Please cite as:
Sofos, Spyros A. (2026). “The Popular, the Populist, and the Plebeian: Mamdani as a Problem for Populism Studies.” Journal of Populism Studies (JPS). October 6, 2026. https://doi.org/10.55271/JPS000132
Abstract
This article develops a framework distinguishing plebeian rupture, populist closure, and plebeian-institutional articulation. It asks how popular agency can endure through institutions while those advancing demands retain the capacity to shape decisions and challenge their representatives. The analysis examines Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign from October 2024 to November 2025 through campaign statements, speeches, endorsement records, and organizational materials. Independent demands, endorsement rules, and public disagreement show organized constituencies seeking a continuing role in the project. Their influence over contested priorities and effective constraints on leadership are less clearly documented. The findings support understanding the campaign’s organizational project as plebeian-institutional articulation, alongside a left-populist reading of its construction of a common identity. The framework shifts attention from the presence of organizations to the authority constituent actors retain as popular projects enter institutions.
Keywords: populism; plebeian politics; plebeian-institutional articulation; political mediation; social movements; Zohran Mamdani.
By Spyros A. Sofos
Introduction
On 4 November 2025, New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City with just over 50.2 percent of the vote (New York City Board of Elections, 2025). By election day, the outcome was no longer wholly unexpected: a poll in September had already shown him with a commanding lead, and Bloomberg described him as the clear frontrunner heading into the vote (Quinnipiac University Poll, 2025; Bloomberg, 2025). Yet the victory still defied a coordinated effort to stop him. Anti-Mamdani political action committees enjoyed a substantial financial advantage, while more than twenty billionaires had contributed to efforts designed to block him; Reuters, meanwhile, noted opposition extending beyond the Democratic Party, including Donald Trump’s late endorsement of Cuomo, threatening to cut funds for New York City if Mamdani were to win the mayoral race (Bloomberg, 2025; Time, 2025; Reuters, 2025).
Mamdani’s lead in the polls and its translation into electoral victory was almost immediately interpreted through the familiar idiom of populism. Commentators across progressive, centrist, and conservative outlets described his campaign as “economic populism,” “left populism,” or as proof that people-centered anti-establishment politics had become endemic to the contemporary United States (O’Donnell, 2025; Sirota, 2025; Michael, 2025; Pilkington, 2025; Heer, 2025; Wimbish, 2025; Laleoğlu, 2025; Epstein, 2025). Some cast him as a left-wing counterpart to Donald Trump: a populist, different in content, but comparable in form, tone, and social appeal. Multiple sources framed Trump and Mamdani as structural equivalents in populism. Mechoui argued that "Trump and Mamdani are just as notable for their convergences as their contrasts," emphasizing that both are "manifestations of the same development: the concentration of executive power" (Mechoui, 2025) as both figures strategically shape voter desires through populist messaging. The Economist similarly observed that "Like Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani promises ‘a new approach to power,’" noting that despite their ideological opposition, both represent a shared political method focused on executive action over procedural constraints (The Economist, 2026).
Others contended that "ideology matters, but method matters more," highlighting how both leaders deploy decisiveness, norm-challenging, and narrative clarity as their primary tools, regardless of left-right positioning (CEO Today, 2026). Epstein positioned both Trump and Mamdani within a broader populist tradition, defining populism as rooted in "public distrust of established legal and social institutions" combined with "would-be champions of sweeping reform" (Epstein, 2025), a framework that encompasses both figures despite their ideological divergence. Even more cautious analyses still implied that Mamdani’s politics were populist, stressing anti-elite mobilization, the activation of disaffected voters, and the construction of a new majority coalition out of constituencies alienated from establishment politics (Dionne, 2025; Singh, 2025).
Mamdani’s campaign raises a problem that a populist classification alone cannot resolve. People-centered antagonism and the linking of grievances can occur in projects with different relations to plurality, representation, and institutional mediation. The more important and urgent task is to examine how popular claims are formulated, joined, authorized, and contested: whether a common identity extends constituent actors’ capacity to act together or concentrates authority to speak and decide in their name.
