It Turns Out, Hope Still Polls Well
An unexpected victory, a surge for the Greens in the UK, one slightly overcaffeinated political commentator and a reminder that optimism still has teeth.
Welcome to Bearly Politics - where I take my angry stick and use it to poke at politics, power and the sometimes strange optimism that keep some of us going despite it all. I’m The Bear, and today’s post is about hope - the real kind, not the PR kind. A note that this is a long and rambling one made specifically for a Sunday afternoon read, so grab a coffee, a tea or pour yourself a little port and settle in.
If for any reason you would like to listen to me talking uncomfortably at my laptop instead of reading through, the option is available below to paid subscribers.
It’s been a rough year for progressive people and people who believe in progressive ideas. And by that, I mean basically anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher these days. With Reform UK seemingly constantly surging in the polls, and their bile being amplified on a daily basis by the media ecosystem, it’s felt a bit rough in the UK.
Add to that the US, which is turning properly post-apocalyptic and completely undemocratic with Orangina doing his thing - and by doing his thing, I mean becoming a full-on authoritarian. Things have felt a bit rough. There have been wars, there’s been austerity, there have been climate disasters.
There’s this rise of populism that feels inevitable. And there’s a bit of a deep fatigue among people who really want to believe in something better.
And there’s also the sense that the central political gravity keeps shifting rightwards, and that every uplifting argument that we make has to start with some sort of apology. If you think that sounds bleak, it is because it is.
However, it does feel like there are a couple of small glimmers of hope coming through - a couple of little green shoots that we haven’t had for a very, very, very long time.
A Socialist in New York
The first of which is Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York this week, which was absolutely spectacular, and I was honestly so genuinely happy for him. And then there’s also the Green surge that we’re seeing in the UK under Zack Polanski.
And these two do really matter a bit more than usual, because of the last eighteen months or so that we’ve seen. They’re not miracles, but they do prove to us that belief and hope and a clear message can actually sell things - can actually sell our ideas.
So, I think it’s worth looking at the Zohran Mamdani win. This man is thirty-four and the Mayor of New York, if that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve achieved nothing in your life, I don’t know what else will.
He was born in Uganda and raised in New York City, although I do understand there were small periods where he lived in South Africa, so I’m going to claim that as my familiarity with Mr Mamdani.
His win was spectacular. He won 50.4% of the vote in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, where Cuomo, the Democratic establishment candidate, won 41.6%, and the Republican Curtis Sliwa, who literally no one has ever heard of, won about seven percent.
That is a win of a massive scale. There was voter turnout of over two million people, which is the biggest it has been in decades, and his campaign focused on grassroots issues.
It was small-donor funded, with eighty thousand volunteers, and it was a big coalition of renters, unions, climate activists, and genuine working-class voters. He ran on a platform of rent freezes, free public transport, city-run groceries, childcare for all, and a city tax on billionaires. Now, all of those things will admittedly give any Republican - or right-wing politician, even in the UK - conniptions.
But I wouldn’t say that’s even necessarily that far left if you think about it. Many of the things that he is looking at achieving would be quite normal in Europe - and if not that normal in the UK, at least in Scandinavian countries, which do run pretty well. There is that sort of level of infrastructure.
And it’s a symbolic victory. He’s the first Muslim and the first South Asian Mayor of New York, and he’s also the youngest in a century. This has inevitably led to a full-on right-wing fanny-bobble meltdown over the past week or so, and I did a post where I collected all the most insane ones.
My favourite one probably being that taxis would be replaced by camels - and honestly, I’m there for it. That would be amazing. However, obviously that wouldn’t work; camels wouldn’t do so well in New York, come to think of it, so that is a bit unrealistic. But then again, he’s not going to do that, but people on the right will tell you that, and they will believe it.
He framed his whole movement as New York for New Yorkers again, and obviously there was the immediate backlash from the right-wing establishment - and I am saying establishment because Orangina, Trumplethinskin, has become the Republican establishment - we got “AND SO IT BEGINS.”
Yes, Mr Trump, so it does begin.
And this matters to us because it is a living rebuke to the idea that socialism or left populism is unelectable. It shows how organising can beat despair and how a disciplined ground game - a real grassroots game - with data-driven field work and, most importantly, a narrative of hope can pull through. I can’t tell you how genuinely happy I am for Mamdani. I’m hoping he does a great job, and if he is anything like Sadiq Khan - and I do hope he is - he’ll lead with integrity and with compassion.
And you know what, New York can do worse than that, despite what people might be telling each other in the US about the first “Islam-run city” being London, and “no-go zones” that we all know do not actually exist. Now, in the context of that, I want to link in the Green Party surge in the UK.
