Over dinner with a politically sophisticated college friend, I explained that I was planning to vote for Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor. In full Gen X snark mode, she asked, “Because vibes?”
She was alluding to the fact that some of Mr. Mamdani’s most meme-able campaign slogans are impossible as actual policy. A few are not even good ideas to begin with.
Take “Freeze the rent,” his rallying cry, understood to refer to the city’s million or so rent-stabilized apartments. Freezing the rent has been tried; it helps in the short term, but it exacerbates many long-term problems. Low-income renters would be better served by a laser focus on increasing housing supply. I’m voting for him anyway.
Or take free buses. Mr. Mamdani has said little about how he’d deliver on this promise, since New York’s mayor does not control the city’s mass transit system and the institutions that do are most likely to hate the idea. I’m voting for him anyway.
I’m doing it because he’s freaking out the business-as-usual power elites and driving establishment members of his own Democratic Party bananas. Because things have gone dangerously wrong in this country, and like a lot of other New Yorkers, I’m ready to tear the whole playhouse down (metaphorically speaking!).
That is the same spirit that motivated a great many people to vote for Donald Trump. You can see the irony: There may be no two politicians further apart on the ideological spectrum. Or two who are less personally aligned: Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to destroy the “Communist” Mr. Mamdani — and beyond him, New York — if Mr. Mamdani is elected. But the appeal they make to voters, and the way voters respond, is uncannily similar.
Trumpism is more than politics. It’s an emotional gas-main explosion, from people who felt unheard, patronized, left behind. The Mamdani phenomenon is a pressure valve, too, an outlet for voters to make a statement against the Democratic burghers who claim to represent “the people” but who are compromised by PAC money and conventional thinking.
The entire political establishment should be scrambling to adopt the lessons of these two men’s candidacies. Instead, many of its members seem to be assiduously ignoring them. Kamala Harris, now on a finally-free-to-be-me truth-telling book tour, recently endorsed Mr. Mamdani in the most tepid way possible — “As far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee, and he should be supported” — before lauding candidates running elsewhere in the country. Politicians, stop talking this way!
In a recent essay, “Bringing a Survey to a Gun Fight,” the progressive communications specialist Anat Shenker-Osorio contrasts two approaches to politics. One, which she dubs “pollingism,” is dominant in Democratic circles. It assumes that voters are rational beings who make decisions based on a tempered analysis of policy. Their preferences, the argument goes, should be discerned and quantified, then duly regurgitated by politicians.
The bland mush that results is increasingly maladaptive to a world dominated by social media algorithms. Prudent, temperate messaging disappears into the ether. It is one reason Mikie Sherrill, the cautiously centrist Democratic candidate for governor in New Jersey, is in an even remotely close race with a Republican who is running in part on bringing back plastic shopping bags.
The alternative to pollingism, Ms. Shenker-Osorio writes, is magnetism, “the notion that if you want people to come to your cause, you must be attractive.” Magnetism contains the possibility that a candidate might change the power equation, that ideas once thought impossible — like Mr. Mamdani’s push for free child care — suddenly become plausible.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Mamdani are both magnetists. People like Mitt Romney and, oh, say, Chuck Schumer are not.
Democrats have been pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to win back young men, who voted for Mr. Trump in droves. In a post-primary survey of likely New York voters, Mr. Mamdani was polling at 85 percent among men 18 to 34. That’s not just Brooklyn hipsters and aura-farming nepo babies. It’s a whole city’s worth of young dudes, from small business owners in Queens to warehouse workers in the Bronx.
Soon after the 2024 election, when Mr. Trump gained ground in Representative Alexandria Ocasió-Cortez’s district, people on social media told her they saw no contradiction between voting for him and for her. “I feel you are both outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment,’” one person wrote. “It’s real simple,” wrote another. “Trump and you care for the working class.”
Centrist Democrats have nonetheless insisted that Mr. Mamdani’s approach would be political suicide anywhere outside New York. Do you really think, they ask, that a democratic socialist has half a chance in Arkansas?
What made Mr. Mamdani broadly popular isn’t his party affiliation; it’s the fact that he actually listened to New Yorkers, including those who voted for Mr. Trump. They told him what they cared about most — the insane cost of living — and he built a hyperlocal campaign around that, all while resisting pollingism’s suburban-strip-mall blandness. Do I think that approach would work in Arkansas? I sure do, and in Cedar Rapids or Sioux County, Iowa. (Paradoxically, the one position on which mainstream Democrats seem immune to pollingism is support of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Mr. Mamdani’s opposition to that has aligned him with most Democratic voters.)
Of course, there is more to Mr. Mamdani’s appeal than his focus on the cost of living; otherwise, the “rent is too damn high” guy would have been elected president by now. This is a febrile, statue-toppling time, one with some parallels to the politics of previous moments of authoritarian ascendancy, when hard-left movements sprung up in response to the right. But it’s not quite a “horseshoe” moment, either. That’s the theory that far-left and far-right ideologies often converge around similar ideas in times like these.
As we watch Mr. Trump lay waste to multiple generations of conservative dogma, it starts to become clear that ideology of any kind is inadequate to capture what is happening in the electorate. Perhaps it’s time to turn the lens from horizontal to vertical and start looking at politics not through the prism of left/right but top/bottom: the elites versus everyone else.
There is another way, however, that the horseshoe metaphor seems quite apt. Democratic sages have for eons warned progressives that we must respond sensibly to MAGA extremism. After all, it was our supposed excesses (D.E.I., college debt relief, campus speech codes, trans rights) that allowed the right to triumph, they say.
The Mamdani phenomenon says the opposite. What is inspiring all those volunteers — some 75,000 by one count — to join his cause? I suspect it is the promise of finally going on the offense and forcing the other side to respond. Call it vibes, if you want, but they put Donald Trump in the White House and will very likely put Zohran Mamdani in Gracie Mansion.
Michael Hirschorn, the chief executive of Ish Entertainment, writes about the intersection of culture and politics.
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