Then New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, right, hugs Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., before speaking during a rally, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025, in New York. Photo by AP/Heather Khalifa
Zohran Mamdani, whose meteoric rise to winning election as New York City’s next mayor last week sent political waves across the country, has called Vermont’s independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders “the single most influential political figure in my life.”
In fact, according to Sanders, Mamdani’s campaign studied the senator’s 1981 run for mayor of Burlington, when Sanders — who, like Mamdani, is a democratic socialist — upset a more moderate opponent who’d held elected office for years. Sanders won that race by just 10 votes, though went on to win three more terms by increasingly greater margins.
“He said when he was running to be the mayor of Burlington, that Burlington is not for sale,” Mamdani told a stadium of thousands of supporters at a rally Oct. 26 featuring Sanders as a headline speaker. “It continues to be the rallying cry for working-class people across this country, and for us, it’s that New York City is not for sale.”
In last week’s election, Mamdani bested former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo with just over 50% of the vote to Cuomo’s 42%. Mamdani beat Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor earlier this year, too, though Cuomo ran again this fall as an independent. (The race’s Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, finished a distant third with 7%.)
In an interview following Tuesday night’s election, Sanders said he sees the 34-year-old Mamdani, and other young elected progressive Democrats, such as New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as the future of a political movement for which he’s long been the standard-bearer.
“We have a whole lot of people, often, very young people, who understand a couple of factors. And that is that we cannot do as the Democratic establishment has done for years, ignore the pain that the working class of this country is experiencing,” he said.
“I don’t look to the Democratic leadership to make the changes that we need. I look at the grassroots of America. I look at people like Mamdani and Alexandria and others, people who have strong grassroots connections,” the 84-year-old senator added.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, then New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, center, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., appear on stage during a rally, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025, in New York. Photo by AP/ Heather Khalifa
A Mamdani campaign video released in September intersperses clips of the mayor-elect talking to voters on the campaign trail with footage of Sanders interviewing Burlington residents when he was the city’s mayor. At the time, Sanders created a cable-access television program, called “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” that he used to make the case for some of his signature progressive proposals, including income tax reform.
There’s a clear line between Mamdani’s social media-centric campaign — which relied heavily, and effectively, on video to explain his campaign promises and connect with younger voters — and Sanders’ efforts, early in his own political career in Vermont, to build out messaging networks that don’t pass through the filter of traditional media.
The September video, titled “Mayor to Mayor,” also describes how Mamdani — who has represented part of Queens in the New York State Assembly — held his first campaign event for that seat at one of Sanders’ rallies for president in 2019.
“It was Bernie’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 that gave me the language of Democratic socialism to describe my politics,” Mamdani said at a town hall with Sanders in Brooklyn earlier in September, according to the magazine Jacobin. Sanders sought the Democratic nomination in both 2016 and 2020.
Both Sanders’ past platform for president, and Mamdani’s for mayor, are rooted in a fundamental concept of redistributing wealth. Sanders has long backed proposals such as Medicare for All and tuition-free college to be paid for with higher taxes on corporations and high earners; Mamdani has proposed raising taxes on New York City’s wealthiest residents to fund universal childcare and city buses that are fare-free and run faster.
“Those are not radical ideas. They are ideas that a vast majority of the American people understand to be right,” Sanders said in the post-election interview, drawing parallels between his and Mamdani’s platforms. “And to the degree that we fight for that — and (have) candidates who fight for that — I think we’re going to see some real, transformative change in America.”
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Mamdani will be able to deliver on his campaign promises, which hinge partly on support from the New York State Assembly and Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul. And it’s not clear whether a campaign based on democratic socialist principles is what Democrats need across the country, to win back one or both houses of Congress in 2026 or to recapture the White House in 2028.
Democrats enjoyed resounding success at the polls on Tuesday, winning governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia as well as a proposal in California that will allow the state to redraw its congressional district maps ahead of the midterm elections in a way that could create as many as five new Democratic-controlled seats in the House.
But the winning gubernatorial candidates — Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia — are more politically moderate than Mamdani or Sanders, as is Gavin Newsom, the California governor who threw his political capital behind the redistricting proposal meant to neutralize a similar Republican-led effort in Texas.
Matthew Dickinson, a political science professor at Middlebury College, said one reason Sanders found success as mayor of Burlington was that he governed as a pragmatist who was willing to compromise, while still sticking to his democratic socialist ideas.
He pointed, for instance, to how Sanders worked with a corporate developer on plans to revitalize the city’s waterfront. It’s a project Sanders highlighted as an example of how the government can improve people’s lives when he launched his first presidential bid in 2015.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a rally for then New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025, in New York. Photo by AP/Heather Khalifa
Sanders is widely popular across the country today, Dickinson noted, but he hasn’t been able to secure enough support from Democratic leaders to get key parts of his agenda into law, much less to be the party’s presidential nominee.
“I think Democrats are, rightly, cautious about what lessons nationally they should take from Mamdani, as a democratic socialist, winning a convincing victory in New York City,” Dickinson said, adding the city is far from a microcosm of the entire country. “It’s an open question whether Bernie and Mamdani are talking about the right issues.”
In Vermont last year, it was the state’s Republican party — not Democrats — who found success at the polls with a focus on lowering the cost of living, Dickinson noted. About half of all state legislative seats the GOP gained across the country in 2024 were in Vermont, dismantling Democratic supermajorities in both the state House and Senate.
Part of President Donald Trump’s campaign focused on affordability, too, in addition to major cultural flashpoints such immigration. But Sanders contended that Trump has quickly lost sight of that promise. In fact, Trump and his GOP allies in Congress are backing plans to make it harder for people to afford necessities, Sanders said to VTDigger, pointing to recent government funding plans that would let expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire.
“I think people all across the country are seeing that and saying to the Republicans, ‘sorry — you’re moving this country in a very wrong direction,’” Sanders said.