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In the days before Zohran Mamdani’s victory, I heard a telling phrase from Washington’s MAGA political class: “Game recognize game.”
The context of this observation was President Donald Trump’s begrudging fondness for “my little Communist,” as he labeled the New York City Mayor-elect. By Nov. 5, the line was in the mouth of the MAGA zeitgeister Steve Bannon, who told his followers on : “Game respects game.”
The notes of celebration in the White House reaction to Mamdani reflect something real. Trump and his circle disdain the Bush-Ryan-Romney Republican Establishment and Clinton-Schumer-Jeffries Democratic Establishment in equal measure.
And they’re eager to join a battle on the other side of the horseshoe, where left-wing and right-wing populists share a diagnosis that the American and global systems are fully discredited, and are ready to fight it out for a new world order.
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In the aftermath of every election, there’s a quick media consensus about what it means — once formed over days and weeks by newspaper columnists, now congealed on X before the date heads go to sleep at sunrise Wednesday morning. This year’s hypothesis is affordability, the thing that Trump talked about whenever he wasn’t jabbing at trans rights in 2024 — a topic that Mamdani relentlessly emphasized in 2025, and which Abigail Spanberger and Mike Sherrill also ran on hard.
That media consensus is famously always too simple, and often flat wrong. It is, at best, part of an argument about each party’s future. The famous “soccer moms” of 1996 and “values voters” of 2004, the “Bradley effect” racists of 2007 and “missing white voters” of 2012 mostly dissolved under more detailed scrutiny of the data.
And this year’s affordability consensus certainly doesn’t capture the manic mood I found when I returned to New York for Election Day and its aftermath. The city is in the thick of a cheerful populist mania.
Mamdani’s supporters on the left are, obviously, rapturous — and a victory speech quoting Eugene Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru didn’t hurt.
Equally hyped up: the city’s vibrant right-wing minority. The New York Post’s crimson “wood” (front page, if you’ve never worked at a tabloid) became the icon of the moment:
Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Leftists raced to snap it up on eBay. It sold out fast — the “cherry on top” to an election cycle in which the Post had a lot of fun losing, as the tabloid’s canny editor, Keith Poole, put it in an internal email.
“To all my comrades at New York Pravda,” he wrote, welcoming “Supreme Leader Chairman Zohran” and promising that “each loyal worker will be rationed an extra (small) potato.”
The city’s leading conservative think tank published a less sardonic call to arms: “The Manhattan Institute exists for moments like this,” its president, Reihan Salam, wrote. “We are behind enemy lines and I hope that we might earn your support.” (A disclosure: My wife edits the Bigger Apple newsletter for the Manhattan Institute.)
The mood here isn’t wonky appreciation of practical solutions to the city’s rolling cost-of-living disaster. The middle class does face crushing rents, but New York also operates what is vastly the largest welfare state of any city in the country.
The mood is, rather, a celebration of the triumph of populism. Mamdani, who began his campaign doing man-on-the-street interviews with Trump voters, ran against bankrupt elites and a dynastic political family. (It’s no contradiction that Mamdani shares the president’s personal ease in Manhattan elite circles; they both grew up in that milieu.)
The single-minded obsession with Mamdani’s talk of affordability, while convenient for the mayor-elect and a vital part of his appeal, also misses an obvious point.
The issue most associated with the establishment of both parties right now — for reasons future historians can decipher — is support for Israel. And while Mamdani focused on affordability, New Yorkers heard endlessly from his enemies about hostility to Israel as well. He never ran away from his years as a pro-Palestinian activist.
It’s hard not to think that the perception — and reality — that a billionaire political class was funding anti-Muslim attack ads on Mamdani over Israel helped confirm his status as an anti-establishment hero. That’s a dynamic Republicans are wrestling with in public right now, as the GOP’s efforts to purge both critics of Israel and open antisemites from the party risk instead driving its populist wing closer to those positions.
Ben’s view
It suits Mamdani and Trump to cast themselves as outsiders, enemies of the corrupt system. Trump has now learned to govern that way, and Mamdani may well take cues from him, despite their wildly different visions for what should replace the neoliberal order — Trump’s new America-first nationalism, versus Mamdani’s globally-inflected leftism.
This horseshoe celebration of populism flatters the left and right alike. Bannon argued to an audience of global financiers and policymakers at Semafor’s World Economy Summit last year, there are only two remaining forces in American politics: “We, the populist nationalists, offer something you’re not going to love, but you’ll be able to live with.” The alternative, he said, is the alleged murderer Luigi Mangione: “That should scare you to the marrow of your bones.”
But of course, this is an argument, not a fact. These post-election battles over what won it — values voters or soccer moms, the base or the swing voters — are proxy wars over each party’s future. And while this festival of populism serves Trump and Mamdani well, it’s hard not to glance at just how narrow their victories were, and how fragile their coalitions. Trump revived a slumbering American electorate and drove record turnout, winning and losing; Mamdani won more votes than any modern mayor. And yet just 49.8% of American voters chose Trump in 2024; 50.4% of New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, by the latest count. That populist moment isn’t yet a sure thing.
Room for Disagreement
Mamdani isn’t as radical as he looks, Vital City managing editor Josh Greenman writes: “The truth is more grounded: New York already runs on big government, with a remarkably generous social safety net, and Mamdani’s agenda mostly builds on what’s already there. The size and reach of today’s system make his proposals, by definition, incremental rather than revolutionary.”
Notable
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“New York is quietly preparing for a Donald Trump takeover of the country’s largest city,” provoked by Mamdani’s win, Politico’s Jonathan Martin writes.
