Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki hailed Zohran Mamdani’s Tuesday night win in the New York City mayoral race as an example of how a Democrat can still motivate voters as more than just a Trump antidote.
“One of the Mamdani things that I think we should talk about is he inspired and excited people,” Psaki said during MSNBC’s live coverage of the election results. “I mean, I worked in politics for 20 years. That’s what it is supposed to be about.”
Psaki speculated that the hope and optimism of Mamdani’s campaign offered voters a stronger incentive to cast ballots, versus most other Democratic candidates in the years since Donald Trump first took office.
“I think we’ve gone through a number of election cycles where it has been such a freaking grind because people are voting against Trump,” Psaki explained. “It is possible for people to be excited and vote for something and not just against something.”
Psaki noted that Mamdani also did not center his entire campaign around his opposition to Trump.
“Trump is the backdrop of all of this, but he didn’t talk about Trump all the time,” the MSNBC host observed. You can watch the full segment in the video below.
Fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes echoed Psaki’s latter point and noted that newly elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger did not make her campaign all about Trump, either.
“Spanberger barely mentioned Trump],” Hayes said. “Partly it’s because of … how oppressively ubiquitous it all is. When you’re the candidate, there’s no reason to talk about [Trump]. You don’t have to.”
Recapping the results of Tuesday’s elections, Hayes added that the night saw a swing toward the Democratic side of the political spectrum among younger voters. The MSNBC anchor argued that may have been the direct result of some of the economic hardships that young voters have faced in recent years.
“We saw young voters generally move to the Right in the last election,” Hayes recalled. “Is it something having to do with this generation, or is it that young people are some of the people most exposed to higher cost of living and the most frustrated when things start to get more expensive? What we are seeing so far [from] we have in the demographic polling in all of the exits in the three big races is big swings to Democrats among [the] youngest voters.”
