For years, politics in New York City have captured national attention. Based on last week, it still does.
The nation’s biggest city must now decide if it will elect a socialist mayor. Democratic insiders fear that Zohran Mamdani’s primary win, and his front-runner status in the general election, reinforces perceptions that their party has moved too far left. They’re right, it does.
New York has a rich history of electing a wide variety of leaders. In 1932, Mayor Jimmy Walker — a flamboyant man-about-town — was forced to resign due to a corruption scandal; the political fallout almost derailed New York Gov. Franklin Roosevelt’s chances to win the presidency that year. Then there was Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a charismatic “progressive” Republican who is remembered for reading the “funny papers” on the radio during a newspaper strike. La Guardia was ranked the best mayor in the nation’s history by a 1993 study.
The city has continued to have nationally famous mayors — John Lindsay, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. Four of them would run for president (and lose).
Current Mayor Eric Adams’ legal troubles, and the political footsy he’s played with the Trump administration to make them go away, have attracted national attention and damaged his reelection prospects. He’s now running for a second term as an independent.
This brings us to Mamdani’s June 24 primary victory. An underdog, he trailed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in fundraising and most every poll. At 33, he proved to be a skillful, energetic messenger for a new generation of progressives. He rallied the left (a big constituency in New York City) and turned out young voters in record numbers.
Mamdani’s campaign also adroitly exploited the growing issue of affordability and showed Democrats how to talk about the high cost-of-living, not with facts and figures, but as a personal “struggle to survive.”
While Mamdani has been able to identify hot issues, the solutions he’s offering require more government, more spending and more taxes. Democrats who want to copy his success in other places will have to ask themselves: Will Mamdani’s self-described “democratic socialist” agenda sell to a wider, mainstream audience?
Polls show there is a large constituency of young voters, not just in New York but nationwide, who embrace the concept of socialism. In March, a national poll by YouGov for the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans aged 18-29 have a favorable view of socialism. But these numbers drop into the 30s among voters 45 and older. Astonishingly, 34% of the 18-29 age cohort also has a favorable view of communism.
Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Party isn’t John F. Kennedy’s or Bill Clinton’s party.
Ron Faucheux
One of Mamdani’s platform planks is the creation of a network of city-owned supermarkets to offer residents low-cost groceries. Something about this idea “feels like Soviet-style communism,” one Cuomo supporter told me.
Mamdani, who doesn’t own a car, is also promising free bus service and has pledged to freeze rents for one million New Yorkers. He favors congestion-pricing to discourage residents from driving cars at peak times. Additionally, he says he doesn’t believe there should be billionaires. He hasn’t explained how that would work in a city with 123 of them.
To fund his proposals, Mamdani is pushing an extra 2% income tax on wealthy city residents and a $5 billion increase in corporate taxes.
Dangerous for Democrats is Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” a battle-cry the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League view as an endorsement of political violence against Israelis and Jews. Mamdani says he regards the slogan as a symbolic call for Palestinian rights. New York City has a Jewish population of 2.1 million, second only to Tel Aviv.
Mamdani’s candidacy has put two top Democrats, both New Yorkers and national congressional leaders, in a political box. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries are reluctant to jump on his bandwagon. At press time, they still haven’t endorsed.
Regardless of establishment and mainstream party opposition, could Mamdani’s campaign become a modern template for left-wing Democratic politics and a fusillade for a new, tougher, more ideological resistance to President Donald Trump’s policies?
Democrats, left and center, should think hard before they step on that train.
Ron Faucheux is a writer, pollster and nonpartisan political analyst based in Louisiana.