Have we reached Peak Socialism? Has the DSA hit its high-water mark, not in Michigan or Wisconsin, but in New York City?
Color me a bit skeptical on this proposition. New Yorkers have not yet paid as high a price for their electoral choices to learn a real lesson about the limits of Other People's Money yet. However, the Wall Street Journal definitely detects some early buyers' remorse over having gone Full Socialist, and the city still has more than three years left with Zohran Mamdani:
Now, after a streak of good fortune, Mamdani is facing growing discontent from New Yorkers upset with his anti-Israel rhetoric and slights against the business community. Efforts to fulfill some of his marquee campaign pledges have stumbled, including the messy launch of the pied-à-terre tax. His relationship with the City Council is fraying.
The latest setback for the mayor came this week when a judge swiftly paused a new tax on luxury second homes after a group of residents, including one of Mamdani’s own supporters, filed a lawsuit accusing the city of botching the rollout. The city quickly appealed the decision, automatically putting the lower-court order on hold, but not before the judge criticized the administration’s handling of the matter.
The city posted an online list of more than 900,000 properties, which included homes that might be subject to the tax but many more that likely won’t. It also sent out notices to 17,000 property owners saying they might be subject to the tax, including some who said they were longtime New Yorkers.
Go figure that socialist incompetence would turn unpopular at some point. The "messy launch of the pied-à-terre tax" is probably just the most obvious intersection between socialist activism and executive incompetence. It won't be the last, as the Mamdani administration is clearly in waters far over its head when it comes to the actual necessities of governance, as opposed to making TikTok videos and doxxing Ken Griffin.
The rise of other Democratic Socialist radicals may erode Mamdani's standing even further. Mamdani managed to sell socialism with a smile last year, but his fellow DSA candidates have not figured out how to follow that roadmap. Abdul El-Sayed is already running aground as his previous statements – and links to the Muslim Brotherhood via his father-in-law – emerge. Francesca Hong nearly eclipsed Mamdani as the most high-profile Democratic Socialist on the national stage, and for all the wrong reasons. Even New York City voters who might have given Mamdani a chance just to try something different are now getting a big whiff of what the DSA has in mind if given power over more than a city, and that realization may also sour these voters on their experiment with the Mao of Gracie Mansion.
Or ... perhaps not, or not yet, anyway. Just how much support has eroded under Mamdani in nine months? Depends on which indicator one watches:
A Siena Research Institute poll released Wednesday indicated a growing divide between Mamdani supporters and detractors. A record high of 44% of likely New York voters held an unfavorable opinion of the mayor, according to the poll, which was conducted the week after the bungled tax rollout. In previous Siena polls of registered New York voters, his unfavorability rating had never gone above 40%.
The latest Siena poll also showed the mayor’s favorability rating at 47%, up slightly from a June poll. Among likely New York City voters, his favorability rating is 69%.
So Mamdani's support hasn't exactly decreased, but he's become significantly more unpopular. That does have some importance when one considers exactly how Mamdani got elected. He won the Democrat nomination by using a DSA strategy that has rapidly become familiar over this cycle – by jumping into a sleepy primary as a relative cipher and turbo-charging turnout from radical leftists, effectively poaching the Democrat line on the general election ballot. He was too unknown to generate real pushback at that time, but as the last eight days have proven, that strategy may have peaked for broader electorates, such as in Wisconsin and Michigan.
The DSA can't sneak up as easily in these primaries any longer. As Hasan Piker lamented last night, the Democrat establishment now sees them coming. Those DSA politicians who win elections will have to account for their performances, and failures matter to those outside the Marxist-Academia-elite bubble. When ciphers with no relevant experience win elections, that problem becomes even more magnified, as one analyst points out to the WSJ:
Juan Carlos Polanco, a political strategist and professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, said that while every mayor has dealt with highs and lows in office, they are amplified for Mamdani. His meteoric rise from a relative political unknown to the winner of last year’s mayoral race turned him into an international sensation, Polanco said, but his résumé was thin before taking office.
“I think that he’s going to experience this roller coaster more intensely, because he had no track record and a lot of us are still uncomfortable with him being mayor because he had no experience to sit there,” he said. “Now he’s in charge, and we are walking on eggshells making sure that this doesn’t go too crazy.”
The DSA used a primary shell game to sell a revolutionary to Big Apple primary voters, and then coasted into office. Now that the Long March has come to Gracie Mansion, Mamdani will get judged by his actions and his deliveries to the electorate. And while that may not have eroded his political support much in the past nine months, Mamdani's incompetence has narrowed it back down to his fellow radicals and the useful idiots of New York City. At least that's a start.
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