Opinion: The Threat of Zohran Mamdani

Thoughts on the staggering out-of-nowhere victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral primary—I say “out of nowhere” because six months ago literally no one in America knew who he was and I say “staggering” because on June 24 he got 43 percent of the first-choice vote in a nine-candidate election in which more than 1 million New Yorkers participated, the highest primary turnout in 36 years.

What you will hear is that Mamdani ran a brilliant race, and he did—he focused on the fact that living in New York City is ridiculously expensive and he would control costs by applying socialist principles to city government, somehow finding a way to “freeze” rents and starting city-run grocery stores, among other free stuff.

Andrew Cuomo came into the race intending to run as the “order” candidate, talking about cleaning up the subways and the streets in a nonpartisan manner. But his team seemed to drop that entirely and instead talk about how he’d get things done, including deal with affordability, and stand up to Donald Trump. So he was playing on Mamdani’s turf rather than his own.

That’s clearly because Cuomo’s polling and focus groups indicated his issues weren’t resonating with Democratic primary voters. He was also thrown off course by the fact that incumbent mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the primary race after his indictment on charges of accepting bribes from Turkey and his subsequent pardoning by Trump. Cuomo assumed he could run with Adams as a punching bag and instead he became the punching bag all the other candidates in the race took turns pummeling.

Mamdani immediately became a serious contender when it turned out he was raising oceans of money—$9 million, with matching public funding bringing his campaign to around $17 million in all. That suggested he had caught fire as a grassroots candidate, and indeed, the results showed that.

But he raised a huge amount of money before he showed grassroots strength. Where did that money come from? His campaign says he had 18,000 donors in New York City, and those donations are the ones that got matched by public funds ($8 for every $1 raised, up to $250 per donation from a city resident). But according to the website City Limits, “Mamdani received 4,494 out-of-state contributions. Cuomo: 1,030.”

Who are these donors? You know who they are—they’re Bernie-bro leftists and Muslim activists. Next to Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who has run and won statewide twice for attorney general, Mamdani got more votes last night in the NYC primary than any Muslim candidate has ever received in the United States.

And while he ran on affordability and did not make his anti-Israel obsession (he opened a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin) a centerpiece of his campaign, he didn’t hide it even though he was running in the most Jewish city in America. Why? Because it was a feature and not a bug. Because it was a significant reason, if not the most significant reason, for his grassroots support.

To put it simply: Mamdani won because of Oct. 7, by which I mean, he is the encampment candidate. He is the “Free Palestine” candidate. He is the “globalize the intifada” candidate. He emerged from the pack because this was his secret sauce. He is a foreign-born Muslim who rose from the ranks of the anti-Israel movement of the 2010s that laid the groundwork for the explosion of anti-Semitism in America over the past 20 months.

He’s smart and articulate and able and impressive. He is also an implicit celebrator of anti-Jewish violence and anti-Semitic evil. He said he would have Bibi Netanyahu arrested if Bibi came to New York City. He did not moderate his views or his positions as he ran for office here. That’s because they were good for him financially and electorally.

So a Muslim supporter of jihad is likely to be the next mayor of a city that was once 31 percent Jewish (in 1950) and is now 12 percent Jewish. In 2024, Jews in America breathed a sigh of relief after ferocious activism knocked off two Squad members in Democratic primaries in Congress—Jamaal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in Missouri—because of their loathsome conduct after Oct. 7.

Now, in the most important election of 2025, the party’s progressive voters are showing they are on the march and they have a new standard-bearer. Mamdani is bad in nearly every way. His economic policies are ruinous. He openly called for defunding the police, ending incarceration, and putting homeless beds in subway stations.

A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, one of the eight public high schools that require a high score on a citywide test entirely blind to anything but the test score, Mamdani wants to end gifted-and-talented programs in middle schools and kill the test he took.

But the real question now is the future of Jews in New York City with him as the mayor. Will he care about attacks on visible Jews? If the encampments re-emerge on college campuses and Jewish students are again under threat, will he stand with those making the threats? Why am I even posing these as questions? Of course he will.

In fact, it is people like Mamdani—educated, intelligent, radical, relentless, and possessed of a worldview that finds a way to blame Jews for things like the sorry condition of the Palestinians that are the fault of his fellow Muslims—that make the 21st-century case for Zionism. If he can rise to the mayoralty of the nation’s largest and most important city in a party that has been trending inexorably toward anti-Semitism for the past 15 years, will Jews in America be safe? And if we are not safe here in the course of Mamdani’s lifetime—he is only 33—where do we go? You know where.

John Podhoretz is the editor-in-chief of Commentary, a conservative Jewish-American magazine, which originally published this article on June 25.