If there’s one thing celebrities love, it’s throwing out political endorsements to radical candidates whose potentially disastrous policies — whether on taxes, housing, or policing — will never actually affect them.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who wants to turn the Big Apple into a utopia for rich, white liberals, appears to have taken the edge over former governor Andrew Cuomo in the days leading up to the Democratic primary on Tuesday. Thanks to the city’s ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani has a decent shot, even though a recent poll shows that Cuomo has more support in terms of raw vote total. (Subscribe to MR. RIGHT, a weekly newsletter about modern masculinity)
Mamdani seems to be picking up more support among Zoomers and Millennials, men, and white voters, while Cuomo appears to be performing better with working-class minorities. But Mamdani’s popularity among that cohort, and his latest endorsement from model and actress Emily Ratajkowski, underscores the Democratic Party’s current identity crisis, which was on full display in the 2024 election.
Three things driving Mamdani surge the last few weeks in @EmersonPolling:
1) Mamdani up 2:1 among Gen Z, millennials, young Gen Xers;
2) Mamdani +12 among men;
3) Mamdani +22 among white voters.https://t.co/7MpoEyd3DC
— John Della Volpe (@dellavolpe) June 23, 2025
Sporting a “Hot Girls For Zohran” t-shirt, Ratajkowski urged young New Yorkers to vote for Mamdani in a video posted to her Instagram account on Tuesday.
“This election is gonna be decided by young voters,” she said. “The average New Yorker is 38 years old. The last mayoral race was decided by 7,000 voters. That means that your vote really matters. Go ahead, get out there, we know it’s hot, but the time is now.”
View this post on Instagram
Ratajkowski’s endorsement of Mamdani is like the Democratic Party in a nutshell: here come the rich, white-collar professionals and celebrities supporting radical policies that will ruin the lives of the very people they claim to represent and fight for. And it points to the other part of the equation: the centrists like Cuomo are lazy and lack ideas.
You don’t have to be a hardcore socialist to have bold, but pragmatic policy ideas that could actually improve the lives of your constituents. You don’t need a revolution against landlords to figure out ways to alleviate absurd rent prices. Cuomo is talking a lot about Donald Trump, too, likely because he views the job of mayor of America’s biggest city as just a stepping stone to the Oval Office in 2028.
Maybe if the moderates of the Democratic Party didn’t squat on their laurels and assume that they could run a mediocre campaign with a mediocre candidate (looking at you, Kamala Harris) and still win solely because they are not the other guy, there would be zero chance a socialist could run the Big Apple. They didn’t, of course, so now there’s a chance.
Sign up for John Loftus’s weekly newsletter here! Follow John Loftus on X: @JohnCFLoftus1_
