To this turn of events — a Muslim socialist chief executive of America’s largest city — the Right responded with characteristic restraint. “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist,” warned House Speaker Mike Johnson, “and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation.” The hard-Right commentator Laura Loomer posted: “The Islamic takeover of America is in full swing.” Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) posted a cartoon of Lady Liberty dressed in a burka.

Nearly a year on, the Big Apple has yet to succumb to an Islamo-communist takeover. Nor has it, much to the chagrin of the Left, transformed into a socialist utopia, with free electric buses gliding through the streets, public grocery stores on every block, and children playing freely under the supervision of nonbinary government employees. 

In fact, what’s notable about Mamdani’s first nine months in office is not what he has accomplished — but what he hasn’t. Despite all the predictions of a communist revolution with Islamic characteristics, the Big Apple today doesn’t look all that different from, well, 2025. We were promised Islamo-Marxism; all we got was a progressive Democrat who likes the camera.

What gives? 

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The more germane detail about Mamdani’s biography isn’t his faith or his socialist ideals. It’s that he is an urban Millennial who — avert your eyes, mullahs — met his wife on Hinge. In other words, he is a creature of social media, instinctively attuned to the demands of online self-promotion. His constant TikTok-length videos and mostly symbolic initiatives — free tickets to the Met Opera! government babysitters to allow couples to take date nights! arresting Benjamin Netanyahu! — have helped him project the image of a radical new politics while mostly allowing the city’s various bureaucracies to conduct business as normal.

Those bureaucracies, moreover, are formidable in their own right. And some of them are answerable not to City Hall, but to the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in Albany. Thus, in addition to his own taste for symbolic politics, Mamdani is hemmed in by the realities of governing.

During Mamdani’s inaugural address, the new mayor promised a “new era.” He pledged that the city would “govern expansively and audaciously,” replacing the “frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His suite of expansive (and expensive) policies — free public buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and public grocery stores — gave proof of this collectivist embrace. On Jan. 1, 2026, it really seemed as though a new socialist dawn was breaking over the world’s financial capital. 

The record since is more mixed than either his admirers or his enemies allow. First, the achievements: a rent freeze for many New Yorkers, $1.2 billion in state funding for childcare, and a $22 billion pledge to build or preserve 400,000 affordable homes over the next decade. But the policies that defined his campaign haven’t panned out quite as well. His plan to launch five public grocery stores by 2029 is already mired in legal challenges, as is his controversial tax on expensive second homes in the city. Meanwhile, budgetary constraints and divisions within his own party have stalled progress on free buses.

Mamdani has been merrily posting his way through these setbacks. Whether it was singing “The Wheels on the Bus” with Barack Obama at a school, cutting an ad featuring Charli XCX music in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, or brandishing green plantains at a grocery store, Mamdani has shown a gift for political optics. Through hundreds of zippy, viral videos, he has cultivated the impression of a hyper-productive mayor Citi-biking around the five boroughs to address the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers.

By (literally) rolling up his sleeves on camera, Mamdani has turned the less glamorous aspects of the job into a hallmark of his mayoralty. Since January, he has shared cheery videos of him fixing water fountains with plumbers, shoveling dirt onto the Williamsburg Bridge bump with city transportation workers, and filling potholes with repairmen. He has also scored easy populist wins with free opera seats for the public and discounted World Cup and US Open tickets to the public. 

Conservatives have responded by variously casting Mamdani as a reincarnated Deng Xiaoping or a closet Islamic extremist biding his time. They have seized on his decision to wear an Arsenal kurta during Eid prayers and his greeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a smile at the 9/11 memorial. The latter brouhaha was quickly debunked after the full footage revealed that he’d only briefly embraced AOC before turning his attention, solemnly, to the reading of the names of the victims; meanwhile, Right-wing officials — not least JD Vance — were seen smiling or chuckling at various points, too.

