Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist turned MAGA power broker, is delivering a stark warning to Republican leadership.
In a wide-ranging interview with Politico, Bannon argued that recent democratic-socialist primary wins — including Melat Kiros's upset of a longtime Colorado incumbent, following Zohran Mamdani's momentum in New York — signal a national leftward shift in grassroots organizing that Republicans have not yet figured out how to counter.
"They campaign as anti-establishment," Bannon said. "Very smartly, if you look at their campaigning, they’re not really even campaigning on [President Donald] Trump. He gets a mention. But they’re very much like the Tea Party, like old Breitbart. They’re going against the Democratic establishment."
The president has warned against the "communist" threat posed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the candidates he's backed, but Bannon said that angle only works if it's properly framed and mainstreamed by the GOP.
"Right now, only the far right is doing the framing," he said. "It has to get into the bloodstream. The consultant class of the Republican Party is always asleep and caught off guard."
Bannon warned that Republicans would be wiped out in November's midterm elections if they didn't figure out how to weaponize Trump's warnings about left-wing populists.
"To beat Mamdani, you have to have intense, ongoing and massive voter engagement," Bannon said. "You also have to get out your core base even more. The only thing that’s going to save the Republicans is a massive turnout of the lower propensity, lower information Trump voters — already Trump voters — at presidential election-type numbers in these congressional districts to save the House, otherwise you’re going to get overwhelmed."
However, Bannon added, there's a danger in turning Mamdani into a boogeyman, because he said there's some genuine appeal to some of the policies he's proposing.
"You have to come up with solutions," he said. "The Republicans don’t know how to respond. They’re on Larry Kudlow’s show on Fox saying, 'You can’t have free rent.' Stop. Hang on. You actually can, and that’s what I’m saying — you have to create economic opportunities to deal with housing separately. If you’re going to fight against these guys with, 'You can’t have free rent,' that’s not a winning formula because people are saying the rent is too damn high."
"What they’ve done very smartly is put a veneer of populism on this," Bannon added. "You have to come back with real populist economic policies. You have to come back with the family as the center of a set of economic policies. You have to give people an alternative. If you just sit there and demonize, that’s certainly not enough."