What’s the Right’s Answer to Mamdani’s ‘Affordability’ Challenge?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

 

Mainstream Democrats are leery of being associated with him. Republicans are dying to make him into a foil against which they believe they can strike a favorable contrast. Both see New York City Mayor–elect Zohran Mamdani as a figure best kept at arm’s length. And yet there is a discernible note of grudging, you’ve-gotta-hand-it-to-him respect that creeps into the conversation. After all, at least Mamdani was talking about the affordability crisis in his city and beyond.

 

Mamdani signaled in his Election Night acceptance speech that, as mayor, he will be every bit the evangelist for socialism he retailed himself as during the campaign. And there is a market for what he’s selling. “Multiple polls have suggested that Mamdani’s progressive platform offers Democrats across the United States a roadmap for candidates in next year’s midterms and beyond,” wrote Jessica Corbett, a reporter with the far-left outlet Common Dreams:

 

·         69% of respondents somewhat or strongly support raising taxes on corporations and millionaires;

 

·         66% support implementing free childcare for every child ages 6 weeks to 5 years;

 

·         65% support freezing rent for lower-income tenants;

 

·         57% support creating a network of government-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low rather than making a profit;

 

·         56% support raising the minimum wage to $30 by 2030; and 53% support permanently eliminating the fares on public buses.

 

In all this, what respondents actually seem to want is more purchasing power — a reasonable demand, even if too many seem to believe that their own prosperity can come only at the expense of the corporations they patronize and the high-income individuals who employ them.

 

But what is the GOP’s response to the progressives’ deeply flawed approach to lowering the cost of daily life in America? To hear the president tell it, it’s to pretend as though the foremost issue on voters’ minds when they elected him to the presidency again has been solved and the crisis averted.

 

“I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” Donald Trump told reporters last week. When pressed on rising consumer costs by Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham this week, the president was even more dismissive of voters’ concerns. “More than anything else, it’s a con job by the Democrats,” he said, endorsing the proposition that voters’ economic insecurity is a “perception issue.”

 

Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, struck a somewhat less contemptuous note. “We had to stop the increase first, now we are starting to see prices level off, come down,” he said this weekend. It will be some time before consumers feel the relief Bessent is forecasting. According to Consumer Price Index data, since January, food costs have grown by 3 percent. So have the prices of furniture and bedding. Home and renters’ insurance is up 5 percent, as are apparel and footwear costs. Appliance prices are up by 6 percent. Et cetera.

 

Insisting that voters are imagining things when they complain about the cost of living is a terrible strategy — one that backfired on Joe Biden and Democrats when they attempted it. But if the Trump administration were to take voters’ concerns seriously, their alternative to Mamdani’s socialist outlook is a slightly less uncompromising version of the same vision.

 

The administration has spent the better part of this year implementing a state-directed vision of economic growth. The president’s beloved tariffs are designed to reorder the economy in ways that Washington prefers. Even if they create conditions in which millions of Americans are reduced to “screwing in little screws to make iPhones,” in Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s words, those policies are aimed at recreating an industrial workforce in America because policymakers in America’s capital think the public should be nudged into behaving in ways the political class prefers.

 

The White House has been reduced to naming and shaming economic actors that pass on the costs imposed on them from Washington to consumers — a GOP version of an Elizabeth Warren–style “greedflation” narrative. Well beyond any reasonable compromise with the demands associated with preserving national security, the Trump administration has wielded its power to take government-owned stakes in private businesses. It compelled Nvidia to fork over a 15 percent vig on the profits it would derive from the formerly restricted sale of sensitive, dual-use electronics to our Chinese adversaries. It did something similar to Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, U.S. Steel, and Lithium Americas Corporation.

 

The Trump administration has done more to expose the fad around “industrial policy” for what it always was — a euphemism for central economic planning — than its critics ever could. Republicans are not going to defeat full-throated socialists with their version of socialism-lite. If voters are confronted with two parties of the same mind on economic policy, they’ll back the one that seems less insecure in their principles.

 

Republicans understand how to bring down consumer costs, but few seem to have the fortitude to articulate what they know to be right. The Republican answer to Mamdani’s approach to affordability should be predicated on individual economic liberty. Not only does that posture strike a compelling contrast with progressive economic policy, it also has the distinct advantage of working.

 

When individuals are free to patronize the firms to which they’re closest, they identify and reward marketplace advantages. That efficiency leaves consumers with more money in their wallets, and it sends signals to competing interests to shift their approach. Those firms that cannot compete die off. Those that can compete are able to grow, expand, and invest — creating wealth and employment opportunities in the process. In the aggregate, this churn puts downward pressure on prices as enterprises vie with one another for market share.

 

It used to be Democrats who frustrated this process of creative destruction, only to insist that the market fails when the wrenches they threw in its works gum up the gears. Today, the GOP is playing that same game.

 

The market works, but it needs champions. It has few on the American right today, but that may not be sustainable for much longer. Progressives will always outbid the GOP when the two parties are committed to retailing socialistic economic prescriptions. It’s a rigged game. The only winning move is not to play. But Republicans do not come to this fight unarmed. They have the tools to provide voters with the economic relief they so desperately seek and which they will reward.

 

The GOP knows the right answer to the questions voters are asking. They just have to demonstrate the courage of their own convictions.