Years ago, in the run-up to the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, I drove past a jarring message on the sign out front of Jack’s Hardware. It said, “A Vote for Nader is a Vote for America.”

At first, I was flummoxed. Why on earth would a local business owner like Jack want to elect a hyper-regulatory leftist loon like Ralph Nader? And then it hit me: Jack didn’t want Nader to win; he simply wanted as many Democrats as possible to vote for Nader instead of Gore, thereby helping Bush to carry our state’s electoral votes. It didn’t work, but that didn’t make Jack’s idea any less brilliant.

Similarly, I’d like to suggest to the dozens of Republicans still living in New York City that a vote for Zohran Mamdani in next Tuesday’s mayoral election is a vote for America.

Why? Because I believe Commie Mamdani’s tenure in Gracie Mansion will be a four-year-long “I told ya so!” and a master class in unbridled leftism for the entire nation to see. If New York City’s dalliance with a naked commie turns out like we think it’s going to turn out — like these things always turn out — his manifold failures will further marginalize the Democrats and their policies while boosting the GOP’s image as the sober-minded adults in the room.

It’d be one thing if Mamdani were going this alone, if the statewide and national Democrat establishment had manned up — so to speak — and denounced his candidacy as the awfulness that it is. But that hasn’t happened. Sure, Mamdani received the enthusiastic support of socialists like Bernie Sanders and Sandy Cortez early on, but there on Sunday at a “New York Is Not for Sale” rally was New York’s supposedly pragmatic governor, Kathy Hochul, being jeered and booed by a crowd of some 10,000 Mamdani fanatics chanting “Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!”

Only when Mandani came on stage to rescue Hochul, clasping her hand and thrusting it into the air, did the crowd erupt into cheers. For him.

It was a disgraceful moment for Hochul, but it was also instructive. As America’s Best Governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, put it yesterday in a retweet of a post by Elon Musk, “Assuming he gets elected, Mamdani will be the most prominent Democrat in America the day he takes office. Voters across the country will be able to watch his leftist agenda in action and know that his path is the Democrat path nationally. Will be good for Republicans, bad for New York City.”

Indeed, how could Mamdani’s election not be good for Republicans? How could the election of a political neophyte and a trust-fund commie not be good for the political party that promotes Liberty and limited government?

But it isn’t just DeSantis. This was Donald Trump Jr. on Fox News last Thursday: “If the rest of the country watches New York fail, and I believe it will under these disastrous ideas, maybe that’s what we need to stop the spread of this scourge, of this disease of Communism in America. I hate to see it. It’s a disaster for us. We have incredible assets there.”

I see two tectonic shifts taking place when Mamdani takes power. First, we’ll see a migration of big money out of the city and out of the state to a cleaner, safer, and more business-friendly environment like South Florida. It’s already happening, and I think Mandani’s confiscatory policies will only speed up that process and hurt New York City’s tax base. As the great Margaret Thatcher once quipped, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The second thing I see happening is the criminality coming back to the city and turning away would-be tourists, which is another huge revenue stream for the city. When the criminal element realizes that the Mamdani administration isn’t going to apply the strong law-and-order policies that rescued New York during the Giuliani administration and kept it safe during the subsequent Bloomberg years, New York will once again become a crime-ridden, urine-splattered cesspool like it was under Democrat Mayor David Dinkins and then again under socialist Bill de Blasio.

As H.L. Mencken, the Bard of Baltimore, famously put it, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard.” In this case, the dim-witted citizens of New York City deserve to get it good and hard.

I know this sounds like a cynical take — and it is, frankly. Last week, my colleague Nate Jackson made a compelling case for the damage that a Mamdani administration will bring to our nation’s greatest and most consequential city and beyond. “It’s tempting,” he wrote, “to just dismiss the people of New York as fools for bringing on their own destruction, but the fallout is not going to stop in the five boroughs.”

Time will tell whether the virus that is Zohran Mamdani can be contained within New York City. In any case, our cities and states have always been the laboratories of democracy, and the Big Apple is about to conduct one heck of an experiment.