After the 2024 election, it seemed the Democratic Party was rudderless and without a leader. Former President Joe Biden — having been unceremoniously dumped by his own party — doesn't have the mental or physical wherewithal to lead from beyond the Oval Office (he didn't have it while in the Oval Office, either). Nor did Kamala Harris, who was soundly rejected by voters a year ago. She's currently on a book tour that Democrats don't particularly like and George Clooney has already said she shouldn't run for office again.
The current crop of Democrats in office, including AOC, Jasmine Crockett, and Hakeem Jeffries, doesn't seem to have what it takes, either.
But there's now a face of the Democratic Party, even if Democrats don't want him to carry that mantle: Zohran Mamdani.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said as much:
SPEAKER JOHNSON: "The Democrat’s national leader now is Zohran Mamdani. He's a Communist. Good luck with that."
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 5, 2025
pic.twitter.com/Ol2qPaA59q
And I'm fine with that. Once his policies destroy NYC, it might just open the eyes of the American public to the dangers of socialism and the insanity of the Democratic Party.
It seems at least one Democrat is not on board with this, however. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.
CNN asks a simple question to KY Gov Beshear: Is Mamdani a leader in the Democrat Party?
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 5, 2025
Beshear offers up a whole lot of words that never answer the question.
Make them own it. https://t.co/JxdHDbhxZW pic.twitter.com/UxroMDJu89
You'll notice the very pregnant pause before Beshear begins talking,
"I think what we're seeing is it's less about what people call themselves and more about what they are focused on. Uh, the winner in the New York mayor's race was unquestionably more focused on people's struggles: on the inability to afford housing and the inability to pay the bills at the end of the week and the end of the month," Beshear said.
Beshear continued, "I think people are less focused right now—even the policy proposals—but what they want is someone committed to trying to address it. I think you see that across all the races. It should be a wake-up call, not just to Democrats but to everybody."
The last part about this being a wake-up call to Democrats caught my attention. Beshear is saying, subtly, that Democrats need to do a better job of addressing these issues without going full-blown Karl Marx.
Beshear probably has his sights set on a higher office beyond Kentucky's governor's mansion and wants to paint himself as a moderate in this. It's smart politics, of course, but if his party doesn't change direction, he'll be tied to the albatross that is Zohran Mamdani's socialism.
As I've written about, Mamdani is the proverbial camel's nose under the tent flap. His comrades in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) want to use his candidacy to launch a socialist takeover of America, and many Democrats are far too eager to help him.
As I've spelled out here and here, socialism like Mamdani's is deadly and economically disastrous.
Beshear is correct on one thing, though: Mamdani is trying to address concerns people have. He's intentionally going about it the wrong way, of course, and it'll only make things worse. But Republicans like Mike Johnson need to do a better job of explaining why socialism fails.
There are not only a plethora of historical examples, but also very contemporary real-life ones, too. The government-backed student loan program, established in 1965, has contributed to tuition increases at both public and private institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the cost of four-year tuition at a state college rose from $278 in 1965 to $10,340 in 2025. That's a 3,618 percent increase. It's worse for private schools, too. From 1956 to 2025, tuition and fees rose from $1,162 to $39,307—a 3,283 percent jump.
Why? The government's efforts to make tuition "affordable" and college "accessible" merely mask the costs of education. Colleges raised tuition because they could, knowing the government would pay exorbitant costs on the front end and saddle a generation of students with crushing debt.
According to the Bennett Hypothesis (first proposed by former Education Secretary William Bennett in 1987), without student loans, tuition would likely be tied to the rate of inflation. What does that mean? Well, the cost of a state college would be roughly $2,860, and a private school about $11,970.
Those are real numbers, and conservatives need to do a better job of explaining this to the general public.
The same applies to Obamacare, which simply applied the student loan scheme to health insurance with similar costly results.
If we want to use Mamdani's rise to power as a way to sink the Democrats, we need to start explaining why the tastes of socialism we have (and that's what Obamacare and student loans are) have already made things worse. The solution is not more of that, but a reversal of our current trajectory.
We will also have numerous examples from Mamdani's New York to point to in the not-so-distant future. Increased crime, empty "government-run" grocery stores, shuttered bodegas, a mass exodus of New York's finest and the average Joe, and the collapse of a great city are all in our future.
We must tie that all to Mamdani and the Democratic Party as they head into the midterms. If they want socialism, we must make them own it, including its failures.