Green Shoots of Hope in the UK
Since Zack Polanski came in, it really has been a surge. They were usually a good couple of points behind Labour in polling - they are now three points away.
They’ve surged past one hundred thousand members and are now at about one hundred and forty thousand, making them officially the third-largest party in the UK - there’s a lot of support among under-thirty-fives and over-thirty-fives for that matter - I mean, I’m supportive of it as someone not under thirty five.
Renters love them, and university towns do too, and yes, that’s not the full demographic of the UK. But considering that we’re a good three years away from the next general election, it is a fantastic start and a really good demographic in the UK to get pinned down.
The messaging is basically a mix of ecological urgency, anti-poverty framing, and a moral critique of what has been happening in Gaza, and Polanski’s rhetoric really does resonate with voters who are a bit disillusioned by Labour’s perceived moral cowardice - especially when it comes to a couple of issues that are important to us, and I think especially when it comes to anti-migration racism coming through, which Zack Polanski has been very, very punchy about - which I particularly appreciate.
And this also matters because, like Mamdani’s campaign, it’s tapping into not only moral conviction but clarity as well. If you ask what the Green Party stands for, you sort of have a good idea. Ask the same of Labour at the moment and it becomes muddled which is the best way I can describe it.
All of this really punctures the myth that progressive politics can only survive in protest, and there’s a chance that they’ll start to shape the mainstream, and that gives voters an outlet for hope that isn’t cynicism - à la Reform - or apathy, which appears to be the approach that the Labour government has taken to date. And that becomes hope as a political technology.
Both in the US and the UK, these movements can demonstrate that being hopeful isn’t naïve - that it can be strategic. There’s an emotional tone we can tap into, that optimism can be an organising force, and that people will turn out for something better, not just against something worse.
Which is what we saw in the last general election when Labour won their stunning victory against the Tories because there had been fourteen years of a panoply of fuck-ups, and I think it’s important there because many people in the UK voted for Labour last year simply because they didn’t want another Tory government - and that is perfectly fair.
Another Round of Tories - No, Thank You
I think it would have just become so much worse - even under Rishi Sunak, who, out of the lot of them, was really, really robotic, but he wasn’t really the worst. I think that goes down to, between the big old bag of lies Boris Johnson and Liz “the Lettuce” Truss, those two were definitely the biggest fuck-up that our country has ever seen.
But if you can shift your focus onto things like affordable living, dignity, and equality - and not the sort of managerial doom - that’s already helpful, and Polanski’s message is really coming through with that as well, with a sort of joyful radicalism, which isn’t eco-piety but systemic fairness and shared wealth, which so many of us on the progressive side of politics would love to see - plus a bit more taxation on the wealthiest among us. But that’s probably a whole episode on its own.
So if we contrast that with the mainstream left - Labour’s current communication style is grey. It sort of feels as though a management consultancy has replaced their imagination. Many of the things they say, I will say, are sensible - not welfare cuts, those are a mess; not the immigration stuff, that is a disaster, and on that they’re clearly trying to out-Reform Reform. It just all feels like there isn’t a narrative running through - there isn’t a narrative thread.
And on top of that, their start was a bit ignominious.
When Labour took over, within five minutes, we had Keir Starmer - a politician who I do still have a decent measure of respect for - standing on the podium telling us, “Lads, it’s a fuck-up. It’s all a mess.” And I agree - it was.
You can’t describe the state of the country as anything else after what the Tories did - with austerity, with Brexit, with the mismanagement of COVID, with the cutbacks, with the fact that we didn’t have any social care infrastructure or services left.
It is very, very bad. And then he proceeded to give us what felt like a bit of a PowerPoint slide of how they might possibly - or might not possibly - fix things, and there was just no real narrative in that, and the thing about politics is that, yes, it is about policy, but it is also about the story.
Reality Checks and Counterpoints
And this is where, I do feel, unfortunately, Labour has failed pretty badly. Again, they have three years left in power and they can turn things around, and I really do, hope that they do.
But somehow I don’t think it is going to be that easy. I think there are going to be a couple of questions to ask in 2028, once we see what the impacts have been.
With having said all of this, there are a couple of reality checks that we need to acknowledge - the first one being more stateside: that New York City, and the New York City mayoralty, is not the United States. We have to be pretty clear-eyed about that.
New York is a deep-blue city with a high progressive density, and the chances of Mamdani’s strategy swinging anything in rural America are very, very slim. But then, if you have a look at the other two elections that were won this week in the states, they were won by centre-left - though I would probably call them centre-right relatively - Democrats.
