Looking at the Democratic primary results, it would be easy to assume that Zohran Mamdani supporters are the sort of rich liberals who claim to advocate for the less fortunate … when the less fortunate actually want something totally different.
After all, Mamdani had a 13-point margin over Andrew Cuomo in high-income neighborhoods, while Cuomo had a 13-point margin in low-income areas.
I also initially assumed this was like the self-flagellating people who denounced their white privilege and championed defunding the police in the summer of 2020 — all ostensibly for the benefit of black people.
But I’m realizing now that this is not the case for many Zohran supporters.
Mamdani is the champion of the faux-working class: those who are actually quite well off but feel otherwise.
In the minds of his voters, the free-free-freebies Mamdani is promising — frozen rent, free buses, cheap groceries — are not for New York’s least fortunate. It’s also for… themselves.
Mamdani’s base are disproportionately young, educated and white, and live in trendy areas of Brooklyn. A great number are well-compensated Zoomers and Millennials who truly believe they are New York’s downtrodden.
They live in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. They’ve never been to Brownsville or Mott Haven.
Theirs is a world of fusion tapas bars and indie coffee shops. Hey, $20 lychee martinis and $7 lattes with cashew milk can, indeed, make a dent in a starting salary.
With their visual arts or sociology degrees, they don’t make as much as classmates who majored in engineering or economics or went to law school.
That is partly the result of their own choices, yet they see the economic outcome as a travesty.
They may be transplants who decided to call the most expensive city in the nation home. But if an immigrant landlord who nearly lost his property during the pandemic tries to raise the rent because of rising utilities — well, he’s guilty of extorting them.
In their free time, these victimized voters scroll through TikTok, which confirms the world is hopeless. AI is coming for their jobs. The economy has gone to hell. There’s an actual king in the White House. The world is literally on fire. There’s microplastic in their bloodstream, and mercury in their sushi.
They text each other sore thought pieces on how their nasty Boomer parents hoarded all the wealth and absconded with it.
In their minds, they’re losing at life before they’ve even begun.
When it all becomes too much to handle, they flick through Instagram and jealously stew over other people’s glamorous vacations and superior apartments.
Their existence is tinged with envy and dread — and lived in a bubble where everyone else’s life looks better, shinier, wealthier. Why, then, shouldn’t they be entitled to free things to make them feel better?
It’s befitting that the ones jumping for joy over a charismatic young politician inventing new entitlements are the most entitled young people of all.
And it’s equally befitting that Mamdani, of all people, is their demagogue: a private school-educated child of a professor and a renowned filmmaker, pocketing a six-figure salary bankrolled by tax-payers while paying dirt-cheap stabilized rent.
He and his followers are not the ones who need handouts and freebies most. They’re the ones who feel entitled to others’ dollars because they’ve convinced themselves that the world is stacked against them.
They believe that they — kids with degrees and bold ideas — truly are the less fortunate.
Less fortunate New Yorkers voted in the primary for politicians like Cuomo, who treated them with dignity instead of unrealistic promises of freebies.
New Yorkers full of envy and entitlement, meanwhile, voted gleefully for more, more, more.
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