Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York on Tuesday night goes back to something simple. Voters don’t want to be told change is happening – they want to feel it, fast. It’s why you can watch the same neighbourhood vote Republican one cycle and Democrat the next without breaking a sweat. They are not developing a crush on either party but auditioning table-flippers.
And that’s why, whether he knows it or not, Mamdani may have just laid the groundwork for the left’s poster candidate – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC to her friends on the progressive side of US politics.
Rewind to summer 2024, and I’m in the watch room for Joe Biden’s first debate against Trump. My heart was bleeding as our campaign nosedived with every answer from our candidate drifting into waffle.
It was brutal to watch but impossible to ignore.
Biden did a heck of a lot in the White House – genuinely more than most presidents manage in two terms – and I remain incredibly proud to have stood by him and the party’s subsequent nominee, Kamala Harris, who would have made a fantastic president.
But the truth is that everything came too slowly and too invisibly for a public hammered by prices, failing healthcare, and creaking services. So people went shopping for the ‘other’ change – in the form of Donald Trump.
That doesn’t make them racist or sexist; it makes them so frustrated with life that they were willing to cover their eyes and ears over parts of his platform in the hope he might “flip the f***ing table”.
The country was not asking for calming words. It was asking to feel some seismic change.
On Kamala’s campaign, we learned the same lesson, the hard way. Voters do not buy vibes – we had plenty of those. They buy change, preferably instant change. If the offer cannot be touched within six months, it becomes theory, which loses to anyone promising something bolder and sooner.
Here is where AOC comes in. Mamdani didn’t just assemble a left coalition – he just laid the groundwork for her to scale up nationally.
Three takeaways for an AOC run. Boldness without delivery collapses. We had days where rhetoric outran rollout – the public can smell that. Have three day-one promises that pay off within six months – things people will feel immediately.
Message discipline beats message volume. On election day, Democrats were knocking on hundreds of doors per minute, but a single crisp line on how Biden-Harris capped the crippling cost of insulin from over $600 to $25 beat five workshopped lines on “opportunity for all.”
Pick a villain and move their money. Mamdani named landlords, price-gougers and wasteful contracts – receipts over rhetoric.
The switching between Republican and Democrat is not ideological whiplash – it is practical hunger. Parts of New York that began leaning towards Trump in 2024 swung back to Mamdani on Tuesday night.
Suburbs that once felt nailed down now move like swing doors because families are buying food, paying rent and queueing for appointments, not reading manifestos.
If Republicans look like the only ones moving the furniture, they get a chance. If Democrats show they will move it faster and in your direction, they will get a chance. Loyalty follows delivery, not the other way round.
So could AOC run for president on the same current Mamdani just rode? The current exists.
A renters-first, bilingual, small-donor campaign built around three quick proofs is not a fantasy – it is the only kind of campaign I have seen cut through in the last two years. The attacks will come. But “socialist” only stings if the bus still costs the same and your rent still rises. Make life cheaper and quicker, and the label loses heat.
That is the heart of it. Voters are not in love – they are impatient. If AOC can make change tangible on a six-month clock, the path is there. The table will be flipped by someone, and a young, articulate, working-class woman from the Bronx seems like a decent bet to me.
Pablo O’Hana is a senior political advisor and campaign strategist who worked on Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House
