Trump Humiliation Worsens as Fresh Info Reveals Scale of GOP Losses

Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral race—in which he broke 50 percent against two serious opponents—also illustrates the point. Mamdani’s campaign was famously focused on affordability and costs. But as I’ve detailed, he also went hard at Trump’s authoritarian abuses of power while running the most explicitly pro-immigrant and even pro-cosmopolitan campaign in memory, connecting the two with dramatic denunciations of ICE and confrontations over Trump’s lawless threats to deny federal funds deliberately to harm the city’s poor and working class.

Relative to the primary, Mamdani made big inroads into working-class Black, Latino, and immigrant communities. Yes, it’s hard to extrapolate national lessons from a New York race. But it’s clear that Mamdani’s twin attacks on economic and authoritarian power; his fusion of affordability, pro-immigrant, anti-Trump, and (yes) anti-fascist politics, have working-class appeal—particularly among the new, diverse, immigrant-heavy working class. Trump’s 2024 inroads into that demographic were accorded seismic significance, so national Democrats should find a lot to learn here, as well.

As Ron Brownstein writes for Bloomberg, this was also the story in California, where nonwhite working-class voters helped power victory on the Proposition 50 referendum allowing the state to redraw House maps. In all these races, Brownstein notes, Democrats started reversing their losses among Latinos, as well; that plus these other gains suggests it was “premature” to see Trump’s inroads as a “durable realignment.”