Nancy Pelosi is out, and Zohran Mamdani is in. Or so Republicans hope.
After spending years — and tens of millions of dollars — pillorying Ms. Pelosi and seeking to tie her to seemingly every Democrat in America, Republicans are betting that their next boogeyman has arrived, just in time for Thursday’s retirement announcement by Ms. Pelosi, the former House speaker.
“Radical socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win is the Democrat Party’s blueprint for America,” declared a statement from the House Republican campaign arm, as the committee began a digital ad campaign denouncing the new mayor-elect of New York City.
For Republicans facing a newly re-energized Democratic base and a potentially challenging midterms environment, a fresh foil couldn’t come soon enough.
In part, they hope to turn Mr. Mamdani into the next national-level villain because they think the 34-year-old democratic socialist vividly illustrates their argument that the Democratic Party has swung hard to the left.
But in a nonpresidential year, with President Trump in Washington and off the ballot, Republicans are also straining to galvanize their base. Some concede that it’s hard to rile up the party’s voters by pointing to current members of Democratic leadership, like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries.
“Nancy Pelosi has been in more than one thousand Republican TV ads over the years — and that’s not like an exaggeration, that’s a vast understatement — but that’s kind of getting old,” said Curt Anderson, a veteran Republican strategist. “Schumer is not very useful, people don’t know him. Jeffries is kind of lackluster.”
Mr. Mamdani, he predicted, “will take over now in a lot of ways, as the sort of Republican example of, ‘Don’t let this happen here.’”
Mr. Mamdani is a Muslim New Yorker who has already faced Islamophobic attacks, and demonizing him as the frightening new face of the Democratic Party could quickly get ugly.
Politically speaking, there are also evident limitations of such an approach.
While candidates running in battleground districts will certainly be asked about him, they are likely to dismiss such questions as hypotheticals — or to use them to signal distance from the unpopular national party. They do not have to take a vote on Mr. Mamdani.
It was a different story in 2018, when Democratic House candidates were pushed on whether they would support Ms. Pelosi as speaker if their party reclaimed the majority.
Plenty of Democrats running in competitive races at the time said they would not back her.
That list included the moderate Democratic candidates Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who won congressional seats that year as Democrats took back the House. Both won governor’s races this week.
“Republicans get a lot of mileage out of vilifying Democrats and trying to tie us all to the politics of one person, but they’re never afraid to take this to extremes,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and Senate candidate, who tried unsuccessfully to block Ms. Pelosi from becoming speaker but praised her tenure on Thursday.
“They do it because they believe it’s an effective strategy, and I do think there’s some evidence that it works,” he went on. “But will it be effective enough,” he added, to overcome Mr. Trump’s unpopularity? “No.”
There are also signs of skepticism among Republicans about the power of messaging about a mayor of a city hundreds or thousands of miles away from voters, even if the New York City mayor has an exceptionally large platform. It will depend in part, some say, on how he governs.
Brinker Harding, a Republican city councilman in Omaha who is running for Congress, alluded to Mr. Mamdani and New York in his announcement video. But even he conceded in an interview this fall that “I don’t know that necessarily Nebraskans know who Mamdani is.”
Democrats, for their part, are divided over what Mr. Mamdani’s stunning ascent represents for their party more broadly.
To plenty, the answer is obvious.
Mr. Mamdani, they say, is a generational talent who should be elevated, emulated and included as part of the party’s efforts to reconstitute itself and push back against Mr. Trump’s Republican Party.
Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani’s transition, said his campaign “brought thousands of young and first-time voters into the political process — and his affordability agenda is so popular that even Republicans are parroting it.”
“I don’t think that our party needs to have one face — our country does not have one face,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another favorite Republican boogeyman, said in an interview with MSNBC. “Our assignment everywhere is to send the strongest fighters for the working class wherever possible. In some places, like Virginia for the gubernatorial seat, that’s going to look like Abigail Spanberger. In New York City, unequivocally, it is Zohran Mamdani.”
It is a more complicated question for other Democratic leaders and strategists who want to harness Mr. Mamdani’s social media savvy, youthful appeal and compelling message on affordability — but have reservations about how much to embrace the messenger himself.
Some would prefer to keep the focus on the statewide victories of Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill, arguing that those are far more instructive in understanding how to win competitive general elections.
Several Democrats running in competitive House districts, especially in the New York media market, have been quick to distance themselves from Mr. Mamdani.
“If he governs responsibly and focuses on what’s happening in the Midtown Tunnel instead of the Mideast, then I don’t think he is at all a challenge for Democrats in battleground districts across the country,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, a former chair of the House Democratic campaign arm. “This midterm will be a referendum on Donald Trump and his handling of the economy.”
But it was possible, he said, that Mr. Mamdani could be a greater factor in Long Island and Hudson Valley-area battleground House districts, where residents absorb New York City news coverage and in many cases commute to the city.
“I do not think that what happens in New York City represents where the country is writ large,” said Representative Laura Gillen, a Long Island Democrat and Mamdani critic, urging her party to “lead from the middle” in a September interview.
“That is the path forward for Democrats, and I do not think that that is representative of what Mr. Mamdani stands for,” she said.
In one sign of the strong feelings the New York mayor’s race inspired beyond the five boroughs, several attendees at the election-night watch party for Andrew M. Cuomo, Mr. Mamdani’s chief opponent, said they were from Long Island, Westchester or New Jersey.
“There is high likelihood that Mamdani, his likeness and image, will appear in many ads in 2026,” said John Brabender, a longtime Republican strategist who was a media consultant to Mr. Trump’s campaign. “I don’t know how he’s not part of the discussion.”
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
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