Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo shows where the Democrat Party is headed. It’s up to populist Republicans to stop the country from going there, too.
The victory of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in New York City’s Democrat primary has conservatives searching for answers. Unfortunately, many are attributing it to college-brainwashed rich kids, dismissing the notion that hardworking people in an expensive city could find price controls and free public transit attractive.
Cuomo did win the city’s poorest voters, but this is arguably attributable to New York machine politics and name recognition rather than ideology. Mamdani crushed him with middle-class white, Hispanic, and Asian voters, winning considerable support in working-class areas where—and this should alarm you—President Donald Trump saw his greatest gains last year.
Appealing to young socialists in gentrified areas and being an Asian Muslim himself certainly helped Mamdani boost turnout among these demographics. But he really won because he used the Trump playbook: he connected his platform with local problems people face in their daily lives.
Former President Joe Biden’s inflation and open borders exacerbated the problems globalism created for the urban working class.
For decades, well-paid industrial jobs were outsourced from urban working-class communities, forcing residents to double up on service sector jobs or rely on government assistance. Wealthy international elites and trust fund babies then gentrified many of these neighborhoods, driving housing costs sky-high.
Biden’s historic inflation depleted residents’ savings, and his record immigration took away service jobs that, for many, provided the last line of defense between the lower-middle class and homelessness.
Many of these residents realized the elite Democrat establishment cared nothing about their plight. This opened the door for Trump to explain that he did and how his policies would help them improve their lives.
Mamdani employed a similar strategy. Like Trump, he ran a social media-savvy campaign that focused on the issues voters—not the party’s establishment—think are most pressing and avoided excessive Trump bashing.
This strategy paid off and should serve as a warning to Republicans. Just as easily as Trump gained urban working-class voters, ignoring their concerns and lacking a roadmap to solve their economic problems can lose them.
Every Generation Must Be Persuaded That Socialism Doesn’t Work
Republicans should avoid the trap of thinking that tying Democrats to Mamdani and his socialist comrades will give them a silver bullet to win next year’s midterm elections.
This isn’t the Cold War, when the S-word conjured images of the Soviet Union or Russian tanks crushing young Hungarian freedom fighters in Budapest.
Urban blue-collar workers don’t care what it’s called. They just want to be able to work and live in a city without getting priced out of their homes. If a socialist candidate can convince them that his policies will help them do that, they will vote for that socialist candidate.
For many white-collar Millennials, the outsourcing, high immigration, and automation are serving to confirm the anti-capitalist brainwashing they received in college.
Savvy socialists like Mamdani are adept at addressing workers’ struggles. But their opposition to nationalism ensures they will never address the root of those problems. Additionally, their tried-and-failed solutions will never offer anything other than a cheap band-aid to those problems.
Conservatives actually understand the root cause of affordability issues and have solutions. Energy independence makes public transit cheaper. Passing strategic tariffs, slashing job-killing regulations, and curbing immigration boost employment for American citizens and legal permanent residents. Additionally, reducing immigration will free up housing for lower-middle-class American workers, while cutting regulations and taxes and cracking down on local corruption will boost housing construction.
This approach, however, requires engaging urban voters and the problems they face, as Trump did in 2024. He correctly identified the globalist policies of both parties that flooded the job and housing markets with foreign labor, the disastrous bipartisan foreign policy that wasted tax dollars on other countries’ infrastructure instead of our own, and the stifling regulations that suppressed economic growth.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) lost the nomination battle to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but his ideology is winning the war. In the 2030s, the Democrat Party will be led by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hogg, and Mamdani. Whether they also lead the country will depend on whether Republicans can win the populist war for the working class. Conservatives have the solutions to continue Trump’s momentum among these voters. It remains to be seen if the Republican Party will go to the mat for them.
Jacob Grandstaff is an investigative researcher for Restoration News.