Some attacks on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign have focused on his plans to create city-owned grocery stores, make bus rides free, offer baby baskets of diapers to new parents and freeze rent for over two million New Yorkers. One of the stranger and more personal attacks focused on his summer scavenger hunt. Mr. Mamdani, who is 33 and a State Assembly member, went from one little-known nook of New York to another — and was promptly denounced as unfit for office.
A member of the New York Post’s editorial board called his base “adult-kickball-league D.S.A.-nerd Mamdani cultists” in a jeremiad against the scavenger hunt. Mayor Eric Adams suggested on social media, before leaving the race last week, that the scavenger hunt was nefarious. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running against Mr. Mamdani for the mayoralty, sneered at it. The ability of a simple scavenger hunt to rile Mr. Mamdani’s detractors showcased a panic that seemingly unites many in the political old guard, even if they didn’t name it: The youngest Americans are taking over American life.
Younger Americans are sometimes derided for apathy about politics. But that indifference is almost entirely a product of established politicians’ appearances on cable news and occasional social media clips, as I’ve seen time and again in my role at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Many younger Americans are eagerly seeking out politicians and pundits of their own age. They are united not by one political platform but by establishment politicians’ inability to relate to younger Americans. Younger officials seem better placed to offer plausible road maps to our students, showing near-term solutions to problems where long-term solutions are often hazy.
This is true on the left and the right. Charlie Kirk understood this, and he was able to convert that enthusiasm into engagement for himself and votes for Republicans. There are very few among the political old guard who could fill a lawn with 3,000 people on any campus in America right now, but he could.
Young politicians will always be criticized by their elders for inexperience, and in politics, “young” doesn’t just mean the under-40 crowd. Barack Obama faced these attacks when he ran for president in 2008 as a barely seasoned U.S. senator. When I covered City Hall in 2001, Michael Bloomberg — the businessman who was nearly 60 when he first ran for mayor — was targeted for his lack of political perspicacity.
The hand-wringing in those cases did not carry the same get-off-my-lawn vibes that characterize jabs at this generation of newcomers — younger millennials and members of Generation Z, mostly. The ire for Mr. Mamdani and other young political hopefuls borrows from tropes about young Americans’ dues-skipping sense of professional entitlement.
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The post Stopping Zohran Mamdani Won’t Save the Political Old Guard appeared first on New York Times.
