Zohran Mamdani Is A Political Risk Democrats Shouldn T Take

Ever since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor two months ago, Republicans have been licking their chops, and prominent Democrats have been squirming. The GOP sees this as an opportunity to tie the broader Democratic Party to a self-described socialist with many far-left policies who is well poised to become mayor of the nation’s largest city. And the reaction from some Democrats – many high-profile ones have declined to endorse him – suggests they see potential peril here. The issue is coming to a head. Polls reinforce Mamdani is a strong favorite to become mayor. Congressional Republicans are running ads invoking him as they try to hold onto the US House next year.

And The New York Times reports he’s heard from former President Barack Obama, perhaps signaling a thaw with the Democratic establishment. Now Mamdani is getting the Time magazine cover treatment. So, it’s a good time to ask: How much of a liability could he be for Democrats? It’s still too early to say. Mamdani remains very new on the national and even the local stage, and much will depend on how he runs his campaign and ultimately, if he wins in November, how he governs. There have been some signs of attempted moderation.

Zohran Mamdani has won New York's mayoral election, giving one of America's greatest cities a democratic socialist mayor. I warned months ago that a Mamdani victory would be appropriated by the far left as validation of their movement’s potential for broader success. While I am saddened for New Yorkers and the country, his victory is a wake-up call for those of us who oppose his ideology. Socialists are going to use Mamdani’s election win to expand their influence within the Democratic Party. Mainstream Democrats are in a weak position to resist, but they would be wise to plug their ears to the socialist siren song. Just because Republicans have gone to the extreme of Trumpism doesn't mean that Democrats need to go extreme themselves.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The unpopularity of Donald Trump's administration means that the ground left behind by the GOP is an opportunity for Democrats to expand into, rather than to run away from. In the days leading up to the election, Mamdani and his friends within the American left sought to portray his looming election victory as just the tip of the spear. He even cast his campaign as a “movement that won the battle over the soul of the Democratic Party.” It has been painfully obvious, ever since the presidential election last November, that the Democratic Party’s brand is in tatters. This week, a Quinnipiac University poll revealed that congressional Democrats have a minuscule 19% approval rating — an all-time low in the history of that particular poll.

Earlier in the week, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll similarly found that the party as a whole has an approval rating of 40% — considerably lower than the Republican Party’s 48% approval rating found by... Nor can Democrats necessarily rely on any GOP infighting to redound, in seesaw-like fashion, to their own benefit; for all the sturm und drang generated by the “Epstein files” affair, President Trump’s approval ratings... The party is right about one thing: It needs an intervention to get back in Americans’ good graces. Some common sense would help. The issue for Democrats is that their current unpopularity is not a byproduct of the political scandals of the day or the vicissitudes of Trump’s polarizing social media feeds. Rather, the problem for Democrats is structural — and it requires a rethink and a reboot from soup to nuts.

As this column argued last November, it is clear that Barack Obama’s winning 2008 political coalition — comprising racial and ethnic minorities, young people and highly educated white voters — has completely withered. “Obamaism” is dead — and Democrats have to reconcile themselves to that demise. At minimum, they should stop taking advice from Obama himself; the 44th president was Kamala Harris’ top 2024 campaign trail surrogate, and we saw how that worked out. In order for the party to rise up anew, as has often happened throughout American history following a period of dominance from a partisan rival, Democrats are going to have to move beyond their... And the good news, for conservative Americans who candidly wish the Democratic Party nothing but the worst, is that Democrats seem completely incapable of doing this. If you want to understand why Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old backbench assemblyman almost no one had heard of a year ago, was just elected mayor of New York City, all you have to do...

Filmed days after Donald Trump’s victory, the clip—in which Mamdani roves the streets of Queens and the Bronx with a microphone—could easily be mistaken for a local news hit about why diverse, working-class neighborhoods... “Market prices are going up,” one elderly man tells him. “I like the Democrats,” he continues. “But I don’t like this in Gaza.” That more or less summed it up. Again and again, Trump voters and nonvoters say that they care about ending the genocide in Gaza and are concerned about inflation. The Democrats run “glitzy campaigns” and “get celebrities,” one young man says, but they weren’t listening to the people.

Trump was—or at least he seemed to be when he promised to stop the war and bring prices down. When Mamdani asks someone else what it would take for him to vote for a Democrat, the young man is blunt: The party would have to “pay attention to regular Americans and their economic... Only in the final 30 seconds of the video does it become clear that what you are watching is a stealth political ad that cleverly blends the conventions of local news with the sharp... “If there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal childcare a reality, are those things you’d support?” Mamdani asks one voter. They were—and others agreed. It turned out that the man asking the questions had the answers, too.

