The June New York City mayoral race gave Democrats a much-needed roadmap to breach President Donald Trump’s working-class coalition, yet too few Republicans realize what’s at stake. Conservatives must take affordability seriously, or America could end up with a socialist president within the next decade.

After upsetting disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democrat primary, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is all but guaranteed to become New York City’s next mayor. Republican Curtis Sliwa only received 28 percent against Mayor Eric Adams in 2021, and Adams is running a futile independent candidacy with a 20 percent approval rating. Cuomo is also considering launching a third-party candidacy, which would further splinter the anti-Mamdani vote.

Since socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ran for president, Republicans have forced mainstream Democrats to run away from socialists out of fear of alienating moderate voters. But as Millennial Democrats age into leadership, simply dismissing Sanders and “The Squad” will become an increasingly obsolete tactic. (RELATED: Is Ro Khanna the X Factor for Democrats in 2028?)

Although surprising, Mamdani’s win is not shocking. As recently as 2022, 58 percent of Democrats, aged 30-49, viewed socialism favorably. Among 18–29-year-old Democrats, only 29 percent viewed capitalism favorably. This isn’t a phase. This is the future if we don’t halt it now.

What Mamdani Means for Democrats

The real winners in New York City’s Democrat primary are Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Vice-Chair David Hogg, known for his anti-gun activism after the 2018 Parkland High School shooting.

Ocasio-Cortez tried to launch a socialist rebellion after unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018, but that effort flopped. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders and AOC Are Not the Answer to the Democrats’ Weaknesses)

From 2018-2022, 90 far-left candidates ran in Democrat primaries, and over 90 percent of them lost. So thorough was the drubbing these post-Sanders radicals took that they essentially played dead in 2024.

Rather than risk young voters staying home, the DNC tried to absorb these radicals by bringing in Hogg as Vice-Chair. But when Hogg vowed to use his political action committee (PAC), Leaders We Deserve (LWD), to unseat established Democrat Congressmen next year, the DNC decided he was too white and too male.

Rather than fight to retake his seat, Hogg turned his attention to New York City, where Mamdani’s campaign presented an opportunity to take his first establishment scalp. LWD donated $300,000 to the Working Families Party (WFP) — which became the largest pro-Mamdani donation of the campaign.

Mamdani — who showed one percent support in a February Emerson poll — spent less than $19 per vote to Cuomo’s $87 per vote. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated over $8 million to a pro-Cuomo PAC—more than all pro-Mamdani spending combined and the largest political donation in the city’s history.

The losers are establishment Democrats. Recently, old white Democrats apologized for being born to avoid the woke guillotine. Now, it looks like rich Democrats will have to go back to asking to be taxed more if they want a seat at the table.

The prospect of taking the mayor’s office in the world’s richest city will undoubtedly drive donations to socialist-aligned PACs like LWD, WFP, Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution. This is disastrous for the Democrat establishment, which will have to either surrender to Sanders’s disciples or burn tens of billions of dollars in next year’s primaries to delay the inevitable.

Who Voted for This Guy?

Some conservatives claim Mamdani is a classic example of a champagne socialist — that the working classes he claims to support didn’t support him, while spoiled white brats did. (RELATED: Government Stores in NYC? Yes!)

Others insist this is the result of mass immigration changing the electorate.

These analyses aren’t entirely off, but there aren’t enough of either class of voters to win a Democrat primary in New York City in what was essentially a two-man race.

Cuomo’s base of support mirrored Adams’s 2021 turnout, while Mamdani juiced turnout in the gentrified sections of Brooklyn and Queens, the New York Times’ Michael Lange calls “the commie corridor.” But that alone didn’t push Mamdani over the top.

NYC Democratic mayoral primary precinct map courtesy of @VoteHubUS

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He won majority-white precincts by five points, majority-Hispanic precincts by six points, and majority-Asian precincts by 15 points.

A couple of noteworthy caveats:

• Cuomo won the poorest and richest ends of the voter spectrum but Mamdani won the middle class by a landslide.
• Cuomo’s familiarity with black and Orthodox Jewish voters skewed more low-income voters his way. Otherwise, Mamdani would have swept both the white vote and the working-class vote by large margins.

New York City has been defined for nearly two centuries by identity politics. The American Prospect describes it as a city of ethnic succession. First came the Irish who supplanted the Yankees, then came the Jews and Italians who supplanted the Irish.

In many ways, Mamdani’s victory is like that of former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s.

Fluent in Italian and Yiddish, LaGuardia had an Italian father and Jewish mother but was nominally Episcopalian. He broke the mostly Irish Tammany Hall political machine with an Italian-led multi-ethnic coalition.

