His Honor, his most excellent excellency, the Grand Poobah of Gotham, Zohran of the Mamdani, has been elected mayor of the largest city in America.
He won because he smiles a lot, tells people lies about how he can make New York City “affordable” (OMG), and all of his radical promises ain’t gonna cost the voters nothin’.
I should also point out that he got a huge assist from the national Republicans and the online MAGA community, who thought they could scare New York voters by calling Mamdani a “jihadist,” a “Communist,” and worse.
The right should have known tactics like that would backfire. The left has spent the last decade hysterically trying to tar Donald Trump with various labels like “Nazi,” “dictator,” and “womanizer.” You can draw a straight line from those attacks to Trump’s Heartland victories in 2016 and 2024. Americans love the idea of fair play, and exaggerated attacks on Trump (and Mamdani) elicited sympathy for them.
“Every time the left calls Trump a Nazi, he gets 10,000 more votes,” I wrote during the 2024 campaign. While that proved to be an exaggeration, the principle is deeply rooted in American politics. Piling on a candidate with obviously untrue attacks leads to voters feeling sorry for the target.
The sympathy vote didn’t elect Mamdani. But it certainly didn’t hurt him, and since that was the motivation for the name-calling, it was a spectacular failure.
Voters aren’t stupid. They may be uninformed, but when it comes to their own welfare, they’re brilliant. Referring to Mamdani as a “jihadist” was an over-the-top, hysterical attempt to tie the Muslim assemblyman to terrorists. It didn’t convince anyone that Mamdani was going to scream “Allahu Akbar!” and blow up the new World Trade Center.
Referring to a “democratic socialist” (sic) as a “Communist” also doesn’t hold water. They are two different ideologies, and trying to call Mamdani a commie is like trying to call Trump a Nazi. The only people who believe it were already going to vote against them anyway.
Besides, a healthy percentage of young voters wouldn’t mind a socialist economic system, and a significant number of young people would embrace Communism.
A recent Cato Institute YouGov poll found 62% of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34% say the same of communism. Calling Mamdani a “Communist” may very well have increased the huge turnout of younger voters, eager to believe the false promises of both socialism and communism.
Recommended: The Socialists Are on the Rise in the Democratic Party Because They’re Not Dead
Also, calling Mamdani a “jihadist” was not only silly, but, for New Yorkers, a curious criticism. It’s more than likely that most New York voters have Muslim friends and neighbors. It just didn’t figure to try to make Mamdani into something almost all voters knew he wasn’t.
The wilder the Right’s rhetoric became, the more it underscored what Mamdani actually is: a familiar figure of the gentry Left who could appeal especially to New York’s stressed educated professionals — which is to say, the group that did most to get him elected both in the Democratic primary and in Tuesday’s general election.
Yet MAGA went out of its way to paint the crudest possible caricature of the mayor-elect: from the late Charlie Kirk tweeting an image of the Statue of Liberty covered in a burka to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) claiming that Mamdani is an “actual communist jihadist.”
The worst offender was arguably Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), a hard-Right firebrand with a history of making false claims about his own past, who led the charge for denaturalizing and deporting Mamdani. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for nuking Gaza, likewise demanded Mamdani’s expulsion from America over vaguely defined (read: bogus) flaws in his naturalization process.
Using 20th-century epithets to try to smear 21st-century political candidates won’t work. The energy and effort that went into trying to portray Mamdani as something he wasn’t could have been used in a campaign to show how Mamdani’s ideas will bankrupt the city, castrate the police force, and cause businesses and the rich to flee the city, while turning the streets of New York into a thug-friendly paradise.
We’ll see how long it takes for “buyer’s regret” to take hold and remove the sheen from Mamdani’s suit of armor.
The Schumer Shutdown is still on. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
Help us continue to report the truth about the Schumer Shutdown. Use promo code POTUS47 to get 74% off your VIP membership.
