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. 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 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, maybe indefinitely, or whether they can afford to buy an inhaler.
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 and his main opponent, the billionaire-funded 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.
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish
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.
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 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, 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 The New York Times to make budget stories more understandable so that readers know what to make of certain figures. His campaign, with Media Matters, 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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