Is Zohran Mamdani a Lifelong Socialist?

By John Fund

Sunday, June 29, 2025

 

Zohran Mamdani claims that he didn’t really identify as a democratic socialist until after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, when he was 25 years old. I’m skeptical.

 

The Democratic candidate in New York City’s mayoral race grew up in a left-wing family. His father, Mahmood, was a well-known Columbia University professor whose work on “class struggles” occasionally cited Karl Marx and the Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon. In high school, Mamdani ran for class vice president with a rap video promising free fresh juice as well as gym credits for students who attend school-sanctioned sporting events. He lost, but the rap videos would return in his campaign for mayor of New York City this year.

 

Mamdani went to Bowdoin College in Maine, where he marinated in activism and an identity politics obsessed with “oppression.” “He founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin,” says Steven Robinson, editor in chief of the Maine Wire, who was at Bowdoin when Mamdani was a student there. In 2014, Mamdani wrote a column in the Bowdoin Orient, the student newspaper, calling for an “academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.” In an earlier column, he blasted the Orient’s editorial board for promoting “white privilege and homogeneity in the opinion section,” despite evidence that the paper had tried to solicit more diverse voices. While in college, Mamdani also engaged in sophomoric mischief that demonstrates his casual attitude toward private property. He and a fellow student snatched a table from an area close to his dorm and snuck it back to his room. When he got a call from the head of Bowdoin’s security, who had reviewed campus security tapes, Mamdani eventually came clean and even wrote an article in the Orient about his pilferage.

 

What Mamdani has learned since then is the need to selectively sell his socialist beliefs, soft-pedal his more-radical foreign policy views, and emphasize the rise in the cost of living and the job pressures faced by many college graduates in New York. After he was elected to the state assembly in 2020, Mamdani introduced bills to make travel on New York City buses free and implement a rent freeze that would block landlords from a greater return on their investment. As a candidate for mayor this year, Mamdani has proposed a full-fledged program of giveaways and tax hikes. He has told reporters that he believes “New York should not have any billionaires,” a view he repeated this Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. He even cheekily told host Kristen Welker that the tax increases he proposes would benefit those who would be forced to pay them: “Ultimately, the reason I want to increase these taxes on the top 1 percent, the most profitable corporations, is to increase quality of life for everyone, including those who are going to be taxed.”

 

Grace Mausser, who co-chairs the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, says that the Mamdani campaign’s “super-clear messaging” has three main themes: “Fast and free buses, freeze the rents, free childcare. That’s so easy to remember. People know it, and it’s said over and over and over again.” Even though experience has shown us the destructive effects of such policies, the campaign’s repetition of these themes might have worked. In New York City’s Democratic primary, those aged 18 to 24 had the largest turnout of any age group, followed by 25- to 29-year-olds, followed by 30- to 34-year-olds: an almost unprecedented outcome.

 

After Donald Trump’s presidential election victory last November, progressives lamented their failure to communicate in clear terms and excite voters — especially young ones. Now, after Mamdani’s performance, some progressives think that they have found a message messiah who can sell socialism with an emphasis on how it will (supposedly) save voters money. “All the conversations after the election were about needing a ‘Joe Rogan of the left’, how people aren’t getting their news from traditional media, how they’re getting their news from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube,” Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid told The Guardian. “And that is exactly the story of Zohran.”

 

In just over four months, New Yorkers will vote in a general mayoral election that won’t feature the gimmick of ranked-choice voting and will, hopefully, offer a real and sustained clash of views: one that properly puts socialism under a political microscope.