Can Democrats actually learn anything from Zohran?
New Yorkers like him. Other Americans … not so much.
Today’s piece is a sneak peek at results from our newest round of polling, which will be released next week. Full results will be available for paid subscribers on Monday (the poll is largely focused on how Americans think about immigration). You can find all of our polling work here, including our previous two polls on free speech and AI. The full cross tabs are available to paying subscribers. - Jerusalem
Zohran Mamdani’s “Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise” has prompted Democrats, socialists, journalists, and progressive activists across the country to wonder: What can Democrats learn from him?
Do Democrats need to move left? Do they need to advance a bold, populist agenda similar to Mamdani’s calls to freeze the rent, with public grocery stores and free buses? Or is it his charisma and fluency in short-form video content that drove his insurgent campaign?
Mamdani will almost certainly be the next mayor of New York. He has undoubtedly captured the attention of large swaths of the media and political elite. But there’s just one awkward problem for those seeking to copy the Mamdani magic: Outside of NYC, Zohran Mamdani is not popular.
Over our last three national surveys, we have polled the national favorability ratings of five Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Zohran Mamdani, and Chuck Schumer. When comparing aggregate favorability ratings across our entire polling dataset, Mamdani’s net favorability numbers (minus 13) are worse than everyone else’s, save for Schumer.
Mamdani’s unfavorability isn’t driven by a partisan asymmetry in name recognition — similar shares of Democrats (58%) and Republicans (63%) have heard enough to form an opinion on him. The reality is just that the voters who know of him simply do not like him. One way to examine this in more detail is to look at his two-way favorability rating, which essentially says “of those who have an opinion on Zohran Mamdani, what percentage like him?”
The results are grim for Mamdani. Among self-identified Democrats and Independents alike and among voters at large, his numbers are actually considerably worse than those of Newsom, Ocasio-Cortez, and Harris.
Mamdani’s national poll numbers are irrelevant for his immediate political future. When it comes to New York City itself, he is popular (and considerably more so than his opponents). But the numbers show that the feverish attempts to make national extrapolations from Mamdani’s win are wrongheaded.
At a high level, everyone knows that what works in New York City doesn’t necessarily work nationally. New York is among the bluest areas in the country, having backed Kamala Harris by nearly 40 percentage points in 2024. A Democratic nominee being above water in New York City is the bare minimum, not a cause for celebration.
And while there are many polls showing support for Mamdani’s policies among New York City residents, they might actually overstate his mandate. For example, an experiment by The New York Times found that although many of the city’s voters expressed support for his idea of free buses, a significantly smaller share believed that the city should actually do it.
The Times’ poll “asked two different questions about each of five policies proposed by the mayoral candidates. Half of the respondents were asked whether they ‘support or oppose’ those policies; the other half were asked whether the city ‘should or should not do’ the same five proposals.”
And while some policies polled received similar levels of support regardless of the question’s wording, free buses saw their support crater from 60% to 44%. In other words, his voters may like his ideas in theory, but there is not as much of an appetite to actually enact them.
The reason Mamdani is on course to comfortably win the mayoral election is really quite simple: He has the Democratic Party line in a city that is extremely Democratic, and the opposition is split between an … eccentric Republican and an unpopular, scandal-plagued former governor, leaving Mamdani few obstacles to victory. But this says more about the weakness of the opposition than it does about his own strengths — in fact, Andrew Cuomo still polls within the margin of error against Mamdani in a head-to-head matchup.
Once you account for just how blue New York City is, Mamdani’s numbers in his race look considerably less impressive. The recent AARP-Gotham Polling poll of the mayoral race found his net favorability to be +3, with 48% of respondents expressing a very or somewhat favorable view of him and 45% expressing a very or somewhat unfavorable one.
In a city where Donald Trump received just 30% of the vote in 2024, those are not very promising numbers. They also do not make a compelling case for him being a Democratic Party instruction manual.
It’s possible that the voters who haven’t heard of Mamdani are different from the ones who have. Mamdani has taken blow after blow on right-wing media shows, and several Democrats have been keen to join in on the criticism.
