Do New Yorkers Understand What They Are Voting For?

New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is handsome, charismatic, and a master influencer on social media. He is currently leading the race for the New York mayorship by 22 points. And now he finds himself at the forefront of a significant leftward lurch in the Democratic Party.

A recent Gallup poll shows that 66% of Democratic voters view socialism positively compared to 42% for capitalism, a stunning 24 point differential. Mr. Mamdani belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the socialist organization opposing Democratic moderates.

He doesn’t merely belong to it. By his own words he is such a vehement proponent of this collective that he advocates setting up safeguards to resist any watering down of the DSA vision once their candidates reach office. In Mr. Mamdani’s speech at the DSA Convention on August 4, 2023, he laid out his plan to have committees of socialists in office work together in order resist “corruption” from moderating influences of fellow “electeds” (3:15) and that “wherever we want to contest power we must not send that person into that chamber alone, we must make sure they remember they are a member of this organization” (13:40). He closes by declaiming, “solidarity forever and socialism forever” (14:08).

In an interview with The Nation on February 18, 2025, he reiterates these commitments unequivocally, stating: “My political home is NYC DSA.”

In a statement issued on June 27, 2025, the DSA reaffirms their side of this ideological pact, stating that Mr. Mamdani “never ran as an individual, but as a representative of a working class socialist movement.”

By his and his party’s own definition, Mr. Mamdani is not a Trojan horse for DSA policies. He is the incarnation of them.

Many New Yorkers believe that President Trump should be held accountable for Project 2025. Shouldn’t the same be true for Mr. Mamdani as it pertains to the platform of the very socialist organization he calls home?

Given our digital churn of accusation and recrimination, our atomized culture, and our different information silos, it is difficult at times to understand what we are voting for and what we are voting against. The nation — and New Yorkers — deserve a clear exploration of the policies and beliefs of their leading candidate.

Below are ten bullet points, drawn directly from the DSA’s 2021 National Convention platform and fact-checked by two different AI large-language models:

• End Capitalism: DSA seeks to dismantle capitalism, replacing it with worker-controlled production and resource distribution.

• Nationalize Key Industries: Public ownership of energy, railroads, and potentially banking to ensure democratic control.

• Abolish Prisons: Eliminate prisons, replacing them with restorative justice systems.

• Defund and Abolish Police: Redirect police budgets to social services and ultimately dismantle police forces.

• Abolish White Supremacy: Dismantle systemic racism and white supremacist structures through policies like affirmative action, wealth redistribution, and cultural reeducation.

• Universal Basic Income (UBI): Provide guaranteed income to all, funded by wealth taxes, to reduce inequality.

• Open Borders: Decriminalize immigration and abolish ICE, allowing unrestricted movement across borders.

• Reparations for Black and Indigenous Communities: Pay reparations to address slavery and colonization, estimated at trillions.

• Cancel All Student Debt: Forgive all student debt (over $1.6 trillion) and provide free public education at all levels.

• International Solidarity, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-Militarism: Promote global working-class solidarity by opposing U.S. imperialism, ending military interventions, slashing defense budgets, and redirecting funds to international aid.

Conclusion: These policies are considered extreme for their radical restructuring of economic, social, or foreign policy systems, high costs, or potential for societal disruption, setting them far outside mainstream U.S. political consensus.

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One section of the 2021 platform titled “Abolition of the Carceral State” decries policing and prison as “white supremacist institutions” and “active instruments of class war.” 

Additionally, it makes promises to:

• “free all people from involuntary confinement”

• “disarm law enforcement officers, including the police and private security”

• “constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state” in order to “achieve collective liberation”

• “defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets or scope of enforcement while cutting budgets annually towards zero”

• “end investment in police training or facility renovations”

• “repeal the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights”

• “decertify police unions and associations”

• “end all misdemeanor offenses…and cut funding to prosecutor’s offices”

• “end pre-trial detention, civil commitment, and imprisonment for parole violations”

• “repeal truancy laws, ending all suspensions and expulsions”

• “repeal local ordinances that criminalize people involved in the sex trades, drug trades, and street economies”

• “cease all funding for contracting, procurement, and in-house development of technologies including CCTV, biometric capture and databases, predictive policing platforms, AI, and risk profiling algorithms”

It is troubling indeed to imagine a New York that has released all inmates from jails and prisons, disarmed the police, defunded police departments to zero, decriminalized drug dealers, and ceased all funding for technologies designed to keep the city safe — just to name a few initiatives from a slender pie slice of the DSA platform. 

