Both parties close out the 2025 election with nostalgia

The highest-profile Democrats on Tuesday’s ballots — Mamdani, Spanberger, and New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill — have run on overlapping “affordability” messages, with a mix of action plans to hold costs down.

But they’ve done so with appeals to history and pre-Trump politics. Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, has compared his ambitions to New Yorkers who succeeded already.

“Great leaders like Fiorello La Guardia taught us that aspiration is something to embrace,” he said at one of his last mega-rallies, invoking one of the city’s most popular mayors. Challenged to explain how he’d fulfill a promise to make city buses free, he rode the Staten Island ferry and told the story of how his would-be predecessors abolished the fare for it.

Mamdani’s remaining opponents, Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa, have hammered the frontrunner over more radical changes he wants to make and anti-police social media posts that he’s recanted.

Both Cuomo and Sliwa have argued that they can fix the city with ideas that worked before; Cuomo points to his direct experience with massive public infrastructure projects, while Sliwa talks about repeating the tough-on-crime 1990s. (Cuomo, like Mayor Eric Adams, has promised to hire 5,000 police officers, while Sliwa has put his ideal number at 7,000.)

“We saved New York City once in ’93, with Rudy [Giuliani,” Sliwa told supporters at a rally in Queens’s Forest Park on Sunday; one supporter played the theme from the 1979 New York gang movie “The Warriors” on a portable speaker. “We followed it up with George Pataki, who beat the better Cuomo, Mario, in ’94. And we can do it again!”

Cuomo’s long resume and nostalgic campaign has kept his support steady despite an embarrassing primary defeat by Mamdani. On Sunday, before he zipped from one Bronx church to another, the former governor was stopped by a retired MTA train conductor who started tearing up about what happened “when the Twin Towers fell.”

Marcus Mims, 62, knew that Cuomo was not governor on 9/11. He still liked how the now-independent mayoral candidate “stepped up” to deliver benefits to survivors years later.

In Virginia and New Jersey, where Trump is less unpopular, the Republican gubernatorial nominees have supported the president’s efforts to roll back progressive policies. Ciattarelli promises to lower energy costs immediately by yanking the state out of a regional greenhouse gas initiative, as well as any other environmental policy that voters are sick of.

“No wind farms off our Jersey Shore,” Ciattarelli said in Woodbridge. “At the supermarket, you can have your plastic bags back!”

Ciattarelli, who is polling close to Sherrill, has some history on his side: New Jersey voters have very rarely replaced a two-term Democratic governor with another Democrat.

In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has largely promised to keep the agenda of term-limited Gov. Glenn Youngkin, while working with the Trump administration to pull progressive gender policies out of schools. She’s said it’s necessary to protect kids from “those who would turn back decades of gains for women’s rights.”

Democrats are increasingly confident that Earle-Sears made a mistake by focusing so much on LGBTQ issues, leaving a blank where her governing agenda should be. In Virginia and New Jersey, their candidates have campaigned on more housing and cheaper energy as a way to deliver on basically conservative ideas: Life used to be more affordable, and politics used to be less bitter. The clock isn’t going to turn itself back.

“Remember how Donald Trump declared a quote-unquote ‘emergency’ so he could put tariffs in place that are now dragging up costs for you?” Obama said at his Saturday rally for Sherrill in Newark. “On her first day as governor, Mikie will declare a state of emergency to bring costs down!”

The first insight of Mamdani’s campaign was that the gloom and doom about crime that defined Eric Adams’s mayoralty was fading, with voters getting more worried about the cost of living. If Democrats have a good Tuesday night, it’ll be because they focused on that, even when their opponents tried to shift topics.

But when voters talk about costs, young voters in particular, the implication is often that life used to be cheaper — and should be cheaper again. For 10 years, that desire has powered the rebirth of democratic socialism, driven by millennials and zoomers who can’t afford the milestones of adult life as easily as their parents did.

That nostalgia for a more affordable time has also powered the MAGA movement, which has always contained an unsubtle promise to control growth: Fewer immigrants, more manufacturing, with the benefits going to people who deserve to be here.

There are plenty of forward-looking ideas in this year’s campaigns, from both parties. But all of them point conspicuously to the past (the recent past for Democrats, the slightly more distant one for Republicans) to claim that life would improve if their candidate wins.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has sold the Democratic “election-rigging response” not as a return to any tradition, but as something new: His party throwing out a rulebook after Republicans decided that they wouldn’t play by it anyway.

“Politics has changed. The world has changed,” Newsom told NBC News. “We want to go back to some semblance of normalcy, but you have to deal with the crisis at hand.”