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MAMDANI’S ECONOMIC POPULISM CLOSES GAP WITH BIG-MONEY RIVAL CUOMO
 
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Whitney Curry Wimbish
June 12, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Progressive candidates and researchers say his approach can win the
U.S. back from Trumpism. _

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani attend the 2025 National
Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York City., Katie
Godowski/MediaPunch/IPX

 

Every day, voters experience an unfair and increasingly precarious
economy. Nearly nine million civilian workers, more than five percent
of the overall workforce, were holding down multiple jobs as of the
end of last month, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
[[link removed]]. More than two in
three Americans worry that they wouldn’t be able to cover living
expenses for the next month if they lost their job, Bankrate’s most
recent annual survey on emergency spending
[[link removed]] found.
And over half of Americans are “uncomfortable” with their level of
savings.

Against such a backdrop, the rising price of eggs is merely a
distraction from the far more life-altering and life-ending decisions
Americans must now make, such as whether to put off having children
[[link removed]],
maybe indefinitely, or whether they can afford to buy an inhaler
[[link removed]].

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for the New York mayoralty has
demonstrated how progressives can capitalize on this awareness among
working people. He’s been promoting a brand of economic populism
that acknowledges the affordability crisis and offering solutions to
fix it, which his polling numbers show is a winning strategy.
According to the most recent survey from Data for Progress, Mamdani
has narrowed the gap to just two points separating him
[[link removed]] and
his main opponent, the billionaire-funded
[[link removed]] political
establishment front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, a former governor who is the
son of a former governor. And a poll released last night
actually shows Mamdani ahead
[[link removed]].

_MORE FROM WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH_
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Mamdani hit this message of economic populism last week with antitrust
expert and former Democratic candidate for New York governor Zephyr
Teachout, and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.
Speaking at the Church of the Village in Manhattan, Mamdani reiterated
his goals of making city buses free, freezing rent on rent-stabilized
apartments, creating city-run grocery stores in supermarket deserts,
and paying for it all by a $10 billion tax hike on the super-rich, as
the _Prospect_’s Robert Kuttner has discussed
[[link removed]].

He also told the audience something economists and financial industry
executives know: Money matters are emotional matters. Mamdani’s
message was that voters are not crazy for feeling crushed in today’s
economy, and they’re not alone.

“I think that it’s so critically important in our politics to
connect the dots between the despair that people feel, the way in
which it feels as if we are merely observers in an ever increasingly
suffocating cost of living crisis, and reveal the fact that
politicians are actually participants in all of this,” Mamdani said
in his opening remarks, citing the choices politicians make that have
failed to alleviate the crisis.

He then pointed to the track records of Khan and Teachout, who “have
not only revealed those choices but also made them in a manner that
has freed so many Americans from the shackles of this crisis.”

Khan reiterated this message, acknowledging that “sometimes, it can
feel like the economic challenges that people face in their day-to-day
lives is just a fact of life, or is just happening to us like the
weather, and we can lose sight of the fact that all of these forward
abuses are intimately the results of legal choices and policy choices
that people in power are making.”

Other political candidates, researchers, and voters told
the _Prospect_ that Mamdani is leading the way on a electorally
potent message that can snatch back economic populism from
Republicans, who at the federal level are promoting flashy,
small-stakes, allegedly pro-worker programs in their deadly spending
bill, like no taxes on tips or savings accounts for babies, which will
in no way offset the harm they’re planning by cutting Medicaid
coverage, nutrition assistance, and other vital social services.
A Quinnipiac poll
[[link removed]] published yesterday
found that the majority of voters oppose the spending bill, and well
over half disapprove of the way Trump is handling the economy.

“Most people think the system’s not fair…they have real cause
for that because, for the most part, people have not shared in the
growth we’ve seen,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for
Economic and Policy Research, said in an interview. “If you care
about fairness and justice, that has to be front and center, if
someone’s calling themselves a populist or a progressive.”

“You have to tell a story that connects to voters and that’s often
what’s missing from progressive campaigns.”

There’s enormous skepticism to overcome, he said, including in
regions where contempt for Democrats runs high, and voters believe
racist ideas, such as that immigrants are all on welfare and taking
all the good jobs. “It’s really hard to break through. There are
all these myths that people believe,” he said. “This is something
we as progressives really have to look at.”

One way to approach the job is to “pick some villains,” Baker
said, such as the financial industry, and to put the lie to Republican
talking points.

