to have his old energy or enthusiasm about the race, and the feeling seemed to be contagious.

Whatever else you may say about the ex-governor, he hardly represented a departure from the hidebound, conventional election strategies that sank the party in 2024. You know, the performance that brought out the circular firing squads as Donald Trump began his Revenge Tour of 2025.

Making a big difference in the New York Democratic primary were younger voters who are more interested in bold change on pressing bread-and-butter issues, such as New York’s notoriously high rent and other high costs of Big Apple living.

Mamdani appears to have a lot of ground to make up to reach older traditional Democratic voters who can’t hear the label “socialist” without having heart palpitations.

The congenial Mamdani hardly comes across as threatening, but he’s going to have to deal with that credibility perception with assurances he still sees something good about free market capitalism, about which he has been uncomfortably snide on occasion.

He will also be called upon to state explicitly what his views are on Israel's right to exist, and on how far he's planning to commit the city of New York to oppose what he has termed the genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the territories Israel controls. These are important positions to New York voters on both sides of the question.

In my view, Mamdani also needs to distance himself from the “defund the police” movement, a misguided reaction to the very real issue of police misconduct. While New York enjoys lower crime rates than other major U.S. cities, its citizens still place a high value on law and order. There’s time for Mamdani to flesh out some genuine plans for improving enforcement and helping New Yorkers feel safe, too often an underappreciated priority in liberal politics.

Mamdani is well-placed to help New Yorkers of various backgrounds work together and save their communities, beat back the “soft on crime” stereotypes and restore the sense of safety that many recall from the days before former Mayor Rudy Giuliani went full MAGA with President Trump.

Moreover, after all the hand-wringing and soul-searching that followed the Democrats' 2024 disaster, Mamdani offers a ray of hope for a recovery before the next national election cycle takes shape.

Among the many postmortem conclusions in Democratic ranks is the sense that it's time for the party’s old guard to step aside for a new generation.

Here again, the comparison of Mamdani to Obama is apt. He is an avid and appealing campaigner. He is a compelling speaker. He articulates a point of view on kitchen-table issues that Democrats have begun ceding to right-wing populists. Even where he is arguably the most controversial — on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — he seems to place high importance on genuine dialogue based on common notions of justice.

As polarizing as Mamdani may appear to some — and make no mistake, the mighty right-wing noise machine is firing on all cylinders to demonize him — the points of contention that surround him are all too real and endemic in the Democratic "coalition" writ large. Whether Mamdani wins or loses the mayoral race, the cleavages that challenge his election campaign also challenge the Democrats' fortunes nationally in 2026 and 2028.

The sooner Democrats mend their coalition, the better their chances will be to redeem American democracy.

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As Obama might say, keep hope alive!

(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)

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