Asian and Middle Eastern immigration recently surged in New York City, and this heretofore sleeping giant is now seeking its place at the head of the table. Like New York City’s pre-LaGuardia Italians, the city’s Asian and Muslim voters were previously underrepresented in government due to non-participation. In 2021, even with Andrew Yang on the ballot, East Asian voters only turned out at 27 percent. Approximately seven percent of registered voters in the city are Muslim but they only turned out at 12 percent.

Mamdani campaigned in Urdu, Bengali, and Spanish, and — like LaGuardia — has adopted the civic religion of his contemporary Yankee elite — secular democratic socialism.

Tellingly, Mamdani’s first viral video promised to lower the cost of food from Halal trucks. Without Yang in the race, he overwhelmingly won Muslim voters and those of Asian ancestry.

Round 6 – Andrew Yang was eliminated after it. The vote breakdown was 34.6% Adams, 26.1% Wiley, 24.4% Garcia, 14.8% Yang. pic.twitter.com/bDCFCQpGrb

— cinyc (@cinyc9) August 19, 2021

Why Did They Vote for This Guy?

Mamdani’s victory in the “commie corridor” is self-explanatory: His identity as an Asian Muslim granted him an ethnic advantage that Adams’s 2021 opponents lacked.

Juicing turnout among these built-in constituencies sufficed to make Cuomo sweat. But it wasn’t enough to win. Mamdani needed to keep up in working-class Hispanic districts like the Bronx and avoid getting blown out in black districts in Queens. Many of these areas swung by double digits from Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024.

A few days after the 2024 election, Mamdani went to these neighborhoods for man-on-the-street interviews. He asked people whom they voted for and why. Ocasio-Cortez famously did the same — albeit via social media — when she realized many of her voters split their tickets and voted for Trump.

Many told Mamdani they voted for Trump due to affordability — which they felt the Democrat Party didn’t adequately address — and they remembered their lives being better under Trump. When asked if they would vote for a mayoral candidate who wanted to freeze rent and make childcare and busses free, they enthusiastically said they would.

Steve Cortes, founder of the League of American Workers, recently told Steve Bannon’s War Room Podcast that across all his polling, affordability remains foremost on people’s minds: “You combine affordability with a charismatic outlook, and guess what, you can win elections.”

Many urban young adults are brainwashed socialists. But others are attracted to class warfare because their standard-of-living prospects don’t match the work they put in or the money they invested to gain job skills.

“They’re moving home, they’re working in retail, they’re being baristas; they can’t get the jobs they thought they were going to get,” Cortes explained.

He emphasized that recent college graduates — even those with useful degrees from reputable universities — are the first generation to be seriously affected by automation. “The job losses are not concentrated now among blue-collar people but among executive types, among white-collared positions, among accountants and coders and attorneys.”

From 2011–2022, the average cost of rent in New York City rose 68 percent, and rental vacancy stands at 1.4 percent.

Cuomo’s daughter tried to seem relatable, telling New York Public Radio’s blog Gothamist she spent months searching for a new apartment. But it probably had to do with the fact that little could replace the $8,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment she left so her father would have a New York City residence to call home while campaigning.

“I don’t think Cuomo knows what a dozen eggs costs … and I think Zohran probably [does],” said one voter. When asked if he thought the national Democrat Party was attuned to egg costs, he said, “No, Senators make over $100,000 a year. I don’t know how I’m going to make rent next month. There’s an entire ocean between most of the Democrats in the Senate and me.”

Most struggling workers respond positively to candidates they feel relate to their struggles and who promise to use tax dollars to improve their lives. They don’t care as much about ideologies, parties, or labels. Mamdani will be able to implement a few of his outlandish socialist ideas. But his election will make housing more affordable by driving away many in the upper-middle class.

How Should the Right Fight Back?

It comes down to taking affordability more seriously.

Celebrating Trump’s expanded base without realizing why he expanded it risks repeating history. For instance, Ronald Reagan won many Democrats who then voted twice for Bill Clinton.

Like it or not, millions of struggling American voters find socialism’s false promises appealing. If Republicans want to maintain a winning coalition in an increasingly urban country, they must offer solutions to the problems facing the urban working class. Many first-time Trump voters supported him for the same reason they voted for Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani — the hope of financial security.

Follow the Trump Model: Address Voters’ Local Needs

Trump crushed expectations in the Bronx and Queens because he addressed residents’ local needs rather than obsessively focusing on Biden. He established relatability by recounting his private sector experience with urban renewal and municipal regulations in New York City. He then promised improved public transit and parks, vowed to address affordability, and pledged to stop the flow of illegal aliens into their city.

