Will Mamdani’s winning streak last to the midterms?

Opinion>Opinions - Campaign The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Will Mamdani’s winning streak last to the midterms? Comments: by Juan Williams, opinion contributor - 07/13/26 9:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Juan Williams, opinion contributor - 07/13/26 9:30 AM ET Comments: Link copied

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, speaks to supporters for Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier during an election night watch party Tuesday, June 23, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

This summer belongs to New York City.

The Knicks are NBA champs. Taylor Swift’s Big Apple wedding is the talk of the nation. And New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani is having his moment as the king of Democrats.

Candidates endorsed by the mayor, running under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America, are on a winning streak. With his endorsement, they are defeating old-school liberal Democrats in New York and even Colorado and putting a new face on the party.

Mamdani’s winners are also being damned as “communists,” by President Trump. But so far, Mamdani keeps winning.

Conservative critics predicted a flight of rich people from the nation’s biggest city due to the mayor’s success in passing a new tax on people with second homes worth more than $5 million. Mamdani wins again. Realtor.com reported last week that despite the new tax “the city’s luxury real estate sector remains unbowed — in fact, it is booming.”

New York also looks like a winning model for economic change with the mayor on track to open city-run grocery stores with lower prices on staples. He also got the governor to agree to have the buses run faster, if not for free.

“[I] hope to write a new chapter in our party’s history,” the mayor said, “where working people are back at the heart of that struggle.”

The big question now is whether the mayor’s “new chapter,” is a winning hand for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.

Trump is quickly painting Mamdani’s team as crazed radicals. He is smearing their “socialist” label by calling it a “communist” takeover.

And mainstream, moderate Democrats are distancing themselves from Mamdani’s hellraisers with a statement asserting, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” But polls show the “socialist” label is no problem for some voters concerned with high inflation and looking to generate a stronger political response to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.

The Democratic Socialist of America’s written platform calls for politics that “meet human needs.” It also opposes capitalism that, in its words, allows “profits for a few.”

Its willingness to fight the status quo has proven successful in generating volunteer campaign workers and big turnout at the polls.

A New York Times poll from May found “more than 80 percent of the party’s supporters said the political and economic system needed to be torn down entirely or overhauled in a major way.”

The movement has deep ties to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old political Independent, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a 77-year-old Massachusetts Democrat.

They do not belong to Democratic Socialists of America,, but both are heroes to the organization for challenging Wall Street titans’ big, controlling donations to politicians. They launched attacks against “Too Big to Fail” government bailouts for wealthy shareholders.

Sanders and Warren are a left-wing reflection of Trump’s right-wing attacks on political elites as out of touch with working class families.

Trump used that populist appeal to win the presidency in 2016. Sanders won 43 percent of the vote in the 2020 primaries but came in second to President Biden.

Today Mamdani’s call for socialism is being tested by upcoming elections.

Nationwide, a Fox poll shows 38 percent of U.S. voters calling for national leaders to consider more socialist policies. And a recent Gallup poll found 66 percent of Democrats view socialism as a good for America.

But socialist policies are viewed negatively by most Americans. Capitalism remains the favorite economic policy of American voters with 54 percent support in a recent Gallup poll.

Yet in media-soaked New York City, Mamdani is popular, with an all-time high, 58 percent favorability. In New York state his favorability is also in positive territory at 45 percent.

But New York City is not a swing congressional district. Democrats have to win middle of the road voters necessary to take control of the Congress for the last two years of Trump’s time in the White House.

Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett of the politically moderate Democratic group, Third Way note that the Democratic Socialists of America have a 22 percent favorable rating, versus 47 percent unfavorable. They add that its candidates “routinely underperform with the working-class voters they claim to represent.”

In 2021, a survey of the group’s members found they are 85 percent non-Hispanic white. Most are male college-educated professionals. Thomas B. Edsall, writing in the New York Times, described the organization as “an elite made up of well-educated professionals,” supporting policies “opposed by both white and minority working class voters.”

With Trump’s bad polls, high inflation and another “forever war” in the Middle East, Democrats have a realistic chance of retaking the U.S. House. Republicans need a political foil for the November elections. They seem delighted to have Mamdani as a prominent face of the Democratic Party. He is a compelling political opponent for the far right: a young immigrant, a person of color, putting higher taxes on citizens, even if they are millionaires.

Odds are Trump and the Republicans will put Mamdani in every ad this fall. New York’s mayor will be mocked as the king of socialists, a radical calling the shots for all Democratic congressional candidates.

Trump wants to test Mamdani’s summer winning streak against the chilling reality of November.

Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.“