There is a tell in the Fox News piece that argues the new-wave socialists are winning primaries but are doomed in general elections, and the tell is the word doing all the work. “Socialism.” Say it enough times, the argument goes, and the voters will flinch, because the voters always flinch. The label is supposed to settle the matter before anyone asks what the candidates actually ran on. So let’s ask.
Start with the fact the piece can’t get around, because it’s the reason the piece exists: Zohran Mamdani didn’t squeak past Andrew Cuomo. He buried him, by something close to thirty points, in a primary the establishment treated as a coronation. That is not the margin of a fringe. That is a landslide, and landslides are data. When a candidate the donor class wrote off beats the candidate the donor class anointed by thirty points, the honest move is to ask what the winner offered that the loser didn’t. The piece declines to ask, because the answer is inconvenient. So it reaches for the scare-word instead.
Here’s what he offered, and notice how exotic it isn’t. Free buses, so getting to work doesn’t cost you a transfer you can’t afford. A rent freeze, so the place you already live in doesn’t price you out of it next year. City grocery stores in neighborhoods where the only options are a bodega markup and a long ride to anywhere cheaper. Strip the label off and read the list again. None of that is a manifesto. It’s a to-do list for a city where rent eats half a paycheck and a carton of eggs is a budget decision. People didn’t vote for an ideology. They voted for the bus to be free and the rent to hold still, because those are the two things grinding them down, and somebody finally said the words out loud.
I’ll concede the piece a real point, because it has one: a label can be a liability. “Socialism” does test badly in a poll, the same way “tax” tests badly and “regulation” tests badly — abstractions always lose to fear. But watch the sleight of hand. The piece needs you to believe voters are recoiling from the policies, when the polling on the policies themselves runs the other way. Ask people whether rent should be allowed to rise faster than wages and they say no. Ask whether transit should be affordable and they say yes. Ask whether a grocery store in a food desert is a good idea and they don’t reach for Marx, they reach for their wallet. The word polls poorly; the program polls fine. That gap is the whole con. The label is a fog machine, and the fog is there so you don’t see the policies clearly enough to like them.
And now the question the piece is built to keep you from asking: who needs the fog? Follow the cui bono. A rent freeze is a “harsh reality” for exactly one constituency — the people collecting the rents. Free buses are a threat to no one except whoever profits from a transit system kept just expensive enough. A public grocery option is a problem only for the markup. The “socialist liability” frame isn’t protecting the voters from a bad deal. It’s protecting the people writing the rules from a candidate who noticed who the rules are written for. When a piece spends its energy warning that affordability is electorally dangerous, ask yourself dangerous to whom, and the answer is never the family choosing between rent and groceries. It’s the family that owns the building.
That’s the inversion the piece can’t survive. It frames the socialist as the radical and the system as the baseline — as if a thirty-point margin grew out of nowhere, as if voters woke up one morning hungry for revolution. But the radicalism is the status quo. It is radical that working full-time no longer covers a one-bedroom. It is radical that a grocery run is a financial event. It is radical that the people who write the laws and the people who pay the rent are two different sets of people who never meet. Mamdani didn’t invent that crisis. He named it. The piece is mad that he named it, and it’s hiding that anger behind a word.
So here is the harsh reality the headline promised, just aimed in the right direction. The liability in American politics isn’t socialism. It’s a political class that hears thirty points and calls it a fluke, that sees a family priced out of its own neighborhood and calls the rent freeze the problem. Voters aren’t running from socialism. They’re running toward anyone who’ll say what they already know — that the economy is supposed to serve the people in it, and right now it has that exactly backwards.