Welcome to Woke 2.0
Just last week, the Democratic pundit class made yet another call for their party to ditch abortion, climate change, and “identity and cultural issues” on the campaign trail. Their “Deciding to Win” proposal formalized some of the talking points we’ve seen California governor Gavin Newsom and, to an extent, Andrew Cuomo’s flop mayoral campaign trot out this year. The logic went that, following Kamala Harris’s resounding loss last November, the party needed to adopt stances that would allow for, say, a young man who supports Trump’s stance on immigration to come over to the opposing party. It treated ceding ground on trans girls’ participation in sports, to give one example, as a reasonable exchange for a successful Democratic 2028 presidential campaign (which Newsom seems to be angling for). To hell with the 86 percent of LGBTQ+ folks who voted for Harris.
That Zohran Mamdani decisively won New York City’s mayoral election Tuesday night is a sharp rebuke to that line of thinking. The 34-year-old democratic socialist cruised to victory despite the proposal’s argument that “voters’ frustrations with the status quo are not the same as a desire for socialism.” Mamdani appears to have “decided to win” by presenting an unapologetically pro-worker, pro-immigrant, pro-trans, and, yes, anti-Trump campaign platform. In doing so, he became the first mayoral candidate in more than 50 years to clinch over a million votes in the city, winning over the electorate across lines of class, race, ethnicity, and gender.
“Here we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall,” Mamdani said in his victory speech. “Your struggle is ours too.”
Trump’s renewed ascendance to power has been facilitated in part by the manosphere, which has resulted in 12 straight months of Democrats questioning how they could regain young male voters. Not only did Mamdani win with men and women overall, but he won men ages 18–29 by a 68 percent margin. And there’s no question that Mamdani’s opponent having been repeatedly and credibly accused of sexual harassment contributed to his win. While Trump’s Cabinet might make it look like this country longs to be led by alleged sex pests, Mamdani’s whooping of Cuomo at the ballot box was a people-powered one: Organizers refused to let voters forget his legacy, and Mamdani pulled no punches in bringing it up himself.
Mamdani, of course, is the story of just one race with elements including robust media coverage and celebrity support that are a by-product of being in New York City. But a slew of other 2025 campaigns saw a joining of kitchen-table issues with the acceptance, or even embrace of, marginalized communities. Both Mamdani’s win as well as that of Virginia state senator and lieutenant-gubernatorial candidate Ghazala Hashmi, who became the nation’s first Muslim woman elected to statewide office, come in spite of rising virulent Islamophobia across the country (much of which was aimed against Mamdani himself, including racist ads and mailers from the Cuomo campaign). Hashmi was motivated to first run for office under Trump 1.0 amid the president’s travel bans on majority-Muslim countries.
Both Hashmi and Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger refuted their opponents’ transphobic rhetoric on the campaign trail this year. Spanberger’s opponent, outgoing Virginia lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears, copied Donald Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ad with “Abigail Spanberger is for they/them,” and both her campaign and Republican support efforts dumped money into attacking Spanberger on trans rights. As Them’s Samantha Riedel reported, Spanberger has adopted a middling stance on trans kids’ participation in sports, but her campaign platform did support protections for LGBTQ+ people. And on the debate stage, Spanberger called out Earle-Sears’s public opposition to gay marriage and support for workplace discrimination based on sexuality. Earle-Sears’s assertion that those stances are “not discrimination,” according to the Human Rights Campaign, “became the defining moment of the debate.” Though transphobia was seemingly a workable electoral strategy for Virginia conservatives in the case of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign, as HuffPost noted, voters are no longer turning out for the blustery punching-down that some Democrats assumed delivered Trump’s win last year. “A lot of the GOP campaigns are falling short because they’re focusing on fearmongering on trans students when the economy is absolutely top of mind for voters in this state,” Jatia Wrighten, a Virginia Commonwealth University political scientist, told the outlet.
The Mamdani campaign also actively courted trans voters, and both he and New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill vowed to protect gender-affirming care, which has been a major target of the Trump administration’s executive-order scare tactics. Mamdani’s campaign messaging noted that LGBTQ+ people disproportionately experience unemployment and homelessness, and his platform promised some $65 million in funding to expand access to gender-affirming care and make New York an LGBTQ+ sanctuary city. So while candidates willing to court bigoted voters can keep bringing up trans girls in sports all they want, there’s no indication that doing so is more popular than centering cost-of-living issues and refusing to leave marginalized people out in the cold. Just look at Pennsylvania, which elected its first trans mayor in Downingtown with Erica Deuso. Virginia voters also returned Elizabeth Guzmán, a former state delegate with a track record of sticking up for LGBTQ+ kids, to that position.
Despite all the fearmongering that Democrats were cooked for going “too woke” in 2024, Tuesday’s resounding victories from candidates that embraced progressive policies speak for themselves. Bari Weiss’s Free Press is crashing out over their success, and Mamdani’s embrace of marginalized identities has sent the internet into a frenzy celebrating the dawn of “woke 2.0.” Finally, people suffering under the weight of Trump’s second presidential administration are getting a chance to exhale — and to laugh a little at this change in electoral fortune. As a they/them, let me be the first to tell you: Pronouns are so back, babes!