Zohran Mamdani spells doom for Democrats — and glee for the GOP

New York Post

6 hours ago

The Democratic Party has created a monster it can't control.
November's presidential election should have been their warning: Major blue cities showed the rest of the country what unchecked Democrat power looks like — and voters really didn't like what they saw.
From Chicago's Brandon Johnson to Boston's Michelle Wu, the state of our deep blue cities shows what happens when the leftists gets everything they want.
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Proving the Democratic Party can be trusted nationally begins with ensuring their political strongholds aren't insane asylums.
With their nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor, it's safe to say the Democrats didn't learn that lesson.
In choosing Mamdani, New York Democrats have decided to shed any remaining pretense of moderation or common sense, and just plow headlong into the abyss.
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Bold move. How did it happen?
It's the kids — and they're not alright.
To put it plainly, the young left has gone insane.
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They believe probably untrue things on everything from economics to history to foreign affairs, they're radical beyond any past generation, they're quick to excuse rioting and even murder, they have zero tolerance for dissent — and an ugly antisemitic streak runs through all of it.
Oh, and they feel very deeply that they should be in charge of everything, immediately.
Sound familiar? If you've been paying attention to activist politics in New York recently, you've surely noticed it in their attitudes on everything from bike lanes to zoning to Luigi Mangione to Palestine.
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And Zohran is their perfect candidate: A 33-year-old trust-fund socialist with a liar's smile and demonstrated allegiance to every lunatic progressive totem you can name. He even has an accent he can turn on and off at will.
Party leaders know they have a problem. Ever wonder why top national Democrats are the same geriatric faces we've seen for decades now?
It's because they don't trust their own young people to take the reins — they're terrified of them.
During the recent LA riots, moderate Democrats on X were openly pleading with activists to scale back their violence — or at the very least, to wave American flags and soften the brutal optics that were being transmitted to every corner of the nation.
But those pleas were ignored: That's not who the leftists are, and they're not going to pretend otherwise anymore. And they wouldn't be caught dead with an American flag.
For decades now, Democrats have cultivated these increasingly radical shock troops.
College campuses became political training camps to serve left-wing interests, and our urban centers became breeding grounds for well-funded activists — backed by NGOs and nonprofits — ready to mobilize on demand.
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For a while, this arrangement worked; Democrats were happy to corrupt our institutions so long it kept paying political dividends — electoral victories, fearful corporations, cultural cachet.
But they were playing with fire as each generation of young Democrats moved further left than the last.
Less tolerant of dissent or compromise. More insular and parochial. Increasingly detached from reality.
Like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, eventually the image becomes unrecognizable. Liberal became progressive, progressive became woke — and woke blew up in their faces.
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Now Democrats are out of power in all three branches of the federal government, with record-low approval ratings to match.
And the army of young people they empowered but can't command is the indelible face of their brand, politically toxic outside of affluent urban enclaves — yet on the verge of capturing the nation's largest and most important city.
National Democrats will have to reconcile this embarrassment to voters in the rest of the country looking on with horror and disbelief. Good luck to them.
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How could the financial capital of the nation nominate for mayor a socialist who's never held a job?
How could a city struggling with crime and violence nominate a radical who wants to defund the police?
Democrats will struggle to answer those questions.
But the explanation is very simple — young urban progressives have completely lost the plot, yet they're the party's energy, the ones who get out and vote, the ones who get the clicks and views, the ones who volunteer and phone-bank and door-knock.
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And they're going to relegate the Democratic Party to a permanent minority — with iron-fisted control over our deep blue cities, and very little beyond them.
Extremism isn't a great long-term strategy for a national party. It tends to play poorly with exactly the sort of voters Democrats need to win back.
And they're about to learn that lesson the hard way: Mamdani is a walking campaign advertisement for congressional Republicans in the midterms.
As Vice President JD Vance posted Tuesday night on Bluesky, 'Congratulations to the new leader of the Democratic Party @zohrankmamdani.'
Frankly, a general-election defeat would be the best-case scenario for Democrats now, sparing them years of embarrassment as Mamdani destroys this city.
As a New Yorker, I pray that's the outcome.
Vickie Paladino is a Republican City Council member representing the 19th district in northern Queens.