Imagine That — Actions Have Consequences

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

 

If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York City, Republicans plan to highlight that fact in their midterm campaigns against Democratic lawmakers nationwide.

 

That entirely unremarkable observation is the subject of an item in Axios in which the GOP is accused of plotting to “weaponize” New York City Democrats’ voting preferences, which, we should observe, consists entirely of noticing them.

 

For years, says reporter Kate Santaliz in her scandalized dispatch, the GOP has made former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into a “bogeywoman.” Her capacity to “rile up the base” was unrivaled. But with her diminished role, “GOP strategists are testing new symbols of the party’s left, and hope Mamdani will fill that void.”

 

Indeed, Santaliz’s item exerts itself in contending that the national GOP’s goal is to frame Mamdani’s victory as the triumph of the anti-police forces that briefly captured the Democratic zeitgeist in 2020. “Mamdani has backed away from his calls to defund the police, among other positions,” she writes in a parenthetical. Rhetorically, he has. But his plans to close city jails, promote social workers as an alternative to police, and grant 911 dispatchers the authority to assess the relative level of threat on the other end of the line would absorb resources currently devoted to law enforcement.

 

In short, the charge that Republicans plan to make is hardly unsupportable. Moreover, Republicans will be on firm ground when they allege that Mamdani’s campaign was that of an “anti-Israel extremist” who is also “anti-capitalist.”

 

Sure, Mamdani has backed away from defending calls to the “globalize the intifada,” which, for the uninitiated, represents calls to murder Jews on buses and in pizza parlors, in synagogues and at Passover seders, and in their very beds. But he still denounces Israel’s defensive actions in its region — either as “occupation” if they are active or as a “siege” if they are passive — and he insists that Israel is an “apartheid” state that maintains a “hierarchy on the basis of race and religion.” That’s a lie, but it’s a lie that advances the notion that Israel cannot exist as a Jewish state and still convince the Mamdanis of the world that its existence is justified. That is an extreme outlook, and Republicans are obliged to make note of it.

 

Likewise, it’s not exactly dirty pool to accuse Mamdani of harboring a deep hostility toward the capitalist enterprise. “No,” he replied simply in a June interview with CNN when asked, “Do you like capitalism?” Mamdani added that he had “many critiques of capitalism.” In a subsequent interview, he insisted that billionaires should not exist, presumably because the state should requisition the capital they earn and redistribute it as central planners see fit. What else would you call that outlook but Marxian?

 

If New York City voters endorse this man and his outlook, it would be irresponsible for the GOP to decline to highlight that outcome and compel Mamdani’s fellow Democrats to account for the phenomenon, particularly those Democrats who are endorsing the Democratic Socialist’s campaign. Those Democrats are buckling to pressure from their base voters, the loudest of whom want their Democratic representatives to defend Mamdani and his political philosophy.

 

It’s the Democratic Party’s voters who want to pick a fight with the country over the virtues of Mamdani’s socialist policy prescriptions. Who is the GOP to deny them what they want?

 

If Democrats are squirming today over the prospect of having to defend the indefensible, they have only themselves to blame. But it is hardly untoward for Republicans to hold Democratic voters to account for their choices. Perhaps such an experience might even impart an important lesson to the Democratic Party’s socialists: everything in life is accompanied by tradeoffs, and your actions beget consequences.