Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee for mayor in New York City, is a “communist lunatic.” That’s according to President Donald Trump, who has pejoratively labeled Mamdani as a communist several times since he won his party’s primary in June. The Queens-born Republican whose namesake tower rises above Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan has sounded deeply concerned about what electing Mamdani could mean for his hometown.
“If a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same,” Trump fretted last month during a Cabinet meeting.
But Republicans in Washington and beyond are not only increasingly accepting of the idea that Mamdani is likely to win the November 4 election—they’re getting excited about the prospect that the 33-year-old democratic socialist could be the new face of the Democratic Party as a result.
“It’s fantastic,” one Republican strategist close to the White House told me recently, echoing the view of others in the GOP I’ve spoken with. Having Mamdani—who has promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, freeze rents, and establish city-run grocery stores—in Gracie Mansion may not be great for New York, but it’s a gift for Republicans trying to cast the Democrats as too radical and out of touch.
And despite reporting from the New York Times earlier this month that Trump is toying with intervening to help Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who lost to Mamdani in the primary but is running as an independent, there’s no indication that the president’s political operation is working to stop the Mamdani train.
“The President has repeatedly stated he does not intend to get involved in the NYC Mayoral race,” a senior White House official emailed when I asked whether Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance might try to raise money for the Republican mayoral candidate, Curtis Sliwa, or otherwise intervene for Cuomo or the sitting mayor, Democrat-turned-independent Eric Adams.
These days, the GOP could use a good foil. Trump’s poll numbers are middling at best, his trade policies have created economic uncertainty, and Republicans are starting to feel vulnerable with the 2026 midterm elections looming. With reliable Democratic bogeymen like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama fading from relevance, Mayor Mamdani doing disastrous things in New York City might be just what Republicans have been looking for.
Like the city’s other high-profile lefty, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani is a young member of the Democratic Party’s progressive vanguard. While he has run more as an economic populist than a doctrinaire socialist in his campaign for mayor, Mamdani represents a fairly radical alternative to the center-left Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, which also have their elections this fall. Even if all three win these marquee off-year races, Republicans and their media allies (especially the Manhattan-based Fox News) will label Mamdani as the leader of the hapless Democratic Party.
What could this mean for 2026 and beyond?
In a limited sense, Republicans are thrilled by the prospect that their New York state candidates in next year’s midterms could focus their campaigns not on defending the unpopular president in their own party but on criticizing the left-winger in charge of the country’s largest city. If the Republicans have any chance of maintaining control of the House of Representatives, they’ll need to hold on to their majority-making seats in New York. And in the race for governor, Republicans see an opening to win a seat they haven’t held in two decades. The way to do that? Keep swing voters both on Long Island and in the lower Hudson Valley in the GOP column.
These are suburbanites in the greater New York metropolitan region who have drifted back and forth between the parties since the Trump era began. (Nassau County on Long Island, for example, voted for Biden in 2020 before swinging to Trump in 2024.) They are enamored with neither the current president nor the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party. Mamdani, Republicans hope, will be a walking, talking study in political contrasts that will benefit them in 2026. The ads practically write themselves. The city’s socialist mayor promised utopia, yet prices and crime are still out of control: Vote Republican.
Meanwhile, Trump’s inroads with minority groups in the city proper could be accelerated if Mamdani is unable to fulfill his promises to address economic anxiety.
And after that? Mamdani was not born in the United States and won’t be eligible to run for president, but it’s possible the example he sets for Democrats hungry for wins will influence the next field of White House hopefuls. And at the very least, Mamdani’s victory in the June primary is more evidence that the Democratic Party base is getting more ideologically radical and is looking for candidates to match. A 2028 presidential election that is a referendum on a more Mamdani-tinged progressive vision—perhaps with AOC herself as the nominee—might help Republicans avoid falling victim to Trump fatigue. Americans won’t want to elect someone spouting a populist message so far out of the mainstream, right? That, at least, is the Republican hope.
Steve Bannon, the voice of the MAGA movement, disagrees, warning on Tuesday’s episode of his online program WarRoom that conservatives are wrong to quietly hope that Mamdani can win to advance their own ends. “New York City is the greatest city in the greatest country in the history of mankind, and we’re about to give it over to Marxists and radical Islamists and not even put up a freaking fight,” Bannon said.
Mamdani is a Muslim, born in Uganda to Indian parents, and a naturalized American citizen. He does not espouse Islamist political ideas, nor is there evidence that he holds them. Despite these flights of rhetorical fancy, Bannon may have a point about the assumption from these Republicans that Mamdani’s political utility can be contained and controlled by Republicans. Those who think Mamdani’s failures in office could be instructive about the limits of democratic socialism, Bannon says, are kidding themselves.
“You’re more clueless about this than you were clueless about MAGA and the rise of Trump,” he said. Those Republicans who are getting giddy over Mamdani’s possible victory might want to consider that.
