In the coming days, plenty of pundits will offer their takes on what Tuesday’s election results mean — for the midterms next year, for the presidential race in 2028, and for the country generally. Your columnist’s beat happens to be national politics, so I thought I’d give my two cents. 

As regular readers will recall, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. And I do have to say: it feels damn good to win again. 

Here in New Haven, Mayor Justin Elicker was re-elected in a landslide, and Democrats won six out of the seven contested seats on the board of alders. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, a former congresswoman, trounced Winsome Earle-Sears, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, by 15 points — the largest margin for a Democrat since 1961. Her coattails were long enough to deliver Democrats a thumping majority in the state legislature and to put Jay Jones, the embattled Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, over the top. Mikie Sherill won the New Jersey gubernatorial race by 13 points; most polls had the race much closer. 

And, of course, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, winning just over 50 percent of the vote against Curtis Sliwa, who was shot several times by the mafia in the back of a yellow cab in the ’90s; and Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, who resigned after he was accused of sexually harassing several women. 

I don’t agree with Mamdani on everything — I’m a liberal, not a socialist — but if I lived in New York, I would’ve voted for him in the primary and the general. Mamdani represents something new. He ran an inspiring, hopeful campaign, laser-focused on the cost of living. He delivered on Bernie Sanders’s promise to remake the electorate by bringing record numbers of young people to the polls. 

Some people argue that “authenticity” in politics is basically fake. To some extent, it is; a candidate is deemed as “authentic” in part by having their supporters say that they are again and again online during primaries. But you can’t manufacture an aura of authenticity or charisma without the raw material. No amount of “brat” memes could make Kamala Harris seem authentic or charismatic because she isn’t. Zohran “bhai” has the juice. 

Cuomo, on the other hand, embodies everything wrong and rotten with the Democratic Party. He’s old, he’s corrupt, he’s out of touch. He acted like the mayoralty was owed to him as compensation for being forced to resign from the governorship in 2021 and ran a lazy, uninspired, AI-slop campaign. He deserved to lose, and I’m very glad that he did. 

Mamdani’s ads and his social media content were relentlessly focused on one thing — freezing the rent — according to a post-election analysis from the Searchlight Institute. Searchlight’s polling found that New Yorkers’ top priorities were affordable housing and affordable prices. Voters thought Mamdani shared their priorities; they thought Cuomo’s top issues were crime and Israel. 

There’s a lesson here for other Democrats. Meet people where they are. Show them that you care about the things that they say matter most. Don’t crowd out your strongest issue by talking about a bunch of other stuff; stay focused, no distractions and grind. 

As I said, I really like Zohran Mamdani. I’m rooting for him to be a successful and popular mayor. And I think there are real and valuable lessons to take from his campaign. 

But not everything about Mamdani’s success will translate outside of New York City. Not every candidate has either his unique virtues or the good fortune of running against opponents as flawed as Cuomo and Eric Adams. There are 283 precincts in New York City that voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. Andrew Cuomo carried those precincts by 18 points. The Trump-Mamdani voter appears to be a pretty rare species. 

For decades, Democrats have benefitted from higher turnout because we used to have what’s called a “lower-propensity” coalition — our voters often showed up for presidential races but sat out midterms and off-year races. That’s not true anymore. If everyone had voted in 2024, Trump would’ve won the popular vote by more. 

The implication is that while Spanberger and Sherill both ran far ahead of Harris in their respective states, at least some of their overperformance has to be chalked up to Democrats turning out and Republicans staying home. Exactly how much of their victories are owed to turnout differentials and how much is owed to persuasion is something that election analysts will tease out in the coming weeks, but probably not before the post-election narratives have been set. 

That’s all to say that while celebration is warranted, those of us on the left of center shouldn’t count our chickens just yet. Depending on how much gerrymandering in red and blue states cancel each other out, Democrats have a good shot at winning the House next year. We might even get lucky and beat Susan Collins in Maine. 

Part of that will be due to popular backlash to Trump’s actions. But part of it will be because many of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 will stay home in 2026. In 2028, they won’t.

MILAN SINGH is a senior in Pierson College studying economics and a former Opinion editor for the News. He is also the director of the Yale Youth Poll. His column, “All politics is national,” runs fortnightly. Contact him at milan.singh@yale.edu.