Suozzi says Mamdani 'tapped into the same thing' as Trump

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a moderate Democrat, said President Trump and Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani “tapped into the same thing” that catapulted their respective underdog campaigns to victory.

In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Suozzi noted that both Trump and Mamdani, a democratic socialist who officially clinched the New York City mayoral nomination last week, focused their campaigns on affordability.

“I disagree with Mr. Mamdani. I have to make that very clear that, you know, I'm a democratic capitalist. I'm not a democratic socialist,” Suozzi said.

“But you have to recognize that he tapped into something,” he continued. “He tapped into the same thing that Donald Trump tapped into, which is that people are concerned that the economy is not working for them. Affordability and the economy is the number one issue in the country.”

Suozzi said “too often,” people perceive Democrats as prioritizing reproductive rights and LGBTQ protections over issues related to economic mobility and affordability.

The former two issues are “important issues,” Suozzi continued, “but they're not the issues that people think about every night when they're lying in bed thinking about paying their bills or when they're talking about how they're going to send their kids to school.”

Suozzi said Democrats can learn from Trump’s and Mamdani’s diagnoses of the problem — even if not their proposed solutions.

“Democrats have got to do a better job learning from both Trump and Mamdani, not with their solutions, which I think are wrong, but with the diagnosis of the problem — that we're frustrated, we're concerned.”

“Everybody in America — whether you're a right-wing conservative or a left-wing progressive — should believe that, in return for working hard, you make enough money so you can live a good life. You can buy a home, you can educate your children, you can pay for your health insurance, you can retire one day without being scared,” Suozzi said.

“People don't feel that currently, and we have to do a better job of communicating that,” he added.