It’s one of the strangest spectacles in modern American politics. The high-flying professionals of New York’s white-collar class are now marching behind an avowed socialist, Zohran Mamdani. These are the same lawyers, traders, and tech specialists who once embodied the American dream.

His campaign thrives not in the boroughs where poverty festers but in luxury neighborhoods like Park Slope and Williamsburg, where median household incomes exceed $200,000—he’s even captured 43% of the overall Jewish vote, with that number rising to a whopping 67% when you look at the voters between the ages of 18 and 44. Furthermore, a brand new poll out this morning shows that Mamdani now holds a staggering 25-point lead over Andrew Cuomo.

That support exposes less a moral awakening than a crisis of a lack of self-control. Mamdani’s backers are not victims of capitalism’s failures but of their own overreach. They lived beyond their means, inflating lifestyles that no paycheck could sustain, and now look to government to subsidize the consequences.

His promises include rent freezes, free childcare, and public ownership of utilities. They sound like lifelines to people who have confused debt with success. Yet they are fiscal landmines, guaranteed to make the city’s affordability crisis even worse by strangling investment, draining tax revenue, and driving employers away.

For all their prestige and pay, many of Mamdani’s supporters feel trapped in an illusion of prosperity. Median rents in Brooklyn now devour over 40 percent of take-home pay for a basic two-bedroom apartment. In Williamsburg, professionals earning $150,000 or more share apartments into their 30s because the median rent for a one-bedroom tops $2,480. Over 65,000 households earning between $100,000 and $300,000 surrender at least a third of their income to rent.

These aren’t oppressed workers. They’re the architects of their own frustration, clinging to status symbols they can no longer afford.

Instead of adjusting to reality, they demand that government reengineer it. Mamdani’s campaign feeds that fantasy by promising economic miracles at someone else’s expense. He markets his movement as a war on “capitalist greed,” but it is in practice a blueprint for economic suicide. His policies would destroy jobs, inflate housing costs further, and erode the tax base that keeps the city functioning.

Needless to say, socialism has never built a sustainable economy.

His donor lists read like a satire of hypocrisy. Campaign finance records reveal contributions from a Deutsche Bank managing director, traders at Jane Street Capital, and multiple Goldman Sachs employees. They all help bankroll a candidate whose explicit goal is a socialist economy. Mamdani raised over $1 million in small donations averaging just $121, much of it from affluent white-collar professionals in New York and beyond.

After his primary victory, new waves of lawyers and financiers funneled money into his campaign, assisted by the city’s generous matching-funds program.

They tell themselves they’re fighting for fairness. What they really demand is insulation from consequence. These donors are not Marxist revolutionaries. They are anxious achievers who mistook privilege for permanence. Their discontent is the offspring of excess. It’s a belief that high salaries entitle them to effortless comfort. Rather than accept that their costs outran their income, they now treat socialism as a bailout plan.

Mamdani’s platform exploits this moral fatigue.

Meanwhile, far from the luxury towers of Brooklyn, consider West Virginia. It’s one of America’s poorest states, ranking second-lowest in median household income at $55,217. A police officer in the worn-out industrial town of Wheeling, earning $60,000, enjoys a better standard of living than pro-Mamdani New Yorkers earning twice as much.

A 2025 SmartAsset study found that a single adult in West Virginia needs about $80,829 to live comfortably, compared with $136,656 in New York City. The cost of living in Wheeling is 82 percent lower than in New York. Housing, transportation, and basic goods are all affordable. There, people can buy homes, save for retirement, and raise families without begging politicians for relief.

The Wheeling officer lives within the bounds of reality; the Brooklyn yuppie refuses to. One builds wealth through prudence and patience. The other demands redistribution when the math of vanity turns against him. That is the divide reshaping America. It is not rich versus poor, but responsible versus reckless.

Socialism’s newfound popularity among the affluent is not a sign of progress but of decay. It reveals a generation that confuses comfort with justice, debt with oppression, and dependency with compassion. Mamdani’s agenda panders to that confusion, trading economic logic for emotional indulgence.

In contrast, communities grounded in affordable living and self-reliance, like those in West Virginia, still understand that prosperity grows from effort, not entitlement. They reject the fantasy that bureaucrats can legislate away the cost of ambition. They know what Mamdani’s followers refuse to admit: that government cannot protect people from the consequences of their own excess.

Zohran Mamdani’s rise is not a revolution; it is a cautionary tale. It shows how easily prosperity breeds delusion, how success without discipline curdles into resentment, and how socialism thrives when people forget that reality does not negotiate.

Dr. Joseph Ford Cotto is the creator, host, and producer of News Sight, delivering sharp insights on the key events that shape everyday life. During the 2024 presidential race, he developed the Five-Point Forecast, which accurately predicted Donald Trump’s national victory and correctly called every swing state. Cotto holds a doctorate in business administration and is a Lean Six Sigma Certified Black Belt.

Image from Grok.