And those are wins, and it might be because Trump wasn’t on the ballot. That is a pretty good explanation for that. But the fact is that we can’t rely only on Mamdani’s win in New York to give us an indication of what exactly is going to happen in both the midterm elections next year and the presidential elections in 2028. There’s a long road to go.
There’s also the fact that not only will Republican centrists, but Democratic centrists, paint the success as more urban radicalism instead of a national trend, and there’s something to be said about whether they’re right or wrong, but that is how it is. What needs to be done in that case is that the New York setting needs to be reframed as a proof of concept, and not necessarily a universal blueprint. Every movement starts somewhere. It might be New York today, but it may be Chicago, Seattle, or Los Angeles next.
You can’t have that wave without a first ripple. And that’s something to keep an eye on - how the cities in the United States respond.
Momentum, Media, and the Machinery of Power
The second counterpoint here is that momentum can fizzle, and we have seen it happen before.
We saw it with Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and Bernie Sanders in 2020. There was a lot of media backlash, a lot of donor panic, and a lot of internal factionalism - which is, unfortunately, a bit of a falling-down point for left progressive politics. And I say that, but it is also a bit of a thing on right populist politics - that it becomes about purity, and you can’t really have that.
Mamdani still has to govern. Mamdani still has to actually make the changes that he wants to make. And one rent freeze that goes wrong could sink the whole narrative. So what he has to do is really make sure that works.
And there’s also another thing that we need to do, and that’s build infrastructure of long-term organising. There needs to be consistent messaging, not just at campaign time. It is easy to get enthralled with someone who says lovely things on a campaign - we’ve seen it, not just in progressive politics. But there needs to be a maintenance of discipline, and there needs to be that avoidance of purity wars.
You need to focus on material improvements that people can feel. You’ve given them hope - now you have to give them results.
You also have to start treating governance as a narrative as well once you do start getting your successes, and this is where I wish Labour was doing a little bit better because I do believe they have had successes, but unfortunately we just haven’t seen or heard them.
They’ve been completely drowned out, and that is not an ideal way of going about things - which brings me neatly to my third counterpoint, which is media hostility.
Most of the traditional media in the United Kingdom and the United States are pretty right-wing-run. If you look at Fox News, GB News; if you look at the traditional newspapers like the Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail - all of them have quite a strong right-leaning stance to them.
And the press has already started smearing Mamdani’s win as chaos. The number of articles I’ve seen over the last week bemoaning the fact that billionaires are going to leave New York in an exodus.
It’s always a bloody exodus of billionaires. I do just wish they would go, but they actually never do. They only ever really move their money abroad.
You’re going to see, over the next couple of years with Mamdani and the mayoralty, a lot of red-baiting. They’re going to call him communist - they already have.
You’ve given them hope – now you have to give them results.
They’re going to fear-monger around eco-austerity, telling people, “Oh, you won’t be able to eat meat anymore. Oh my God, they are going to force you to recycle into seven bins,” à la Rishi Sunak, who had to invent a dragon to slay at the 2023 Tory Party conference.
The biggest thing we need to do in this case is really diversify communication channels, and this is where Polanski has been pretty good in the UK so far, and Mamdani has been pretty good in the US so far. You need to do a lot more direct-to-audience media: Substacks, podcasts, community radio. You need to talk to local journalists - don’t just chat to the guy from the Telegraph.
Chat to the guy from the Northern Echo, or any one of the really good local media organisations that we have. We also need to use humour a bit better, and storytelling, because what we’ve learned is that ridicule does work, because sometimes that’s a better rebuttal than just saying, “Okay, these are the data points; this is why our policy will work.” We need to start being better about telling stories, and that’s something we’ve lost out on.
Building a Bigger, Bolder Left
I think the last politician I can remember who really told the story successfully before Mamdani was Barack Obama. And since then, everything has become a bit too technocratic - and I’m saying that as someone who is very much a technocrat at heart.
There does need to be that change, and what needs to happen is a lot more cross-movement solidarity. As it stands, the left, especially in the UK, is made up of a couple of factions. There’s still the part of Labour that is on the left-hand side - which I’m very grateful for because they are keeping things in check - even though Angela Rayner isn’t in a position of power anymore, which is a disappointment, but it is what it is.
But then we also have the Greens and then we also have Your Party, which is sort of starting to grow. (I’ll be honest: I need to see what happens there with Your Party - I am interested but to date I’ve not been massively impressed).
There are Lib Dems that have been pretty on message, and there needs to be more coordination between these parties to really get their messaging across and become a bit more united in a message, because the fact is that there’s every possibility that the next election may be a coalition of sorts.
