(Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

I remember an argument I had 10 years ago with an ancient fossil of a lawyer after I mentioned that I had attended a Bernie Sanders rally. “But he calls himself a socialist,” croaked the old codger, himself a lifelong Democrat. “Nobody would vote for him!” So, entrenched party insiders like that fellow led Democrats into instead running Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. We all remember how that turned out.

Today, after self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won New York’s ranked-choice primary, becoming the Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor, we are hearing all the same pearl clutching. “If the city of New York is going socialist, I will definitely close, or sell, or move,” whined billionaire grocery chain CEO John Catsimatidis.

Mamdani’s ascension marked the start of “hot commie summer” for New York, according to hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb. Meanwhile, Joe Kernen of CNBC’s financial news channel had a Batman-inspired take: “They’re taking Wall Streeters and making them walk out onto the ice in the East River. And, and then they fall through.”

I mean, if we were indeed walking Wall Streeters out onto the ice, about 90% of Americans would actually be fine with that. Popular support for Gotham-style justice aside, this is all wildly hyperbolic. Mamdani’s signature policy proposals include affordable housing (accomplished in part through a rent freeze in rent-stabilized apartments), making public buses free, universal childcare, a pilot program to bring city-run supermarkets to a handful of strategic locations, and higher taxes on the top 1% of earners to pay for it all.

Now, I can see why maybe Catsimatidis would not want city-run supermarkets springing up as potential competitors. But Mamdani is only proposing five of them in the whole city, at least at first. Opening five public grocery stores in a city of more than 8 million people hardly makes someone Mao Zedong.

Of course, because he has to make himself the center of everything that happens, President Donald Trump chimed in too to call Mamdani a “pure communist.” Thank goodness for that, anyway: we wouldn’t want to have an “impure” communist as New York’s mayor.

Led by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, titans of the finance industry are assembling “hundreds of millions of dollars” to oppose Mamdani’s campaign. Although Mamdani secured a stunning and overwhelming victory in the Democratic primary, he still must face off against a slew of opponents in November, including the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa as well as current New York mayor Eric Adams, who announced, despite his many scandals, his intention to seek reelection as an independent.

Money might not be enough this time. The millions Wall Street donated to its preferred candidate in the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo, were wasted as Mamdani easily swept the former governor aside.

Mamdani came from polling next to nothing to crushing his closest opponent. He talks like a normal person on the platforms that regular people actually look at instead of blowing millions on focus-grouped television ads. He hammers a handful of issues that are important to average New Yorkers (hint: one of these is not an endless debate about the meaning of the word “socialist”). Plus he has Hot Girls 4 Zohran on his side, which certainly can’t hurt.

November is a long time away. Anything can happen in the run-up to an election. Still, this primary result alone is enough to suggest that Democrats around the country should be taking notes rather than hand-wringing and seeking the counsel of the same highly paid strategists who lost them two presidencies to Donald Trump.

Sure, even if he’s elected, a lot of what Mamdani is proposing won’t actually work out for a whole variety of reasons. If one thing is clear, though, it’s that voters want to see politicians experimenting and taking bold action rather than defending the status quo: they get points for trying. Don’t believe me? Well, how’s that full-length border wall that Mexico was going to pay for during Trump’s first term coming along?

As for Wall Street, there’s an old saying that applies here: “Check thyself before you doth wreck thyself.” Don’t be a crybaby about this. Rather than once again donating millions to one of Mamdani’s competitors only to see it backfire spectacularly, just save that money and do something cool with it instead. Worst-case scenario, you have to pay a little more in taxes and you’re still rich as hell.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].