The Mamdani Effect
In Seattle, Katie Wilson, a transit activist, is leading in the polls against the incumbent mayor after touting her history advocating for reduced fares for low-income residents and youths. In Texas, Senate candidate Colin Allred last week unveiled his “A More Affordable Texas” agenda, which included a ban on price-gouging and restoring tax credits to renewable energy companies to lower utility bills. And in New Jersey, congresswoman and gubernatorial front-runner Mikie Sherrill’s first ad took aim at soaring energy costs, promising that “Day 1 as governor, I’m declaring a state of emergency on utility costs using emergency powers to end these rate hikes and drive down your bills.”
This newfound focus on affordability by Democrats has emerged as the animating force behind many of this year’s political campaigns. It coincides with Zohran Mamdani shocking the political world with his 13-point win over former governor Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. That victory came in a race that began with a focus on crime and public order, with left-leaning candidates disavowing previous progressive stances on policing and quality-of-life concerns. Mamdani tacked the other way, never deleting tweets calling for the defunding of police. Instead, he focused relentlessly on three campaign promises devoted to lowering costs: free buses, free child care, and a rent freeze on regulated apartments. In February, half of the city’s voters told a pollster that crime and quality of life were their top two concerns; by July, a poll by left-leaning Data for Progress found the top issues were affordable housing and lowering costs.
“From the beginning of our thinking about this race we knew that it was time for a politics that was directed to the struggles in people’s lives, a politics where when you set a policy people didn’t need it translated as to what it would mean for them,” Mamdani told me. “Too often it feels as if politics is an act of imposing a vision on voters as opposed to having a vision that is a reflection of the needs of those voters.”
Almost immediately after the primary Mamdani was anointed by both liberals and conservatives as the face of the Democratic Party — by the former because of his charisma and vision for a new kind of activist government and the latter because he is a Ugandan-born 33-year-old with little experience and is an out-and-proud Democratic Socialist. In the months since, he has become something of a counterpoint to Donald Trump in the national discourse, with the two trading barbs from 200 miles away. A YouGov survey the month after the election found that nationally, Mamdani had higher approval ratings than any New York politician except for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries, but, more important, that more Americans had some opinion of Mamdani than on figures like Governor Kathy Hochul, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (who ran for president five years ago), or New York’s two most recent mayors, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio. It amounts to proof that Mamdani has already become better known to the voting public than many politicians with far longer tenures in public life.
The Democrats’ focus on affordability dovetails with a steady embrace of Mamdani from elected officials across the party’s ideological spectrum. Earlier this month Chris van Hollen, a moderate Maryland senator, blasted congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer and Jeffries for not yet endorsing Mamdani, calling their reluctance a “kind of spineless politics” the “people are sick of.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman who has delighted in tangling with his party’s left flank, told the New York Times that Mamdani “is as impressive as any person I’ve ever met in politics.” And Carl Heastie, the powerful speaker of the New York State Assembly, who had declined to back Mamdani throughout the primary despite the fact that the two are colleagues in the state’s lower chamber, endorsed him earlier this month. When asked which of Mamdani’s agenda items he prioritized, he responded, “All of the above.”
“Though I don’t live in NYC, it’s clear from the outside that Mamdani is an effective communicator and trying to drive a singular message,” Bryan Bennett, a public-opinion researcher with Loft Bank Strategies, wrote in an email. “It’s hard to parse what is likely helping him most from what data there is out there, but I have to believe it is a combination of things. First, he’s actually driving a positive message not just about affordability, but about the role of government itself (e.g,. “a government’s job is to actually make our lives better”). Second, he is focused on very specific and discrete examples of what that means (e.g., improving the speed and affordability of mass transportation, free child care). Third, these things are important in the context of his competition with both Adams and Cuomo having histories of scandal.”
Affordability has also increasingly become the Democratic party’s fallback issue of choice as it has struggled to mount a coherent response to the daily torrent of outrages coming from the Trump White House. In 2024, Kamala Harris occasionally made arguments about price-gouging or the inflationary risk of the president’s tariff policy. But overall she focused her campaign on on Trump as a threat to democracy and abortion rights.
“Donald Trump won by saying that on day one he was going to lower prices. It was a total lie, but he completely hammered that message home,” said Ro Khanna, a progressive Bay Area congressman. “Mamdani’s was the first campaign that matched the fervor of lowering costs with an economic message on our side. In that campaign, he changed the terms of the debate, and it’s a very good lesson for our side. You don’t have to argue on their terms about the border or wokeness. We can argue on our terms on affordability and good jobs and making sure we are taxing the wealthy. And ultimately campaigns are decided on what grounds you are fighting over rather than who is winning on any particular debate.”
Mamdani and other Democrats have found success with the focus on cost of living even as the inflation crisis of the Biden years has largely faded as a top political concern. A recent New York Times poll found that nationwide, “inflation” ranked as only the seventh-most-important issue in voters’ minds, behind “The economy/jobs/the stock market,” “polarization,” “Trump/Republicans” “immigration” “The Democrats” and “the state of democracy/corruption.”
When the 2025 mayoral race began, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t have enough money to hire a pollster, so the free buses and child care and rent freeze that became cornerstones of his campaign came from conversations the candidate and staffers had among themselves and with voters. Now, campaign officials say that even had they had the funds to hire a pollster, it’s unlikely that those surveyed would have mentioned lowering costs as something they wanted the next mayor to tackle since most voters remain skeptical that government can meaningfully impact their bottom line.
“The blueprint for Democrats is to find things people stress about and offer answers about how they are going to address it, “ said Rebecca Katz, whose firm, Fight Agency, does ads for the Mamdani campaign. “Everyone stays up late at night and worries about how they are going to pay the things they need, and what Zohran did is he came up with easy-to-understand solutions to the problems of real New Yorkers.”
For some Democrats, the notion of centering affordability in your campaign pitch is hardly something that Mamdani deserves all the credit for. Talking about prices during a time of high inflation is, after all, a bit like talking about jobs during a recession.
“Why are we talking about the New York City mayor’s race and not about a Sioux City Democrat who just flipped a +11 Trump district in Iowa?” said Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and a potential 2028 presidential contender. “It’s because you are a New York City journalist with a fucking 917 area code.”
Still, Emanuel conceded that “every time Kamala Harris talked about affordability, she was ahead in the polls, and every time she talked about democracy, she was down in the polls. It’s the core issue for voters, so if you are running for office, you had better be on top of it. And every action Trump does is so that the public doesn’t focus on the economy and affordability. You see it every time the inflation numbers come out and he starts talking about crime and immigration.”
It is not only around affordability that Mamdani has altered the contours of the Democratic Party’s discourse. While most Democrats criticized or at least shied away from the 2024 campus protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Mamdani campaign tried from the start to tap into the energy of the protesters. Prior to Mamdani’s run, doing anything other than pledging fidelity to Israel was thought to be political suicide, especially in New York. During the first mayoral debate, nearly all the candidates onstage said their first overseas trip would be to Israel; Mamdani, who has refused to say that Israel should remain a Jewish state, said he would focus on the city and remain in the five boroughs. Soon after Mamdani won the primary, however, polling showed that only 8 percent of Democrats nationwide supported the Israeli government’s action in Gaza, while in New York, a yawning 18-point gap has opened up between those who say they are more supportive of the Palestinians than of Israelis.
In 2024, Khanna said that when he was one of a handful of members of Congress to vote against aid to Israel, he was told by his colleagues that “it would be a career-ender for me.” Now, more than a year later, with Mamdani set to go to City Hall, Khanna said the whole party can have a different orientation.
“I don’t think anybody would say that vote was a career-ender anymore.”