President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met at the White House on the afternoon of Nov. 21 and when they met with reporters after their Oval Office meeting had good things to say about each other and the way the meeting went.
Mamdani did not turn out to be the boogeyman Republicans including Trump had positioned him to be. The two of them said they agreed on the need to help residents of New York City who are having a tough financial time especially when it comes to the cost of housing in the city. They both agreed that more affordable housing needs to be built. They both agreed that New York City was a great city with extraordinary potential for growth.
While Mamdani and Trump presented an image which was the opposite of what some observers forecast would happen such as Trump’s blowup at Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the meeting came against a background of negativity. Both Trump and Mamdani had been frequent critics of each other. A Marquette University Law School poll this week showed Americans viewed Mamdani unfavorably by a 38%-29% margin, while a Reuters-Ipsos poll released last week showed they disliked him 36%-33%. Trump had persistently labeled him a “communist.”
While independents disliked Mamdani him 35%-25% in the Marquette poll, those numbers were actually significantly better than Trump’s (70%-29% unfavorable), Vice President Vance’s (60-25%), Kamala Harris’s (55%-38%) and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (54%-32%).
Perhaps most strikingly, the Reuters poll actually showed Mamdani’s favorable rating among independents (30%) was actually slightly higher than Trump’s (26%) and similar to Vance’s (28%) — even though Mamdani is far less well-known. 33% of independents viewed him negatively.
The numbers seem to reinforce something seen with other prominent democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And that’s that Americans don’t write them off just because of the “s-word” (socialist). Americans seem open to democratic socialists, as long as they are appealing on a personal level and focus on what they think are the right things.
And for Mamdani, that’s all about affordability.
“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well last night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” White House political adviser James Blair told Politico the day after the election. “People talk about communists, they can say all these things, but the fact is he was talking about the cost of living.”
By contrast, Trump’s lack of focus on those economic issues seems to be costing him dearly, with the Marquette poll showing Americans disapproved of him on the “cost of living” by a massive 72%-28% margin. Even 4 in 10 Republicans disapproved of him on that issue.
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