President Donald Trump is starring himself as the savior and New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani as the devil in the political drama unfolding across the Big Apple.
A Democratic state assemblyman noted for his decisive primary win as a socialist candidate over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has emerged as the new darling of the national progressive movement, joining Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in calling for policies designed to appeal to working-class voters.
As Mamdani rises within the progressive movement, he has become the favored bogeyman of Republicans, led by Queens native Trump, who called the mayoral hopeful a “Communist lunatic” on Wednesday morning.
“I think it’s very bad for New York. I don’t know that he’s gonna get in. It’s inconceivable … he’s a communist,” the president said last week. “I can’t imagine it.”
In a rare boost for Republicans, some Democrats have joined the criticism, warning that it could be a grave political miscalculation to mistake enthusiasm within certain circles for Mamdani’s proposals, including raising taxes on the rich, providing free public buses and child care, freezing rent in subsidized units, and creating government-run grocery stores, with broader support for such ideas.
“His solutions to those problems are not ones that will be roundly embraced in New York City, and I don’t think they will be roundly embraced in the larger Democratic diaspora,” former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told Politico. “Leading with ‘Let’s tax the rich’? … It definitely appeals to a certain populace — people who believe there are people not paying their fair share of taxes. But I don’t know if that’s a winning formula.”
Experts say there’s another problem for Mamdani beyond alienating capitalist proponents or New York billionaires. Despite his campaign being grounded in pitches to voters disillusioned with New York’s affordability crisis, Mamdani lost the working-class vote by a significant margin.
“It was the millennials, overwhelmingly college-educated, white millennials, who successfully brought Mamdani to winning the Democratic primary,” Ivan Pongracic, an economics professor at Hillsdale College, told the Washington Examiner.
The working class, on the other hand, “is not interested in those ideas at all,” he continued.
“I mean, it’s ironic, because the whole idea of of socialism, from a Marxist perspective, is that it was an ideology that was supposed to appeal to the working classes … because they got the rawest deal under capitalism, and that is not what we are seeing these days at all,” the professor continued. “So it’s a very strange thing, but the Democrat Party is not appealing with these ideas to the working classes at all at this point.”
Mamdani built an impressive coalition to fend off Cuomo last month, crafting a grassroots campaign that spurred critical surges of support from young voters and made inroads into the Asian community.
Mamdani’s base believes in the socialist idea, Pongracic said, “of an omnipotent government that’s going to be capable of controlling the economy.” The centralized system will “usher in perfect social justice, right? Because they see so many problems,” he said.
But working-class voters, who form a critical voting bloc that could prove essential to winning the Big Apple’s mayoral race, haven’t embraced the movement, Pongracic warned. Nationally, such voters have long lined the Democrats’ base, although Trump shocked pundits last year when they flocked to his campaign. In liberal New York, the demographic still seems stubbornly opposed to falling in line with Mamdani’s socialist version of the party.
Election results show that New York City’s lower-income voters, including significant numbers of working-class black people, remained solidly in Cuomo’s camp, a coalition that will likely transfer to Mayor Eric Adams ahead of the general election should the former governor pull his campaign.
Where Cuomo won lower-income voters in areas such as southeast Queens and central Brooklyn by a margin of 13 points, Mamdani took middle- and higher-income voters in areas such as western Queens and northern Brooklyn by margins of 10 and 13 points, respectively, according to the New York Times.
Cuomo won heavily among black or lower-income working-class populations in areas such as Springfield Gardens, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and St. Albans, by respective margins of 43, 41, 37, and 35 points.
Mamdani won areas that tended to be whiter, younger, and more affluent and secured by margins of 66 points in Bushwick, 43 points in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 39 points in Fort Greene, 39 points in Long Island City, 32 points in Park Slope, 27 points in Astoria, 27 points in Williamsburg, and 26 points in Jackson Heights.
“What we are finding is that there’s an enormous level of enthusiasm and support for socialist ideas among the millennials, in particular,” Pongracic said, pointing to “massive audiences” Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders encountered during their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour this spring.
“So that is where the enthusiasm and where the real strength of the Democrat Party is right now,” he continued. “It’s a huge liability for the Democrat Party because outside of the millennial group, these ideas are not popular. And if you look at, you know, Gen X or boomers, or even Gen Z, they, in general, are not drawn to these ideas. So for the Democrat Party, enthusiasm for Democrat socialism probably spells electoral defeat.”
One aspect of Mamdani’s candidacy that Republicans hope will lead to his defeat involves the candidate’s past support for ideas like “seizing the means of production,” a communist policy birthed in Marxist theory, which they have used to brand him as an extreme candidate deeply out of touch with mainstream consciousness.
“At the heart of all socialist economic systems is that the government is in control of at least the major means of production, and sometimes all means of production,” Pongracic said, later adding that “a lot of Democrats” find enthusiasm for such ideas “alarming.”
“They don’t think that that’s the traditional Democrat message. [But] this is where the Democrat Party is heading. It is heading further left,” he said.
Ahead of the general election, Trump has gladly rallied the charge against Mamdani, portraying himself as New York City’s savior who will not let “this Communist Lunatic destroy” his birthplace.
“Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City, and make it ‘Hot’ and ‘Great’ again, just like I did with the Good Ol’ USA!” the president said Wednesday morning.
Still, while Trump believes Republicans will have the last word, the debate about socialism is likely one that is here to stay, as millennials will soon be the largest voting bloc in the country. And enthusiasm for such policies has only grown in recent decades, posing a looming challenge to traditionalists in both the Democratic and Republican camps.
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As New York City emerges as the latest testing ground for progressive Democrats, pollsters say Mamdani could face a tough path to victory ahead of the general election, saying the race will likely hinge on voter turnout.
“In theory, Zohran could be vulnerable,” pollster Nate Silver wrote in an analysis of the race last Tuesday. “Whether you count his [primary] victory margin as 7 percent or 12 percent, that’s extremely impressive for a candidate who started out polling as low as 1 percent in some surveys. But it’s also not an insurmountable margin. While slightly over a million votes were cast in the Democratic primary, New York City has 5.1 million registered voters.”
