MAGA influencers, Republican lawmakers, and conspiracy theorists all responded to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York by pushing far-right anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and claiming the city had fallen.
Mamdani, who campaigned on progressive issues and identifies as a democratic socialist, will be the youngest New York mayor in over a century. He will also be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor. With over 90 percent of the 2 million votes counted on Wednesday morning, Mamdani held an almost 9 point lead over former governor Andrew Cuomo, with Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa trailing far behind with just 7 percent of the vote.
“The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate,” Mamdani said during his victory speech on Tuesday night. “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
It is Mamdani’s embrace of New York’s immigrants and his own Muslim upbringing that most of the MAGAsphere fixated on, calling him everything from a “a third-world communist” to a “Marxist” and “a jihadi.”
“A third-world communist won in New York because New York is a third-world city now,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh wrote on X. “This is mass migration working exactly as intended. It isn’t anymore complicated than that.”
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, meanwhile posted a screenshot from a 2023 report on the Nyc.gov website that showed around 50 percent of New York households contain at least one immigrant, without adding a comment.
Others suggested that New York’s election result would be a harbinger of things to come across the rest of the US. “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist, and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation,” speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote on X. “Zohran Mamdani’s election cements the Democrat Party’s transformation to a radical, big-government socialist party.”
Many others focused on Mamdani’s Muslim faith, pushing Islamophobic conspiracy theories about the future of New York. “America is about to become a very violent country, Mamdani will encourage Muslims to commit political assassinations to acquire power and silence critics,” conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer wrote in one of her many posts about the election on X.