It’s all in that three-minute video: the overriding focus on the affordability crisis and the genocide in Gaza—the two issues that would define his campaign—as well as the conviction that Mamdani knows how to... Those issues, moreover, aren’t introduced by the candidate, but by real people who happened to be willing to talk to a fellow New Yorker who, as the months passed, often seemed to be on... Zohran Mamdani does not operate by the same logic as the Democratic Party establishment. Waleed Shahid explains five key aspects of how Mamdani has broken through. Zohran Mamdani seems to operate by a different logic than the party around him. (Noam Galai / Getty Images)

Jacobin‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out soon. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly and get it right when it’s released. Democrats are not just losing arguments; they are often losing the room. The problem runs deeper than messaging. It is a crisis of attention and, beneath that, a crisis of credibility. Voters may still tell pollsters they prefer Democrats, yet few believe the party can change the cost of anything they will pay next week.

That is a failure of poetry and of prose: campaigns that no longer inspire and governments that no longer deliver. The party often defines itself by what it opposes — Trumpism, “wokeism” — rather than what it stands for. It hesitates over which communities to defend and which concrete struggles, from childcare to antiwar to immigrant rights to housing, it has the will to win. The deeper problem is a Democratic Party liberalism unsure of itself, adrift at sea. Democrats have forgotten how to act as if they know what they are for. American history abounds with well-known monuments to brittle intellectual orthodoxies, from the Scopes trial to the cult of the Marvel blockbuster.

To that illustrious lineage, we can add the perennial spectacle of the Democratic establishment blanching before the prospect of a successful movement-driven populist campaign. The latest campaign in question, of course, is Zohran Mamdani’s bid to be the next mayor of New York, and skittish party leaders are already declaring it a pox on their efforts to recapture... The Nation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Never mind that the two elections involve vastly disparate constituencies and are separated by a full calendar year. And never mind the complete lack of symmetry, with not a single GOP election consigliere getting remotely worked up over the host of MAGA authoritarian power grabs now polling at toxic levels will play...

No, this is simply how you get to be a respected strategist in the upper echelons of the Democratic consensusphere: You only perceive threats to your left, and you tirelessly position yourself as the... Witness a curious recent report in Politico bearing the pitch-perfect Beltway headline “‘Giddy’ Republicans Cheer Mamdani’s Impact on Democrats.” In any sanely configured political system, taking advice from an irredentist authoritarian party on the... Now that Mamdani, an unabashed Democratic socialist, has won more votes than any prior mayoral candidate in his June primary victory, the notion that the Republicans are gearing up to unleash their full McCarthyite... Yet, even though Politico packages its report as a cascade of GOP schadenfreude, the body of it is taken up with lamentations from Democrats. Indeed, the wording of the headline comes not from any Republican operative but from a concern-trolling Democrat—former Nassau County executive Laura Curran, who absurdly opines that the GOP opposition is “more excited about this... Republican ad makers will know what to do with this.”

Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. In Seattle, Katie Wilson, a transit activist, is leading in the polls against the incumbent mayor after touting her history advocating for reduced fares for low-income residents and youths. In Texas, Senate candidate Colin Allred last week unveiled his “A More Affordable Texas” agenda, which included a ban on price-gouging and restoring tax credits to renewable energy companies to lower utility bills. And in New Jersey, congresswoman and gubernatorial front-runner Mikie Sherrill’s first ad took aim at soaring energy costs, promising that “Day 1 as governor, I’m declaring a state of emergency on utility costs using... This newfound focus on affordability by Democrats has emerged as the animating force behind many of this year’s political campaigns. It coincides with Zohran Mamdani shocking the political world with his 13-point win over former governor Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary.

That victory came in a race that began with a focus on crime and public order, with left-leaning candidates disavowing previous progressive stances on policing and quality-of-life concerns. Mamdani tacked the other way, never deleting tweets calling for the defunding of police. Instead, he focused relentlessly on three campaign promises devoted to lowering costs: free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze on regulated apartments. In February, half of the city’s voters told a pollster that crime and quality of life were their top two concerns; by July, a poll by left-leaning Data for Progress found the top issues... “From the beginning of our thinking about this race we knew that it was time for a politics that was directed to the struggles in people’s lives, a politics where when you set a... “Too often it feels as if politics is an act of imposing a vision on voters as opposed to having a vision that is a reflection of the needs of those voters.”

Almost immediately after the primary Mamdani was anointed by both liberals and conservatives as the face of the Democratic Party — by the former because of his charisma and vision for a new kind... In the months since, he has become something of a counterpoint to Donald Trump in the national discourse, with the two trading barbs from 200 miles away. A YouGov survey the month after the election found that nationally, Mamdani had higher approval ratings than any New York politician except for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries, but, more important, that more Americans... It amounts to proof that Mamdani has already become better known to the voting public than many politicians with far longer tenures in public life.

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