What Makes Democrats So Afraid of Zohran Mamdani?

American history abounds with well-known monuments to brittle intellectual orthodoxies, from the Scopes trial to the cult of the Marvel blockbuster^[3]. To that illustrious lineage, we can add the perennial spectacle of the Democratic establishment blanching before the prospect of a successful movement-driven populist campaign. The latest campaign in question, of course, is Zohran Mamdani’s bid to be the next mayor of New York, and skittish party leaders are already declaring it a pox upon their efforts to recapture a House majority^[4] in the 2026 midterms.

Never mind that the two elections involve vastly disparate constituencies and are separated by a full calendar year. And never mind the complete lack of symmetry, with not a single GOP election consigliere getting remotely worked up over the host of MAGA authoritarian power grabs now polling at toxic levels^[5] will play out in the midterms—or how extreme-right candidates such as New Jersey GOP gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciatterrelli^[6] are likely to alienate moderate swing voters in purple-trending districts.

No, this is simply how you get to be a respected strategist in the upper echelons of the Democratic consensusphere: You only perceive threats to your left, and you tirelessly position yourself as the voice of reasoned moderation, in touch with the authentically centrist impulses of the Real American Median Voter. Witness a curious recent report in Politico bearing the pitch-perfect Beltway headline “‘Giddy’ Republicans Cheer Mamdani’s Impact on Democrats^[7].” In any sanely configured political system, taking advice^[8] from an irredentist authoritarian party on the risks of an intraparty realignment candidacy would be filed under the general heading of life tips from Job’s counselors^[9]—particularly coming out of a 2024 cycle in which this same opposition party relentlessly portrayed a status-quo centrist ticket as a threat of commie insurrection^[10]. Now that Mamdani, an unabashed Democratic socialist, has won more votes than any prior mayoral candidate in his June primary victory, the notion that the Republicans are gearing up to unleash their full McCarthyite wrath on the Mamdani campaign is scarcely surprising, or cause for serious concern.

Yet even though Politico packages its report as a cascade of GOP schadenfreude, the body of it is taken up with lamentations from Democrats. Indeed, the wording of the headline comes not from any Republican operative but from a concern-trolling Democrat—former Nassau County executive Laura Curran, who absurdly opines that the GOP opposition is “more excited about this than Mamdani’s followers or supporters.” Not to be outdone, Hank Scheinkopf, a longtime Democratic operative in New York who is working with an anti-Mamdani PAC, delivers this whopper: “Mamdani is the greatest threat to Democrats probably since Ronald Reagan because he’s everything Democrats have been accused of being and in fact is—to the extreme. Republican ad makers will know what to do with this.”

This narrative is so firmly ensconced in mainstream discourse that Politico reporters Nick Reisman and Jeff Coltin go out of their way to enable it. In a mind-bending excursion into speculative punditry they write:

While Democratic socialists are on the verge of a high-profile victory in a deep blue metropolis, that success stands to be curdled by Trump’s vow to exert more federal power over American cities. Trump’s focus on urban crime^[11] has further driven a wedge into a party struggling to find its identity. And Mamdani’s since-qualified support^[12] for slashing police budgets while pushing to increase taxes on rich people to pay for services like free bus fare and child care has put Democratic officials on edge as their party’s nominee barrels into the general election with a comfortable polling lead.

Here on planet Earth, there’s zero evidence that Trump’s illegal and authoritarian putsch into urban law enforcement (which, in practical terms, translates into masked ICE renditions and failed bids to harass detainees into facing unfounded federal charges) is anything like a political asset for the GOP, let alone a fatal wedge issue for Democrats. Polls show a majority of respondents^[13] opposing it^[14], even as they also register general concern about urban crime. (Oh, and speaking of which, Trump’s federalized crime boondoggle isn’t even doing much to reduce crime in the District of Columbia^[15], the centerpiece of Trump’s program.)

Yet the canons of sober political analysis hold that Republicans aggressively set the prevailing terms of debate, and Democrats just as reliably freak out and flee in terror. Hard as it may be to believe midway through the 20th century’s second decade, this template was established in the aftermath of the disastrous 1972 election—the last time modern Democrats nominated a movement-backed candidate for the presidency, the antiwar South Dakota Senator George McGovern. Ever since then, the wised-up establishment has clung to the hoary commandment that a Democratic Party hoping to succeed must always and forever shun any disturbances on its left flank. That’s the logic behind the successive presidential runs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s why the 2004 anti-war candidacy of Howard Dean got shoved briskly aside for the infinitely more equivocal critic of the Iraq War John Kerry, whom the smart money in the party knew was a sure thing based on his own credentials as a war hero. (Note to the New York Democratic sachems thinking they can outwit GOP attack strategies with candidates bearing Republican-seeming résumé entries: Kerry got ruthlessly attacked for his war record anyway^[16], in stunningly dishonest fashion.)

Evidently a glutton for punishment, Dean went on to captain the Democratic National Committee, where his ambitious 50-state strategy to keep the party competitive in every voting constituency was overruled by the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rahm Emanuel, thereby locking in long-term Republican advantages^[17] in many winnable districts. (Is Emanuel still adhering to the party establishment like gum on its shoe, and positioning himself for a content-challenged and trans-baiting 2028 presidential run by bashing Zohran Mamdani? You’d better believe it!^[18]) All of this savviness in a vacuum was of course but a prelude to the party establishment’s well-documented bid to marginalize Bernie Sanders’s successive presidential runs; the party’s final anti-Sanders piece of primary choreography had all of the 2020 cycle’s centrist candidates dropping out ahead of Super Tuesday to secure Joe Biden’s hold on the nomination—the collective dive into change-averse gerontocratic rule that all but guaranteed Donald Trump’s second term in office. Meanwhile, Sanders remains one of the country’s most popular politicians^[19].

The Democrats’ addiction to left-marginalization strategies is especially unwarranted in Mamdani’s case, since the substance of his platform does what this same cohort of centrist party leaders tirelessly claim they want to do: He focuses on “kitchen-table issues,” with plans to secure affordable housing, free transportation, and mitigate the rise of daily living expenses in the country’s most costly city. In a never-ending regress of subject-changing rhetoric, Democratic officials can be heard claiming that virtually every authoritarian power grab from the Trump White House is a desperate ploy to distract voters from kitchen-table issues. They said it about the illegal mobilization of federal troops in LA^[20]; they said it about the mobilization of the broader immigration police state^[21]; they said it about the Epstein files^[22]; and they keep saying it about the battle to restore the foundations of American democracy^[23].

Now the party has a charismatic, well-spoken advocate to actually solve kitchen-table issues, and its leaders have rallied to declare him anathema. (They are also keen to repudiate Mamdani for his principled stand against the Gaza genocide, to the point of militantly ignoring the extensive polling showing his strong support among Jewish voters in New York^[24], but that’s another column entirely.) It’s long past time to recognize that the true distraction here are the members of a Democratic consulting class dogmatically opposed to revising their stratagems in the face of system-wide failure^[25]. Alas, it’s far from certain that they will get out of the party’s way before another midterm debacle.

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