Although Mamdani toes the looney leftist line on everything from abortion to gender ideology, he keeps things focused on daily problems that affect the average voter. USA Today’s Sara Pequeño noted, “Mamdani’s videos are more than memes, but they don’t spend time waxing poetic about how he’s the only one who can stand up to President Donald Trump.” Instead, he remained “relentlessly on message and [grounded] that message in affordability.”

It’s Still the Economy

Because of the Republican Party’s suburban base, the GOP often addresses problems that suburbanites associate with cities rather than the most pressing problems urbanites themselves face. This wastes donors’ money and leaves potential voters on the table.

Brent Buchanan, president of the polling firm Cygnal, criticized Republicans last year for sidelining their economic agenda to slam Democrats on crime and public safety — an issue his polling showed consistently ranked seventh on voters’ minds.

In New York City, crime is not as pressing a concern thanks to the tough-on-crime policies of former Republican mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Though hard for many conservatives to believe, violent and property crime rates show it ranks as the second-safest city in America with over a million residents, the third-safest with over 500,000, and the 13th-safest with over 100,000.

Addressing safety concerns still matters, but that won’t keep working-class people from being evicted or having to work 60-hour weeks to stay ahead of rent.

Conservative Policies Are Still the Best Answer to Urban Problems

The intersection of transportation with energy, environmental, and labor policies offers an opportunity for conservatives to connect their solutions with urban needs.

Conservative energy policy helps everyone, whether they use public transit or drive personal vehicles. But gas prices dropping to $2.50/gallon does nothing for people who ride the bus to work.

Making the bus system free, however, does make urbanites feel they’re getting something back for their taxes. Rather than make a big deal about something so trivial, conservatives should instead connect their policies of gaining energy independence and lowering regulations in building and hiring with cities being able to afford to expand public transit and reduce out-of-pocket costs.

Conservatives Still Hold the Immigration Card. If They Play It, Socialists Can’t Keep Up.

No country can function with high immigration and European-style democratic socialism. Both are bad for native workers, but their combination leads to disaster and social unrest.

Cortes emphasized that the beginning of the automation job crunch “is not an environment where we want to invite in millions of foreign workers to compete against Americans in the job market.”

American democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are internationalists who would abolish borders immediately if they could. Their lack of loyalty to — or even belief in the existence of — Americans as a distinct people means they can’t defend American workers from being undercut by foreign labor.

Cracking down on immigration will also make housing more affordable. “If we remove this ridiculous created demand of millions and millions of invaders trespassing into our country, housing is going to get far more affordable for American citizens,” Cortes argues. He’s correct.

Open borders socialists can’t protect American renters from being driven out of their communities by hordes of low-skilled foreigners who outcompete them in the rental market by piling up with half a dozen workers per apartment.

If we continue down this road, the only answer to unending mass immigration will be a command-and-control economy, complete with rent freezes and grocery price controls. Economic common sense and the history of socialist countries everywhere show that this eventually leads to shortages and economic collapse.

To avoid this, conservatives must confidently explain to urban workers that flooding their communities with more immigrants will make their lives harder.

Don’t Repeat the Liberal Media’s Mistake with Trump

The worst reaction the Right could have toward Mamdani is hysteria. Dismissing fringe candidates without understanding their appeal is politically dangerous. Enthusiasm can close polling gaps quickly. In districts Mamdani won, turnout surged between 20 and 40 percent higher than in 2021, while in districts Cuomo won, turnout remained at the same level.

Trump conquered the Republican Party and defeated the Democrat establishment precisely because the Left became arrogant in its ability to define him to voters. The Right should not make this mistake with leftist candidates with dangerous solutions — who, nevertheless, know how to surgically target voters’ pain points.

Mamdani’s imminent takeover of the New York City mayor’s office is a blaring wake-up call for Republicans on the danger of ceding urban working-class and young white-collar voters to socialist demagogues. To crush this dangerous socialist momentum, Republicans must double down on Trump’s winning playbook — relentlessly address urban voters’ kitchen-table concerns like sky-high rents and job losses from immigration and overregulation, while hammering the catastrophic fallout of open borders that fuels housing shortages. Conservatives must also connect their energy and deregulation policies to real urban benefits, like cheaper transit, and avoid the liberal media’s trap of underestimating charismatic radicals.

Ignoring Mamdani’s appeal risks ceding Trump’s 2024 urban momentum, which the GOP cannot afford if it wants to remain nationally competitive.

Jacob Grandstaff is an investigative researcher for Restoration News.

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