So Zohran Mamdani was sworn in on January 1st as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and first democratic socialist mayor, and the outrage machine on both sides has been in full swing. Michael Rapaport, less than a week into Mamdani’s tenure, posted an Instagram announcement that he’s running for mayor in 2029 to save New York from “Zohran the moron.” And I’m sitting here wondering: what is everyone so scared of?
Mamdani sounds like a reasonable person with reasonable ideas. Has Bernie Sanders ruined the Senate? No. If anything, he’s been one of the few voices consistently standing up for regular people against corporate interests and wealth concentration. Morning Consult has him pegged as the most popular senator in the country for several quarters running, with a 68% approval rating in Vermont. I have no idea if Mamdani’s tenure will be good or bad, but what we’ve been doing clearly hasn’t been working. So what’s wrong with trying something different?
If he fails, the voters will tell him. That’s how democracy works. But rather than actively working to make him fail — which would mean New Yorkers suffer — why not see if he actually has good ideas? Universal child care support makes sense. The cost of living is out of control. The “same old, same old” clearly isn’t cutting it, and that’s exactly what the other candidates would have offered.
Some of the criticism aimed at Mamdani has been genuinely ugly — racist and Islamophobic attacks that have no place in political discourse. That’s wrong, full stop. But there’s also something else going on that feels very familiar: the system generating maximum outrage because someone wants to change it. And that scares the people in charge.
Here’s the thing I keep noticing about new progressive politicians. The reaction is always the same shape.
Take AOC. When she got to Washington in 2019 after upsetting a powerful incumbent, Gallup polled her Republican favorability at 5% favorable, 73% unfavorable — a net rating of -68. She was a freshman House member who had been in office for two months. That was the initial dose of the outrage machine: maximum distortion, maximum fear, applied immediately.
Fast forward to 2025. The April Siena poll has her Republican favorability in New York at 21% — more than triple where it was — and an October YouGov poll showed her overall positive rating at 43%, ahead of Trump’s 35%. Her policies haven’t really changed. Her age, gender, ideology, and ethnicity haven’t changed. What changed is that people had time to look at her actual work and decide what they actually thought.
Sanders went through the same arc, just over a longer runway. In 2016 he was a fringe socialist with a thick Brooklyn accent who couldn’t possibly be electable. Now he’s the most popular senator in America. Same policies. Same guy. The difference is decades of people seeing him show up, do the work, and not turn out to be the cartoon villain the outrage machine drew.
What does that have to do with Mamdani? He’s at the freshman-Gallup-poll stage. He just walked in the door. Whatever the screaming sounds like right now — left, right, all of it — it’s the first dose. We’ve seen this movie. We know what it usually shows.
I’m actually curious to see what happens. Maybe Mamdani will have fresh approaches to problems that have plagued the city for years. Maybe his proposals for rent freezes, fare-free buses, and city-owned grocery stores will work, or maybe they won’t. But freaking out before he’s done anything accomplishes precisely nothing.
There are legitimate questions about how he’ll pay for his proposals — they require tax increases and state approval, which won’t be easy. A $30 minimum wage by 2030 is ambitious and controversial. These are real policy debates worth having, and they’re the kind of debate you can have without the hysteria, the name-calling, and the fear-mongering.
Mamdani grew up in an open-minded environment. His mother is filmmaker Mira Nair, his father is academic Mahmood Mamdani. He went from being a housing counselor to a state assemblyman to mayor in the country’s largest city, in his thirties. That kind of background could actually be beneficial for a city as complex as New York. Or it might not be. We’ll find out by watching him do the job, not by deciding in advance.
Take a collective breath. Some criticism of Mamdani is rooted in ugly prejudice and should be called out. Some concerns are real policy questions and should be debated. Both can be true. Judge the guy on his actions and results, not on manufactured fear about what he might do, and not on blind faith either.
The system loves it when we fight each other. That’s how nothing changes for regular people. Whether you’re excited about Mamdani or skeptical, let’s at least give him a chance to do something before deciding the sky is falling.
Even that's Odd 
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