Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary has sent the conservative commentariat into a fit of apoplexy. The Right’s response — portraying him as, at once, a pro-LGBT communist and a jihadist menace, and even calling for his deportation — foreshadows the GOP’s messaging problems should more Democrats follow Mamdani’s lead in downplaying “woke” identity issues in favour of material ones such as rent, wages, and inequality.

A scan of social media provides an appalling kaleidoscope of attacks on Mamdani solely because he is a Muslim. MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, posted an AI image of the Statue of Liberty covered in a burka, along with the caption: “This hits hard.” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, meanwhile, bloviated: “24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.”

Never mind that Mamdani is a Shiite Muslim who has called for “queer liberation”, and whose wife doesn’t even wear a hijab. As more astute conservative commentators such as Christopher Rufo have pointed out, Mamdani is in fact a highly assimilated product of progressive New York culture and the movement built up around the revived Democratic Socialists of America.

Yet unlike the DSA Leftists of, say, 2020, during his campaign he largely de-emphasised hardline race-and-gender rhetoric, instead personally engaging voters and addressing the anxieties of the city’s downwardly mobile middle and educated classes. These include high rents, low wages, massive expenses associated with childbearing that disincentivise family formation, and even regulatory red tape which makes it hard for small businesses and contributes to inflation.

This is an about-face for Mamdani. After all, he previously advocated defunding the police (including to advance LGBT rights). Yet in his campaign, he dissociated himself from such themes — or at least kept them in the background. He walked back his commitment to #defund in a debate, and while he continues to support publicly funded transgender medicine for kids, it’s far from the centrepiece of his pitch.

While he has targeted specific New York communities with videos in which he speaks Hindi and Spanish, Mamdani has usually managed to shift every discussion back to issues of class and inequality — the historic mission of the “Old Left” before the so-called cultural turn and the rise of identity politics. A campaign speech in which he highlighted his father’s anti-Jim Crow activism was instructive. Although he began with themes of racial discrimination in the past, he didn’t make the predictable progressive point that “structural racism” is still with us. Rather, Mamdani argued that the freedoms for which the likes of Martin Luther King fought are meaningless if the poor and working classes are too economically stressed to exercise them.

The exception, of course, is his stance on Palestine. Here, he refused to disavow his use of the creepy slogan “globalize the intifada” — which understandably disturbs many Jewish Americans. Yet it ultimately didn’t bar him from winning over a decisive share of the primary electorate, including many younger Jews.

Mamdani’s victory should raise discomfiting questions for Republicans as they head into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 general election. If more Democrats remain laser-focused on entitlements, wages and health insurance rather than culture wars, Republicans might find themselves in a difficult spot. Having campaigned as populists, they have spent recent months promoting a new war in the Middle East and cuts to Medicaid. Scurrilous accusations of crypto-Islamism won’t do.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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