Trump and GOP find midterm message after New York socialist sweep

Trump’s own relationship with Mamdani is complicated, to say the least. Though he frequently referred to the then-candidate as a “communist” during the 2025 campaign, the president hosted the younger politician at the White House in late November of last year. The pair has reportedly maintained contact in the ensuing months and has largely avoided escalating any tension in their working relationship.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from casting Mamdani as a socialist foil to the GOP’s self-claimed commonsense economic platform. Republican National Committee officials told the Washington Examiner they’d been suggesting even before Mamdani’s win last year that his influence would be the “kiss of death” for Democrats in the midterm elections and that they would rather face socialist candidates in the general than centrist Democrats.

Republicans ran with those themes on Wednesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), speaking to reporters at a press conference, declared that the New York results show Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have “taken full control of the Democratic Party, or what was left of it.”

“There are mini Mamdanis popping up all around the country,” he said. “It is a dangerous thing. This is not a joke. These radical candidates are self-describing, they’re self-identifying as Marxist. They want to fundamentally transform this country, and sadly, many of these Democrat candidates and their voters just don’t have the same zeal and affection for America.”

RNC Chairman Joe Gruters similarly said Wednesday that “last night, Democrats confirmed they are the party of socialists.”

“They are the party that cheers for America’s downfall,” Gruters posted on X. “We can’t let them win.”

The president himself, upon arriving on Capitol Hill for a lunch with Republican senators Wednesday afternoon, told reporters that Republicans would do “very well” in November.

“They want a lot of communists,” he said. “The people that they’re pushing are communists, and this country is not going to have communists.”

Later in the day, speaking to reporters during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Trump claimed the rise of DSA candidates “should make it easier for Republicans because most of the nation is composed of sane people.”

“If you look throughout history — go back thousands of years — you’ve always had socialism and communism by different names,” he contested. “It’s never ever worked. It’s not going to work this time.”

Still, even a unified, anti-socialist message may fail to cut through affordability concerns, especially with the president and Republican lawmakers beefing over the final legislative sprint ahead of November.

Trump further worsened the divide between the White House and the Hill Wednesday morning by canceling a planned signing ceremony for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at lowering housing costs that the president had also backed himself.

Instead, even as housing costs remain a top concern for midterm voters, the president declared the bill would be put on ice until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act, Trump’s favored election integrity act that Republican leaders say doesn’t have the votes to move through the upper chamber.

Some sitting Democrats sought to downplay Tuesday’s socialist wave as an aberration, suggesting to the Washington Examiner Wednesday that the DSA would not resonate with voters in battleground states or in general elections.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a progressive and the deputy secretary of the Democratic Caucus, said that Tuesday was a “New York story more than anything else” but admitted that voters “are clearly telling us they want us to be bolder.”

“I don’t want to bend over backwards to extrapolate too much based off of one state’s elections,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Obviously, in New York, the mayor and [Ocasio-Cortez] have enormous power inside the Democratic Party today. I’m not sure that election would reproduce itself, those results would reproduce themselves in every other state. But, yeah, I think you’d be silly not to read something into yesterday’s results.”

Randy Jones, a senior Democratic operative and the political director for Andrew Yang’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary run, told the Washington Examiner that it’s “absolutely a mistake” for Trump and Republicans to lean into socialism attacks, noting it didn’t dent Mamdani’s rise last year.

“The poll numbers and the reality that they face will force them to change tactics,” he said in an interview. “So they’re either lying or they’re delusional, one of the two. I think it’s possibly both.”

THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE IS OVER. THE LEFT WON

“Even if some of these progressive politicians aren’t perfect on the issues for the average Democratic voter, I think they seem authentic and I think that voters across the board have their BS meter turned up to 10 right now,” Jones said. “I think that voters think that everybody is lying to them across party lines, and I think that progressive candidates, like I said, not only sound authentic and real, but I think they’re speaking plainly with passion, without a lot of flash, and I think that’s what voters are responding to today.”

He additionally rejected the idea that the DSA isn’t popular in the heartland or battleground states, claiming “this kind of fiery, populist-progressive economic agenda is very attractive to folks in Middle America whose grocery prices are going up, housing costs are going up.”