Republican officials and strategists are always on the lookout for new villains, especially as the political potency of their usual go-to targets fades. “Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are out to destroy everything you hold dear!” is far less effective in 2025 than it was in 2015.
With this in mind, Politico reported, “Just hours after Zohran Mamdani’s apparent victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Republicans are already homing in on the 33-year-old democratic socialist as their new boogeyman ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.”
This isn’t exactly surprising. I’m skeptical this will make much of a difference — getting voters in Iowa, for example, to care about proposed city-owned grocery stores in the Bronx sounds inherently difficult — but GOP operatives are in dire need of new villains, and a self-described Democratic socialist is bound to end up in some hysterical fundraising appeals and overwrought campaign ads.
But as The New York Times reported, some Republicans are going much further than going after the young mayoral candidate over his ideology.
Even before Zohran Mamdani claimed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, he had become a target of racist attacks from the far right. Those attacks have only intensified in the wake of his commanding performance on Tuesday, with Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures accusing him of promoting Islamic law, supporting terrorism and posing a threat to the safety of New Yorkers, especially Jews.
The White House’s Stephen Miller helped get the ball rolling, slamming the results of the local mayoral primary as “the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.” Rep. Andy Ogles, a scandal-plagued Tennessee Republican, went so far as to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to strip Mamdani of his citizenship — and deport him.
They had plenty of company. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina promoted a photo of Mamdani preparing for a religious service alongside text from the congresswoman saying “we sadly have forgotten” the Sept. 11 attacks. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia responded to the primary results with an image of the Statue of Liberty — in a burqa.
Subtle, it was not.
A separate report in the Times noted, “The responses to Mr. Mamdani’s electoral triumph were the latest examples of how far-right Republicans in Congress have become overt in their use of bigoted language and ethnically offensive tropes, in both casual comments and official statements.” It’s an important detail: In the Trump era, Republicans who might’ve otherwise steered clear of overt bigotry now feel unconstrained in ways that do real harm, not only to the discourse but to society. But I’m also reminded of the fact that many Muslim voters last fall were willing to give Donald Trump a second chance, despite his record of anti-Muslim bigotry. The president returned the favor with betrayals, to the point that leaders of Arab Americans for Trump decided to change their group’s name. While some New York Democrats could be responding to Mamdani’s candidacy with far more grace, the partisan scales are not even. If Republican officials, in the wake of 2024, are counting on increased support from Muslim voters in the coming years, they might want to lower their expectations.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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