After a year in the political wilderness, Democrats in the US have finally got the taste of convincing victory in elections to different bodies and posts that appear to puncture the pride and confidence of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. This will be a big and much-needed boost to the morale of the Democrats in their bid to try and bounce back in the mid-term polls slated a few months away. In every election held in the US on November 4, whether for Mayor of New York, Governor in Virginia and New Jersey, Supreme Court judges in Pennsylvania, or a redistricting referendum in California, the results clearly went in favor of the Democratic Party. This means the gains the Republicans had made among Latino and African American voters just a year earlier seem to have started to abruptly evaporate. It is certainly a cause of concern for the ruling dispensation, even though Trump tries to brazen it out by asserting that his name in no way figured in the ballot papers of those elections. That could be a solace Trump may desperately need, but it does show how the white supremacist agenda that brought Trump back to power is losing its sheen and cost-of-living issues are swaying the common man far more than rhetoric on divisive politics.
It could be that Trump’s approach to governance and the consequences of his economic decisions got rejected. With the current federal government shutdown – the longest in US history-, Republican candidates rather than the Democrats seem to have been held responsible at the polls, even though the latter had initiated the standoff to defend health insurance against proposed budget cuts. The very next day – November 5 – the Supreme Court justices examining the constitutionality of the tariffs the US President had unilaterally imposed on other countries showed their scepticism of the supposedly special powers Trump had used bypassing the Congress to launch his global tariff war. Some of the judges appointed by Trump also put tough questions to the Solicitor General. If the verdict goes against Trump, the fallout would damage his image.
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Of all these Democratic successes one stands out as the most remarkable – the victory of Zohran Mamdani as the New York City mayor. The young Mamdani had entered the mayoral race in October as a socialist outsider who was not known beyond his constituency. Yet, what he did was a miracle of sorts, winning over 50% of the vote after the highest turnout in more than half a century. He was pitted against the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo as Independent and backed by billionaires. He becomes the youngest mayor of the US’ largest city for more than 100 years and the first Moslem to assume charge. New York is a traditional Democratic stronghold and as such Mamdani’s victory should not be hailed as a national bellwether but it has emboldened Islamists across the world. But, the significance of his victory lies in the specific challenge that he has thrown at the Republican Party by enlisting the support of working-class and immigrant voters. He steered the polarization politics Trump-led Republicans are good at and seems to have excelled them. He campaigned relentlessly and almost exclusively on the theme of affordability but underpinned by the immigrant story. His opponents sought to use his socialist credentials against him, but the charges of ideological extremism failed to cut much ice with the voters who responded overwhelmingly to his pledges of free childcare, free buses and a rent freeze offering public solutions to years of rising inequality. With Indian blood running in his veins, Mamdani seems to have worked out his American political dream with, probably, a huge dollop of the idea of sops for the poor just as politicians do here in India.
Mamdani’s promises persuaded a vast army of 100,000 volunteer canvassers to knock on millions of doors, akin to the early days of Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi.
It would be wrong to read too much into these Democratic victories. But at the same time it would be a mistake to dismiss green shoots of political recovery when they appear. US politics is now delicately poised with Trump’s popularity sinking amid ongoing cost-of-living concerns, high inflation and the hollowness of MAGA pledges to improve blue-collar living standards. The new focus on affordability may turn out to be the right strategy for the Democrats to regain their lost ground.
