Zohran Mamdani Is a Spectacular Own Goal
If they want to defeat Trump, Democrats need to stop making this sort of mistake.
In 2024, the Democratic Party suffered about as terrible an electoral rebuke as it’s possible to have. They lost—decisively—to a candidate whose last act in office had been trying to attack his own Congress. They lost ground among Hispanics to a candidate who favored mass deportations and among African-Americans to a candidate who—as events would prove—was dedicated to rolling back landmark pieces of civil rights legislation. They lost not just a state or two in the vaunted Blue Wall—remember when losing Wisconsin in 2016 was a shock?—but every brick of the entire fortress. The party’s approval as a whole has sunk to 29%—the lowest of any party since the start of this polling category.
What a gift a defeat like that is! What a chance to take stock and really consider, without any mitigating excuses, why your party is losing as badly as it is! And there were—pretty obviously—two main factors contributing to the Democrats’ defeat. One was the problem of gerontocracy and the inability to connect with a younger digitally-forward voting public. And the other was the party’s inability to seize the common-sense middle ground, to present themselves as the adults in the room. They somehow managed to be seen, in pre-election polling, as the more extreme party—and this against an opponent who wants to lock up his political rivals and invade Greenland.
So the solution to the party’s woes really was pretty simple. First of all, they needed a cohort of candidates who knew how to use a smart phone. And second, they needed those candidates to just please—for the love of Christ—not be crazier than the other side, which, honestly, really shouldn’t be that hard of a bar to clear.
With the impending election of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani—the clear frontrunner to be mayor of New York—they are at last taking a significant step to putting the gerontocracy demon behind them, but they are flunking the test to mark themselves as the party of the center, and doing so in a way that suggests that they will just never ever learn from their mistakes.
Heading towards the 2026 midterms, if not 2028, the Democrats have nothing but soft targets as they try to be the party of common sense—how about challenging raids by masked ICE agents on American workplaces? Or the National Guard deployed in peacetime to American cities? Instead, we all know what’s about to happen: the Fox News crowd gets to come after “Soviet-style” state-run grocery stores in New York or “globalize the intifada” or defund the police, that bear trap which, through Mamdani’s embrace of the position in 2020, the Dems are about to run straight back into. These sorts of issues have been Trump’s ace in the hole in his last elections—autonomous zones and decriminalization policies were the gift that West Coast mayors gave Trump in the 2020-2024 cycles. But with an actual socialist running the country’s largest blue city, Trump will have just about all the ammunition he needs to hammer at the Dems all the way to 2028.
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Mamdani knows a reel from a livestream. His sprinting at the camera—which seems to be the signature move of his campaign videos—isn’t necessarily the pathbreaking political cinema that his supporters make it out to be, but for a party that has had a pronounced senility problem in its standard-bearers, the Dems should take youth and energy where they can get it. And Mamdani is a savvy-enough politician. A recent New York Times profile has made much of the listening tour he took with the city’s powerful and of his campaign trail tendency to shy away from some of his earlier, more extreme positions.
But, oh, what rage bait those early positions were, what catnip for Fox News viewers. He had to apologize for a “Defund the NYPD” tweet from 2020. He has struggled mightily to distance himself from the phrase “Globalize the Intifada”—this in the city with the world’s second-largest Jewish population. He has held to his promise to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the next time he visits New York—no matter that that’s probably illegal and no matter the international chaos that would create.
And then there are the city-run grocery stores, the millionaires’ tax, the rent freezes, none of which he likely has the authority to enact but which so perfectly confirm every wild stereotype that every Fox News host has of what Democrats really want. And then there’s—as Cuomo cruelly but not unjustly pointed out in the final mayoral debate—the fact that Mamdani has “never had a job, [has] never accomplished anything.” It’s all the same pie-in-the-sky idealism that led to the autonomous enclaves and to decriminalization movements and “Abolish the Police” drives and the various excesses of the Peak Woke era—while law-and-order broke down in pockets of liberal cities and progressives gave the impression of being kids playing in the sandbox and the Fox News crowd lapped it all up and the Trumpies had all the talking points they needed. In case you think I’m being melodramatic, by the way, the National Republican Congressional Committee has already rolled out a plan to make Mamdani the target of their 2026 midterm campaign, making use of Mamdani’s 41% unfavorability rating in national polling (against 25% favorable) to exploit a can’t-miss opportunity to depict the Democrats as “anti-police, pro-defund” socialists.
