Red Dawn Over New York City

Bushwick, Brooklyn—The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) watch party here was supposed to kick off when the polls closed at 9 pm. But when I arrived at 9:15 the line to get in already wrapped around Three Dollar Bill, which lays claim to being the borough’s largest queer nightclub—and Mamdani enthusiasts were still streaming towards the end. All of us were feverishly scanning our phones for news. The polls, though encouraging right up till Election Day, had been catastrophically wrong before. Given the millions of dollars spent to smear the Democratic nominee as an antisemite and a radical Islamist, nobody wanted to celebrate prematurely.

“The AP has Zohran ahead by 10 points!”

“With what percentage of the vote counted?”

“Oh. Only 30 percent.”

So we went back to our screens, flipping from X to the TV networks to Instagram to The New York Times. The organizers, who had capped RSVPs at 2,000 people, moved down the line giving everyone who had responded in advance a blue ticket, while latecomers were given red tickets. Blue tickets were admitted first, but in the end no one was turned away.

As we trudged slowly forward the news kept coming in, making its way up and down the line, with hope and fear vying for predominance.

“Zohran’s still above 50 percent—but just!”

“Has Staten Island been counted yet?”

“What do Sliwa’s numbers look like?”

Being old school—not to mention old—your correspondent relied on the Times, which did an excellent job of updating its numbers every few minutes as results came in from the Board of Elections. The paper’s drop-down menu also offered a breakdown by neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, Mamdani was running strong in Astoria (+39 percent) and brownstone Brooklyn (+27 percent in Brooklyn Heights and + 45 percent in Cobble Hill), while Cuomo dominated in the Upper East Side (+24 percent), Howard Beach (+25 percent), and Borough Park (Cuomo 78 percent). But in the Bronx, which Mamdani had lost to Cuomo in the primary by 18 points, he was now running ahead. The same was true for Harlem, Bed-Stuy, Flatbush, and a string of other historically Black neighborhoods. Likewise in the Latino strongholds of East Harlem (+30 percent), Washington Heights (+32 percent), and Jackson Heights (+28 percent).

When NBC called it for Mamdani at 9:33 the line erupted in cheers and chants of “Zohran! Zohran!” We were still outside, but the entry was in sight. Behind me two women from Los Angeles—one now a New Yorker, the other just visiting—were arguing about cigarettes.

“You keep saying you’re going to quit smoking. But you never do!”

“Maybe this will be my last one.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Fair enough.”

“I understand that under fascism nicotine is one of the few pleasures allowed by the state. But socialism is coming! Don’t you want to live to enjoy it?”

As we turned the last corner toward the entrance, the man ahead of me peeled off to the bodega across the street and came back with a plastic bag full of bottles of beer, which he handed out down the line. As we toasted—“To Mamdani! To socialism!”—I asked our benefactor, a young Black man with an earring, his name. “I’m Theory,” he said (or at least that’s what it sounded like). “It know. It’s a bit of an unusual name.”

Before I could ask how to spell it he disappeared inside, swallowed up by the swell of celebration. There were a lot of young white men in flannel shirts and young white women with asymmetrical haircuts—like other DSA events I’d been to. But there were also a lot of Asians, South Asians, and plenty of Black and brown faces. A number of revelers wore Not In My Name or Jewish Voice for Peace T-shirts. On the way to the dance floor I passed tables for DSA and Jacobin. The one demographic thin on the ground was the over-50s. But there were other watch parties elsewhere in Brooklyn, including the one Brad Lander attended wearing a T-shirt saying “Good Fucking Riddance.”

That was a sentiment the Bushwick crowd could get behind. Before Cuomo’s graceless concession speech, the emcee had us chanting “Fuck Andrew Cuomo!” Which felt less like a cheer than an exorcism. But most of that bitterness—not just at the disgraced ex-governor’s campaign to thwart the clear will of New York’s primary voters, but also at the Democratic Party’s suicidal inability to embrace the next generation of leaders—dissolved as Mamdani’s address came onto the screen:

“While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair.”