Yusuf Bangura (Switzerland): Sierra Leone Telegraph: 10 November 2025:
I shouldn’t allow the excitement of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory in New York City’s Mayoral election to pass without a few remarks, despite other demands on my time.
For one thing, even though I’ve tuned out US national politics in my daily routine, I very much followed Mamdani’s campaign after he defied the odds and won the primary in April. I even stayed up late to know the result and listen to his engaging, upbeat and defiant victory speech.
I think I went to bed around 6 am. I tuned out the TV punditry, which I stopped listening to in 2023 after the mainstream channels’ awful coverage of the Gaza genocide. I switched on to CNN around 4 am our time when the provisional result was expected to be announced.
While waiting, I read an interesting new book I have just recently bought from Amazon by two seasoned linguists, Selasie Williams and Tom Spencer-Walters, titled Sierra Leone Krio: Language, Culture, and Traditions.
I’ve been attracted to Mamdani’s politics because of his courageous and admirable effort to upturn three big assumptions or beliefs about US politics.
The first is the power of billionaire money in shaping voter choices and electoral outcomes. It is generally believed that billionaires call the shots in US elections—they can make or break politicians in both major parties through the enormous funds they channel in election campaigns.
Big money has, indeed, had a corrosive effect on US democracy. The online platform Represent Us reckons that it costs about USD2 million dollars to win a US Federal House seat and USD 20 million to win a Senate seat. It also reveals these startling statistics: “Nearly 94% of House candidates and 82% of Senate candidates that outspent their opponents won their elections’’. A staggering USD 14 billion was spent on federal elections in 2020.
Politicians across the divide shared this huge amount of money, even if unequally, ensuring that both parties are ensnared in the grip of corporate capital, which can pull the plug if candidates pursue policies that threaten their interests.
The cosy relations between billionaires and Democrats, a party that claims to defend the interests of common people, has given rise to the concept of Corporate Democrats. Such Democrats impose limits on the extent to which they would tax the super-rich to fund programmes that help the working and middle classes. They seem interested only in marginal, trickle-down improvements that their billionaire donors find acceptable.
Forbes estimates that “at least 26 billionaires and members of billionaire families .. donated more than $22 million to Mamdani’s opponents’’, with Andrew Cuomo, who Mamdani beat in the primary, receiving the lion’s share. Michael Bloomberg, the Lauder Family, Bill Ackman, and the Tisch family top the list of billionaires who opened their wallets to Cuomo to stop Mamdani.
Mamdani, on the other hand, relied largely on individual donors with small amounts and an army of 100,000 young volunteers to drive his campaign. His uplifting and progressive message, oratory, and organisational ability proved decisive in defeating Cuomo and the moneybags.
Mamadani’s victory has also punctured the belief that elections can’t be won by candidates who openly subscribe to a socialist ideology, even if, as Mamdani’s has done, “democratic’’ is added to socialism. The political establishment and corporate media, owned by billionaires, have, over a period of decades, successfully made socialism a dirty word in America—a word that stands for humanity, progress and redistribution in Europe and elsewhere.
US establishment politicians and their billionaire backers ignore the powerful evidence that the most successful countries in human or welfare development in the world are those in the Nordic region—Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, which top most global indexes on social or inclusive development. The economic and social success of these countries was midwifed by the long rule of social democratic parties, or democratic socialists.
Throughout the campaign, Mamdani leaned on the words of Martin Luther King to push back on the smears and misrepresentations of his ideological and policy positions. As King said: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children’’.
It was Mamdani’s clearly-defined and forceful message on redistribution in favour of the struggling masses of New York that frightened the billionaires. He proposes a rent freeze for rent-stabilised apartments, universal child care, fast and free buses, experimental city-run groceries stores, and a two percent additional tax on the city’s wealthiest residents to pay for the programmes. Most Europeans won’t bat an eyelid on these policies. The majority of New Yorkers also embrace them and reject Cuomo and his billionaires’ scare tactics and smear campaign.
The third belief or article of faith that Mamdani shattered on Tuesday is that a candidate’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict have to align with those of Israel. The realist scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, provide compelling insights on how the Lobby, which is a loose coalition of groups, exerts considerable influence over the US presidency and Congress, and controls how information is presented in mainstream media.
