By Joshua Arnold

With only a week to go until several American states and localities hold off-year elections, perhaps the biggest surprise is the ascent of little-known New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani (D), an avowed socialist who looks like a shoo-in to become the next mayor of New York City. The leftist elements of the Democratic base are ecstatic about Mamdani’s candidacy: a minority candidate who not only shares their every radical belief, but who has also proven a talented retail politician and a competent rhetorician (the Titanic disaster of “Harris 2024” is still fresh, after all).

“Mamdani will almost certainly be the next mayor of New York. He has undoubtedly captured the attention of large swaths of the media and political elite,” wrote left-wing political analyst Lakshya Jain. “But there’s just one awkward problem for those seeking to copy the Mamdani magic: Outside of NYC, Zohran Mamdani is not popular. … The reality is just that the voters who know of him simply do not like him.”

Jain brought statistics to back up her conclusion. Although Mamdani remains less well-known than other prominent Democrats, his favorability rating sits at -24% among voters who do have an opinion. That’s worse than California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), former Vice President Kamala Harris (D), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The only politician more disliked than Mamdani is Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), largely because his leftist base soured on him after he voted to keep the government earlier this year.

But this nationwide disapproval of their chosen candidate has only made young radicals in New York City more determined to back their chosen agent of radical transformation. At a Sunday night rally, 13,000 impassioned supporters jeered down New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D), who endorsed Mamdani with chants of “tax the rich.” Despite a lengthy record of promoting abortion and opposing Donald Trump, even she isn’t radical enough for them.

The same crowd gave a different reception to Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 election inspired a generation of young, restless, and radical progressives to seek public office — as long as they have the right skin color; anything but “white” will do. For the devoted adherents of Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez is the “OG.”

So, what message did Ocasio-Cortez deliver to this adoring, but decidedly leftist, crowd? “We must remember in a time such as this, we are not the crazy ones,” she declared. “New York City, we are not the outlandish ones. New York City, they want us to think we are crazy. We are sane.”

Even the utterance of such rote concedes that the issue is a contested one. Radical leftists in New York City want to be reminded that they aren’t crazy because many people throughout the rest of the country (or even the state) believe that they are and aren’t afraid to say so. Radical leftists in New York City want to be reminded that they aren’t crazy because their ideas are so radical that they are insecure about their own sanity.

This is a good sign. Underneath the university propaganda and mindless zealotry of youth, Mamdani’s most radical supporters nevertheless retain some vestiges of conscience and self-consciousness, which whisper in their quiet moments: maybe it is crazy to abolish law enforcement, rich people, and the Jewish people.

In Mamdani’s mind, these three issues are all related. In the month before the October 7, 2023 terror attack against Israel, then-state Assemblyman Mamdani shared his thoughts on “international solidarity” with the Gazan cause that oozed anti-Semitism. “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, that boot has been laced by the IDF,” he insisted. “We’re in a country where those connections abound, especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here.”

Turning police brutality into a blood libel against Israel? Anti-Semitic tropes about Jews being greedy capitalists? Connecting hostility to the state of Israel with hostility to Jews in New York City? What more could he say to disqualify himself from becoming mayor of America’s leading city in two short years? What more could he say to endear himself to leftist radicals? What more could he say to sound crazy?

Mamdani’s campaign is clear-eyed enough to recognize that their Muslim candidate with a history of anti-Israel advocacy is struggling to reconcile New York’s sizable Jewish population. This weekend, they launched a new campaign ad which specifically targets — or which they hope will target — Jewish voters. The ad featured four rabbis seeking Mamdani’s praises: three women and a transgender-identifying male.

If that didn’t seem desperately cloying, the Mamdani campaign also managed to make it weird. The trans-identifying rabbi he featured goes by the name Abby Stein, an Israeli native who was thrown out of the Biden White House’s LGBTQ Pride party for heckling the first lady about Palestine — then wrote about it as if such misbehavior was a badge of honor.

The reason why Ocasio-Cortez has to reassure keftist radicals that they are not crazy is because they remain committed to the transgender ideology, which is at odds with God’s word, at odds with human biology, at odds with every society throughout time, and increasingly at odds with contemporary American opinion. The simple truth of the matter is that God created every person as male or female (Genesis 1:27), and no amount of mental, hormonal, or surgical gymnastics can change that fact.

Mamdani’s campaign pressed this sore spot in its closing argument to voters, eliciting a shriek of pain that went unheeded as another hallucination in the asylum.

Of course, the Left’s embrace of transgender ideology is not limited to Mamdani, although he may be one of the most visible, personalized examples of it. Just across the Hudson River, as Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) is locked in a close contest for New Jersey’s governor’s mansion, one of her top supporters has also gone out of their way to promote transgender ideology. Next week, the New Jersey Education Association will host an event for teachers celebrating drag shows to “ignite creativity in the classroom” because “drag is what education is all about.”

It’s comments like this that provoke the most backlash and skepticism to leftist ideology from normal Americans. It’s comments like this that set the stage for radicals to need the mental reassurance. It’s the people saying things like this who then also need to hear: “We are not the crazy ones. … They want us to think we are crazy. We are sane.”

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.