The ‘Downwardly mobile’ who feel betrayed by middle-class dreams flocked to Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has been elected mayor of New York City.

More than one million New Yorkers — 50.4% of the electorate — cast their ballots for a guy who promises government-run grocery stores, free buses, a rent-freeze, diminishing the role of police in fighting crime, higher taxes on the wealthy and a vastly expanded government sector.

Some of his best numbers came from the gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

Prospect Heights, East Williamsburg and Bushwick gave him more than 80% of their votes.

These areas are now associated more with oat-milk lattes than organized labor.

That’s led many conservatives to scoff at the idea that Mamdani represents a working-class insurgency.

Far from being a tribune of the downtrodden, we’re told, he’s simply channeling the performative rage of the privileged: over-credentialed, under-showered and long on theory but short on gratitude.

There’s something to this.

Mamdani is a self-described socialist.

He really does want to freeze rents in rent-stabilized apartments and introduce government-run grocery stores.

He thinks the police can be replaced with social workers.

But that reaction misses something important.

The Park Slope-Bushwick Mamdani supporters are not, in any meaningful sense, working-class.

But they are not exactly elite either.

They belong to a group that has become increasingly central to American politics: the downwardly mobile professionals, the overproduced graduates of our university system, raised to expect middle-class stability and discovering instead that the system has little to offer beyond high rent and burnout.

Their rage is real, and if the right wants to be serious about building a majoritarian coalition around economic renewal, it ought to start by understanding that rage, not mocking it.

These voters are not clamoring for socialism out of youthful rebellion.

They’re reacting to a broken bargain.

They grew up being told that education was the path to a stable, meaningful life. Instead, they’ve entered a labor market that treats professional work as disposable, housing as a luxury good and children as a financial impossibility.

Many have good salaries by national standards — $80,000, even $120,000 — but in New York City that can still mean roommates, debt and no hope of buying a home.

They’re too rich to be poor and too poor to feel secure.

I lived in Park Slope from 2008 to 2020, most of that time in a fourth-story walk-up apartment with my wife and our two daughters.

We had about 1,200 square feet.

I know the neighborhood, and I know the people Mamdani represents.

These are not revolutionaries and they are not committed socialists.

At one point in the not so distant past, their class equivalents would largely have identified as Republicans.

They are parents, renters, freelancers, teachers, social workers, policy analysts and junior lawyers trying to make life work in a city where everything is getting more expensive and nothing feels stable.

The neighborhoods where Mamdani won aren’t the working-class strongholds of the 20th century.

They’re something newer, stranger: enclaves of educated precarity.

These are not blue-collar districts where people punch clocks and belong to unions.

They’re zones of post-industrial drift, populated by nonprofit managers, freelance writers, overburdened teachers and software engineers who live paycheck to paycheck despite six-figure incomes.

This is a class increasingly defined by contradiction: culturally elite, economically unstable, and structurally blocked from mobility.

They are renters in every sense — of housing, of jobs, of status.

What they see in politics is not a chance to remake society in the image of Marx, but a last-ditch effort to recover the future they were promised.

Housing is the most obvious pressure point.

According to the real-estate-analytics firm Zumper, the annual median rent for two-bedroom apartments in New York City increased 15.8% to $5,500 over the past year alone.

In Brooklyn, the median rent for a two bedroom is $4,645.

That means a household earning $150,000 a year — comfortably in the national top 10% — can still be paying well over 30% of its income just on rent.

What used to feel like a path toward stability — education, professional work, a modest home — has become a monthly scramble to keep a roof overhead while saving nothing.

A survey of New Yorkers conducted by the Manhattan Institute in June found that housing costs were cited as the most important issue by one-quarter of likely voters, just behind the 26% who said crime and public safety were their top issue. Jobs, taxes and the economy came in a distant third at 18%.

This is not just about cost. It’s about trajectory.

Homeownership was once the bridge between generational struggle and middle-class stability.

It turned work into wealth and rooted families in communities. Now that bridge is washed out.

For Mamdani’s voters, the idea of buying a home feels like a taunt.

