Corey Robin at Corey Robin:
Two years ago, the day after after the 2024 election, the mood was grim, the future was bleak. Nobody saw the possibility for regrouping. What did Mamdani do? Just one week after Trump’s victory, he went out and interviewed Trump voters all across the city. He spoke to white, Black, brown, Muslim, Asian, but above all working class, men and women, and above all, in the Bronx and Queens.
Everyone now thinks of Mamdani’s victory a year later, first in the primary and then in the general election, as a foregone conclusion, a New York thing that had no meaning beyond New York. It wasn’t. The reason it wasn’t is that Mamdani understood something that no one else understood: Trump voters had their reasons for going for Trump, and those reasons could be explained and understood. Not the hardbitten right-winger, mind you, but the people who put Trump over the top. That reason was economic. Mamdani saw that, and he gave it a name: “affordability.”
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