That isn’t to say that his symbolic politics have lacked for missteps. A city-produced map of “Immigrant Enclaves” conspicuously excluded Little Italy, triggering a Sopranos-style eruption in downtown Manhattan. (The map, meanwhile, included a reference to “Little Palestine,” a phrase that has never crossed the lips of an actual New Yorker.) The mayor’s video protesting financier Ken Griffin’s house in Manhattan was roundly criticized as an ill-judged attempt to turn a billionaire into a political prop. And his grandstanding on arresting Benjamin Netanyahu — which he walked back a few days later — was a weak attempt at serving red meat to his Left-wing base.

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But by portraying Mamdani as an Islamo-communist hellbent on turning New York into Gaza-on-the-Hudson, his opponents have allowed the mayor to present himself as a moderate, even technocratic, leader more interested in reducing the cost of groceries than imposing Sharia law. Worse still, these attacks have distracted from more substantive concerns about Mamdani’s policies and ability to govern. Most pertinently, can a 34-year-old with five years in the state legislature really deliver the most ambitious agenda in a generation?

Today, Mamdani is the most popular elected official in the city. Some Democrats have even lamented that the Uganda-born mayor can’t run for higher office. But it is also possible that his symbolic gestures will soon wear thin — not with Republicans, but his own supporters. Recently, the Democratic Socialists of America and various Mamdani allies attacked the mayor over his failure to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, hated by the Left for being a tough-on-crime law-enforcer and a Zionist to boot. Mamdani has not only retained Tisch from his predecessor’s administration, but given her wide berth to do her work. 

For as long as he keeps Tisch — and the relationship between the two appears strong — Mamdani has an answer to the accusations that he is weak on crime, a common critique of Left-wing leaders. For now, crime in the city is at record lows, and subway ridership is nearing pre-pandemic levels, but a recent spate of subway killings and rise in felony assaults and hate crimes could yet test his approach to public safety. Posting slickly edited social media clips on his channels won’t suffice.

Who, then, is the real Zohran Mamdani? Is he a run-of-the-mill social democrat who realized that the key to governing was to play the radical, without actually being one? Or is his newfound pragmatism a way of demonstrating that a democratic-socialist future needn’t mean street-level disruption, chaos at City Hall, or intra-Democratic turmoil? Perhaps even he doesn’t know. But at some point, the mayor’s honeymoon will end, and Mamdani will have to show what he really stands for.

The numbers speak for themselves: the Energy Corridor covers some nearly 2,000 acres, 20 miles west of Houston’s central core. It is home to eight Fortune 500 companies, has 67,000 jobs, 27 million square feet of office space, and nearly 4 million square feet of retail and restaurant space. The residential population is 20,000 strong and growing, and should continue to thrive so long as fossil fuels continue to supply four-fifths of the world’s energy supplies. It and a host of new communities further west — many developing their own retail and residential centers — have accounted for nearly 86% of the region’s growth since the year 2000. 

Houston’s light touch regulation and openness to urban expansion accounts for much of the new development, according to Tim Cisneros, a local developer and architect. Over excellent steak at a local Uruguayan restaurant in the Energy Corridor’s City Centre dining-and-retail hub, Cisneros tells me his big opportunities are increasingly in the peripheries, in places like Sugar Land, Pearland, the Woodlands, and Cinco Ranch, all metropolitan Houston or adjacent communities created in the past few decades. “In places like this,” Cisneros says. “You get the urban experience even when you are not in the city.”

The conventional wisdom is that being big and dense is the key to success. As Neil Irwin wrote in The New York Times in 2018, the future would be one “where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities.” However America’s essential story has always been one of migration — first from New England to the Midwest in the early 19th century, then from the countryside to big cities, followed by mass migration to California after World War II. Today’s big shift is the movement of companies and people to business-friendly regions in the suburbs and exurbs.

Corporations are leaving the great urban cores of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles due to high energy prices, regulatory constraints and sky-high taxes. They are locating instead in less glamorous places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh. A ranking of American business climates by Site Selection gave top ratings to Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Florida, and Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana. 

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Houston has emerged as first in job creation among the nation’s largest metro areas, growing 50% faster than New York, twice as fast as Los Angeles, and over seven times faster than greater Chicago in the past year. Overall, mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations of between 1 million and 10 million, are adding jobs the fastest. 

