Last week, 33-year-old socialist and state assembly member Zohran Mamdani declared victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo and several other candidates, thanks to a coalition defined by what I’ve called “luxury beliefs”—ideas that win applause from the affluent but often impose real costs on everyone else.
The influence of luxury-belief voters has become a defining pattern in the modern Democratic Party. Working-class constituencies are being displaced by highly educated elites who champion policies with major downsides that they can largely avoid.
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Emblematic of this divide was the support Mamdani drew from the city’s entertainer elite. Model Emily Ratajkowski recorded a video endorsing him, as did several other major celebrities.
Few of us would look to celebrities or supermodels to decide who should run a Fortune 500 company, a school, or even a McDonald’s. But for Mamdani’s young, affluent supporters, Ratajkowski’s endorsement seems to carry real weight.
By contrast, working-class voters were less persuaded. The latest tally shows Mamdani’s strongest support coming from high-income neighborhoods, while low-income voters overwhelmingly backed Cuomo. Those most exposed to poverty and the breakdown of public order turned out to be the least interested in Mamdani’s candidacy.
The class divide extends to crime policy. Though Mamdani has distanced himself from his past support for defunding the police, he remains skeptical of beefing up NYPD staffing. Instead, he proposes creating a Department of Community Safety to “prevent violence before it happens.”
That’s a familiar gloss among elites. Surveys consistently show that the highest-income Americans are the strongest supporters of defunding the police, while the lowest-income Americans are the least supportive. In New York, a preelection poll from the Manhattan Institute found that voters who named crime as their top issue overwhelmingly supported Cuomo.
The divide reflects a basic reality: low-income voters are far more likely to be exposed to crime. High-income voters, by contrast, can afford to signal their insulation through radical anti-police politics.
Consider the view—advanced by Mamdani and others—that officers should focus only on serious crimes like shootings and murders, leaving everything else to mental-health professionals and social workers. This approach is already being tested. As City Journal’s Charles Fain Lehman notes, “cops seem to have focused on bringing murder down, while sidelining other, less significant crimes. This helps explain surging public disorder, which has remained high even as homicide has dropped.”
On the subways, Mamdani proposes deploying “specialists, including peers, mental health professionals, and EMTs” to engage with homeless individuals and people in crisis. The underlying assumption is that police aren’t really necessary to keep riders safe. But as Boston Globe columnist Carine Hajjar asks: “Will a social worker restrain someone who is threatening to attack me? Can they stop a man from setting a woman on fire, like what happened on the F train in December?”
In both cases, elites who endorse these ideas believe they’re pursuing justice. In practice, it’s a new form of political elitism. If the policies fail, the voters who backed them will be largely shielded from the consequences.
The November mayoral race is shaping up as a contest between the luxury-belief class and everyone else. Voting for a socialist helps affluent voters feel less guilty about their wealth—while allowing them to avoid any fallout when things go wrong.
Photo by Rob Kim/Getty Images