Zohran Mamdani’s rise to prominence in New York City politics is nothing short of a cautionary tale for anyone concerned about the future of America.
An avowed socialist Democrat, Mamdani has harnessed a coalition fueled by decades of mass immigration and a swelling cohort of leftist ideologues who reject the private sector and embrace government control.
Polling consistently demonstrates his advantage. A Sept. 10 Quinnipiac University survey, in a hypothetical three-way mayoral race, showed Mamdani leading with 46% support. Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent after losing the Democratic primary, got 30%, leaving Republican Curtis Sliwa at 17%.
The New York Times/Siena poll from Sept. 9 mirrored this finding, with Mamdani at 46% in a four-way race, Cuomo at 24%, and Sliwa at 15%. Emerson College’s Sept. 18 survey placed Mamdani at 43%, Cuomo at 28%, and Sliwa at 10%.
These numbers are not mere abstractions. They reflect a coalition galvanized by the erosion of traditional New York City values, driven in part by perilous immigration policies stretching back six decades.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled national-origin quotas, unleashing waves of newcomers from Asia, Latin America, and Africa into the city and altering its cultural fabric.
By the 1980s, census data documented massive demographic shifts, with Caribbean and Latin American immigrants reshaping neighborhoods and straining public resources.
Throughout the 1980s, federal immigration records showed over 854,000 new arrivals in the city, driving non-Hispanic whites below majority status and creating fragmented communities struggling to maintain cohesion.
The demographic transformation accelerated in the 2010s. African immigration doubled in the United States within a decade, profoundly altering New York City’s racial and cultural landscape.
Into this milieu arrived Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents. He immigrated to New York at age seven and became a U.S. citizen only after two decades. His story demonstrates the political rewards of lax naturalization and the risks of newcomers quickly gaining influence.
By 2022, over 210,000 asylum seekers poured into New York City, overwhelming shelters and services, a crisis that shaped a volatile electorate inclined toward progressive and socialist dogmatism.
Mamdani’s triumph in the June 24, 2025, Democratic mayoral primary underscores the political potency of these demographic shifts. Propelled by immigrant and minority voters in Queens and Brooklyn, he defeated the establishment to capture a pathway to citywide power.
This victory, however, is more than an isolated political upset. It is the years-long culmination of politics which incentivized out-of-state and non-local progressives to flood the city’s nonprofit sector and public agencies, shaping an electorate more concerned with leftist crusades than sustaining economic vitality.
Bill de Blasio’s era inaugurated this dynamic: His 2013 mayoral election brought an influx of social welfare programs and drew lefties from across the country into city government and nonprofits. By 2018, de Blasio’s policies like universal pre-K attracted young progressives fleeing red states, creating echo chambers that prioritized activism over entrepreneurship.
This transformation of the electorate paved the way for Mamdani’s ascent. His June 2025 Democratic primary win was turbocharged by this transplanted bloc of nonprofit warriors and public-sector employees. Their loyalty to socialist ideals outweighed concern for fiscal prudence or the lived realities of long-term residents.
The result is a candidate who openly threatens property rights, economic stability, and public safety. Mamdani has proposed shifting property taxes higher onto “richer and whiter neighborhoods,” a policy that signals antiwhite hatred while destabilizing the housing market.
He has advocated for free city buses at a cost exceeding $700 million annually, transforming public transit into de facto homeless shelters. Mamdani also supports government-run grocery stores designed to undercut private markets. These initiatives are classic socialist experiments that replace market incentives with politically driven redistribution, with consequences that ripple well beyond city limits.
Mamdani’s foreign policy positions amplify concerns. He has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, calling it an apartheid state, and later declined to denounce Hamas. He defended the slogan “globalize the intifada,” signaling alignment with movements dangerous to Jewish communities. His advisory circle includes communist activists and anti-Israel advocates, many tied to George Soros-funded networks.
In short, Mamdani embodies an anti-Western extremism. It eschews traditional parasitic, yet pragmatic blue machine politics for fringe-left objectives, each of these clearly rooted in deep personal grievances.
The implications extend into economic governance. As mayor, Mamdani would oversee the New York City Banking Commission, which influences Wall Street — the engine of global finance responsible for trillions in daily trades, $2 trillion in assets, and 15% of national commercial loans.
His proposals to redirect $100 billion in city deposits toward “equity-focused” subsidized lending, impose equity audits, fee caps, and a “Banking Bill of Rights” for anti-discriminatory practices, threaten to saddle banks holding 42% of U.S. deposits with crippling compliance costs. These mandates would likely drive fee hikes, credit tightening, capital flight, and jeopardize small businesses, family borrowing, retirement accounts, and community lenders nationwide.
The political architecture enabling Mamdani is inseparable from immigration-driven demographic changes. The 1970s exodus of native-born New Yorkers and influx of Asian and Latin American immigrants fractured the city’s moderate Democratic core, weakening the traditional working-class anchor. By 1982, this upheaval had left neighborhoods and schools vulnerable to discord, eroding civic cohesion.
De Blasio’s landslide victory in 2013, amplified by a wave of out-of-state idealists staffing nonprofits and city agencies, marked the onset of an aggressive leftward drift that prioritized bureaucratic virtue signaling over fiscal responsibility.
By 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America were leveraging immigrant and nonprofit networks to topple veteran incumbents and mainstream radical policy. By 2023, the continuing migrant crisis exacerbated city dysfunction, empowering nonprofit-working newcomers and public-sector zealots to push policy further into socialist territory.
The story of Mamdani is the story of a city reshaped by mass third-world immigration and a homegrown leftist influx. It is a narrative of displacement — of traditional New Yorkers pushed to the margins, of neighborhoods transformed, and of economic and cultural institutions stressed by policies favoring redistribution over productivity.
His ascent is not a mere electoral anomaly but the predictable outcome of demographic and political engineering that elevates immigrant votes, noncommercial employment, and leftist fervor above the interests of long-established families and private enterprise.
Mamdani represents the confluence of mass immigration and anti-capitalist leftism, a combination capable of altering property markets, public services, fiscal stability, and global financial influence. It is also has venomous designs for whites and Jews, even as certain of these groups cheer their own downfall.
Mamdani’s policies threaten to ripple across the nation, fueling leftist radicalism, rallying mindless prejudices, and destabilizing long-standing institutions that sustain prosperity. For Americans invested in strong borders, stable communities, and thriving private enterprise, this is more than politics. It is a wake-up call.
New Yorkers and the nation alike are witnessing the consequences of long-term experiments in open borders and leftist governance. Mamdani’s ascendancy is neither accidental nor unopposed. It is a direct product of a city’s transformation through left-lurching immigration policies and the cultivation of a grievance-driven electorate, increasingly divorced from the realities of sustaining economic and social stability.
The impending election is thus a referendum not just on a candidate but on the very future of New York City and, by extension, the health of American civic life itself.
Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the news that shapes everyday life. He also provides affordable, results-driven consulting for business, management, media, politics, and the economy. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.
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