Love him or hate him, Zohran Mamdani ran a remarkable campaign that took him from a long-shot nobody a year ago to the next mayor of America’s largest city. A strong ground game, a hopeful vision, relentless message discipline around affordability, and an infectious smile — all helped catapult the self-described democratic socialist to Gracie Mansion.

But so did the national Republican Party and the online Right, which unleashed a barrage of ugly rhetoric and imagery portraying Mamdani as an exotic Islamo-communist menace.

The smear campaign did nothing to help Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opponent, and much to damage him. The wilder the Right’s rhetoric became, the more it underscored what Mamdani actually is: a familiar figure of the gentry Left who could appeal especially to New York’s stressed educated professionals — which is to say, the group that did most to get him elected both in the Democratic primary and in Tuesday’s general election.

Yet MAGA went out of its way to paint the crudest possible caricature of the mayor-elect: from the late Charlie Kirk tweeting an image of the Statue of Liberty covered in a burka to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) claiming that Mamdani is an “actual communist jihadist.”

The worst offender was arguably Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), a hard-Right firebrand with a history of making false claims about his own past, who led the charge for denaturalizing and deporting Mamdani. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for nuking Gaza, likewise demanded Mamdani’s expulsion from America over vaguely defined (read: bogus) flaws in his naturalization process.

The dubious legality of such calls aside, they play downright horrifically in New York City, where voters are thoroughly accustomed to Muslim neighbors and foreign-born NYPD officers, community leaders, and the like. When they see Mamdani on their television or phone screens, they don’t think Jihad for Allah but Cosmopolitan Lefty Guy With a Hipster Wife. The sheer cartoonishness of the Right’s attacks, in other words, rendered him more sympathetic.

Then, too, the Republican Party has spent the past decade (rightly) condemning attempts by Democrats, the media, and deep-state allies to overturn Trump’s electoral victories through lawfare. In that light, the calls to denaturalize and deport Mamdani can’t help but seem hypocritical, given that his only real “offense” appears to be political charm.

Much more effective would have been to focus on Mamdani’s past as a police abolitionist and to interrogate the sincerity of his more recent pro-police pronouncements. But even here, the Right went in a nutty direction, casting Mamdani’s proposal for mental-health professionals to accompany the NYPD on certain calls — as though it were a plan to build up a Hezbollah-style parallel police force.

The real problem New Yorkers are likely to face under Mamdani is an intensification of lifestyle criminality. The mayor, beholden to gentry-Left orthodoxy, wants to install so-called safe-injection sites and legalize prostitution — moves that are likely to degrade neighborhood quality.

But note: all this is a far cry from the Big Apple enjoying its last few days of hedonism before Mamdani’s Basiji thugs begin enforcing mandatory hijab.

The anti-Mamdani campaign revealed a deeper crisis within the GOP and the broader Right: an apparent inability to counter Mamdani’s optimistic — if idealistic — vision with anything beyond Boomer fear-slop about Islam and Communism.  If that’s the strategy heading into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race, the Right is in serious trouble.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

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