In short, Mamdani’s coalition was not primarily that of the low-educated aggrieved, misfits, and revolutionary wannabees – though these types can be seen sprinkled throughout his rallies in ample quantities. Yes, he flipped back working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods – the types that responded to Trump’s famous “what have you got to lose.” And Mamdani’s well-received message there can travel far beyond Brooklyn. But the key to his city-wide appeal was his huge (60%-70%) margins in the gentrified neighborhoods across the city. These are neighborhoods of educated young professional people earning roughly $80,000 to $150,000 a year. In a very illuminating article, Breitbart’s Business Digest examined the phenomenon and termed this new, highly significant voting class the "precarious professionals".    

We are all acquainted with precarious-professionals. They are in our extended families, our friends or neighbors’ kids and many of our own children, and indeed may be reading this column. They’re 24-40, got educated, got good jobs, seemingly good money, many married – ‘playing by the rules,’ as the saying goes. But they’re renting an apartment, with no hope in their minds, of ever owning a house at today’s eye-popping prices. They’re spending their lives renting what their parents owned. If they’re married and have a child, there’s no room for a second in their rental unit, and their healthcare costs are strangling them. And you can find masses of them in most cities and suburban areas across the nation. 

They are middle-class professionals, and in the first quarter of this century they’ve seen housing costs explode, job security evaporate, career opportunities outsourced, and now they’re threatened by AI. They and their communities are rapidly becoming the Rust Belt of this century. And just as the MAGA movement successfully brought in the blue-collar displaced, it makes perfect sense to bring in the precarious-professionals – they are a natural fit within the coalition. But, it is imperative that their predicament and their needs be addressed with intelligent and credible policy prescriptions - in the private sector vein.  

Democrat candidates who addressed this voting block in New Jersey and Virginia were “talking about affordability,” but offered no more than cheap notions like “I will freeze utility costs” – and were awarded a majority of votes for such vapid gab. Republicans in 2026 must not simply ape such nonsense. Next year voters will already be seeing that the cheap, perennial pablum and tweaks do nothing to solve the underlying problems. The DNC strategists think they’ve picked the lock on Tuesday, and as the ’26 mid-term cycle develops they will be beating the affordability drum, and laying the middle-class squeeze at the feet of Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

Trump, like Reagan in ‘80 and Clinton in ’92, rode into office stressing the inflation and joblessness experienced under their predecessors. Reagan had fortunate timing in that his policy prescriptions visibly kicked-in with enough results in time for his reelection. Typically for Clinton, his economic hardship claims were another mis-direction, and the ‘90s took off on a productivity binge entirely of the private sector’s making. But the economic squeeze facing the middle-class today dwarfs those prior episodes. In fact, this squeeze has been building, going back sixty years to the dawn of big-time deficit spending – the infamous ‘guns and butter’ days of the mid-1960s Johnson Administration. It was here that running wars through budget deficits and ‘printing money,’ became the standard operating procedure of our ruling political class. The result is that the American standard of living has declined ever since the early ‘70s, and it is being most acutely felt today – it has all come home to roost.

Each year the U.S. annual budget deficit (currently about $2 trillion) gets financed through the issuance of new federal debt. The more currency you print via debt-issuance, the more you devalue the purchasing power of the dollars in circulation. And it was all turbo-charged at the turn of this century. In 2000 the national debt was $5 trillion. Today it is kicking $38 trillion. Mountains of new dollars have been printed, and the real-world effects from those wealthy enough to accumulate them and reinvest them, are demand-driven, out of control prices for most of the basics for middle-class life – most notably, housing. The money printing has severely impacted healthcare and higher education as well, but government intervention in those markets has also been a mighty cost-multiplier. 

Leftist Democrats are happy to pounce on this as if it was Trump’s doing, and win some elections in the process. Those of the Mamdani stripe - committed Socialists and Communists - seek a fundamental, collectivist, transformation of the U.S. economy – and they’re being heard. The danger here is real and immediate, because the Left has the attention of the precarious-professionals, it has harnessed their frustration and anger to some degree, and it’s offering them prescriptions straight from the Marxist playbook. And because most all of them have been exposed to the indoctrination of the public school system over the past forty years, they don’t know the history of the definitive failure of government-controlled economies - and in large numbers are cheering on the Socialist prescriptions.  The challenge for MAGA and the Republican candidates in the highly consequential upcoming mid-terms, is to recognize those in the professional middle-class squeeze, and connect with them, presenting free-market oriented, non-government solutions. A mighty tall task with less than a year to make the case and get traction.

So far, President Trump’s initial take on the election is off the mark. He’s rightfully complaining that the corporate media doesn’t report his successes – they never will. But, exit polling indicates voters are most concerned about “affordability,” and on that front Trump is in denial – “everything is way down,” he said – it is not. He promised the moon on affordability-related issues to get elected. This time Democrats campaigned griping about it, and voters have largely held Republicans accountable for the current state of affairs. Trump IS endeavoring to make the necessary economic structural shifts to bring about stable prices and a rise in the standard of living, but by their nature the cure is long-term - it did take decades to get into this mess. (We’ll look at some solid specific policy proposals which address the intractable problems in a follow-up column.) Unfortunately, American voters are mighty impatient – all to their collective detriment. 

The vast majority of voters are unaware of the causes of the decades-long decline in their standard of living – from the time when one household breadwinner with an average job could support a household that today takes two highly-compensated, seasoned professionals to strive to maintain. Since our colleges still refuse to do it, candidates should sprinkle a little history of the crisis’s true causes into their stump speeches.

For well over a century, in an effort to guard the power of the ruling political class, the people have been told by the politicos, the commentariat, and the mass corporate media to vote for what’s going to benefit them personally – and to vote their ‘pocketbook.’ The purpose of these messages is to cleave the citizenry, so the two major parties can bark out slogans and wave their deceptive wands every two years, to corral enough voters into their respective corners to win elections. They win some and lose some, but the process assures the established ruling political class stays in control... and the citizenry never looks in unison to them as the true source of society’s strife, turmoil and hardship.  This cynical and debilitating paradigm has to change.

We’ve had a year of reveling in Trump’s incredible win and the counter-revolution it has triggered. Mamdani’s proposals offer just more warmed-over ‘managed-decline.’ But his rise and everything the organized American Left represents, pose a mortal threat to our efforts to re-establish the country on its foundational principles and morals. For if we don’t set our sails right for this election cycle, we will be thrust to the sidelines and worse, by the enemies of our great republic in all their Leftist manifestations.