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Hours after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani secured New York City’s mayoralty with 50 percent of the vote, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted a lone screenshot. The image, pulled from a NYC.gov webpage titled “Family Household Types by Immigration Status,” began simply: “Almost 50 percent of New Yorkers live in households with at least one immigrant.” Miller had clearly identified his culprit.
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon made the thesis explicit hours later, stating in an interview: “You’re going to see a whole new group of Mamdanis in these major urban cities because they’re just flooded with immigrants, right? That’s where his vote came from, principally.”
It is hardly surprising that figures like Miller and Bannon have rushed to pin responsibility for Mamdani’s win on immigrant voters and their descendants. Under the most charitable interpretation, it is more comforting for some conservatives to attribute socialism’s rise in popularity to an influx of foreigners rather than to shifts in opinion among American youth. Their claims also carry surface-level plausibility: An exit poll showed Mamdani did win 86 percent of voters who had lived in New York less than five years.
The theory that immigrant support is behind Mamdani’s rise has gained steam online in part because analysts with differing views are reluctant to challenge it. Many progressive writers still hope that their movement remains a rainbow coalition of the ascendant—proudly including immigrants—that will soon send the Republican Party to the demographic ash heap of history. Others of varying political stripes are uncomfortable seriously tackling restrictionist arguments about demographic replacement, since that would require validating what they see as a xenophobic premise.
Gil Guerra is a contributing writer at The Dispatch and an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center and the 2024 rising expert in Latin America with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.
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