It’s…the politics of no translation
when you're running for mayor, intelligibility > intersectionality
What a difference a year makes.
On June 25, 2024, I was in Yonkers at the election night watch party for Jamaal Bowman’s re-election campaign. The night was over quickly, a small mercy for those of us who spent the day knocking on doors in the blistering heat. Bowman was trounced by Westchester County Executive George Latimer and the combined forces of the Israel lobby, which spent $14.5 million against the Congressman in the most expensive House primary in history. The irony was that much of the spending made no mention of Israel at all, instead playing up Bowman’s vote against President Biden’s infrastructure bill as a means of painting the representative as a disloyal Democrat. In reality, Bowman joined with other left-wing members of Congress to vote against hewing the bill from the president’s broader agenda in the hope of keeping both alive.
I can’t say the mood at the watch party was funereal. We all suspected Bowman’s defeat was imminent. The outcome had been likely determined by redistricting months prior, when a Congressman who served as spokesperson for an amorphous left found himself representing a district where that left did not live. As Bowman conceded, I gave consolation hugs to my friends in the movement, from Sunrise to Justice Democrats to NYC DSA, as I braced myself for backlash from the revanchist right.
Then came June 24, 2025 and Zohran’s seismic victory in the New York City mayoral primary. I’m still marveling at the breakdown of the age of the electorate from last Tuesday. The turnout of young or infrequent voters on which Bernie Sanders pinned his political revolution — only for those voters to fail to materialize in adequate numbers — finally seemed to come true.1
But what’s just as impressive is Zohran’s ability to drive this turnout despite facing the same onslaught that sank Bowman’s re-election. At $22 million, the super PAC supporting a disgraced ex-governor spent far more than Latimer’s allies, only for Andrew Cuomo to get denied the Democratic nomination as well as his shot at redemption. It was a humiliating loss by the establishment to a democratic socialist, a fierce critic of Israel, and a guy I smoked weed with in college.
The take industry has been grinding out content to make sense of Zohran’s victory. Was it due to populism or popularism? Was it his personal charisma or his message discipline or the affordability message itself? Was it all those doors his volunteers knocked (1,621,326 of them, per the campaign WhatsApp I’m in), or all those social media feeds that his vertical videos went viral on?
I don’t want to adjudicate these disputes but add my own color. Because an under-discussed key to Zohran’s victory lies in a memorable line from the campaign, describing how the Queens assemblyman went from zero name recognition (he was polling at 1% in January!) to commanding the election narrative on the way to a romping victory. It’s...the politics of no translation.
In Zohran’s own words: this is “when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people’s own lives. If I tell you that I’m going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.”
He was referring to his social media strategy, but I think “the politics of no translation” can apply to his mayoral campaign as a whole. It was direct. It was resonant with the electorate’s needs. And — crucially — it was free from jargon that lefties love.
Many have remarked how Cuomo served as a strong foil to Zohran during the campaign. Where Cuomo was creepy, Zohran was charming. While Cuomo was the insider’s insider, a dynastic governor who married into another Dem dynasty, Zohran was an outsider, a Uganda-born socialist only four years into his legislative career. The ex-governor ran a media averse campaign, mostly sticking to scripted remarks at churches, while Zohran took every opportunity to talk to the press, all while harnessing the organic reach enabled by his promethean video team. Cuomo would be the city’s oldest mayor elected to office. Zohran is likely to be its youngest in a century.
Cuomo’s weaknesses as a candidate should not be dismissed — it’s easier to capture an open seat against a disgraced official with a high unfavorability rating than it is, for instance, to primary a relatively popular incumbent. But this point undersells, I think, the campaign that Zohran ran. After all, there are plenty of different mayoral candidates who failed to electrify the city like Zohran did.
One in particular, from last cycle, stands out to me, a counterpoint for a similarly insurgent left-wing campaign. Let’s un-memory hole Dianne Morales.
The 2021 mayoral primary in New York City was a dark, dark time. Before Morales locked her campaign staff out of their office, before Scott Stringer was accused of sexual misconduct, before Maya Wiley finished a distant third in ranked choice voting, I graced a headline in The New York Times with my melancholy: ‘Sense of Disappointment’ on the Left as the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Unfolds.
Stringer was a liberal technocrat, the city comptroller and originally WFP’s number one choice in the race. Wiley was a liberal lawyer from the de Blasio administration and an MSNBC contributor who struggled to define herself.2 Morales, meanwhile, billed herself as the “radical” in the race, which was an insult to radicals.
A refresher: Morales was a nonprofit executive making $350,000 a year for a housing nonprofit considered one of the worst evictors in the city. (“I’m not going to apologize for making a decent living and being able to provide for my family,” she told the Times in 2021.) She herself was a landlord in Bed Stuy, raking in an additional $24,000 in income. She “probably” voted for Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in the 2018 gubernatorial race.
In spite of these ruling class bona fides, Morales staked out a position as the “movement candidate” in the 2021 primary. This was curious, because, as Ross Barkan noted in a campaign retrospective, she had “no history in the movement” but became “their champion through a few rhetorical flourishes.”3 She certainly deployed awkward, left signaling phrases, but I think she attracted much of her support on the strength of her maximalist policy positions. Where other candidates mostly ran from the “defund the police” protests that stormed through New York City the previous summer, Morales embraced the demand, proposing cutting the NYPD budget by 50%. By making the call for police reform a centerpiece of her candidacy, mediated through the grammar of social media, Morales drew young lefties to her, with many finding her candidacy on TikTok.
