THE ISSUE THAT WASN’T

His stance on Israel was supposed to sink him. Instead, it maybe helped.

- RYU SPAETH

Mamdani at a Jewish Voice for Peace protest nine days before launching his campaign.

ON NOVEMBER 15, 2024, Zohran Mamdani released a video of himself interviewing people on the street in Queens and the Bronx who had voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election the previous week. It was one of the first of the viral posts that propelled him into the spotlight and ultimately helped him all but capture the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York. Then polling close to zero percent, Mamdani seemed more like a local news anchor than a candidate, gamely thrusting a microphone into the faces of voters and letting them take the stage. The answers to why they voted for Trump—“Food prices are going up,” “Rent is expensive”—informed Mamdani’s campaign as it homed in on the issue of affordability. But the other answer that came up again and again—one that Mamdani chose to highlight—was Gaza. “They like Trump because they don’t want their Palestinian brothers to be killed,” one man says.

This was a terrible miscalculation on the part of these voters, as is almost any attempt to make common cause with Trump. But voters’ disgust with the Democratic Party for its unstinting support of the Netanyahu regime, just like their anxiety about the high cost of living in New York, was real, and both sentiments carried over into the mayoral primary in June, a setting for the liberal left to confront itself. And once again voters punished the Democratic Party for its inability to address those issues, coming out in droves for the most un-Democratic candidate in the field—a socialist, in fact.