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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) said democratic socialists running as Democrats are “going back to what the party used to be.”
Mamdani was interviewed for a pre-taped episode of the SiriusXM show “Urban View” on Friday. Host Clay Cane asked the mayor if he thinks there are any good contenders for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. Both Cane and Mamdani dismissed the mayor as an option, as he was born in Uganda.
“I think we have a number of choices,” Mamdani said. “I know that people are making their own choices, of whether or not they want to run. What I’m hopeful of is we’re seeing a lot of examples of what it can look like to have that focus on the working person. People who understand that affordability isn’t just something you say, it’s something you have to deliver.”
“And that in doing this, we’re not running away from the Democratic Party; we’re going back to what the party used to be. You think about FDR and La Guardia, you think about the New Deal; that’s what the Democratic Party once was,” Mamdani continued, referring to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (D). “That’s what it could be again. And if we want to win, I think that’s what we have to become.”
Roosevelt and La Guardia led their respective reform agendas to enact New Deal policies aimed at lifting Americans in need of affordable healthcare and housing and facing poverty during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Both championed policies that Mamdani said on the campaign trail that he would strive toward as mayor.
Such reforms are also popular among democratic socialists who have won a series of recent Democratic primary nominations on the heels of the mayor’s victory last year. The victories have put a spotlight on divisions within the party over various policies, including Israel and the acceptance of political contributions from corporations and other political interests.
Democratic strategist James Carville, who notably worked on former President Clinton’s 1992 campaign, has been an outspoken critic of the economic populist wave within the Democratic Party. He argued last week to CNN that the party’s progressive left is “too hotheaded to know that they’re not popular.”
Some progressives, however, have dismissed Carville’s summation of them and their effect on the party. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has been the target of some of Carville’s remarks, said last week that there was not “much of a choice” with what Carville was saying.
“If Mr. Carville doesn’t want to be in my party, the party I belong to, that Piker, that El-Sayed belongs to, he can start his own party,” Sanders said, referring to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D) and popular left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
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