So here we are again. The party that lost the center in 2024 drifts—the first chance it gets—over to the loony left. For once, we can’t get mad at the Democratic panjandrums—Mamdani was a long shot who, thanks to his own campaign charisma, brought himself to the doorstep of City Hall—but Democratic voters really should, by this stage of Trumpism, have a better self-preservation instinct than what they have shown. In the digital media age, a mayoral election isn’t just about the city where it’s held. It’s about how it’s reflected on the national stage. Trump was able to make the most of the 2020 events in Minneapolis, and in West Coast cities, and some of the excesses of the trans rights movement, to win the hearts and minds of the country in 2024. If Democrats can’t learn from this, they’re going to keep losing in national elections over and over and over again.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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I feel like this article is almost self-parody. Not saying it is invalid to criticize Mandami’s position. But he has been able to go toe to toe with the folks on Fox News discussing these issues, and has demonstrated he listens even to those who don’t think like them (such his changing position on policing). He has been able to his messages across mainly because people feel he believes in something and not just doing “electoral tactics”.
The whole “the Democrats must pivot to the center” as a strategical and not an ideological or policy argument is part of the reason some people feel disconnected from Dems and tend to overvalue the “authenticity” of MAGAs.
If you think Mandami policies are wrong say it, we need more debate and discussion between the center and the left. I personally distrusts rent control and it only works as an “emergency button” while incentivizing more housing development. But reducing political positions to mere electoral strategy is the problem, not the solution.
1. You're way underestimating how charismatic Zohran is. For instance go watch his live-on-Fox apology to the NYPD (did you know he did that apology in the middle of the interview on Fox?)
2. You're ignoring that he's rapidly pivoted to moderate on every issue. Such as NYPD, which I know you know about from previous point. This invalidates at least one of, but not neither, of your criticisms about perception and governance. He's so damn charismatic as an un-politician that his base gives him a pretty long leash to redo his policies. Sound like any politician on the right you can think of?
3. You're ignoring he's penetrated into what should be Cuomo's base, for instance Jews who you think would be skeezed out by antisemitism but that's evidently not how many of them voted in the primary. I feel that should fuel into your thesis that all the Fox News viewers who are apparently voting for him think he's too extreme.
4. I thought you would at least bring up who the establishment ran against him, namely a corrupt sex criminal gerontocrat who spent his governor terms screwing over NYC at every step and has more or less kowtowed to Trump by now. You brought up Cuomo one time, for when he sort of landed a punch against Zohran during the debate. Zohran's best punch was probably "Cuomo just admit the state was screwing over the city. Who was leading the state???" Cuomo tried blaming his successor for screwing over NYC instead of saying anything remotely resembling "I was good for NYC."
5. You're advocating for moderate in the worst way possible -- like if R offer pizza and D offer burgers, you say why not put American cheese and ground beef on a pizza to appeal to everyone. Or better yet -- Trump was 78, Biden was 80. Was it really that hard to get a 79 year old to appeal to everyone?
6. The best way to be moderate is to absolutely incense the opposition by advocating for common sense. Let me annotate:
As you say Fox News is talking about: "And then there are the city-run grocery stores (the affordability crisis), the millionaires’ tax (the affordability crisis), the rent freezes (the affordability crisis), none of which he likely has the authority to enact but which so perfectly confirm every wild stereotype that every Fox News host has of what Democrats really want (a solution to the affordability crisis)."
Conversely, What exactly do you want Fox News attacking Democrats for besides their solution to the affordability crisis? Drag story hour? Like you really need to answer this if you're going to use that attack by Fox News as the centerpiece of your thesis. As far as I can tell you think Democrats need to move just right enough to start getting plaudits from Fox News.
7. Kinda telling your metaphor is "to use a smartphone" not "to use Tiktok." Like that attack would have made sense in 2010, back when we still called them smartphones and not just phones.
One Zohran ad on YT: "I'm going to say something a politician has never said to you before. (go on.) I don't want your money. (??)" then he explains he needs volunteers. Also literally that's just true. There's basically two people who can instantly reach me by text, my wife and every f*** Democrat running for office in the country.
The establishment thing to do would be to say -- look, some of our voters are [some euphemism for] broke-ass. We still need their money but we should lower the ask to $4.33 or some number like that." Zohran appalled the establishment by connecting with voters on affordability instead.
8. Of course the biggest way you personally are being a Democrat who never learns is you're mad at the establishment for failing to rig voter preferences out of the primary. In this telling, the problem isn't that we got Hillary instead of a real primary -- it's that the gerontocrat establishment class simply didn't hire the right consultants to tell them to not run Hillary.
9. Do you actually believe millionaires are going to flee NYC over a millionaires tax? Do you really think the world is a better place if no one in the world ever takes a stab at calling this bluff?
10. What risks do you think Democrats should take? You know what's weird, you literally should not nominate Democrats who are not a bad idea. The reason is you're losing. Good ideas are not enough. You need weird ideas that look bad and hope you get lucky.
And obviously you should be learning from his victory instead of hardening the establishment's defense. When will Democrats learn to even bother trying to learn?