It used to be that dense cities were considered to be inherently more productive. However, technology such as remote work, video conferencing, and instantaneous communication is enabling  worker dispersion, bearing out Frank Lloyd Wright’s prediction that in the future “the city should be everywhere and nowhere.” And a recent report from Brown University suggests that neither city size nor density strongly correlates with higher productivity. This merely reflects reality: today, the 50 fastest-growing counties, almost all in metropolitan peripheries, are gaining jobs at well more than two times the general rate.

In the once glittering downtowns, there has been a 90% decline in the prices of commercial real estate in some cases. This is not just a post-pandemic phenomenon. Office occupancy started to decline by the turn of the new millennium, and construction of new space also began to fall around that time. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of the year 2000.

This reflects an economy already dispersing at a rapid rate. Between 2010 and 2017, 91% of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside of central business districts. Remote work has proven a gift to some outlying areas, sparking growth even in parts of southern Appalachia. The 50 highest-growth counties, almost all of them in exurbia, experienced an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of other counties in 2019. These aren’t “bedroom communities”; they are spread out cities.   

Some urban cores, notably Manhattan, remain powerful in terms of media and culture, but no longer dominate the country’s economic life. The rise of AI may accelerate this process by downsizing many of the activities key to urban centers. 

Growth in the business-services industry has also trended toward smaller metro areas of 1 million to 5 million people, particularly over the most recent five year period. Booming business service-industry hubs include smaller metros such as Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Omaha, Orlando, and Portland, Maine. In contrast, San Francisco and San Jose are suffering the nation’s biggest employment declines, as well as stubbornly high vacancies for commercial real estate. 

Moving out of big urban areas used to mean a downgrade in earnings, but now, salaries across the 19-state American Heartland region, essentially the territory between the Appalachians and the Rockies, are above the national average.  The hinterland’s improving conditions are further buffeted by growth in jobs making material goods. Cities like Miami, Charlotte, and Knoxville — none of them historically associated with industry — have seen the most robust industrial growth, while the last generation’s industrial leaders — cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle — suffered a marked decline. Traditional manufacturing-oriented communities such as  Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, are also benefiting from re-shoring businesses and foreign investment.  

Increasingly, great urban centers play an essentially symbolic role, known for glamor and high-income residents. In New York, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has also increased. The result is a bifurcated urbanity, more like that of a stratified Medieval city rather than an engine of upward mobility; for example the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from increasingly bourgeois Manhattan, remains the country’s poorest urban county. Even as poverty in suburbs has increased, the suburban poverty rate is only half of that found in big cities. 

These stark class divisions have helped progressives to gain elected office in blue cities like Seattle, Chicago, Washington, LA, and Portland, Oregon. These groups, notably the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, embrace policies that weaken law enforcement, allow for public camping, and seek an expansion of the welfare state by imposing higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals. Ultimately, such policies backfire as technology allows key executives to become more mobile.

The second shift lies with migration of people, particularly young families. America’s urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants from 2020 to 2024, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Growth has shifted to peripheral areas, largely to areas 20 miles or more from the central core.

This is a longtime trend. In 1950, nearly 24% of the US population lived in the core cities. Today, according to one MIT study, roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population lives in suburbs or exurbs, while barely 8% live in the urban core and another 13% live in traditional transit-oriented suburbs. Since 2010, suburbs have accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth.

In many ways, this represents a return to deep-seated patterns. Americans have long tended to favor single-family houses in lower-density neighborhoods. In the 2020 Census, 92% of the population lived in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4% of the population, mostly located in and around New York City.  

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These trends seem likely to increase as the two key demographic groups, Millennials and immigrants, continue to move to suburbs, and increasingly the exurbs. In the past, many younger people headed for big cities like New York, as well as places like Seattle and Denver, but high  housing prices make settling in these places more difficult, particularly for families. Instead they are moving to affordable regions, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Houston, where Millennial homeownership has surged. 

The key is that Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994, and now the largest portion of the population, are entering middle age. Lured by lower crime rates, single family homes, and better schools, educated Millennials now are migrating to suburbs or smaller cities. In contrast, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Seattle have lost some of their once magnetic appeal. The top 10 cities for Millennials include Austin, Dallas, Jacksonville, Tampa; Salt Lake City, and Henderson, Nevada.

