Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s election to the Senate in Michigan is “one that means so much to so many,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Wednesday.
The Republican Jewish Coalition has called El-Sayed, who declined to say that the Iranian regime is more dangerous than Israel, the most antisemitic Senate candidate in America, and Jewish leaders have said that Mamdani’s rhetoric has made Jews less safe.
“To see that victory in the face of all that he had to reckon with over the course of that campaign, whether in terms of the extraordinary amount of money spent to oppose him or the racism and slander that he was met with on a daily basis, it is incredibly exciting to see, as he said last night, that the good guys won,” Mamdani told reporters, of El-Sayed.
“Americans are tired of being told that their needs are unrealistic by politicians who have been bought by the wealthiest people in the country,” the mayor said at the press conference. “This country has elected a new generation of leadership, a generation with a mandate to lower the cost of living, to build not bomb, to never betray the working people who entrusted them with power.”
The mayor, who campaigned on having the Israeli prime minister arrested, said that he would like to see “compliance with international law” and “an evaluation of humanity over what we have seen for too many years.”
A reporter asked Mamdani if, given the momentum from the “left flank of the Democratic Party,” the left “should continue to kind of press its foot down on the gas? Or is there a risk of too much feuding, fracturing the party ahead of an important presidential cycle?”
“Foot on the gas,” the mayor said. “This is the moment where we are seeing people across this country vote for a politics that will mean something. For a long time, politics has felt like a hobby only some people can afford. We want politics to mean the deliverance of dignity into working people’s lives.”
“It’s a new dawn in America,” he said. “It’s a new day in America, and I cannot wait to see what we do with this opportunity because it is one that we now must deliver on.”
