Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute explains one factor in Zohran Mamdani’s electoral success.
Zohran Mamdani’s socialism and anti-Zionism have rightly attracted the lion’s share of attention and criticism, but I was surprised to see that his message and appeal to New Yorkers was less ideological than you might think. More than anything, the city’s residents are eager to take a chance on youth and energy against an old and tired Democratic machine. And Mamdani played into this by downplaying the left’s worn out rhetoric about the “forgotten poor”—as if their cause was the only one that mattered. Instead, he focused his message on middle-class concerns: better public transportation, lower rents, free child care—all aspirations designed to help working people do a little better in a city that has gotten too expensive. He emphasized the importance of work in his victory speech:
“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.”
Don’t get me wrong—I’m betting that once in office he will retreat to Democrats’ same-old, failed handout policies—because that is really all they know how to do. And I’m deeply concerned about the broader effects of his radical rhetoric on the city’s Jewish population. But at least during the campaign, Mamdani spoke to the concerns of people who work hard and still struggle—people who make up most of the city.
Now that he has to govern, he will find that beyond the cost of living, the most important issue for these voters is public safety.
