Demographics Is Destiny—And Zohran Mamdani Just Proved It

And New York’s Socialist Experiment Has Begun

By now you’ve probably heard: Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race.

That’s right, the 34-year-old Ugandan-born, Muslim socialist who promised free buses, city-run grocery stores, and an army of social workers to replace police is now mayor of America’s largest city.

I wrote about Mamdani a week ago—about how his victory was baked into the cake. About his talent for politics, his charisma, his potential to become the Left’s next Obama—and what that spells for America. Spoiler alert if you haven’t read the piece: nothing good.

One thing I didn’t get into in that first essay was demographics. It was too early for that then—but now that the election’s behind us, we can. Because as the saying goes, demographics is destiny, and New York’s mayoral election might be the clearest case study in that truth for the rest of America.

The Demographic Calculus

What stands out about Mamdani’s win is how openly demographic it was. He built a coalition of immigrant groups and rode the city’s shifting population to power. His acceptance speech made that clear—he went on a tirade thanking those “who made this movement their own”:

Zohran Mamdani: I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.

Notice anyone missing from that list? Americans.

This was by design.

New York City is now 37% first-generation immigrants and just 30% non-Hispanic white—a dramatic change from twenty years ago, when whites made up about half the city.

With demographics like that, you don’t need to win over everyone. You just need most of the first-generation immigrant and minority vote. And that’s exactly what Mamdani did.

According to exit polling and public surveys, Mamdani captured roughly 80% of the immigrant vote. Meanwhile, white men largely voted against him. Support among white women was mixed. But every other major demographic group broke heavily in his favor. Black men, Black women, Latino men, Latino women, and “all other” voters each gave him well over 58% support.

Call it what you want—an anti-native coalition or something else—it worked because the demographics made it possible.

Compare that to Minneapolis, where in the November 2025 mayoral race a similar progressive candidate—Omar Fateh, a Somali-American state senator—tried the same playbook. There, 58% of the population is non-Hispanic white and only about 15% are foreign-born. The demographics just didn’t allow it to work. The immigrant vote wasn’t large enough to overcome the native population. The establishment Democrat held on.

The lesson? Once first-generation immigrants cross somewhere between 15% and 37% of the population, the political calculus fundamentally changes. Traditional coalition-building becomes optional. You can win by appealing exclusively to immigrant groups while bypassing—or even antagonizing—the native population.

Mamdani understood this. His closing campaign ad featured him speaking Arabic in front of a Palestinian flag. He didn’t bother running ads featuring white neighborhoods or traditional New York imagery. He didn’t need to. The demographics gave him a path to victory that didn’t require winning over the white population.

Pay Up, Whitey

So what happens when you win by organizing around immigrant groups instead of the native population?

You deliver for your coalition. And Mamdani’s got plenty of promises to make good on.

In fact, his platform reads like a socialist wish list: universal childcare, free buses, city-run grocery stores, replacing police with social workers. All expensive. The social-worker plan alone is estimated to cost about a billion dollars.

And he’s made no secret of who’s expected to pay — white people.

In his own words, Mamdani wants to shift the city’s tax burden to “richer and whiter neighborhoods.” Not just richer — “richer and whiter.”

Source: X

Call it race communism, call it the South Africanization of America—it fits perfectly with his coalition strategy. Those Yemeni bodega owners and Senegalese taxi drivers didn’t vote for abstract ideas about “economic justice.” They voted for someone who promised to extract wealth from the established (white) population and redistribute it to them.

Whether Mamdani actually delivers remains to be seen. But he campaigned on it. So when it happens—and it probably will (and if it does, it’ll likely be just the beginning of race-based wealth redistribution)—no one should act surprised. When you organize people along ethnic lines, your policies naturally follow the same logic. The coalition expects rewards. And they expect someone else to foot the bill.

The Exodus

Now here’s where things get, well, kind of predictable.

According to a survey by JL Partners, about 9%—roughly 765,000 New Yorkers—say they’re preparing to leave because of Mamdani’s election. Another 25%, or around 2.1 million, are considering it. Among high earners—those making over $250,000 a year—7% say they’re definitely fleeing.

Why wouldn’t they? Mamdani has made it clear he views them as piggy banks. His entire platform is built on extracting their wealth and redistributing it. When you explicitly declare war on a segment of your population, that segment leaves.

And those are the people funding everything. They’re the tax base. When they leave, revenue collapses—making it difficult, if not impossible, to fund the bloated social(ist) programs Mamdani promised. Then what? More taxes on whoever’s left. Which drives out more people. Which shrinks revenue even further.

It’s a doom loop—and, again, entirely predictable.

The end result is that New York’s going to end up looking a lot like the countries Mamdani’s diverse, multicultural coalition fled from. Not because immigrants are incapable of prosperity, but because the very policies needed to hold his coalition together are the same ones that created dysfunction in those countries to begin with.

When It’s Time to Flush

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: maybe New York needs this.

The alternative was Andrew Cuomo—the same Cuomo whose COVID nursing home disaster killed thousands. Another corporate Democrat who would’ve continued the slow decline—keeping taxes high enough to bleed the city but not high enough to force a reckoning. Keeping crime bad enough to be miserable but not bad enough to demand real change. Keeping the trajectory pointed down but at a pace slow enough that people could pretend things might turn around. Four more years of circling the drain.

Mamdani might just be the one to flush it.

And maybe that’s what New York needs—to hit rock bottom. To see what happens when the Left’s logic reaches its natural conclusion. When the American promise of unity turns into a numbers game of ethnic coalition-building. When “equity” means race-based wealth extraction. When successful people become enemies to plunder rather than assets to retain.

This is an experiment that was bound to happen. Mamdani didn’t create it—he’s just the one accelerating it.

Because sometimes, the only way to learn is to let the experiment run its course.

And maybe then—after the dust settles, after New York starts looking less like a Scandinavian utopia and more like Venezuela—the city can finally wake up and rebuild.

Of course, the real danger is that the rest of America—watching from the sidelines—might not learn from New York’s eventual lesson at all. And Mamdani could ride the same demographic wave all the way to higher office.

We’ll see.

Regards,

Lau Vegys

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