Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito said Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won the New York City race because he took a page out of President Donald Trump’s playbook.
“I think that why [Mamdani] won in New York was because he stole something from the Trump playbook in that he showed up in places where people don’t show up,” Zito said Thursday on Fox News’s The Bottom Line. “And he was having fun while he was doing his campaign.”
Mamdani, a socialist, won 50.4% of the vote with 93% of the votes counted already. Independent candidate and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo earned 41.6% and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa received 7.1% of the vote.
Zito said young people did not “pay attention” to the “depths” of Mamdani’s “socialis[t] and communis[t]” policies.
“They heard ‘affordability’ and they’re like, ‘Oh look at that dude in my neighborhood,’” Zito said.
Voters under 30 years old strongly supported Mamdani, with 78% of them voting for him, according to the Fox News Voter Poll.
Zito said that Pennsylvania Republicans “fell flat talking about the economy” in the 2025 elections and that the results are not because of Trump.
Pennsylvania Republicans “lost really important counties of Bucks, Erie, Luzerne. They even lost tiny little Clearfield County, and I don’t think that voted for a Democrat in like 100 years,” Zito said. “But they stole from the president’s playbook — they talked about economic populism.”
Pennsylvanians voted to reelect three justices who ran as Democrats, keeping the state Supreme Court at a 5-2 majority.
2025 ELECTION TAKEAWAYS: REPUBLICANS LOST AND THEY KNOW IT
Zito said that Pennsylvania Republicans, outside of Sen. David McCormick (R-PA), did not talk about the economy.
“The local Republicans just didn’t show up and do that kind of thing that makes the voter want to be on your side because you’re going to take them to a better place,” she said.