Attitudinal swings associated with entering middle age are responsible for this shift, according to Robert Schottenstein, CEO of Columbus-based builder M/I Homes, Inc. “This is a flight to safety and security,” Schottenstein told me. “The Millennials are getting older and they are transitioning as they start families.” Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of Millennials preferred suburban living. One clear sign: high-growth exurban counties have added residents ages 25 to 34 by almost four times the national rate.  

Minorities and immigrants, who make up a large share of new buyers, favor not dense metros but sprawling areas such as South Florida, Houston, and Dallas-Ft. Worth, all of which now attract more immigrants than gateway cities like New York and Los Angeles. This reflects a preference for affordable single-family houses; something particularly marked among Latinos.  Roughly half of all Asians and Latinos live in single-family homes.  

Meanwhile it seems likely that migration patterns out of the dense, blue states will continue for the foreseeable future. In a poll taken in early 2026, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they have considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents already plan to leave within the next five years, as do 4 in 10 Californians. Recently, more are moving not just to Texas and Florida, but even to “hillbilly states” like Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. By 2050, according to the most recent projections, Texas is on track to surpass California as the nation’s most populous state. 

Over time, birthrates will further propel these trends. Dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, Boston, and Chicago, have experienced the most rapid decline in birthrates. The next generation of high school graduates will be concentrated in places like Texas, Florida and the Carolinas, while huge drops are expected in California, New York, and Illinois.  

These trends suggest an America that will look more like the Energy Corridor than like a historic urban core. This prospect may not thrill urban sophisticates, but developers like architect Tim Cisneros are not about to miss an opportunity to meet the aspirations of America’s perpetually restive population. “You go there,” he says, “because that’s where the action is.”

He hasn’t tweeted the word “queer” since 2023, nor “defund the police” since 2020. (Except for a 12 June post that read: “Don’t believe the MAGA billionaires funding Andrew Cuomo’s fear-driven campaign: I will not defund the police.”) But back in 2020 Mamdani insisted that “Queer liberation means defund the police.” This would have been toxic to a citywide campaign in pandemic-era NYC, but Mamdani isn’t running on it now. He’s running on one thing and one thing only: affordability. And it has captured the disenfranchised Millennials that Democrats have ignored.

Back in November when we chatted, as Democrats were reeling from Donald Trump’s culture-war comeback, Mamdani’s populist streak actually positioned him well to meet the moment. When I asked what his message was to Trump-supporting New Yorkers, Mamdani said he’d just spent the weekend in Queens and the Bronx chatting with voters about why they backed Trump or stayed home from the polls.

Trump, they told him, spoke to their “desire for a more affordable life and bringing peace back to the world.” So Mamdani said his path to victory was clear: talk about “tangible, deliverable policies” for the working class, not about “values or ideas.”

“There are far more New Yorkers who feel left out by the economic policies of Mayor Eric Adams and the Democratic leadership,” he told me, “Than identify with any one political persuasion.”

This turned out to be the key to Mamdani’s primary win. For most voters, in New York City or anywhere else, elections are always a matter of choosing between two imperfect choices. To read Andrew Cuomo’s loss as the Democratic electorate’s embrace of defund-the-police socialism is to underestimate the toxicity of the party establishment and how much voters have turned against it.

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People are viscerally angry at Cuomo. And they are right to be, they project understandable grief onto him for Covid-era nursing home deaths. They see him as a figurehead for the party that led the city ever deeper into an affordability crisis, and the party that went to comical lengths covering-up the president’s mental decline. That’s enough to motivate many voters to actually go to the polls, and enough for them to take a chance on the guy who only ever seems to talk about one thing: the cost of living.

Mamdani was the perfect foil to a terrible candidate. It’s really that simple. If Democrats are mad about voters electing a socialist, they should consider that consolidating behind Cuomo left a whole lot of New Yorkers determined to vote in a way to take the disgraced governor down at all costs. For some, it was more about affirmatively embracing Mamdani’s platform and for others it was more about rejecting Cuomo. You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to vote for one when the alternative is more Andrew Cuomo.