And we have to ask ourselves: do we want to see a broad coalition of Labour, Greens, Lib Dems? Or do we want to see a coalition between Reform and the Tories? And that should be the driving force.
I think the political environment is going to change so much over the next couple of years - there are new players coming in, and tactical voting is going to be so important and unfortunately, there is no way of us getting proportional representation in before then.
I do wish we could, and there was a fantastic article this week by, Mark Kieran, who wrote about proportional representation and how it affects the economy, because when you only need to listen to one third of the country, you’re not going to be delivering anything for everybody. It’s a bit of a disastrous system, but we all know that.
Reclaiming Emotion and Clarity
We need to do all these things to rebuild, and one of the main things we need to do is reclaim emotion.
Progressives love to talk policy, while the right talks about feeling, and the feeling the right talks about isn’t positive feeling - it is anger, it’s resentment, it’s mistrust. It’s “the immigrant’s going to steal your job, but also the immigrant is on benefits” (There are a lot of conflicting things, but never mind that).
We need to start pairing fact with emotion. We need to start putting together our outrage with vision.
It’s all well and good to say there are far too many food banks in the UK - which there are - but we need to put a vision out there that if there’s a big change in 2029, food banks will be a thing of the past, or there will be a new system to look after those who need that support.
And we need to put the empathy that we have together with ambition. We also need to simplify the message. I’m very guilty of this myself - I am prone to going into really complex narratives about things.
And none of those narratives are as punchy as “Stop the boats,” “Take back control,” or whatever the three-word slogan of the time will be. But maybe we need to think about our punchy three word slogans, three Cs perhaps?
Care, competence, courage, compassion.
(Okay, so that’s four Cs - so you can pick and choose.)
What we need to do is not just use spreadsheets, but use human stories as well - and we need to showcase delivery.
Even if it is small wins, there needs to be a celebration of when things have improved locally. There needs to be a highlight on: “This community service was brought back; these are the impacts we saw; this is how people are better off.”
That’s important - there needs to be something measurable for people to hold onto, because we’ve not been great at that.
And there needs to be a re-energising of communication, and this is specifically towards the government. You really need to drop the “it’s bad, lads” tone. You can acknowledge pain, but you have to pivot not only to a workable solution but to a compelling one. You can say, “Yes, it’s bad, and that’s exactly why we’re fixing it and not just describing it - and this is how our exciting policy is going to do it.”
I get that there is economic pressure. There is going to be for the next couple of years while Trump is in power and the world economy is a bit of a fuck-up, but that’s where we find ourselves - and we need to give a picture not just of “Christ, what are we going to do?” but an idea of “This is our plan; this is what we want to try,” and then push hard for it to be a success.
And as already mentioned, this is all going to need to be collaboration. There needs to be coordination between progressive political parties in the UK on things like climate, housing, health, and human rights. And you can compete on personality later.
Almost all three of the main progressive parties have the same goal in essence. Work together, lads. Make a team effort of this. You’ll be surprised to see how far that goes.
And then lastly, you have to own moral clarity.
Why is inequality bad? Why is austerity bad? They’re not fringe issues.
They are things that really affect people, and the public notices this integrity. If we have a government that can come out and say, “The austerity we’ve been living under for fifteen years has been bad” - that could definitely move things.
We’re starting to see it now with Labour, who has finally decided they can name Brexit as a possible reason why things are maybe not so great - which took them bloody long enough.
But even then it’s hesitant. It’s like they’re still tiptoeing around it. And that’s annoying.
You really have to think about how you go about these things - to pussyfoot around a subject that a lot of people care about isn’t going to help you. There needs to be less triangulation by the government on this.
There needs to be less of “we have to keep everyone a little bit happy,” because that’s just not working. But that is sort of where we are right now, and we maybe have to look at different options. And those different options are starting to look a lot more Green to me.
The Politics of Hope
What I want to end this bit of a ramble on is that hope doesn’t mean denial of the facts; it means defiance.
It means that we can push against narratives; we can push against the situations we find ourselves in. The world’s right-wing wave that we’ve seen hasn’t been built on hope - it’s been built on despair - and you can see it in the messaging from Reform, from the Republicans, from Alternative für Deutschland, from all these populist parties.
It is a dark message that they send, and they’ve found it resonates - and we need to counteract that. Mamdani and Polanski remind us that joy and conviction and clarity aren’t luxuries.
They are strategies - and they’re bloody good ones, and if we can get to the point where we can make politics feel human again - feel compassionate, feel helpful and hopeful - that’s going to push us forward
If you’ve enjoyed this stroll through the weeds of hope and politics, Bearly Politics is full of similar long reads, written by a man who really should learn to summarise.
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