00:00Reflecting on the results of yesterhead. Results where we saw that more than 545,000 New Yorkers gave us a mandate to make this city of war.
00:12So a lot of New Yorkers were surprised by Zilran Lamdani's recent win in the Democratic mayoral primary, but if you've been following how young people have been trending in terms of their views of socialism, you might not have been.
00:24Lamdani was controversial for a lot of his more socialist policies, including frozen rent, free bus tickets, government-run supermarkets, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.
00:34But that's something that would actually not surprisingly be very popular with Gen Z.
00:39A March 2025 survey by Cato asked 18 to 29-year-olds whether they had a positive or negative view of socialism, and fully 6 in 10 had a positive view.
00:48And they actually also asked them about communism, and more than 1 in 3 said they had a positive view.
00:53If you compare that generationally, it tapers down very quickly, all the way to 2% in the 65-plus generation.
01:00So you might be wondering what this all has to do with the election.
01:02Well, it seems like Lamdani brought a historic number of young people out to the polls.
01:06In the two weeks leading up to the election, there were 37,000 new registrations in New York City.
01:12Compare that to the two weeks leading up to the 2021 election, and there were just 3,000.
01:16We also know that roughly a quarter of primary voters in this past primary were first-time participants in that type of election,
01:24and that in the early voting period, a majority of voters were in the 25-34 age bracket.
01:30So the bottom line is that socialism is very popular with Gen Z.
01:34Lamdani is a socialist, and Gen Z and millennials seem to have potentially brought him his victory in this election.
01:40So my personal take as a member of Gen Z who is not a socialist is that Lamdani was able to capitalize on the fact that Gen Z is definitely an ill-informed generation.
01:51We have the worst financial knowledge of any generation that's an adult today.
01:55When we were 8th graders, only 1 in 5 of us were proficient in history,
01:59and I think that's why 1 in 3 of us today now can say that we have a positive view of communism,
02:05an ideology that took 100 million lives in the 20th century.
02:09And I think that Lamdani was really very adept at using social media to reach young people
02:13and to capitalize on our fiscal anxiety and our economic illiteracy,
02:18and I don't think this is a good thing for New York in the long term.
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