Chartbook 395 Youth, the middle-class & the NYC mayoral race: an appeal for more analysis.

What drove Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable upset victory in the Democratic Party primary in New York City? As more and more data come in, we begin to get a fuller picture.

One aspect was a youth revolt successfully channeled through the electoral system.

As By Emma G. FitzsimmonsAlex Lemonides and Irineo Cabreros show in The New York Times, registration of new voters surged close to Election Day, on a spectacular scale.

The result was to induce an improbable skew in the Democratic Primary electorate towards younger voters. This is the opposite of the normal profile, which is normally dominated by older voters. This time was different. Roughly three times as many 18-24 year olds voted in 2025 compared to 2021, making them by far the largest group of voters.

Part of the dynamic was Mamdani’s own youth. Also relevant for younger voters was his fearless and truthful stance on Gaza, an issue which, particularly in New York, has become a critical issue for the youth vote. To be able to vote for a Democrat who was not a shameful embarrassment removed one major obstacle to youth mobilization.

But emphasizing youth and Gaza does not mean deemphasizing issues of affordability and the socio-economic factors I stressed in the previous post.

Mamdani’s emphasis on the affordability of food, housing, transport, childcare and education, has an obvious appeal for younger voters, who, regardless of their educational background, struggle to find a footing in the exorbitantly expensive city.

On income inequality in New York City, Peter Ryan (@_PeterRyan) put together some really helpful graphs, adding flesh to the bones of the statistics that have been widely circulated.

As Ryan argues, it makes sense to describe Mamdani as having mobilized an essentially middle-class coalition.

Of course, the distribution of income - a continuous variable - is not the same as class, which, by definition, involves splitting the population into distinct and interrelated - antagonistically related - groups.

To move from the distribution of income to class categories, Ryan draws on the work of resourcegeneration.org, a rather remarkable organization dedicated to mobilizing the top ten percent of the most affluent American young people, to overcome their own privilege.

Whatever one may think of their politics, resourcegeneration.org have the virtue of speaking clearly not only about wealth and income inequality, but about how those combine to structure different class positions.

Here is their heuristic mapping of American society.

Source: Resourcegeneration.org

One might take issue with the idea that the top 20 percent of the income distribution can really be described as “upper class”, or that the top one percent “rule”. But this is at least a typology one can argue with.

In these terms, Mamdani’s electorate is more or less identical with the “middle class”. But this is a crude first approximation. To really dig into New York City’s sociology and political economy we need a far more precise anatomy of social dynamics.

Unfortunately, the most influential social mapping that seems to have been applied to New York City is that advanced by Richard Florida, who divides the city’s population in functional terms along lines of occupation into the creative class, the service class and the working-class.

This clearly correlates with economic analysis that emphasizes the increasing polarization of the NYC labour market between highly skilled and low-skilled jobs. But beyond that it hardly gets us very far in understanding how education, occupation, race, inherited capital (both financial and cultural) and age interact in the city.

What we would ideally like is a complex class mapping, mobilizing categories from sociology including the work, for instance, of Pierre Bourdieu. Unfortunately, I am not able to find anything for New York City that compares to the fascinating analysis conducted by two Dutch researcher - Gijs Custers and Godfried Engbersen - for the city of Rotterdam.

Better still than a Bourdieusian analysis of social structure would be something more in the spirit of a Sartrean novel, or a Ferrante for NYC.

Start with the criteria for “the middle-class” developed by resourgeneration.org and ask: What does it mean to make a stable middle-class home in NYC? What does it mean to worry about bills, when your class position suggests that you should not be worrying? How heavy is the burden of debt or the risk of a major shock? What anxieties and fears pervade the question of child-rearing? And how does the hurdle of College figure in that equation? What does it mean to be associated with but also misidentified with the Professional Managerial Class? How are you positioned both with regard to those “above” and “below” you in the social hierarchy? How does all of this make you rally to a candidate who, in contemporary America, embraces the identity of democratic socialism?

It is these questions that would generate a truly rich understanding of the social pressures that have generated Mamdani’s breakthrough and around which a constructive democratic politics for the City may be organized.

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