They followed the script, but the rewards are gone.

Education, the other great pillar of middle-class ambition, has become just as unstable.

The rewards of a college degree have become much thinner.

A team of St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank researchers found that while college graduates consistently earn more than high school graduates, the wealth gap between them is shrinking.

For younger generations — especially white Americans born in the 1980s — the lifetime wealth advantage of a college degree has nearly disappeared, raising questions about the long-term financial value of higher education.

The costs, meanwhile, kept climbing.

For younger professionals, student debt is now the price of admission to a labor market that no longer delivers.

A generation of Americans has mortgaged its future to chase jobs that don’t pay enough to secure one.

And it’s not just the price of education — it’s the competition for what it’s supposed to guarantee.

The elite labor market has grown more brutal even as the actual work has grown more hollow.

A surprising number of the people who make up Mamdani’s base are doing what David Graeber called “bulls–t jobs” — positions that serve little productive purpose, sustained by inertia, branding or grant money.

These aren’t blue-collar jobs lost to China.

They’re white-collar jobs lost to abstraction.

What Mamdani tapped into wasn’t class war in the old sense.

It wasn’t tenant against landlord or worker against boss.

It was a revolt of the educated against the system that lied to them.

In a kind of mirror image of the alienation felt in the deindustrialized Midwest, gentrified Brooklyn has developed its own sense that something has gone deeply wrong.

The implicit promise of potential prosperity — that education and effort would pay off — has been broken.

Their professional identities are eroding.

Their earning potential has stagnated.

And yet they remain dependent on a system they cannot afford to leave.

This is the political economy of professional immiseration.

It breeds resentment, yes — but also yearning.

Not for revolution in the abstract, but for restoration in the concrete.

For housing they can afford, transit they don’t have to calculate against grocery costs, a job that makes sense, a city where adulthood still feels possible.

As Julius Krein observed in a 2019 article for American Affairs, the real economic divide is not between elites and the working class, but within the elite itself: between those who live on capital and those who live on labor, even elite labor.

Professionals who once ran the system now find themselves increasingly at its mercy.

It’s easy to dismiss their demands as radical.

What’s harder is admitting that what they really want is something conservatives should recognize: a chance to own, to settle, to raise a family, to participate in a community that offers continuity and meaning.

These are not fringe values.

They are the building blocks of a stable society.

There is a cautionary note here for the right.

Too often, conservatives talk about economic dislocation only when it affects the industrial or rural working class.

They ignore the ways that the credentialed class has also been turned into tenants — of property, of institutions, of their own social position.

Mamdani’s base isn’t angry because they’ve lost power.

They’re angry because they were never given enough to secure prosperity and a sense of economic security in the first place.

A conservative movement serious about the common good ought to see this as a call to action.

These voters are not lost to the left by necessity.

What Mamdani’s win reveals is not that New York’s professionals have embraced socialism, but that they’ve given up on the institutions that were supposed to work for them.

But the elements of that alternative already exist — just not yet in the political imagination.

A pro-family housing agenda that addresses the cost of living in urban centers.

An industrial policy that creates meaningful white-collar work outside of finance and marketing.

A humane vision of education that doesn’t reduce young people to debt-fueled strivers.

A broader rethinking of what professional life is for, and how it can serve the nation instead of the asset class.

Mamdani is not offering this vision.

But he has captured something real.

And that should worry anyone who wants American politics to move beyond false choices between NGO progressivism and financialized technocracy.

There is a restless class out there — highly credentialed, economically insecure, politically volatile.

If conservatives refuse to understand this class — if they retreat to easy dismissals and recycled culture war lines — they will cede this territory by default.

But if they engage seriously, with a willingness to acknowledge that the American Dream must be rebuilt, they may find this new class less of a threat and more a political companion.

Politics in this country will not be shaped by the capital class alone, nor by the working class in isolation.

The people who turned out for Mamdani are the third force — the frustrated professional middle, the overeducated and under-rewarded, the strivers without a staircase.

Mamdani’s election is not a tantrum of the privileged.

It’s a forecast.

Reprinted with permission from Commonplace.