2 days ago
Attacking Zohran Mamdani is only making him more powerful
Moderate opponents of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, are beginning to panic. His initial primary win was, of course, a shock to the Democratic Party establishment and the Cuomo political dynasty, after they had confidently predicted his support would melt away on polling day. But it also sent conservatives into crisis management mode. Mamdani's critics have been firing on all cylinders ever since to warn against his radical ideas.
No matter how many times the nickname 'Mamdani the Commie' is uttered, however, his star hasn't dimmed. He leads Andrew Cuomo by 19 percentage points, according to a recent Siena Institute poll. In fact, Mamdani's support is equal to that of the next three most popular candidates combined – Cuomo, independent mayor Eric Adams, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
To be sure, a large part of Mamdani's popularity stems from the fact that he is untainted by any suggestion of scandal. For example, nearly half of New Yorkers opposed the Trump Justice Department's decision to drop charges against Adams, according to a poll from February. For them, 'champagne socialist who had armed guards at his lavish Ugandan wedding ' doesn't pack the same punch as 'alleged fraudster'.
But such an overwhelming lead for Mamdani can't just be a rebuke to Adams for allegedly mixing pleasure with business on Turkish Airlines, or Cuomo for allegedly sexually harassing his staff or for overseeing a crisis in New York's nursing homes during the Covid pandemic.
As the old guard of the Democratic Party struggles to prove its relevance, the new guard is also offering something deceptively positive for young people: financial relief. Mamdani's prescriptions will centralise more power in government and send us further down the road to serfdom, but young people don't see the big deal. They appear to be more concerned about what they could gain from a socialist system.
New York City is a place where ambitious graduates come to find greatness, to put their advanced degrees to work, to climb the corporate ladder. But given the astronomical cost of living — average rent is $4,000 – those benchmarks of accomplishment are getting harder to reach. I say this as a young professional who often stacks my successes against those of my parents and dreads that I may never achieve what they did, and that includes home ownership.
As Reihan Salam wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Mamdani 'knows the sting of having grown up in bourgeois comfort only to find himself scrambling to pay the rent in a less fashionable neighbourhood. That experience is a major reason why he's emerged as the darling of the millennial Left, a movement defined by its sense of downward mobility.'
Mamdani's critics have pointed to his radical musings on X and podcasts, from supporting calls to defund the police to seizing the means of production. But they're forgetting that his campaign platform is based on affordability, a concept especially important to young voters and one that Cuomo and Adams have never meaningfully mentioned. Though misguided, Mamdani's demands for rent control, free buses, and government-run grocery stores appeal to those failed-to-launch young New Yorkers who believe the city economy is rigged against them.
The fearmongering against Mamdani hasn't hurt him. If anything, it may be helping him. It's similar to what happened in the UK when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. His far-Left manifesto was also packed full of promises for free stuff subsidised by other taxpayers, including proposals for abolishing university tuition fees and expanding free childcare. He called for the nationalisation of some industries, an idea which Mamdani has flirted with in his demands for government-run grocery stores.
A freak out ensued even on the Left, with former Labour prime minister Tony Blair writing in a Guardian article in 2015, 'If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won't be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation.'
That's not how things turned out – at least in the 2017 general election, when Corbyn's party earned an almost 10 percentage point increase in its vote share, the largest rise between two elections since 1945.
Perhaps the reason for Corbyn's political resilience amid the backlash was that the furious criticism of his policies ultimately increased the salience of the issues he was talking about. Similarly, in New York City, Cuomo thought he had caught Mamdani in hypocrisy when his team discovered that the latter is living in a rent-stabilised apartment despite having the income to pay market price. But it likely just affirmed to young voters, to quote Jimmy McMillan, that 'the rent is too damn high'.
Critics are correct to point out that Mamdani's ideas are dangerous and anti-American. But the young professionals struggling to get ahead in New York City today were educated in a school system that glossed over the horrors of communism and failed to explain why capitalism works. Only the oldest millennials were alive when the Soviet Union collapsed, and they were still just kids. So they are starting to fall for the same siren song that many countries did in the 20th century, this time nicely packaged as 'affordability'.
The generations that came of age in the late 1990s and 2000s inherited an insanely expensive world. Gen Z experiences a higher cost of living than previous generations when they were the same age, according to Nasdaq. Living costs keep climbing, but wages are stagnating, although a Trump economic boom pledges to reverse that.
Attacks on Mamdani's socialist platform will no doubt intensify in the lead-up to November, but whether any of it erodes his lead remains to be seen. If it doesn't, it's likely because young people are too preoccupied with their own inadequacy to pay any mind to ghost stories about Mao Zedong and Hugo Chavez.
Caroline Downey is a staff writer at National Review, editor-in-chief of The Conservateur, and a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum
