Zohran Mamdani Says He's a Democratic Socialist, but What Does That Mean?

A year ago, Zohran Mamdani was polling in the single digits, and Andrew Cuomo looked like the inevitable mayor of New York. Now, Mamdani is officially the next mayor of New York, and following his tremendous electoral success, people across the country want to better understand why he describes himself as a democratic socialist.

Mamdani is not the first national politician to describe himself that way, but many want to better understand what the label means and why he uses it. Here's what we know.

Democratic socialism is a worldview that can be defined a number of ways, and there's no set definition. Most generally, though, it's an ideology that defines itself in opposition to capitalism and seeks to give more power to workers at the expense of the ruling class. Democratic socialism marries socialism, more generally, with the idea that this kind of equality is possible within a Democratic system.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders both use the label, seeking to reclaim it from its somewhat tarnished history dating back to the Cold War and the Soviet Union. In an interview with The New York Times from 2019, Sanders said that he saw democratic socialism as an extension of the country's history, instead of an ideology that had never existed in the United States before.

He explained that he saw it as an extension of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision “to go forward in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and guarantee a decent economic standard of living in life for all of our people. And to do that, obviously, we have to combat oligarchy and the incredibly unfair and unequal distribution of wealth and income, and to take on the incredible political power that the 1 percent have.”

The most common question people have about democratic socialists is whether they're actually just progressive Democrats, and to some extent, this is just a question of how these people label and explain themselves. Trump has called Mamdani a communist on more than one occasion, attempting to conflate his worldview with communism. Mamdani has been clear, though, that he defines himself as a democratic socialist, and not a communist.

“I think it reflects the fact that … whereas that identity would have been enough for Donald Trump in the past, now he doesn’t even want to use that because he knows that the message of my politics is one that is connecting with New Yorkers across the five boroughs. It’s a message of dignity in each and every person’s life," he explained, per The Hill, suggesting that Trump doesn't think democratic socialism is a negative label anymore.

Mamdani's victory does indeed suggest that being a democratic socialist no longer disqualifies you from leading the biggest city in the country. Whether Mamdani's victory suggests that his policies should be run everywhere is another question, but at least in New York, it signals a fundamental change in what people are looking for.