Consider how the conservative writer Rod Dreher likened Mamdani’s win to Trump’s, writing that New York’s Left-wing voters “lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past.” Just as voters did for Trump nine years ago. “We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani,” he argued “but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself.”

The question, then, is why voters are animated and desperate to reject the Democratic Party, so much so that some were willing to vote for the erstwhile host of Celebrity Apprentice or a millennial socialist. I think Peter Thiel might have the best answer.

Cuomo is, of course, repulsive in many ways that have nothing to do with his economic policies. His fall from gubernatorial grace was particularly humiliating and shameful. But Thiel, the techno-libertarian billionaire, articulated socialism’s pull with millennials in a 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among other tech heavyweights. “I would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” he wrote. “But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”

“And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact,” he added, “there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”

In Thiel’s framework, it is no surprise then that Mamdani outperformed Cuomo in boroughs with the highest concentration of young voters, who are facing extreme rising costs and unaffordable housing in New York City. Andrew Cuomo’s own campaign website observed the cost of living has “risen faster than the growth in incomes.” New York’s state comptroller reported that food costs rose by 56.2% over the last ten years, which is 10% more than the national increase. And rents in the city “grew more than seven times faster than wages last year, the largest gap in the country.”

But this is not all Cuomo’s fault. It’s the result of structures that transcend the city’s borders. Places like New York City struggle, in part, because they’re such desirable places to live, with abundant economic and cultural opportunities. It will always be a hardscrabble city for the ambitious and artists. But it needs a healthy middle class and it can have a middle class — at least if politicians hope to neutralize the appeal of populism.

Mamdani’s biggest vulnerabilities in the general election in November are the two issues that fall in the middle of the Venn diagram between culture and economics: immigration and crime. They’ll either be his salvation or his downfall. The #defundthepolice record will be hard to run from in a general election, but Mamdani has backed away from it and the city is recovering from the pandemic-era crime spike, meaning it’s not as sensitive for voters right now as it was several years ago.

Immigration could be even tougher. Like many Democrats, Mamdani is leaning into the culture war angle by aggressively opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown as a fight against “fascism.”

“We are going to protect our immigrant communities and not collaborate with ICE,” he pledged this month. The campaign will have to convince wary New Yorkers, who also connect immigration with jobs and housing, that his opposition to Trump’s crackdown won’t be a package deal with the policies that flooded hotels and shelters earlier in Eric Adams’s term.

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The likeliest case is that any time Mamdani is asked to defend his cultural record, he’ll pivot to affordability as fast as Adams jumps on business class flights to Turkey. When Mamdani says people in New York are “struggling to afford even a shred of dignity in their lives,” it resonates, and makes people more willing to take a chance on something new. His bet is that they care more about decreasing the cost of living than whatever he may or may not do in the cultural arena. If he can signal that queer liberation is a lower priority than affordable housing or universal childcare — and his opponent is a scandal-stained centrist — he can keep overperforming expectations, and win.

For Mamdani, the key to achieving that in the primary was a “relentless focus on an economic agenda,” as his communications director Andrew Epstein told me on Election Night. When I asked Epstein what the campaign’s message is now that Mamdani is running in the general election, he replied, “One thing Zohran has said throughout this whole campaign is there is not an ideological majority in New York City but there is a majority of people who feel disillusioned with the political system and alienated from the economic system and feel the strain of the cost of living prices.” The alienated and disillusioned — Thiel’s millennials — showed up full throttle for Zohran.

“I don’t think the message really changes,” said Epstein. “I think it continues to be this relentless economic agenda.”

Democratic voters are clearly not the only New Yorkers ready for change. Mamdani’s opponents, be they Bill Ackman, Curtis Sliwa, or Eric Adams, will need to make Mamdani look like a riskier bet than the painful and precarious status quo if they have any hope of preventing his win in November. Like the broader Democratic Party, Mamdani is now winning voters’ trust by focusing on kitchen table issues without fully disavowing the progressive cultural policies he prioritized before Peak Woke started receding. If he’s successful, then the party might have found its path out of the wilderness.