“If you have clear eyes, a lot of what the Republicans can say can
be thrown right back at them,” he said. Trump said he was going to
make overtime tax-free; Democrats should demand an answer for why
there is overtime in the first place and why taxpayers should
subsidize employers forcing workers into longer hours. Republicans
“decide what they want to say and figure out how to make it popular,
whereas Democrats sit around and do focus groups and then tell you
what the focus group says. That’s not a good way to do policy or
politics.”

Candidates should also have a story to describe their approach to
economic matters, said Zev Rose Cook, who is running for city council
in Tacoma, Washington.

“People don’t always need to understand all of the policy if they
understand the story,” she said. “The story we’re telling at the
door is that we’re an insurgent, people-first campaign, and we’re
taking on the corporate establishment. By supporting our campaign and
our issues, you’re helping us fight back against the corporate
establishment.”

Too often, she said, progressive candidates have good ideas about
policy but they’re scared to differentiate themselves.

“They’re afraid to tell a story of, ‘here’s what we’re up
against, here’s what we’re going to do,’” Cook said. Too many
times progressive candidates sidestep taking that approach in favor of
“being like, ‘Oh, well, we’re both good people and you should
vote for me and I have these nice ideas.’ You have to tell a story
that connects to voters and that’s often what’s missing from
progressive campaigns.”

Socialist Alex Brower was unafraid to differentiate himself during a
recent successful campaign for District 3 alderman on the Milwaukee
Common Council. He ran on using a state law to replace We Energies, a
power company with expansion plans that environmental advocates
say will worsen the climate crisis
[[link removed]],
with a municipal utility. Brower was sworn into his new position April
4 and used his first meeting to challenge a We Energies easement on
city property.

“I have people who think I'm completely insane… for talking about
replacing We Energies. Some liberals or progressives would just say,
“Oh, that's, that's too big. Don't even bother,’” Brower said.
“But it did engage enough voters for us to win.”

“If we want to have a thriving democracy, we need to be talking
about big, bold things,” Brower continued. “I said this to voters,
I don't expect a revolution once I get elected… I will be there to
organize the working class of my district, make policy proposals, use
the bully pulpit and do everything I can from a policy angle and
legislative angle to ameliorate the sharpest edges of capitalism at a
local level, as much as city government in modern America can
accomplish.”

There is also the challenge of breaking through media coverage that
fails to put budgetary figures into context, Baker said. This is a
subject he has long battled against, including pressuring 
[[link removed]]_The
New York Times_
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make budget stories more understandable so that readers know what to
make of certain figures. His campaign, with Media Matters
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was successful—for a time. “But then they went back to the usual
reporting,” he said. 

“People hear we’re spending $40 billion on foreign aid, and they
go, ‘Oh my god, that’s where all our money’s going! Why should
we spend money on these poor people in Africa when we have poor people
here?’” Baker explained. Yet nowhere in those stories is any
understanding that $40 billion is a fraction of one percent of the
overall budget. “It’s a real problem for individual campaigns,
this is something progressives should be focused on. Someone running
for Congress, or the next presidential race, it’s going to be a
really hard battle.”

Mamdani’s candidacy could provide a road test for this economic
populist message, pushing him toward the top in a primary when he
started out virtually unknown. Mamdani has another chance to make an
impression at a debate tonight. The primary is June 24.

After the Friday event, attendees spilled into the warm evening and
stood in clusters talking politics. One of them, Sheena Medina, said
any politician, regardless of their position, must understand that New
Yorkers are in an affordability crisis in which it is difficult to
keep up with prices, especially housing and food.

“We’re being squeezed, and I think any politician who leads with
that message is going to strike a chord with New Yorkers. We’re
feeling the effects of inflation, and our salaries haven’t kept
pace,” she said. “There’s literally a way to finance your
Seamless delivery now and break that up over four payments, which is
an absurd level of capitalism that we are in… I think that’s a
smart move for anybody running for office to speak to those challenges
because that’s what we are facing, and people are being forced to
move away.”

_WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH is a staff writer at The American
Prospect and can be reached at [email protected]. She previously
worked in the Financial Times newsletter division for 17 years and
before that was a reporter at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and
the Herald News in New Jersey. _

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* Zohran Mamdani
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* elections
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* New York
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* economic populist
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* voting
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* Ranked choice voting
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