One of the groups in the Lobby, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is believed to have a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress—unflinchingly punishing representatives who deviate from the Lobby’s position on Israel and rewarding those who comply.
Mamdani has been unapologetically vocal in his support for Palestine and highly critical of Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. He vowed, as mayor, to effect Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arrest and hand him over to the International Criminal Court if he visited New York.
Many mainstream commentators felt such a stance would be unpopular in the US and derail his campaign, especially in a city that hosts the largest number of Jews in the US—slightly more than one million residents, which is an electoral force. One thousand Rabbis signed a letter denouncing his candidacy.
But Mamdani’s views on the Israel-Palestine conflict rhyme with those of the wider US public, especially the rank and file of the Democratic Party, which dominates the politics of the city.
According to a recent CNN poll, whereas in 2023, Americans’ support for Israel was 48 percentage points higher than their support for Palestinians, Americans in 2025 support Palestinians over Israel by one percentage point.
The biggest shift in attitudes is among Democratic voters. Whereas in 2023, Democrats supported Israel over the Palestinians by 26 percentage points, by 2025 that support had dried up. Democratic voters now support the Palestinians over Israel by a whopping 46 percentage point margin—a more than 70 percent swing.
A New York Times poll in September 2025 also found that only 25 percent of New York City’s voters supported Israel in its dispute with Palestinians, while 44 percent supported the Palestinians, and 12 percent supported both.
A comprehensive win
It, truly, has been a political education in the past four maths as I watched Cuomo and other corporate Democrats, Wall Street billionaires and Trump scramble to scupper Mamdani’s chances of winning the election.
These forces closed ranks and waged a scorched earth campaign against him. They accused him of anti-Semitism, cheating his admission into college by adopting a false identity, and articulating a wild policy to defund the New York Police Department. They also derided his faith as a Muslim and linked him with terrorism—with Cuomo laughing and seeming to agree with a right-wing talk host that Mamdani would applaud another 9-11 terrorist attack on New York.
The electoral strategies they adopted to beat Mamdani also looked desperate. When Mamdani won the primary, the billionaire class thought Cuomo was toast as far as New York politics was concerned. They threw their weight behind the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams—a highly compromised figure, who Trump rescued from a legal case on corruption and illegal campaign financing.
But when Cuomo decided to run as an independent and Adams’ poll numbers looked unimpressive, the billionaire class and Trump switched to Cuomo. There were reports that Adams was promised an ambassadorial job to drop out of the race, which he eventually did, after initially insisting that he would stay in the race because he was more likely than Cuomo to defeat Mamdani.
However, the anti-Mandani coalition could not get the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, to drop out of the race. Trump even threatened to withhold funds to the city and send in the National Guard to maintain law and order if Mamdani won.
The two most senior national Democratic leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer (Minority Leader of the Senate) and Hakeem Jeffries (Minority Leader of the House of Representatives) refused to back Mamdani—Jeffries only reluctantly did so a day before early voting started, when it was clear that Mamdani was unstoppable. The idea of denaturalising and deporting Mamdani was also floated.
I watched Barack Obama being demonised by the hard-right and Trump when he first ran for the presidency in 2008. A black person had never been president of the U.S., so many people wrote him off as an upstart. With ancestral links to Kenya, Obama’s citizenship and birth certificate were incessantly challenged. Critics also doubted his Christian faith and used his middle Arabic name, Hussein, to mock him and link him to terrorists.
However, as a centrist, Obama did not face a convergence of corporate capital, corporate Democrat and Republican Party interests to derail his campaign. He was not seen as a threat to Wall Street. He also had a decent opponent, John McCain, who refused to play the race and religious card against him.
However, despite the big money, smears and threats, Mamdani won the election with 50.4 percent of the votes, beating Cuomo (41.6 percent) by almost nine percentage points and carrying four out of the city’s five boroughs.
His success in crossing the 50 percent mark means he can emphatically claim to have the mandate of the city to govern on his policies. Corporate Democrats, Trump and Republicans who want to obstruct his agenda will have to reckon with the wrath of the majority of New Yorkers.
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