Barack Obama reading books to preschoolers with Zohran Mamdani is a very big deal
The former president seems to have realized that Democrats cannot defeat Trumpism unless they include all of the party’s voters
A politician reading books with a preschool class isn’t normally a notable event. Leaders like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani routinely visit classrooms as cameras watch. But there was something different about the reading that took place on Saturday at the Learning Through Play Pre-K Center: former president Barack Obama was seated next to him.
An ex-president doing a publicity event with prominent mayor of his own party is also a routine kind of event. But not for Mamdani. Despite his strong victory in the Democratic primary last June against former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, party elites stayed away from him, with many fellow Empire State Democrats declining to endorse him. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t even say whether he had supported Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist.
The reluctance and hostility Mamdani has faced since bursting onto the Democratic scene hasn’t gone unnoticed by his fellow progressives.
“The Democratic Party cannot last much longer by denying the future, by trying to undercut our young, by trying to undercut a next generation of diverse and upcoming Democrats that the actual electorate and voters support,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN on election night.
It’s certainly true that Mamdani won a comfortable victory against the increasingly conservative Cuomo and also Republican Curtis Sliwa, but the 2025 elections also saw more moderate Democrats Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey sweep into their state’s governorships. The reality that both progressive and liberal factions of the party have not accepted is that neither side is large enough to win general elections on their own. Each needs the other, and what matters most is that party leaders promote candidates who will fight Donald Trump and his party as hard as Republicans fight the Democrats—regardless of their ideologies.
Moving toward a pugnacious way of doing business that is always iterating and always welcoming new voices goes against everything today’s Democratic leadership class knows about politics. The party’s overwhelmingly older elected officials and major donors learned their trades when The West Wing was on the air and Bill Clinton had managed to get elected after 12 years of Republican presidencies.
It’s no surprise to see that former Clinton hands like James Carville want to keep playing the same tracks, but there has been a growing rift among Obama alumni over whether campaigning like it’s 1999 is still a good idea. The 44th president’s network has essentially split into two distinct camps, and Obama’s willingness to publicly embrace Mamdani suggests that one faction has managed to sway him to its position.
The don’t-change-a-thing faction is led by David Plouffe, manager of Obama’s 2008 campaign; David Axelrod, the chief strategist for both Obama campaigns; and strategist David Shor, who in 2024 steered $560 million dollars in ad monies for Future Forward PAC toward a highly inefficient television ad campaign.
This group embraces a campaign strategy that Shor calls “popularism,” the idea that Democrats should poll relentlessly and talk only about what tests well, based on the false assumption that public opinion is static, that voters have coherent ideologies, and that taking right-leaning social stances would somehow prevent Republicans from pushing their perpetual narrative that Democrats are “woke communists.”
The static faction compiled their thoughts into a report released last October called “Deciding to Win.” Critics called it a compendium of the consultant class’s worst instincts: poll-tested messaging, avoidance of “identity and cultural issues,” Clinton-style triangulation dressed up as pragmatism. It is, in other words, the 1990s model published under a new cover, unaware that triangulation means moving toward the enemy’s position ultimately.
But not everyone in the Obama orbit is as stuck in their ways. Jon Favreau — Obama’s former speechwriter, co-founder of Crooked Media, and host of Pod Save America — called Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “pathetic” for their months-long refusal to endorse Mamdani, asking what had happened to the rule that Democrats rally behind their nominee. Favreau isn’t alone, his Pod Save colleagues have also come out in support of Mamdani.
Another prominent person in the big tent faction is Patrick Gaspard, Obama’s former White House director of political affairs, who has been an informal Mamdani adviser since before his general election win, and someone who helped open the door to Obama for the new mayor. Part of what made him decide to side with Mamdani was his all of the above approach to campaigning, Gaspard said in December:
It was clear to me that it was not going to be a symbolic run, that he had a strategy, and that his strategy would take advantage of all the tools that are available to us to communicate broadly to the public on social media, et cetera. But that he would also rely on old shoe-leather organizing as well. He had this goal of hitting a million doors knocked in this city. He had a vision for how he could grow a volunteer base.
And most importantly for me, he had a clarity of narrative on what he thought really mattered and what impacted New Yorkers most now, and what he thought would animate the contest.
The fact that Obama has been willing to openly do a public event with Mamdani seems to suggest that, more than 100 days into the new mayor’s term, he has stopped trying to “deny the future.” Obama’s Bronx visit was more than just a charming photo op. It’s a very visible metaphor that the former president is leaning toward, or has actively chosen to align with the big-change faction.
While it seems obvious that Republicans will attack Democrats as “socialist” or “woke” regardless of whatever policies or labels they favor, it’s worth comparing Mamdani’s New York public opinion numbers to those of the politicians who have been reluctant to embrace him. According to a late January Siena College poll, among registered Empire State voters, Mamdani had a 48 percent favorability rating, with 32 percent viewing him unfavorably. His favorability was up slightly, but within the margin of error, from a December Siena survey which had him at 46-31.
Schumer, by contrast, was viewed favorably by 39 percent of New Yorkers and unfavorably by 46 percent. Jeffries, who waited to endorse Mamdani until just days before his general election victory, had a 36-32 percent rating. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani in mid-September, came in at 49-40. Just for comparison, Trump had a 33-63 percent favorability rating.
The leaders who decided Mamdani was too toxic to touch are now, by every available measure, less popular than he is across the more conservative sample of New York state voters.
The political logic of the don’t-change-a-thing camp — manage the risk, protect the brand, avoid association with anything that might alienate swing voters — has failed on its own terms. The man they spent months trying not to be seen with has better numbers than they do.
It was predictable. As New York Times contributor and longtime city politics observer Elizabeth Spiers put it in our January Theory of Change discussion, the politics of today has fundamentally changed from the 1990s:
People are now being forced to choose between fighters and folders. And they want fighters. […]
People want to see their elected officials try to do something to make life better. They want to see improvements, they want to see trying. They don’t want to be told repeatedly that things cannot be done, or because they couldn’t be done 30 years ago, we’re not going to try them now.
In tomorrow’s conclusion to this essay, I’ll explore how Democrats have been here before, outflanked in terms of popular appeal by the Republican party because populist Democrats were shut out of national power.