The forever-renter generation: they’re the ones who voted teal and Mamdani

New York City was once the epitome of aspiration, a global symbol of possibility and prosperity. If you can make it there, Liza Minnelli sang in 1977, you can make it anywhere. Last week the voters of NYC delivered their verdict: you can’t make it there. Possibly not anywhere. It’s no longer up to you, New York, New York.

The election of a 34-year-old democratic socialist as mayor of New York has been called many things. “People-powered”. A “youth quake”. A triumph of “luxury beliefs”. And the “revolt of the credentialled precariat”. Australia’s unofficial ambassador to “royals and rockers”, Kathy Lette, declared this election “an inoculation against pessimism … and antidote to the right-wing rhetoric of Trump & selfish co”.

In Australia, it could be called something else: familiar. We’ve already had two rounds of this revolution – the first in 2022 and the second in 2025.

The US voters who elected Mamdani have a lot in common with the Australians who gave their votes, hopefully or strategically, to the teal-branded “voices of” franchise. In both cases, post-election analyses reveal that the largest bloc of voters electing these political disruptors were university-educated, middle- to upper-income renters.

According to a CNN exit poll, Mamdani significantly outperformed his main rival, Democrat candidate Andrew Cuomo, with voters who had a bachelor’s or advanced degree, while Cuomo led among voters with lower completed levels of education. Cuomo won voters who earned less than $US30,000 ($45,900) a year, drew even on those who earn between $US200,000 to $US299,000 and trounced Mamdani – 64 to 32 per cent – on those who earn more than $US300,000.

Mamdani’s voters were overwhelmingly what is referred to in the US media as “transplants” – that is, people who had moved to New York City. The more recently they had moved there, the more likely they were to vote for him, with 86 per cent of voters who had been in NYC for less than five years casting their ballot for him.

In Australia, the archetypal teal voter was portrayed in the media as an older, financially secure, professional female home owner in an affluent neighbourhood. And certainly in the NSW electorate of Wentworth, teal volunteers, who wore their T-shirts like fashion items at street stalls, cafes and in Double Bay boutiques, seemed to confirm the archetype.

But pollsters tell a different story. After the 2022 election, Redbridge Group’s Kos Samaras told The Australian Financial Review that teal candidates did better in the less affluent parts of the otherwise wealthy electorates they contested. “Their voters in general were younger, and the rental class skewed heavily towards the teals.”

Samaras pointed out that the second-most pro-teal electorate in Sydney was “Surry Hills East”, part of a suburb formerly known by the more down-at-heel name of Redfern. This is a suburb dominated by young professional renters who are beginning to realise they may never be able to afford to own a home in the urban electorates they favour.

What we’re seeing in both here and in NYC is a cry of rage from the downwardly mobile classes – those who went to university, have good jobs, likely went to private schools and yet who can’t afford to buy a house in the places they want to live, and might not be able to afford to send their kids to a school like the one they went to.

It stings. Trump voters are often pilloried by the left for expressing their impotence at a changing world at the ballot box. In the same vein, the poor little privileged professionals embracing socialism are the subject of derision on the right. But humans are creatures of status, and losing hope that we may strive to improve our significance or lot in the world is a unique kind of metaphysical pain.

It doesn’t help that the parents of this declining generation are keen to cheerlead the political rage but reluctant to acknowledge the role they can play in fixing it. Which is why Kathy Lette’s tweet stood out to me.

Far from being “an inoculation against pessimism”, Mamdani’s election was clearly articulated despair. The trajectory of Lette’s daughter’s generation is the opposite to that of her mother’s. In 1979, when the Sutherland Shire girl shot to fame for the teen novella Puberty Blues, young Kathys everywhere could still picture themselves becoming king of the heap in NYC – or London, as Lette eventually chose. The West was wealthy and becoming wealthier. Living standards were rising and continued to rise throughout their lives.

Protest chic was as in vogue among the boomers then as it is now. This was a generation raised on the ballads of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. They complained about the staid morals of their parents who built and saved, fought wars for freedom and had small-town dreams for themselves so they could have big-city dreams for their children.

It is not the fault of the Baby Boomers that they were a lucky generation. But it is their responsibility to own up to the problems that they have created. It was Boomers who worked out how to use lawfare and red and green tape to ossify suburbs and send house prices stratospheric. The effects of the process so eloquently described by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance have now manifested. “Selfish & co” wasn’t a Trump invention but a byproduct of a me-generation that unconsciously morphed into the capitalist asset-holding establishment.

It is easier now to don the T-shirt or celebrate the socialists than it is to unpick the policy errors of the past. But it is a terrible hypocrisy. Instead of cheering their kids and grandkids as they sink, the generation that did well should be doing everything it can to pass down the favour.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.