Mamdani earned the highest number of votes cast for a mayoral candidate in sixty years

The numbers themselves were a seismic event, a raw declaration of power from the city’s working class. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s final tally—1,036,051 votes—did more than just secure him the keys to City Hall; it etched his name into the city’s political bedrock.

It was the highest number of votes cast for a mayoral candidate in sixty years, a resonant echo from the era of John Lindsay’s 1965 victory. But where Lindsay’s win was a triumph of a liberal Republican establishment, Mamdani’s was a thunderous rejection of one.

In the stark silence emanating from New Jersey, that thunder found its most telling counterpoint: the refusal of U.S. Senator Cory Booker, the state’s most prominent Democrat, to offer even a perfunctory word of support for the Democratic nominee.

Mamdani’s victory was forged in the crucible of a uniquely ugly campaign. He didn’t just face political opposition; he endured a visceral assault on his very identity.

Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, in a desperate independent bid, became a megaphone for the darkest undercurrents of the electorate, sanding down the edges of outright bigotry into polished, dog-whistle attacks. He consistently framed Mamdani, the son of a Ugandan immigrant, as “divisive” and “radical,” labels that clung to him like a shadow, their anti-Islamic subtext clear to anyone listening.

Mamdani campaigned in a sweat-soaked shirt at a Queens rally, telling a crowd of thousands, “They call us radicals for believing that a city evicting its own people is not a success story. I call that a moral failure.”

His campaign became a shield for communities that had long been used as political targets.

This made Booker’s silence not merely an absence, but a profound statement.

For those familiar with the senator’s political history, it was a familiar, calculated dance. The precedent was set in 2009, when Booker, then the Democratic mayor of Newark, executed a stunning act of political cross-dressing.

He crossed the Hudson to endorse Republican billionaire incumbent Michael Bloomberg, who was drowning his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson, under a 14-to-1 spending deluge.

The political class was stunned. The New York Times described it as a “bombshell.” The move reeked of a cold pragmatism that valued power and patronage over party loyalty or progressive principle. The financial choreography that followed was a masterclass in transactional politics.

Roughly a month after Booker’s endorsement, which provided Bloomberg invaluable cover with Democratic-leaning voters, the mayor’s longtime accountant, a man named Martin Geller, cut a check. He donated the maximum allowable $26,000 to Booker’s own re-election committee back in Newark.

It was a perfectly legal transaction, yet it laid bare the unspoken currency of Booker’s alliances: a favor for a favor, an endorsement for an infusion of cash.

Bloomberg ultimately won by a shockingly narrow margin, a moral defeat for the billionaire that highlighted how the Democratic establishment, from the White House on down, had abandoned Thompson as a lost cause.

This is the consistent pattern of the senator who has built a national brand as a charismatic optimist while his political operations often serve a grittier reality.

Booker has long been an evangelist for a brand of urban revitalization that critics decry as state-sanctioned gentrification, partnering with hedge funds and Silicon Valley titans while the working poor are priced out of their neighborhoods.

He is a champion of charter schools and tax incentives for corporations, policies drawn from the playbook of vulture capitalism that he presents as urban innovation.

His refusal to stand with Mamdani was a logical extension of this worldview—a rejection of a politics that seeks to tax the rich, demilitarize police, and build affordable housing, in favor of the cozy, cross-aisle relationships with the moneyed class that have long defined his career.

The contrast on election night could not have been more dramatic.

As Mamdani stood before a roaring, multi-ethnic crowd, receiving a congratulatory call from former President Barack Obama, the silence from Booker’s office was deafening.

In a powerful statement, the Democratic Socialists of America co-chairs, Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, declared, “Despite the millions spent to stop us, working people proved that our ideas are popular and that organized people can defeat the power of big money.”

The story of the 2025 mayoral race is thus two tales in one: the rise of a grassroots, democratic socialist movement to unprecedented power, and the calculated retreat of a Democratic establishment figure who has always been more comfortable in boardrooms than in barrios.

Mamdani’s 1,036,051 votes are not just a number; they are a mandate that repudiates the very political tradition Cory Booker represents.