Also troubling to imagine is the impact this will have on families and children, workers and small businesses, first responders and emergency services, and tourism and taxes.   

In 2024, the DSA updated its platform, removing the vast majority of specifics and boiling down each of their major policies to a single graphic and two sentence fragments. 

For example, they reduced their policy statement on police and incarceration, from 981 words…

…to 16.

Credit: Democratic Socialists of America

The above policy “statement” has removed 98.37%  of what used to be there.

And every other section of the DSA platform has undergone similar shrinkage.

There are certainly various conclusions to be drawn from this, but it seems not unreasonable to conclude that the abbreviated blurbs are designed to euphemize, obfuscate, and conceal. 

On August 28, a mere three weeks ago, Mr. Mamdani scrambled to distance himself from a few of the DSA’s most radical positions, but despite countless interviews and appearances he has refused to adequately clarify, qualify, or explain the vast majority of positions of the movement that he claims defines him. Nor has he denounced his repeated ironclad vows to resist moderation and fight to enact DSA policies acting an instrument of the collective.

Don’t New Yorkers deserve to know what precisely they are voting for?

Don’t Democrats in general deserve to assess whether the DSA platform represents a winning message that aligns with American values and voters? Because these positions clearly do neither. And if Mr. Mamdani wins, the Democrats are going to have to answer for his positions and performance for election cycles to come.

Many in the party claim that no matter what Democrats do, President Trump and Republicans label them radical extremists in order to win elections. What will make this significantly easier?

The fact that in this case it’s true.

A victory for Mr. Mamdani will embody and solidify the most extreme positions within the Democratic party — positions that are clearly outside the norms of American politics.

Is it possible, many wonder, to even define American norms anymore?

It is.

In September of 2024, with a small post-partisan team, I conducted nationwide polling with a sample of 1,285 that found that the vast majority of Americans agree on virtually every major issue.

The results are something to behold.

Credit: Gregg Hurwitz

Credit: Gregg Hurwitz

For this moment, one of these in particular is worth pausing for: I believe in gratitude, not grievance: 86% agree.

What I find most alarming in Mr. Mamdani’s camp is that I don’t see a crumb of gratitude over there. Not for America. Not for the city that welcomed him and his family and gave them opportunities to work and thrive. Not for the private and selective schools like Bank Street School for Children and Bronx Science that educated him. Not for the law enforcement community who kept him safe. Not for the systems that guarantee the freedoms he rightly enjoys.

No gratitude.

Just grievance.

In our own lives and relationships we know intuitively, as is true at a larger scale, that nothing good grows from the seed of grievance.

Imagine another approach. Imagine how powerful America would be if we unified gratefully around our vast agreement and drew from the brilliance, resources, and brainpower of our entire nation. Imagine how much stronger we would be to navigate the complex changes ahead. Imagine how we could compete and lead on the world stage.

Every moment in our current reckoning can represent a turning point. We can keep moving to greater extremes as Mr. Mamdani is planning to do. Or our leaders can reject radicalism, step closer to one another and the 80-100% of us who agree on virtually everything, and own the future.

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Disclaimer: Mr. Hurwitz is volunteering with various organizations in an effort to defeat Mr. Mamdani.

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Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 26 thrillers including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Gregg currently serves as the Co-President of International Thriller Writers (ITW). Additionally, he’s written screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks, and is an award-winning documentary producer. Gregg also wrote comics for AWA (including the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), DC, and Marvel, and poetry. Currently, Gregg is working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he’s penned dozens of Op/Eds and pieces for The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Bulwark, Salon, and others, and pieces of creative content which have won numerous industry awards and achieved several hundred million views on digital TV platforms. He also helped write the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.