In just a few months, Mamdani, a 34-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Socialist, has gone from a long-shot fringe candidate to a national figure — securing an upset win in the June primary, where voters 18-29 had the highest turnout of any age group.
Now, on the cusp of Election Day — where polls show him the clear frontrunner over his closest rival, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo — Mamdani is counting on that youth coalition to show up again. But his pledge to address rising costs appears to be resonating with young people far outside of the five boroughs. It’s a message that many Gen Z and millennials say speaks to their most pressing concerns at a time when many feel hopeless about their leaders and yearn for new voices willing to break with political norms.
“When a candidate is able to speak to the concerns of the populace and validate those concerns … I think that that has a big impact, especially when it comes to young people,” said Ruby Belle Booth, who studies young voters for the nonpartisan research organization CIRCLE.
You raise valid points, yet I think we’re talking about different kinds of Socialism in a way. Your form of socialism here is like a Cold War era form of the ism. That form is often thought of as something which needs be imposed in a top-down fashion unto society — an inherently vulnerable approach. Look to history, a lot of 20th-century “socialisms” were really authoritarian states using socialist language to justify centralized control, and they did often end up as new dictatorships.
I think what I am aiming for, though, is not socialism as a bridge from dictatorship to democracy, but as a result of capitalism evolving beyond its own contradictions. More like democratic socialism: cooperative ownership, strong social infrastructure, but still open markets and innovation. It’s less about revolution or replacement, and more about integration. A phase where capitalist systems start to internalize social equity and worker participation as competitive advantages rather than ideological opposites. The socialism Id advocate for can (and maybe should) rise organically from the bottom up.