February 13, 2026

Hope, and grief, and Mamdani’s victory

Posted in Uncategorized tagged NYC, Politics at 1:32 pm by chavisory

I finally got around to listening to this conversation between Heather Cox Richardson and Zohran Mamdani, which I’d had bookmarked since before Christmas (when he was still Mayor-elect Mamdani), in which he talks in part about winning back voters in districts that had swung the hardest for Trump in the 2024 election by rejecting politics as usual and ignoring the advice of consultants and pollsters in favor of listening to people about the real obstacles in their real lives and returning a feeling of agency about the future to them in designing solutions.

And it worked!

And I’m glad it worked. I’m glad he won. I’m glad we have evidence that voters respond to this kind of respect for their real lives. I’m glad we have politicians out there who are gifted at this and who are doing it.

(Don’t mistake me; I have no illusions that this means we can or even should be electing Democratic Socialists everywhere in the country; that’s not what this is about.)

It leaves me–I won’t say relieved–but a little more hopeful about the 2026 and 2028 elections, if this is something that other Democrats can take to heart and emulate.

And I still don’t know that I’ll ever get over it that that many people were able to listen to Trump’s openly racist, fascist, authoritarian rhetoric, and still decide to put their family and friends and country on the line for the price of eggs, as they say.

I’m glad people are showing themselves capable of making better choices and believing that government can be better. And I still don’t think I’ll be able to look at most of them the same way again for the rest of my life, and I don’t know what to do about it.

Even if Democrats manage to sweep the House and Senate in 2026 and the White House in 2028, I don’t know that I’ll be able to get over what a lot of people told us about who they really are.

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