This article makes a theory-building intervention grounded in a bounded interpretive case study. It asks: How can analyses of popular politics distinguish institutional articulation that preserves autonomous voice and contestation from closure around an indivisible popular will, and what does Mamdani’s campaign reveal about that distinction? The argument proposes and develops an analytical typology distinguishing among plebeian rupture, populist closure, and plebeian-institutional articulation.
These three concepts address different questions about the politics of the popular. Plebeian rupture concerns political emergence: people previously excluded or assigned a subordinate position assert their standing as actors entitled to shape collective life. Plebeian-institutional articulation concerns how that agency can endure through organizations, representation, and institutional participation. Its distinctive feature is that those actors retain meaningful opportunities to formulate demands, influence priorities, and challenge their representatives. Populist closure concerns the treatment of disagreement: it develops when a leadership or organization claims exclusive authority to express an indivisible popular will and treats competing claims as illegitimate.
Their relationship involves no necessary sequence. Political emergence need not begin with a dramatic rupture, and a disruptive mobilization may already contain claims to exclusive representation. Institutional articulation can sustain agency and provide protections against closure through independent organizations, accountable representation, and procedures that keep collective priorities open to revision. These protections do not merely depend on the existence of institutions of representation but on their effective function. They require continuing political work. Where they weaken, representatives may increasingly displace the agency of those they represent. Making binding decisions or establishing leadership does not itself constitute closure; what is important is whether those represented retain legitimate and effective means of questioning and redirecting that authority.
Distinguishing these dimensions allows us to examine what happens to popular agency across different moments and relationships within a political project. The emergence of previously excluded actors establishes neither their continuing influence nor the accountability of their representatives. Organizational continuity tells us little, by itself, about whose demands guide the organization. Public disagreement demonstrates independent voice, while its consequences reveal more about the distribution of authority. A project may therefore expand political standing, develop durable institutions, and restrict contestation in different relationships or at different times. The distinction makes those developments visible and allows us to assess how institutional articulation preserves agency, where its protections become ineffective, and whether claims to exclusive popular representation produce closure.
By plebeian-institutional articulation I refer here to a mode of institutionalizing agency from below in which actors contesting unequal political standing retain the capacity to formulate independent claims, challenge representatives, and participate in revising collective priorities. Its defining combination is plebeian political authorship, the pursuit of institutional duration, and autonomous mediation. Populist closure, by contrast, treats an indivisible popular will as authorizing privileged representation and subordinates particular claims and independent contestation to that authority. The distinction concerns what organizational and institutional arrangements enable, not simply whether such arrangements exist.
Mamdani’s campaign is analytically useful in this respect because people-centered antagonism coexists with a dense movement ecology and extensive organizing infrastructures. That combination makes it a boundary case for examining the relationship between popular articulation and mediation. I approach his campaign as a possible experiment in plebeian-institutional articulation whose character must be assessed through the relationships among constituent organizations, campaign leadership, and collective priorities. Neither the presence of intermediaries nor electoral success establishes that those actors retained autonomous voice or effective influence. What is critical conceptually is to distinguish how popular agency acquires institutional duration and how that process may preserve or restrict contestability. Empirically, the article examines Mamdani’s campaign during the 2024–25 election period, focusing on its relationships with the organizations and networks that supported it. This assessment takes the left-populist interpretation seriously. In Mouffe’s account (2018), left populism can accommodate heterogeneous demands and pluralist institutions. Plebeian-institutional articulation may therefore specify relationships that a broader populist classification leaves open.
A democratic concern with plurality and equal political standing runs through the argument. It directs attention to whether participation gives those involved an effective role in shaping collective priorities and holding representatives to account. The article first develops its conceptual framework and research design, then examines Mamdani’s campaign in dialogue with the left-populist interpretation. It concludes by considering how plebeian-institutional articulation might endure and how the framework could apply beyond this case.
