10 hours ago
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Zohran Mamdani owes his primary victory to young New Yorkers’ fiscal anxiety — paired with their economic illiteracy.
The majority of my generation is warm to socialism, thanks to our education system’s failure to equip us with the knowledge of history and economics required to debunk the shiny promise of “free things.”
That’s why, as a Gen Z New Yorker, I wasn’t actually all that surprised by Mamdani’s primary win. As disappointed as I am by the outcome, I saw the writing on the wall.
A March 2025 survey conducted by the Cato Institute in partnership with YouGov found that fully 6 in 10 New Yorkers between ages 18 and 29 had a favorable view of socialism. This is something I’ve long noticed among my peers.
Worse yet, a staggering 34% had a positive view of communism. Compare that with just 2% of senior citizens, who are old enough to remember some of the ideology’s atrocities.
Young Americans are so cozy with destructive ideologies because they’re woefully uninformed.
Less than 1 in 5 Zoomers were proficient in history when they were in the 8th grade, according to NAEP reports. If they had even a basic understanding of history, surely they’d know of the 100 million plus lives communism claimed in the 20th century through unimaginable hardships in Soviet gulags, Chinese repression and famine and genocidal regimes such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Add to that the fact that 60 to 75% of American college students never take an economics class in college, according to the Journal of Economic Education. Meanwhile, just 28 states require high school students to take any course in economics to graduate.
The majority of Gen Z is fiscally illiterate, and their “functional knowledge is substantially lower for each area compared with older generations,” according to the 2025 TIAA Institute-GFLEC finance and retirement report.
Is it any wonder they’re seduced by socialism? When you don’t know the first thing about the past or how the economy actually functions, then frozen rent, free bus tickets, government run supermarkets, backbreaking corporate taxes, and a $30 minimum wage all sound like a totally cool idea.
Mamdani’s promise seems quite simple, on its face: “New York is too expensive. Zohran will lower costs and make life easier.”
Thanks in no small part to his social media savvy, Mamdani was able to capitalize on youthful angst and ignorance — and actually motivate young people to get out of their houses and down to the polls.
He brought out an unprecedented number of first-time voters. In the two weeks ahead of the primary, 37,000 people registered to vote, compared with just 3,000 in the lead-up to the 2021 election, according to the New York Times.
In fact, nearly a quarter of Democratic primary voters were first-time participants — and voters between the ages of 25 and 34 made up the largest share of early voters.
The bottom line: young New Yorkers delivered Mamdani his victory.
While I think my peers’ flirtation with socialism is wholly misguided, I understand why some of them have fallen into the trap.
Firstly, local Democrats didn’t exactly give them an alluring alternative. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo has a lot of baggage, to say the least.
But I also am sympathetic to my peers who came of age being told constantly by politicians that they simply can’t get ahead — whether it’s artificial intelligence coming for their jobs, student loans promising to drown them, a housing market they’ll never break into, or climate change always lingering in the background.
This is a generation who had the rug pulled out from under their feet at a formative age with the pandemic, and they’ve been fiscally anxious ever since.
Along comes a fresh new face with TikTok videos and Instagram reels offering free goodies and an affordable life in New York City.
The education system hasn’t taught them any better, so how can we expect them to be able to resist?
English (US)