Mamdani has paved the way for AOC to run for president

Zohran Mamdani's mayoral win in New York on Tuesday night goes back to something simple. Voters don't want to be told change is happening – they want to feel it, fast. It's why you can watch the same neighbourhood vote Republican one cycle and Democrat the next without breaking a sweat. They are not developing a crush on either party but auditioning table-flippers. And that's why, whether he knows it or not, Mamdani may have just laid the groundwork for the left's poster candidate - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC to her friends on the progressive side of US politics.

- PABLO O'HANA

Rewind to summer 2024, and I'm in the watch room for Joe Biden's first debate against Trump. My heart was bleeding as our campaign nosedived with every answer from our candidate drifting into waffle. It was brutal to watch but impossible to ignore.

Biden did a heck of a lot in the White House - genuinely more than most presidents manage in two terms - and I remain incredibly proud to have stood by him and the party's subsequent nominee, Kamala Harris, who would have made a fantastic president. But the truth is that everything came too slowly and too invisibly for a public hammered by prices, failing healthcare, and creaking services. So people went shopping for the 'other' change - in the form of Donald Trump.

That doesn't make them racist or sexist; it makes them so frustrated with life that they were willing to cover their eyes and ears over parts of his platform in the hope he might “flip the fucking table”. The country was not asking for calming words. It was asking to feel some seismic change.