Zohran Mamdani’s lead in first choices in New York City’s ranked-choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he’ll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation’s largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November.

Mamdani, 33, is a three-term state assemblyman who calls himself a democratic socialist. He has backed a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses, putting homeless service centers in the subways, a $30 minimum wage, defunding the police, zcity’s scattered white ethnic areas more robustly. When his father, Mario Cuomo, ran, unsuccessfully, for mayor in 1977, carrying those blocs, even narrowly, would have guaranteed victory. There weren’t that many other voters.

It’s different now. Mamdani won by huge margins from the same constituency that cast the critical votes for Johnson in Chicago. It’s the same constituency that in 2021 in New York was the base of Maya Wiley, who won slightly more first-choice votes than Kathryn Garcia, whose base was affluent Manhattan, but fewer than the winner, incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose base was Blacks in Brooklyn and Queens.

That constituency is mostly, but by no means totally, white. It tends to have higher levels of education than income, and it skews young — Millennials and Gen Z. If you’re under 30, one Mamdani ad explained that Andrew Cuomo hasn’t lived in New York City since before you were born.

I have called this constituency the “barista proletariat,” made up of people with temporary jobs in service industries, nonprofit organizations or media, perpetual grad students or adjunct lecturers who supplement their incomes often by gaming welfare systems and working off the books. You could see them as economic parasites on Manhattan’s rich finance and media wealth. They prefer to see themselves as cultural rebels against the larger society’s complacency and intolerance.

Geographically, these voters are concentrated in formerly ethnic outer-borough neighborhoods connected to Manhattan by subway lines, such as Astoria, Queens, where Mamdani won his Assembly seat by beating an incumbent in 2020, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick in Brooklyn. The Chicago equivalent is the far North Side, reachable by the L but distant from the Loop and the Lakefront.

Many such New York neighborhoods emptied, especially in the high-crime and civic-bankruptcy 1970s, as white ethnics fled to Long Island, the Jersey Shore and Florida; the city’s population fell by nearly 1 million people.