Zohran Mamdani and the Revolt of the Overeducated Underemployed

Democrats are learning the wrong lesson from Mamdani's campaign. For Republicans, it's an opportunity.

Much has been said about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign message of “affordability”—free rapid transit, rent freezes on a million apartments, and government-owned grocery stores, all wrapped in the rhetoric of justice and progress.

The track record for this kind of program is long, global, and grim: shortages, grey markets, spiraling costs, and the inevitable whiff of bloated bureaucracy.

But for now, let’s think about the more politically urgent question: who most responded to Mamdani’s message? Because the answer is not what most people expected.

This matters for two reasons. First, Mamdani’s message isn’t a one-off. Affordability is the new gospel of the progressive left heading into the 2026 elections—and if Democrats win the midterms, they’ll credit “affordability” and mistake it for validation. Only a brutal loss will cause them to realize it’s not timidity, but extremism that’s their problem.

Second, understanding who these ideas attract—and who they repel—tells us a lot about where Democrats are heading, and where Republicans might go if they want to grow the party.

You’d probably expect Mamdani’s Robin Hood theme “take from the rich and give to the poor” would resonate more with the direct beneficiaries of that equation. But the results tell a different story.

According to The New York Times, Mamdani won majority-white precincts by five points, middle-class Democrats by 10%, and high-income Democrats by 13%. Meanwhile, middle- and lower-income Black voters went strongly for Cuomo—by an 18-point margin. Low-income New Yorkers overall backed Cuomo by 13 points.

So why did affluent whites vote to raise their own taxes while working-class voters opted for the guy who resembles an Ozempic abuser?

Because for Mamdani’s voters, this was a campaign about wishful thinking. For Cuomo’s, it was about economic reality.

The voter surge helps tell the story: turnout was up 5% since 2021, and the group that mobilized most enthusiastically? Young, white, college-educated progressives with little experience - but great certainty.

Mamdani fits the profile perfectly. The son of a Columbia professor and an award-winning filmmaker, he has never held a job outside of politics. His five-year legislative record in Albany includes three inconsequential bills and a long history of calling for Jews to be driven into the sea.

His supporters, meanwhile, resemble him closely: college grads, many from elite universities, often subsidized by parents still reeling from tuition bills. These are the people Mamdani is planning to hit with a 2% wealth tax—not on income, mind you, but on everything they own, whether or not it produces income.

Facing the prospect of an annual mugging by someone insisting they’re only liberating your wallet, it’s easy to imagine these parents now Googling “Naples, Florida real estate.”

Meanwhile, voters in the Bronx, southeast Queens, and central Brooklyn - people who’ve experienced firsthand what happens when governments overpromise and underdeliver - lined up for Cuomo.

Many remember Mayor Beame’s rent control policies in the ’70s, when landlords burned their buildings to claim insurance, or abandoned them altogether as rats claimed squatters’ rights.

They remember Bill de Blasio’s $1 billion police budget cuts, which turned subways into rolling metaphors for runaway crime.

So why did Mamdani so overwhelmingly attract upper-class, college-educated young white voters? First off, it’s doubtful their college economics class covered the part where socialism doesn’t just flatten the rich—it bulldozes the whole economic ladder. Second, like most people who’ve never had to navigate a government housing office or stand in a welfare line, they still believe government is the solution, not a waiting room.

As George Orwell said, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

Here’s the real takeaway: poor and middle-class voters haven’t given up on the American dream. Free bus rides and rationed government groceries are not their idea of a better life. Their hope is in greater opportunity. They want a ladder to climb, not a frayed hammock to nap in. And they’re ready to walk away from any politician who tries to deny them.

This raises the real question: what does “affordability” actually mean? Mamdani’s version imagines that prices can be made low by decree. But true, lasting affordability doesn’t come from price freezes or punitive taxes on investment. It comes from abundance—not the Democrat kind that results only in bigger government discouraging individual success and punishing those who produce value, but by unleashing free individuals to build, innovate, and compete.

We get more housing and better services when entrepreneurs take risks, builders build, and investors back bold ideas. Affordability follows when competition and productivity thrive.

Government has a role—protecting consumers, setting fair rules, and providing a safety net—but it cannot replace the daily choices and persistent effort of millions of individuals pursuing opportunity for themselves and their families.

Mamdani and his followers don’t understand this. But the voters they lost, and the ones beginning to wake up, get it. Republicans would do well to be ready with a message not just of opposition, but of opportunity.

If Mamdani’s campaign is a preview, the sequel will be even more painful for New York City. Unlike his progressive predecessors, Mamdani doesn’t bother with restraint, he fully embraces the kind of Marxist ideology that has, time and again, crushed hope, stifled growth, and drained opportunity. The last wave of progressive leadership merely dented New York’s resilience. This one threatens to finish the job.

For Republicans, it’s time to extend a warm welcome to the coming escapees from the Democrat Party.

If Republicans will present a message grounded in growth, fairness, and real upward mobility, it can attract the very voters who increasingly feel unmoored from the Democratic Party’s cultural and economic agenda.

Mamdani’s campaign may have made headlines, but it also revealed the growing distance between the ideologues and the everyday. That gap, if handled wisely, may become one of the defining political realignments of this century.