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If there is one picture that had every Republican campaign consultant wanting to punch a wall in frustration, it was the image of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani grinning ear-to-ear while standing next to a likewise smiling President Donald Trump in the Oval Office last month.
The GOP has made no secret that it intends to use Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who has spoken admiringly of communism, as a cudgel with which it hopes to tie the rest of the Democratic Party to the more extreme elements of its base and thus make the party’s brand toxic to voters in the 2026 midterm elections.
It was a foolproof plan. Highlight Mamdani’s unpopular stances on police and the economy, warn voters that he is representative of all Democrats, and voila: The Republican majority in Congress is defended, and Democrats are left in the wilderness with no path back to power until the 2028 election, when Trump will be preparing to exit stage right, his political career concluded.
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But it’s a good thing Trump spoiled their plans. As easy as it may sound to turn a city politician into a national foil, it is doomed to fail in this case. What may have been a GOP campaign consultant’s nightmare is actually Trump saving the party from embracing an ineffectual attack line that will do nothing to blunt the Democratic Party’s advantageous position with voters as the out-of-power party headed into the midterm elections.
When it comes to political talent, Mamdani and Trump are quite similar. It is no accident that the traditional campaign playbooks rehashed cycle after cycle by politicians in both parties failed to blunt and stop the rise of both men.
As Mamdani and Trump chummed it up in the Oval Office, there was one interaction that was particularly notable and highlighted the complexities of campaign politics and what drives a person to the polls to vote for a particular candidate.
“A lot of my voters actually voted for him,” Trump said, before Mamdani piped up to add that the specific number was 1 in 10.
If Republicans want to hold their majority in the House of Representatives and stave off any losses in the Senate, they would do well to remember that the voters who decide elections are often looking for a reason to vote for a candidate, not against one.
That was the case with Trump, and it was the case with Mamdani, both of whom centered their messaging on issues that spoke to the lived realities of voters in a way that felt accessible. And it is the very reason why 10% of Trump voters turned out for Mamdani.
In Trump’s case, that meant striking a decisive contrast against then-Vice President Kamala Harris, with a two-part message. First, he told voters, your economic situation has worsened under the Biden-Harris administration, and Trump will fix it. Second, here’s a clip of Harris advocating the federal government to spend money for transgender prisoners to get sex change procedures.
Simple, accessible, and viral. A message that put his opponent on her back foot as voters questioned if Harris had their priorities at heart. On Election Day, Trump swept all swing states and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election in 20 years.
While a New York mayoral race is nothing like a presidential election, Mamdani’s embrace of a simple and accessible messaging style was similar, even as he was unabashedly opposed to Trump. Throughout the mayoral campaign, Republicans, establishment Democrats, and every major business interest in the city raised alarm bells at the idea that someone could be mayor of New York who was so hostile to market economics, had pledged to defund the police, called the New York City Police Department a “threat to public safety,” played footsie with extremist groups, and refused to denounce antisemitism in a city with the nation’s largest Jewish population.
None of it worked.
For all of his seemingly extreme policy views, Mamdani’s political talents lay in his ability to hyperfocus on affordability and portray his opponents as out of touch with the electorate, which, as it turned out, they were.
During a mayoral debate for the Democratic primary, the candidates were asked which country they would visit on their first foreign trip as mayor. While his chief rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, pledged to visit Israel due to the rise in antisemitism, Mamdani gave a surprising answer: “My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs.”
While the promises of a politician are hardly something to take seriously, the exchange was revealing. Mamdani may very well visit many foreign nations during his mayoralty. But the answer at least gave the impression that he was singularly focused on the people he was seeking to represent rather than using the office of mayor to take trips abroad. It made his opponents appear out of touch with the priorities of the people of New York.
Besides committing to stay in New York, Mamdani also spoke to voters in ways that felt quite personal.
The hallmark of Mamdani’s campaign was a series of videos posted on social media that highlighted extremely simple ways that the government was making the cost of living in New York higher and how they could be fixed in a way that was easy to understand for the average voter. The most famous was the halal food truck video.
First posted online in January, long before he was even considered a serious threat to win the Democratic primary, let alone the general election, Mamdani spoke to a group of halal food truck vendors and asked them how much they charged for their food. Ten dollars was the common reply.
Then he asked them how much they paid to have a permit to sell the food, and the common answer was around $20,000 because each vendor was paying a permit holder, rather than paying $400 to the city for their own permit. “What would you charge for halal if your permit was only $400?” Eight dollars.
Simple, accessible, and viral. “Vote for Zohran, he’ll make your halal food truck meal eight dollars again.” It’s the kind of message that gets a politically disengaged person off the couch and to the polling booth. And on Election Day, Mamdani got more votes for mayor than any candidate in half a century.
That isn’t a result that just happens in a vacuum. As voters become more and more disillusioned with the status quo, and the Democratic Party in New York is the status quo, they are far more likely to listen to and support politicians whose policy goals are far outside what was previously considered politically acceptable, simply because they are promising to disrupt that status quo.
Lest Republicans forget, a significant contributor to their successful campaigns in 2024, and in particular Trump’s victory, was voters seeking to disrupt the status quo. The cost of living was too high, wages were stagnant, immigration was out of control, and wars had broken out in Europe and the Middle East, all of which happened under the watch of the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden.
But now the GOP is the status quo. By the time the midterm elections come around in November 2026, Republicans will have held unified control of Washington for two full years. The election will be a referendum on the GOP, not a referendum on Mamdani’s radicalism in a city dominated by the Democratic Party, no matter how much Republicans in Congress want it to be.
If 1 in 10 Trump voters pulls the lever for a Democrat in the midterm elections, the Republican Party is all but guaranteed to lose control of the House and may even have trouble holding the Senate despite a favorable map.
Instead of trying to turn Mamdani into a boogeyman for the midterm elections, a party that was serious about trying to earn another mandate from voters would ask itself why so many people who voted for it in 2024 turned around and voted for someone so fundamentally opposed to its governing agenda a year later.
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The only way to break a cycle of voting that sees disruption as the only answer is to build a status quo that voters are afraid to lose.
Trump, as he stood there speaking admiringly of Mamdani with a smile, at least seemed to understand the similarities between the two men and how each of them had managed to connect with voters in a way that uniquely spoke to their concerns. The same cannot be said for the rest of the Republican Party.