So, I compared Mamdani’s numbers to another New York Democratic Socialist who receives unending flak from both the right-wing media and her own party’s centrist wing: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC’s rise to prominence bears many similarities to Mamdani’s, but he is actually considerably more unpopular than she was at a comparable point in time.
A Gallup poll taken in September 2018, two months before her election, found the now-congresswoman’s favorables underwater by just two percentage points, with 24% of respondents expressing a favorable opinion of her and 26% expressing an unfavorable one. Meanwhile, in our latest survey, 21% of respondents have a favorable view of Mamdani, while 35% have an unfavorable one.
Even after Ocasio-Cortez became a national figure, with Fox News constantly attacking her, she was never as unpopular as Mamdani is right now. In neither the 2019 nor the 2025 Gallup surveys did her image ever hit the lows that Mamdani currently sits at in our survey. Nor did her ratings hit those depths in the Biden years, per YouGov’s tracking surveys. In other words, Mamdani really does appear uniquely unpopular in a way that most of his Democratic counterparts simply are not.
So what exactly is the Mamdani magic?
He might be unpopular, but no one can deny that Mamdani is an incredibly talented politician in many ways. It takes serious skill to upstage the entire Democratic field, which included elected officials, a prominent business leader, and even a former governor. He’s obviously charismatic, and I find his willingness to be everywhere a breath of fresh air — even if I disagree with many of his ideas.
Like Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign, a laserlike focus on affordability and an anti-establishment edge propelled Mamdani to prominence. It was what enabled him to beat not just an unpopular Andrew Cuomo, but several other well-established New York City elected officials. In doing so, he showed that Democratic leaders didn’t understand their own voters.
Cost-of-living is the most salient issue for voters in 2025, and as data scientist David Shor stated, Mamdani’s message discipline on the issue was rare among Democratic politicians. Also like Sanders, Mamdani’s strengths in the Democratic primary were concentrated among young and disengaged voters, as his campaign brought thousands of them to the polls in unprecedented fashion.
Democrats are out of touch and focused on the wrong things, according to the voters. Mamdani’s campaign is yet another lesson that the Democrats’ own base cares most about kitchen-table issues. But while the diagnosis may be correct, the prescription itself is wrong — Mamdani’s spectacular unpopularity suggests that his ideas are not to be used as a national party template for a larger, more general audience.
This doesn’t mean his campaign and ideas are without value. Ultimately, the point of winning elections is to get things done, and it is eminently reasonable for people to push for policy gains in areas with electoral cushioning, even at the cost of a decreased victory margin. Not everything in life (or politics) is about winning over the marginal voter in Pennsylvania. But for the Democratic Party in 2025? Yeah, that’s basically everything.
(Our full October survey, complete with Mamdani’s favorability numbers, will be released on Monday for paid subscribers.)
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to “Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign” as a “victory.” Which it was in many ways, but not literally.
I’m surprised that his national numbers are even this, considering the Republican Party, and leading Dems, have been calling him a “terrorist who wants to carry out jihad.” I’m being quite literal here Kristen Gillbrand (National NY Dem leader) said he wants to carry out global jihad and Megyn Kelly (one of the saner right wing personalities) called him a literal terrorist. Cuomo’s recent press conference was with Eric Adams saying he doesn’t want NYC to be “become like European cities run by Muslim extremists.”
The reason people are talking about him so much is not only because NYC journalists live there but because he’s the only Dem politician since Obama who has such charisma and can hold his own even in hostile settings.
This analysis seems pointless at this point, impossible to disentangle his racial and personal profile to gauge any ideological or communication lessons.
To me the obvious takeaway is that Zohran's locally-resonant messaging is driving popularity. "I live in Queens and know NYC unaffordability personally" doesn't resonate outside of the tristate area. Every single one of his ads and messages that I've seen centers borough-specific identity. He has otherwise been an unknown canvas that has easily been painted in traditionally partisan ways one would expect.
I get that this popularity comparison to national figures is a classical analytical angle to take, I just don't put a lot of stock in it given Mamdani's lack of prior candidate profile and hyper-local messaging.