Transcript: Mamdani Is Winning Because Democrats Hate Party Leadership

Gaspard: Yeah, it actually turns out, Perry, that it’s important to speak English.

Yes. That does matter to working-day folks. So there’s a—there was a plainness to the approach. He centered a number of really simple things that people feel in their lives, that were proximate to their pain points, and that they could say, yeah, okay, yeah, I understand what this person is trying to solve for.

I understand on whose behalf he is fighting. And even if I may disagree with one approach or another from him, he’s actually engaging in the space of ideas. And that’s an exciting thing and makes me, as a voter, wanna lean in. There’s a thing to engage with, there’s a thing to debate, there’s a thing to rally around.

I’m being led in some fashion that I can react to. That is really essential. It’s also really, really important, I think, that if you look at all of the policy prescriptions that Zohran is lifting up in this campaign, there’s a way that all of it adds up to trying to get dignity in outcomes for average folks, right?

That’s very, very, very, very clear in his housing proposal, in his public transit proposal, in his food insecurity work, in how he thinks childcare ought to be organized and provided for in the city. It’s all about dignity in outcome, integrity in the system, reform and innovation in spaces that don’t work.

He’s never standing up there and saying government is perfect and that’s why only government investment works here. He’s saying these systems have not been in the service of working folks, and we’ve gotta reform them—but we have to reform them in a way that is driving toward participation and driving toward dignity.

And he’s doing it with, like, a real simplicity. It’s not a 10-point plan. It’s not a series of litmus tests that you have to, like, you know, be able to bring back the broomstick of the Wicked Witch in order to get access to childcare in the city.

Bacon: I wanna ask about the general election, which I’m interested in because I think it’s been—and I wanna ask about two aspects of it.

It feels to me, and I’d be curious what you think, two things are going on. One, he’s doing a lot of outreach, including to people who probably were never gonna—he’s, you know, he’s trying to… my understanding is he got a phone call with Barack Obama. He’s talking to people who are, like, elites in the party, but more importantly, I would say, he’s talking to people who obviously maybe are not going to vote for him, or maybe who are not in love with him.

Michael Bloomberg—he reached out to. A lot of business leaders in the city. A lot of police unions, police members—people who maybe are not gonna vote for him. It seems like he’s really gone out of his way to say, I might be your mayor, and that probably is helping.

The second thing, though, is I don’t perceive him as flip-flopping a lot. A lot of politicians probably lose credibility when they say one thing in the primary and one thing in the general. And even on Israel-Gaza—the hard issue there—it feels like his actual positions have stayed the same, even if maybe he’s changed some parts of his rhetoric or globalized intifada the obvious one.

But—so talk about that: both the outreach and the not changing positions.

Gaspard: Outreach and not changing positions. I’m gonna answer, Perry, but—two seconds on your previous question. I think what you’re saying is so spot-on about the directness of his appeal. I wanna just add that, and contrast that with, you know, the way some of us were going around last year in the national election, trying to explain things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the infrastructure bill.

And we had a really difficult time landing that in people’s lived experiences and concerns. Imagine if the infrastructure bill had been a housing bill instead—how that would’ve been received in communities and how it would’ve been translatable in ways that our alphabet soup just was not, at all, on the trail.

So I’m glad you asked that question. So, on outreach—you know, here’s what I found to be really interesting about Zohran from day one of this campaign. This was never a person running a lefty, symbolic race. He wasn’t just trying to change the conversation—he wanted to do that—but he actually wanted to shift the way… shift who has power in the city. And the only way you can shift who has power is by winning.

So early on, he knew that I couldn’t just hang out with the friends that I have here in my living room when I’m telling everybody that I’m prepared to govern a city that has more than eight million people in it. So right from the very start, you know, there’s high-profile outreach now to the Bloombergs of this world, Cardinal Dolan, people like that, for the general election.

But he was always going into communities that had voted against candidates like him in the past, who had given Donald Trump a lot of support, and trying to break down the differences to get to the heart of what we needed to fix in order to make our city governable—but also to maintain people’s hopes and aspirations for what they wanted for their communities and their children into the future.

That was always a part of his political DNA. He is, instinctively, an organizer, not an activist. Being an activist is a tribal thing—you’re just talking to like-minded people to mobilize them. Being an organizer requires you to engage in the hard, tough conversations and the work of persuasion, where you move folks—but you yourself might be moved a bit as well.

