Free buses and woke politics? UK Labour has little to learn from Zohran Mamdani’s win
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani speaks at his election night party in Brooklyn, New York, 4 November 2025 (Credit: Barry Williams/New York Daily News/TNS/Alamy Live News)
4 min read
I’ve been bemused by the levels of excitement among some Labour colleagues about Zohran Mamdani being elected as mayor of New York.
The politics that appeals to New York City would go down like a cup of cold sick in US Rust Belt states or in UK post-industrial equivalents like my North Durham constituency.
Mr Mamdani’s achievement was undoubtedly groundbreaking in terms of his persona being far from that of the traditional US politician – a young Muslim man who is an avowed member of Democratic Socialists of America – but it wasn’t actually that electorally impressive.
He was the Democratic candidate in an incredibly diverse, young and left-wing city where 45 of 51 city councillors are Democrats, and there are more than six times as many voters registered as Democrats (3.4 million) as there are Republicans (0.5 million). He actually only managed to get under a third of the registered Democrats to vote, securing just over 1 million votes. In terms of vote share, the 50.4 per cent he secured was anaemic compared to recent Democratic predecessors Eric Adams (67 per cent in 2021) and Bill de Blasio (66 per cent in 2017; 73 per cent in 2013).
Nor was Mamdani in any sense in a fight against Donald Trump and Maga. The Republican mayoral candidate was marginal to the contest, which saw Mamdani take on and beat for a second time his Democratic primary opponent Andrew Cuomo – more centrist but hamstrung by sexual misconduct allegations – who ran as an Independent in the election.
Given Mr Mamdani’s mix of firebrand rhetoric, radical transport policies, a falling-out with his party hierarchy, and an uncomfortable relationship with his city’s Jewish community thanks to his support for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel, the nearest UK parallel is probably Ken Livingstone’s London mayoral win as an Independent in 2000. Neither has any real lessons for electoral success in the rest of the country they happened in, such is the cultural and political distance between New York City and London and the wider USA and UK respectively.
Mr Mamdani was right to focus on the cost-of-living crisis facing ordinary people, but whether his solutions such as free buses are actually funded or would stand up to scrutiny from sceptical British voters is doubtful. My North Durham voters would be happy with buses that actually turn up on time, or at all, having spent last winter with frequent cancellations, and they can see North East mayor Kim McGuinness has a realistic plan for bringing them under public control. Nor would I expect the socialistic grocery chain the UK already has, the Co-op Group, to be very keen on Mamdani’s eccentric proposal for council-run grocery stores.
Labour has tried an electoral positioning close to Mamdani’s recently in the UK, when Jeremy Corbyn, who phone-banked for Mamdani, ran for PM in the 2017 and 2019 elections. In the former, he stacked up an impressive vote share, but it was so concentrated in big cities and university towns – the UK counterparts to New York – and polarised the electorate into the arms of the Tories so much, that it didn’t deliver many seat gains.
In the latter, he led Labour to its worst defeat since 1935. This type of politics hasn’t suddenly got more popular since 2019.
Of more interest to Labour should be those aspects of the ‘Blue Wave’ of Democrat wins that happened in competitive states like New Jersey and Virginia.
I certainly won’t be telling my constituents on the doorsteps of North Durham to forget the concerns about illegal immigration many of them raised because I have a New York-inspired municipal grocery store or free buses or a woke take on the Middle East to offer instead.
Luke Akehurst is Labour MP for North Durham
