by Neil H. Buchanan
While the global rise of the far right often seems unstoppable, on November 4, 2025, a politician who describes himself as a democratic socialist won New York City’s mayoral election. In his op-ed, Prof. Neil H. Buchanan argues that Zohran Mamdani is a political phenomenon who will nevertheless face relentless efforts from across the political spectrum to bring him down.
The Democratic Party establishment tried to stop him, ignore him, and distance itself from him. Former presidential nominee Kamala Harris, for example, could only manage to say that “as far as I’m concerned, he’s the Democratic nominee and he should be supported.” US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer refused even to go that far, withholding his endorsement entirely. New York Governor Kathy Hochul rushed around promising business leaders that she could stop the Democratic socialist from doing anything that they would not like.
Yet Zohran Mamdani is now the Mayor-elect of New York City. On Tuesday of this week, he handily defeated Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced and Donald Trump-endorsed former Democratic governor of the state, who also lost badly to Mamdani in the party’s primary election.
Mamdani is a political phenomenon, to say the least, drawing ready comparisons to Barack Obama, another man of color who has what many Americans would call a “funny-sounding name” and whom Republicans called a terrorist. Somehow, both men broke through and won elections that no one thought they could win.
Unlike Obama, Mamdani is in fact a Muslim who was born in Africa. Unlike Obama’s “hope and change” shape-shifting rhetoric that never was as progressive as it sounded to many people, Mamdani unapologetically identifies himself as a Democratic Socialist. Unlike Obama, the attacks on Mamdani will not be coming only from the Republican Party. Too many Democrats are invested in the idea that Mamdani is “scary” to back off now. What to do?
For those naïve souls who think that elections allow leadership to begin for the winners while the losers regroup, I have sad news. American politics has in recent decades become the site of constant refusals to allow Democrats (at least those who lean even a bit to the left) to govern. California has seen multiple recall elections run against its governors, including an ultimately unsuccessful one in 2021 against the current incumbent, Gavin Newsom.
The once-common idea of uniting behind one’s former opponent for the good of the people has too often been cast aside in favor of endless political warfare.
What will happen to Mamdani? Even though he has received strong support from many of New York’s Jewish voters, especially younger ones, one of the attacks against him has been that his becoming mayor – that is, his very existence as the leader of the city – will make Jews unsafe. A Jewish Democratic congresswoman from Florida even argued that Mamdani has a “callous disregard for antisemitism, terrorist activity” and has given his “permission to use dangerous rhetoric that potentially incites violence.”
Meanwhile, the same people who opposed Mamdani all along, and who have opposed other progressive American politicians, will run a relentless smear campaign against him. The billionaire Trump supporter Bill Ackman has become increasingly active in bankrolling Republicans’ attacks on institutions and politicians he despises. Having recently claimed absurdly that Harvard University turned his daughter into “practically a Marxist,” Ackman was instrumental in bringing down now-former Harvard President Claudine Gay, the university’s first Black president, as part of a campaign to make Harvard submit to right-wing demands. Trump’s administration has happily taken up that baton.
Ackman tried but failed to stop Mamdani from winning New York’s mayoral election. Will he and others like him stop now? Why would they? For that matter, why would The New York Times, which ran a scurrilous story about Mamdani that was sourced from a notorious White supremacist, not do what it can to try to prove that they were right to oppose Mamdani all along?
How might the Democratic establishment, the billionaire class, and the journalistic old guard go about taking Mamdani down? They all have self-interested reasons to turn Mamdani into a failure, because that will allow them to say – as they always say – that socialism is fatally flawed and “the left” is a bunch of mushy idealists.
Not only their personal wealth and privilege but, perhaps more importantly, their entire understanding of how the world should work, is at stake here. Mamdani, in their eyes, cannot be allowed to succeed.
How will things play out? Much of what will happen next would be inevitable in any event. New Yorkers are famously hard on their mayors and tolerate extraordinarily short honeymoon periods.
Moreover, Mamdani’s substantive agenda – attacking the city’s affordability crisis – will be difficult and excruciatingly slow, even if it is successful. He has, for example, talked about building an additional 200,000 housing units in the city, but that would be over a period of ten years. Even making genuine progress on everything that he tries to achieve will nonetheless leave people quite understandably impatient.
To be clear, Mamdani did not make unrealistic promises as a candidate. Indeed, the housing example shows how careful he is. He is certainly no Trump, who claimed during the 2024 election that consumer prices would immediately come down as soon as he returned to office, without ever explaining how (especially in the face of his planned tariffs). In stark contrast, Mamdani offered detailed ideas and laid out realistic policy outcomes. That will not, however, stop his powerful opponents from attacking him relentlessly.
Similarly, Mamdani has pointed out that one-quarter of all New Yorkers live in poverty. What will happen if the new mayor is able to make serious progress, but the numbers are down by “only” five percent after his first few years in office? He will be declared a failure, an incompetent, and probably a crook (no evidence needed).
More tragically, crime will become the central talking point about Mamdani. Even though New York has become one of the safest cities in the country, with violent crime rates at lows not seen since the 1950’s and 1960’s, those crime rates are not zero.
In 2024, Republicans cynically exploited one tragic murder, claiming it as “proof” that immigrants are violent monsters. Having primed people to believe falsely that immigrants are criminals, they only needed to find a salient example to prove their rule.
With the anti-Mamdani talking points prominently focused on the claim that his rhetoric will make New York unsafe for its Jewish citizens, what will happen when one of those citizens is killed? I say “when” because it is as close to a statistical certainty as one could imagine: a city with almost one million Jews will be a city in which some fraction of them will soon become crime victims. That will be true of Christian New Yorkers, Muslim New Yorkers, Buddhist New Yorkers, and atheist New Yorkers as well. The murder of a person from one of those groups, however, will not fit the attack line on Mamdani.
With the narrative already set regarding Mamdani, we can see where this is going. I should be clear that the complaints about Mamdani’s “rhetoric” have actually been complaints that he has not condemned other people’s rhetoric to the standard that others think is appropriate. But that kind of nuance will be long gone once there is a photogenic victim and a grieving mother who will stare into a camera and say, “My child is dead, and I blame Mamdani! He brought this hate to New York.”
It is also important to bear in mind that all of this will play out in the shadow of Trump and the Republicans using Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani (as well as calling him a communist, as Trump is already doing). Given that the billionaire class wants to take Mamdani down for economic reasons, while the Democratic establishment would like nothing better than not to have to respond to Republicans’ red-baiting, does Mamdani stand a chance?
The results of New York’s election were historic and filled many people with hope. Those of us who study powerful insiders’ responses to genuinely popular ideas and politicians know that what comes next will be intense and ugly. That is not a reason to wish that Mamdani had not won, but it is a reason to be realistic about what will happen now and, perhaps, to understand that the negative news cycles that Mamdani will soon face are already being contrived by the people who cannot stand to allow a progressive politician to succeed.
Neil H. Buchanan is Emeritus James J. Freeland Eminent Scholar Chair in Taxation and Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Florida. Prof. Buchanan is an economist and legal scholar whose writing has increasingly focused on threats to the rule of law in the United States and around the world. He writes at Dorf on Law and Verdict.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