The trouble was that Morales was not running a campaign to be mayor of New York City. She was running to be mayor of woke twitter.
Take a look at her platform. There’s good stuff in there — including a “citywide rent moratorium,” one of Zohran’s calling cards — but she packaged it all in the parlance of the time: college student. Her campaign was littered with acronyms and references to moral high ground. She touted her platform of “dignity now” as an “intersectional agenda.”
Here’s the thing: I don’t know what it means for an agenda to be intersectional. My best guess is that it’s one geared towards supporting the most marginalized members of a community. I know that intersectionality was coined by the legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw to show that identities overlap in ways the law can miss. An example, paraphrased from Crenshaw’s 1989 journal article, as I understand it: a firm argues against a discrimination lawsuit brought by its black women employees by saying “we do not discriminate on the basis of race or sex” and then pointing to white women and black men in leadership roles. Intersectionality provides the legal basis for black women to claim discrimination based on the intersection of race and sex.
It’s a valuable concept. But it isn’t likely to win over skeptical, disillusioned, or otherwise checked out voters who are sick of politicians talking down to them.
The use of a word like “intersectionality” demonstrates, charitably, a commitment to justice for those denied from the halls of power. Yet you have to have some conception of what it is — you have to belong to some in-group — in order to recognize this. Its use thus is less about what it means than what it signals: social justice and moral righteousness, sure, and also something about the class background and educational attainment of the speaker.
In short, it needs to be translated. I did not talk to voters on behalf of Dianne Morales, but I did get out the vote for Zohran. I imagine it is much, much easier to convince someone to vote by saying “he wants to make the city more affordable by freezing the rent” than it is to say “she is running on an intersectional agenda of dignity for all” and then explaining that means defunding the police, investing in green jobs, and instituting a moratorium on rent hikes.
If this sounds obvious in retrospect, consider how insurgent campaigns in the past have struggled with a clear, easily accessible defining message. Even Zohran’s.
The democratic socialist won his first assembly race in 2020 by 423 votes. His was the closest of the NYC DSA slate that year, in part because he was challenging the first Greek-American woman elected to Albany in a district home to Greek Town, with the second highest Greek population outside of Greece.
Zohran’s campaign slogan in that race was “roti and roses.” It’s a reference to the DSA motto of “bread and roses” with a South Asian twist.4 As he told Vogue India:
For a long time, we’ve had candidates who attempt to appeal to this mythical mass of people….But what I’ve found is that when you are specific, it isn’t detrimental. Under my campaign slogan, I didn’t put parenthetical references like ‘flatbread’ or ‘cousin of naan’…because when you speak confidently about who you are and where you come from, people who don’t understand will ask you to explain it to them. But to speak in a way that assumes the necessity of an explanation takes away from the story you’re trying to tell.
This provides a fascinating contrast, both to a vague appeal to “lived experience” and to the politics of no translation. You might call it the politics of translation-as-invitation: a starting point from which to bring your neighbor into conversation. But instead of meeting people where they are, physically and ideologically, it invites them to take a step towards you. This strategy was (just) enough to win Zohran election to the state assembly in Astoria. It would not, I think, have won him a city-wide election.
His campaign seemed to agree. One of his first viral videos was the candidate himself doing man-on-the-street interviews in neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens that shifted towards Trump in the 2024 election. It was a canny tactic: through it, the campaign created sharable video content of a political candidate asking questions to voters and listening to their answers. Exactly the opposite of what people expect of politicians.
After listening to these New Yorkers’ concerns and why they either sat out the November election or punched the ticket for Trump, Zohran asked what it would take for them to vote for a Democrat:
“Pay attention to regular Americans and their economic needs.”
“They should make economics the forefront of their campaign.”
“We need childcare that is affordable.”
And that’s what Zohran offered. No translation needed.
Burn After Reading
The preliminary conclusions that
, an organizer from across the pond involved in Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent in the Labour Party, is taking away from Tuesday’s stunner are worthwhile reading for anyone interested in how Zohran won the primary and the difficulties a socialist will face on the way to governing. I appreciate Joe’s shoutout of Brad Lander, an utter mensch and a hero for his selfless commitment to public service even as a top rival to Zohran.The one thought I’ll add to Joe’s reflections is the importance of independent organizations like NYC DSA. This victory belongs to them.
Matt Yglesias refers to this Sanders theory of supercharging the electorate with new voters as the “mobilization delusion.” Look, I am on the record sparring with Matt, but I think this is a valuable critique for those of us on the left to reckon with, even if we disagree with his conclusions. Too often in my experience, “we’ll expand the electorate” is used as an excuse to avoid the difficulty of persuading more regular voters of the merits of our ideas.
She is also the daughter of civil rights organizer George Wiley, a founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which might be a fact of interest to anyone who has read Poor People’s Movements by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward.
As fate has it, Barkan ran for state senate 2018 in a campaign managed by none other than Zohran Mamdani.
As Wikipedia tells me, “bread and roses” itself comes from the women’s suffrage and labor movements. In particular, a walkout led by immigrant workers at a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 was known as the Bread and Roses Strike.
Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator," would *never* use academic phrases like "intersectionality." Abstractions, however useful in categorization, do not inspire or "reify" (!!!); they needlessly add another layer, and thus dilute....