OPINION: Mamdani and others like him will continue to win unless the GOP gets its act together
NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, will soon take power. His political win has spurred many questions about communism, elections, and changing tides
Opinion-Analysis by Summer Lane | November 7, 2025
NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, will soon take power in what was once the “greatest city in the world,” but his rise to political authority has shaken many Americans to their core.
How could Mamdani win an election? His platform is built on socialist ideas that translate swiftly to communist policies. As reported by LindellTV, he has supported everything from rent cancellation to universal daycare – great ideas in concept, but impossible to execute on in a free society of working, taxpaying American citizens.
And yet, Mamdani won in a veritable landslide, beating out former New York City Mayor Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin, netting just over 50 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 41.6 percent.
Why did Mamdani win so decisively? As a socialist and a practicing Muslim, there’s no question that he is one of the most diverse and out-of-the-box candidates New York has ever elected to the office of mayor.
When it comes down to it, Mamdani won because he was addressing real, everyday issues that plague New Yorkers daily, and in that, he was far more decisive than any Republican ever thought about being.
Mamdani’s message was hip, cool, and authentic – and it must be taken seriously
Let’s be clear: communism has killed at least 100 million people over the past decades across various communist regimes that have arisen and fallen.
Mamdani’s vanilla flavor of socialism – which is a direct route to communism – always ends the same way: doom and disaster. And yet his ideas are resonating with young American voters, particularly among young women ages 18-29 (by a whopping 84 percent), and a massive 67 percent of the vote among the same age group in men, per CNN’s exit polls.
Is Mamdani a radical? Absolutely.
He advocates for taxing the richest one percent with a glitzy smile on his face. He supports city-owned grocery stores – a hallmark of communism. He’s pretty openly anti-Israel. But so are a growing number of Americans who are tired of seeing one administration after the other focus on foreign policy issues that have no bearing whatsoever on domestic crises like skyrocketing mortgage rates and unaffordable groceries.
Many people in New York – an immigrant-heavy city – may not see his refusal to disavow the phrase, “Globalize the intifada” as a problem. Why? Because, like it or not, the political tides are changing. And the younger generation is looking for something new, whether it’s good or disastrously bad.
Mamdani’s message to New Yorkers worked well because, unlike tired and stale Republican candidates, he largely addressed everyday problems like high rent and expensive daycare. These are the issues that Americans – particularly young people who have been priced out of achieving the American dream – care about.
And while Mamdani’s proposed solutions to those problems may, indeed, be radical and in total disagreement with the founding principles that made America great, it’s important to understand that those ideas address the issues people actually care about. And that is ultimately why he won.
His campaign was slick, quick, and charming. Rotten socialist ideas wrapped up with a deftly delivered and unifying narrative are more effective than anything the Republicans – other than President Trump, of course – have put forth over the past few months.
The administration’s focus lately has been heavily on the Israel-Hamas conflict, and while peace is always a noble goal, this reality remains: people care more about domestic issues than they do about what happens abroad. And that’s normal.
Mamdani-esque candidates will continue to win
Candidates like Zohran Mamdani will continue to win their races by large margins if Republicans cannot deliver a message that clearly and defiantly addresses real domestic issues for the middle class and for young people who are struggling under the weight of a crushing economy.
Consider a different national demographic: according to Rasmussen Reports, voters under 40 – a demographic that swung heavily for President Trump in the 2024 presidential election – have rapidly dropped their support for him since his term began.
This is essentially the same demographic that swung heavily for Mamdani in NYC.
“They were happiest when the system was being dismantled,” said Rasmussen’s head pollster, Mark Mitchell. “Republicans – change or fade (further) into irrelevance.”
He’s right. President Trump won by a landslide last year, mostly because of his strong, clearly defined America First agenda that promised the complete dismantlement of the Deep State, along with a return to a powerful and common-sense economy that would favor the Middle Class and an up-and-coming Gen Z.
It can be argued that the Republican hyper-fixation on issues like the endless Israel-Hamas conflict or the multi-billion-dollar deals with Big Pharma behemoths like Eli Lilly (for the sake of making GLP-1 weight loss drugs cheaper) simply aren’t hitting with Americans.
Americans don’t care. They want cheap groceries. Cheap energy. Cheap gas. And an attainable house payment.
If this week’s election and Mamdani’s meteoric rise to power offer any lesson at all to the GOP, it is this: focus on domestic issues, deliver big on them, and take a unifying and clearly defined agenda into 2026, or else risk losing everything to Democrats in the midterms.
Conservatives can rage and complain about the election of candidates like Mamdani, but he and others like him will continue to win, repeatedly, unless the GOP counters that kind of messaging with something better. Something uplifting. Simple. And heavily anti-establishment, which is what young people want, because they have been betrayed by establishment politicians for decades.
President Trump’s campaign in 2024 spoke to these frustrated voters extraordinarily well. His was a campaign of strength and anti-establishment rhetoric, and it won all swaths of voters, from Republicans and Independents to left-leaning college kids looking for a way to rage against the proverbial machine.
The late Charlie Kirk told Tucker Carlson shortly before his death of Mamdani, “Most people are missing the point of, really, what this is. This is yet another distress signal by young people to say, ‘Hey, if you’re not going to fix our life economically, we’re going to get very radical politically.'”
The rest of the Republican platform must learn from this, or be doomed to fade into obscurity and meaninglessness, crushed beneath the boot of communist policies delivered with calculated and ruthless efficiency nationwide.
Photo: Screenshot: Zohran Mamdani/YouTube
