Zohran Mamdani has said his victory in the New York City mayoral election has shown the way to defeat Donald Trump: with a left-wing populist, anti-establishment ticket. Senator Bernie Sanders heralded Mamdani as “the future of the Democratic Party”. 

But the Democrats also won decisive victories in two other gubernatorial races – with moderate, centrist candidates. Abigail Spanberger easily overturned a Republican majority in Virginia, while Mikie Sherrill defied expectations of a tight race with 13-point win in New Jersey. Now, the party must decide what lessons to learn.

What did the commentators say?
Moderate Democrats and their media allies will try to claim Mamdani’s “improbable victory” doesn’t matter, said Alex Shephard, senior editor of The New Republic. They will say a young, inexperienced Muslim democratic socialist can become mayor of New York but the city is “not like the rest of the country”. They will say his campaign – although built on “a series of tactile, eminently achievable and, frankly, small-scale promises” – is “all a fantasy”. “Make no mistake: they are afraid of Mamdani.” And they should be: “Mamdani is not a warning shot; he is a sign of things to come.” Democratic voters want “radical, transformative change”. 

Democrats showed that their “demoralised party” can still win, “and win big”, said Lisa Lerer in The New York Times. Yet it “still hasn’t coalesced around a coherent political identity or a clear electoral playbook that can win in swing states and safe states alike”. Mamdani, Sherrill and Spanberger all “benefited from showing independent streaks and a willingness to break with party leaders”.

There was a “common theme” that emerged from this trio of wins, said Ry Rivard and Madison Fernandez on Politico: affordability. For all their “ideological differences”, Mamdani, Sherrill and Spanberger found “a shared language that aims at the heart” of Trump’s populism: “the high cost of everyday life”. In a political landscape “dominated by culture-war battles and Trump’s omnipresence, Democrats found traction by talking about rent, utilities and groceries, instead of ideology”. 

What next?
The Democrats are still a party “teeming with tensions over age, ideology, tactics and tone, and they are still rebuilding their damaged brand”, said Lerer in the NYT.  These results suggest “an intra-party battle may be looming” as they get ready for the midterms next year and “a wide-open presidential primary contest” in 2027.

Half of the world’s remaining uncontacted Indigenous groups face extinction within a decade, due to growing contact with missionaries, miners, drug traffickers and social media influencers, a new report has warned. Human rights group Survival International has identified 196 “uncontacted” communities around the world who are living “at the edge of survival”.

Who are they, and where?
Uncontacted peoples are those who reject contact with outsiders as an active and ongoing choice, said Survival. Some are entire peoples who are uncontacted, while others are subgroups of bigger tribes with whom they share a language and often a territory. These groups are self-sufficient and resilient.

The Amazon basin accounts for the vast majority of these communities, with the rest living in the Asia-Pacific, including India and Indonesia. Some people romanticise them as “lost tribes” frozen in time, said Fiona Watson, Survival’s research and advocacy director, but the reality is that many are contemporary societies whose avoidance of outsiders is “rooted in memories of devastating past contact and invasion”. The threats they are facing now are “what I would call silent genocides”.

Why are they under threat?
Resource extraction is by far the biggest threat to uncontacted peoples, many of whom live on land ripe for mining, logging and agribusiness. Deforestation and infrastructure projects, like roads and railways, often leave food and water sources destroyed and polluted, bringing starvation.

Drug-trafficking gangs also pose an existential danger to Indigenous communities, according to Survival’s report, as do missionaries who are “bankrolled by multimillion-dollar evangelical organisations” to track and convert people to Christianity. A new but growing threat is the rise of “adventure-seeking tourists” and social media influencers who expose uncontacted groups to deadly diseases. 

What can be done?
Brazil adopted a policy in 1987 to protect isolated peoples and demarcate their land. This “allowed many populations to grow”, said The Guardian, but the agency set up to protect them has been “deliberately weakened” by successive governments over the years.

Survival has called for a global no-contact policy and urged private companies to ensure their supply chains are free of material sourced from land inhabited by Indigenous groups. Protecting uncontacted peoples will require not only “stronger laws”, said The Independent, but also a “shift in how the world views them: not as relics of the past but as citizens of the planet whose survival affects everyone’s future”.

Prince William surveys Rio de Janeiro at the foot of the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Mount Corcovado. The royal is attending the Earthshot Prize Awards in the Brazilian coastal city this evening, before travelling to Belém for the UN’s Cop30 climate conference tomorrow.

Chris Jackson / Getty Images

“As one door is pushed shut by a grimy MI5 boss, another creaks open,” said Tim Glanfield in The Times. The fifth season of “Slow Horses” may be over but another of Mick Herron’s books – this time, his debut novel – has been adapted for the small screen. And, if you’re a fan of the Slough House “outsiders” and their “battles against the system”, you’ll enjoy this new show.

The action kicks off in Oxford, where “bored art restorer” Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) is hosting a dinner party with her financier husband for one of his “particularly important and irksome” clients. But the evening is “cut short” by a deadly gas explosion at a neighbouring house. When Sarah realises that an injured child has “mysteriously disappeared”, she turns “amateur sleuth” to “find the girl, and some answers”. She soon stumbles on the offices of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), and the pair discover they are “up against a lot more than they first thought”. 

Thompson is “every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical“ and “unlikely” as Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. And Wilson delivers a performance that is just as “mesmeric”. Both are “unforgettable” female characters. 

It is a bit “messy here and there”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. But that didn’t stop me “bingeing the whole lot, in thrall to the cast chemistry”. “Down Cemetery Road” is not “Slow Horses” but this crime thriller is “its own beast: faster, funnier and unrelenting”. 

Reform UK’s Gunpowder Plot
Mary Harrington on UnHerd
Most of us have “forgotten the details” of the Gunpowder Plot, but many of its “drivers” have “echoes” in today’s “febrile atmosphere”, writes Mary Harrington. I wonder “how much longer” the “attempted murder of an entire government” will feel “remote” enough to be a “fun theme for an autumn party”. Pollsters say Reform voters are “more sympathetic than any other group” to Guy Fawkes. Given their desire to blow up Parliament – “figuratively, rather than literally” – that “makes perfect sense”.

The BBC was right about the Capitol riots. In a sane world, Trump would be in jail
James Ball in The i Paper
Donald Trump is “winning” his war on US media, writes James Ball. And now “some in the President’s camp have the BBC in their sights”, after an internal report apparently criticised its “dishonest editing” of a speech he gave to demonstrators who then “marched on the Capitol”. But “the BBC didn’t get January 6 wrong”; Trump “whipped up a crowd with an untrue conspiracy”, and our public broadcaster should stand up “for its reporting – and for the truth”. 

Cars hurt us more than strangers on a train
Matthew Parris in The Times
Our “perception of risk” fails us when “huge numbers are involved”, writes Matthew Parris. The UK population “travelled 37.3 billion miles by train” last year, and we can “compute” that we’re “massively more likely to be killed or injured while crossing a road (as were 19,176 pedestrians last year) than at the hands of a crazy on a train” – yet we don’t “really feel” it. “Cool rationality sometimes goes against the grain of human nature.”