Last summer, there were more Google searches for “Project 2025” — the 900-page policy blueprint from the conservative Heritage Foundation — than there were for Taylor Swift.
Even though then-candidate Donald Trump said he had nothing to do with the document and had never read it, the Kamala Harris campaign worked tirelessly to convince voters that Project 2025 was Trump’s secret second-term agenda.
They weren’t wrong, as the Trump administration now embraces and implements several controversial elements of Project 2025. But if Trump can be forced to answer for ideas authored by close allies and people who previously worked with him, so too should NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani’s connection with the radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is deeper and more consequential than any affiliation that Trump had with Heritage. And Mamdani and the DSA likely have more revolutionary plans for his city and the Democratic Party than you would imagine from Mamdani’s sunny mayoral campaign to make New York affordable again.
Mamdani has been a DSA member since 2017, and glowingly described its NYC chapter — the largest in America — as his “political home.” He worked on several campaigns to elect DSA-backed candidates to the New York City Council and state Legislature. It was at a 2021 meeting of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, when he echoed Karl Marx by suggesting that the movement’s ultimate goal should be to “seize the means of production.”
In short, Mamdani is a DSA true believer, and voters deserve to know which parts of the DSA’s Political Platform he believes in, especially with DSA national membership growing exponentially from around 5,000 a decade ago to nearly 100,000 today. Does Mamdani believe the government should:
Extend “voting rights to non-citizens?”
“Disarm law enforcement officers,” and abolish prisons?
Nationalize “businesses like railroads, utilities, and critical manufacturing and technology companies?”
Prohibit any “new fossil fuel projects from being authorized or built?”
Provide “free abortion on demand?”
Allow trans minors to access “gender affirming care” — like puberty blockers — “without parental consent?”
These ideas weren’t in Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign platform, but he emphatically endorsed many of them in the past. Mamdani is also now the primary vehicle for the DSA’s ambitious plan to accumulate influence and power within one of America’s two major parties.
Earlier this year, the Socialist Majority — one of the largest and best-organized DSA caucuses — said the “only viable strategy to build a party in the U.S., at present, is by using the Democratic Party ballot line” to run candidates who are “unapologetic democratic socialists.”
It isn’t hard to see the parallel with Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party in 2016, in which he remade the party in his image. A growing constellation of far-left groups, including the DSA, now wants to do the same with the Democrats. Combine a Mamdani victory in November with the existing strength of the Bernie Sanders/AOC wing within the party, and their takeover may be complete by the time the 2028 elections roll around.
The DSA is hardly Mamdani’s only radical affiliation either. On several occasions, he traced his start in political organizing to cofounding the Bowdoin chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The National SJP described the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” conducted by Hamas “martyrs.”
Despite Mamdani’s unapologetic extremism, he got through a 19-minute interview on “Meet the Press” in late June without once being asked about DSA or SJP, let alone his own previous social posts in which he calls police murderers, praises Communists, and pushes for legalizing prostitution.
In retrospect, Project 2025 proved as consequential as its critics feared. It was a signal that Donald Trump was preparing to do things in office that he almost certainly knew were too politically toxic to discuss before the election. Zohran Mamdani’s longstanding DSA membership is sending a similar signal to New York City and America. Are we willing to see it?
Clancy lives in Brooklyn and is the chief strategist for No Labels.