It’s, you know, the candidate in Maine now who is attracting a firestorm—Graham Platner—said something interesting the other day, where he said, I wanna invite your discomfort about my candidacy, and let’s have a conversation about that. I think Zohran is comfortable being discomforted himself. And that’s a really important thing when you’re trying to lead a place as complicated as New York City.

So that was always present. You’re right that, in the general election, as he’s talked to billionaires who are funding the super PAC against him—a super PAC, by the way, that is ending this campaign with the kind of bigotry that, you know, we’ve seen from Republicans in the past—it’s been pretty, kind of grotesque. But as he’s done that outreach, he has not shifted from his moral clarity on where we’re at in the nation as an economy, where we’re at on the use of U.S. power in the world, where we’re at with corporations that have more power than most nation-states, who are paying tithe and tribute to the would-be authoritarian in the White House.

He has not changed or shifted in any way. He’s the same guy who confronted Donald Trump’s border czar when this person was showing up in our city, making corrupt deals with the sitting mayor in City Hall to literally disappear people from our streets. Zohran is still that same central character, that central figure, who’s got a moral clarity on these issues.

And he’s gonna, like, speak out on them and then make it very clear that, as he organizes across communities, organizes across differences, he’s going to be clear on the outcomes that he is trying to achieve. But he’s not gonna have a religiosity about how we get to those outcomes.

And he’s gonna be kind of nimble in a space where you have to negotiate with a governor, you have to negotiate with a state legislature, you have to work closely with the City Council, and again with those very same business leaders—to govern for impact.

Bacon: I know we’re in the midst of voting here, so this is a complicated question, but does 50% matter?

‘Cause I’m guessing we’re gonna hear if he doesn’t get that. Is that, what does that number mean? Does it, should it matter?

Gaspard: Winning matters. Bill Clinton was a two-term president of the United States who wielded his authority and his power to affect, you know, to, I think, great and proper effect for the kind of politics that he was trying to advance at that time.

Bill Clinton never achieved 50 percent in any national election in America. I think it is difficult to get to 50 percent when you are in a three-way contest—or a four-way contest, if you count Mayor Eric Adams, who’s on the ballot, not running for reelection, but whose name is still on the ballot.

So achieving 50 percent is going to be, you know, a challenging thing. It’s within reach, and it’s not unrealistic. If you look at—if he believes—any of the tracking polling, it’s not unrealistic to think that Zohran can come fairly…

Bacon: But he’s not lacking some quote unquote mandate if he doesn’t give the 50% of your view.

Gaspard: Absolutely not. Donald Trump, I believe, became president of the United States in 2016, having lost the popular vote by several million, claimed his mandate, and mobilized on his mandate. And it seems to me that all the institutions have bowed to that. So, no, I think that there are clearly, clearly millions of New Yorkers who are aligned with Zohran Mamdani’s vision.

There are hundreds of thousands who exercised their ballot in June that affirmed that vision—and many more still who are coming out, who are volunteering now, who are voting early, who are saying, I believe in this direction for my party and for my city.

So there will be a mandate to claim on the other side of a victory—but first, you gotta win. So there’s a lot of work to do still. But you just, you know, as the old Al Davis line goes: just win, baby.

Bacon: So—two more questions. I know we usually go half an hour, so we’re making a little bit over.

But I want to ask how, and it’s a two part question. The first one is like, how much has Zorhan’s primary win already changed the Democratic Party, and how much do you think he’s going and what do you see in the future in terms of his victory influence in the Democratic party?

Gaspard: Look, I think that you gotta telescope out.

We’re in a moment that—I love Zohran, I’m excited by the campaign and what’s being built here—but we have to telescope out. This is so much bigger than one election campaign, one candidate in New York. There is something that’s roiling the waters of the Democratic Party.

And I think that the fine, exceptional leaders that we have in that party have to recognize the moment that we are in right now. People are righteously angry that we blew last year’s election to a twice-impeached, thrice-indicted vulgarian who made it very clear that he intended to smash up constitutional norms and to kind of usher in a pretty dark and dystopian age in our politics. He was clear about what his intentions were. They believe—many voters believe—that Democratic leadership has not been clear. Kind of basically inchoate—we were inchoate going into the election last November—and that we have lacked the constitutional spine needed to fight back effectively against Trump, against MAGAism, in 2025.

So people are angry about that. They’re angry about how they’re living their lives. You know, Perry, I think that the most important political moment in 2024 was not the election but the response that we saw on social media and elsewhere to the brutal execution of the health care insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan—where we were seeing average people who were cheering for that murder.

