What Americans think of Zohran Mamdani

President Donald Trump will meet Friday with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — the man that Republicans have made no secret that they would very much like to turn into a national boogeyman.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens — they are due to meet at 3 p.m. ET at the White House — but it’s not difficult to see Trump trying to make political hay.

But just how productive might that be? And is Mamdani proving to be the boogeyman Republicans hope he’ll be?

We’ve got some new national polling conducted after the self-described democratic socialist’s win earlier this month. And it offers some clues.

In sum: Mamdani isn’t particularly unpopular, especially relative to plenty of other big-name US politicians. But he does clearly animate Republicans and older Americans against him — a lot more than he animates Democrats and young people for him.

And that reinforces the potential utility for the GOP of making him a main character nationally.

A Marquette University Law School poll this week showed Americans viewed Mamdani unfavorably by a 38%-29% margin, while a Reuters-Ipsos poll released last week showed they disliked him 36%-33%.

These are negative numbers, but they’re not exactly “pariah” numbers. In fact, these surveys show Mamdani’s splits are better than some of the most well-known American politicians.

Those include Trump (17-19 points underwater), Vice President JD Vance (14-16 points underwater) and Kamala Harris (minus-19 in the Marquette poll).

Even when it comes to the political middle, the democratic socialist appears to be in relatively decent territory — at least at this early juncture. (He doesn’t take office until January 1.)

While independents disliked him 35%-25% in the Marquette poll, those numbers were actually significantly better than Trump’s (70%-29% unfavorable), Vance’s (60-25%), Harris’s (55%-38%) and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (54%-32%).

Perhaps most strikingly, the Reuters poll actually showed Mamdani’s favorable rating among independents (30%) was actually slightly higher than Trump’s (26%) and similar to Vance’s (28%) — even though Mamdani is far less well-known. (33% of independents viewed him negatively.)

The numbers seem to reinforce something we’ve seen with other prominent democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And that’s that Americans don’t write them off just because of the s-word. (In fact, a July Gallup poll showed Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were actually the two most popular US politicians among 10 figures tested.)

Americans seem open to democratic socialists, as long as they are appealing on a personal level and focus on what they think are the right things.

And for Mamdani, that’s all about affordability. Even the White House has given Mamdani props for that, suggesting it helped him overcome efforts to label him an extremist.

“Why did Zohran Mamdani do so well last night? He relentlessly focused on affordability,” White House political adviser James Blair told Politico the day after the election. “People talk about communists, they can say all these things, but the fact is he was talking about the cost of living.”

And there seems to be something to that. In fact, polls have suggested Americans are actually in favor of some of Mamdani’s more socialistic ideas, including rent freezing, free public buses and even the much-maligned (on the right) government-owned grocery stores.

You could be forgiven for thinking people just want to see politicians doing something about affordability.

By contrast, Trump’s lack of focus on those issues seems to be costing him dearly, with the Marquette poll showing Americans disapproved of him on the “cost of living” by a massive 72%-28% margin. Even 4 in 10 Republicans disapproved of him on that issue.

All of this being said, it’s clear Mamdani can be politically useful for Republicans. That’s because he negatively polarizes some key groups.

In both polls, strong views of Mamdani tilted more negative — by about a 2-to-1 margin in. That suggests the passion was very much on the “anti” side — and that he mobilizes the opposition.

In the Marquette poll, for instance, 56% of Republicans viewed Mamdani “very unfavorably,” compared to just 30% of Democrats who viewed him “very favorably.”

About three-quarters of Republicans who knew Mamdani well enough to rate him felt very negatively toward him. But less than half of Democrats who knew Mamdani that well rated him very positively.

This negative polarization is also particularly strong among older voters. Four times as many Americans aged 60 or older viewed Mamdani very negatively as very positively, according to the Marquette poll. It was about a 3-to-1 margin among Americans aged 45 through 59.

Given all of that, you could certainly understand why Republicans want to elevate Mamdani. But using him as a foil doesn’t seem like a silver bullet right now, especially as he seems to have tapped into an issue Trump has struggled with.