New York should elect Zohran Mamdani mayor. Then we'll see socialism fail. | Opinion

I love to visit New York City. It's a thriving metropolis that boasts delicious food, world-class entertainment and iconic landmarks. But I'd never want to live there. It's expensive and dirty, and New Yorkers have a history of electing Democratic mayors.

Now, New Yorkers have discovered a zeal for Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democrat socialist, showing a penchant for leaning left even more.

It's a mistake to prop up socialism as a solution to New Yorkers' affordability problems. But the more I’ve seen of Mamdani’s campaign, the more I think a full-throated case for why New Yorkers should vote him in as mayor may be in order.

Mamdani is already a media darling, but he lacks real-world experience

I want New Yorkers to vote for Mamdani to be the dummy test for socialism because he's already captured the mainstream media, even though he has a résumé thinner than a Broadway playbill.

Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, but he's had little legislative success. He's only been the primary sponsor of three window-dressing bills that passed.

This doesn't matter to the press. In 2021, he made Prospect magazine's list of "The world’s top 50 thinkers." The New York Times Magazine published glowing praise of the front-runner in the mayoral race: "Inside the Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani," an Oct. 14 headline for the feature reads. In the September Vanity Fair cover story headlined "The Legend of Zohran," the writer praised him as having "Kennedy-like charisma."

New Yorkers have picked up on this glowing media attention. Whether they have influenced the coverage, or the coverage has influenced them, they're wildly in Mamdani's favor. In a Quinnipiac University poll published Oct. 9, Mamdani led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, now running for mayor as an independent. Among Mamdani's likely voters, 90% say they are somewhat or very enthusiastic about him.

It's time this enthusiasm be tested in a real-world scenario.

If New Yorkers want Mamdani, they can have him

It's clear New Yorkers want Mamdani. He should win so voters can see if the policies he advocates play out in real life as well as they expect. I'm not one to play devil's advocate with policy − the risk/reward ratio is way off − but in this case, I think I agree with what U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Vanity Fair in that same cover story.

“I kind of like Mamdani winning,” Bessent said, "because the worst thing in a way would be when Cuomo comes back in, you just keep losing a little bit of altitude for four or eight more years, and they kind of hold it together, and more people leave. So if you could just say, ‘Okay, he’s a shock to the system, and there’s a chance you can come back from it.’ ”

He's basically saying New Yorkers should give Mamdani a go. They'll see how his policies fail. They're tough enough to handle it (or not), and it's possible things will get so bad, they'll have to make a 180-degree turn toward conservatism to right things again.

Everything Mamdani has said he would do for New Yorkers, if elected, confirms this thesis. The democratic socialist has said that he'd raise taxes on millionaires, and he has also pushed for raising the minimum wage, freezing rent, providing free public transportation and establishing city-run grocery stores.

There are other questionable issues, too. In a recent interview with Fox News' Martha MacCallum, Mamdani issued a broad apology to the New York Police Department for comments he made in 2020, calling them a “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”

An apology is good, but the timing raises questions about Mamdani's authenticity. The aspiring mayor has also criticized Israel's role in the Gaza war and says it's too early to give President Donald Trump credit for the Israel-Hamas ceasefire.

Here's the bottom line: No matter how good Mamdani's ideas sound on paper, socialist policies in practice are always a colossal failure. History is our guide here. New Yorkers could start with the collapse of the Soviet Union and end with the decline of Venezuela.

Why would New York be any different? Perhaps New Yorkers think so because they could elect a socialist mayor but still be insulated within the free market system and the democratic republic of the state and country. Perhaps it's because they're gritty and scrappy, the epitome of the American spirit.

Because New Yorkers often embody this spirit, I guess that's why I'm surprised to see them support a politician whose ideas are the opposite of America's bedrock: capitalism. Often, socialists don't see this irony.

In a 2025 Cato/YouGov survey, 62% of Americans under 30 said they "feel favorable toward socialism," and yet 81% of all respondents said they can't afford to pay more taxes next year. Who wants to tell them that's how all of Mamdani's "free" stuff gets paid for? (Even raising corporate taxes, which is one of the ways Mamdani plans on paying for his "free" transportation, will eventually result in increased costs for consumers.)

Regardless of how charming Mamdani is − and he is, I'll give him that − his plans will fail. Of all Americans, New Yorkers perhaps can own up to this mistake, dust themselves off and vote differently next time. If we're going to test out socialism, might as well let them get it over with.

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.