Politics is downstream of culture. It was a hugely significant cultural moment that wasn’t a left-or-right response. It was an outsider-versus-insider response. And failing to heed that—and to pay attention to that sentiment out there—is a dangerous thing for any political party.

And, you know, I worry that the leadership of my party has not heeded the kind of pitchfork force and antipathy that exists about the party itself—that is seen as not responding to the needs in people’s lives, but instead responding to corporate donors and their interests.

Bacon: Last question. I’m excited about Zohran, I’m excited about what’s potentially happening on Tuesday. I’m a little worried ‘cause we made the Obama comparison earlier in terms of Gaza and Iraq. A lot of my friends, I thought, got overinvested in one person as opposed to the political system. You know, one person—Barack Obama—you know, brilliant person, great speaker, but also a great politician.

Great knowledge about policy, great values, but could not change the—you know, still couldn’t change the broader system in some ways. So talk about… do you see—talk about—one, do you see how Zohran compares to Obama? And then, two, is there any worry about overhype?

Gaspard: I’ll try to answer as quickly as possible, because I know I can be a little long-winded.

First, candidates do matter. You can’t be something with nothing, right? So while I appreciate, you know, the concern about getting overhyped about one individual, it really is important to have somebody who can kind of be a wind shifter in the popular political imagination.

It’s gonna matter in 2026 all over the country—certainly will matter in 2028. That’s one thing. The second thing is, I will tell you what makes me most excited about this Mamdani moment in New York. It’s not Zohran, but the tens of thousands of young people who are going out there—young and old people—going out and having conversations in their communities.

I have been, as an organizer, deeply concerned for a really long time about the institutionalization of our politics. How do I mean that? Every election we go out and we pay people to go and knock on doors. We pay people to, quote, ‘organize,’ on our behalf. The 80,000 young people who are going out there right now for soon-to-be Mayor Mamdani are not being paid. This is the spirit of old-fashioned volunteerism that used to animate our politics.

If we can replicate that in North Carolina, in Mississippi’s Senate race next year, in Arizona, and in incongruent places—the Nebraskas, the Oklahomas, et cetera—that’s how we’re gonna transform our politics in a way that’s gonna push up against the systems that have not been working for people.

We need average folks who are seized with these moments, who are building in their awareness, who are challenging this system with their energy in a way that I think will enable us to craft, create, and elect a new political class—which is necessary to build up that ground-up pressure.

So I’m not gonna over-index on one individual, but I will say candidates actually matter. Those candidates need to be beholden to a thing, accountable to a thing, and making sure that we continue to invest in the twenty-somethings to thirty-somethings who are excited about Zohran now, who could be a credible force for accountability into his mayoralty, matters.

I think that we failed coming out of the 2008 campaign to continue to invest in all of that autonomous, independent energy that existed and flourished in that campaign. We had folks who were so enterprising, who ran their precincts, who, you know, took time off from work and did—average people doing extraordinary things.

And then we sent them home after the election, and there was no accountability to that energy. That got folded into the DNC and into traditional Democratic Party structures. And I think that did not serve the Obama presidency well and was not true to the movement that elected him.

Bacon: Lemme repeat back these things ‘cause I’m thinking, as you were talking, it’s like—the parallel between it is true that I feel like my friends, people I know, are running outta our houses to volunteer and to vote for this person, to be excited about this. I felt like I experienced that in ’07 and ’08 with Obama.

People were very excited to volunteer. There was a month last year, after Harris replaced Biden, when a lot of my friends were like, How do I volunteer for her? How do I… And then it became—I don’t know what they did, but something happened. And then I see, with Zohran, my friends in New York, my friends who live in, you know, Nebraska for that matter, or Kentucky, where I live, actually, you know, are also very excited and doing everything possible.

So your point is that a candidate can help. You need the candidate, in some ways, to create the movement—and the movement is what really matters. But the candidate is a big part of creating the sort of movement.

Gaspard: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. How do we invest in the continued momentum of that indigenous energy that pops up in our cities and in our states and across the country in these unique moments? How do we invest in that instead of investing in traditional institutions that then kind of corporatize advocacy at the city, state, and federal level in a way that really is not animated, at its core, by the interests, the aspirations, the provocations of average people who came out and door-knocked in these moments?

Bacon: Patrick, this is a great conversation. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Great to see you.

Gaspard: Thank you, and love being on Perry. Thank you.