POLL-TESTED AND INOFFENSIVE IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE

If I said that Zohran Mamdani is the Donald Trump of the Democrats, you'd say I'm just trying to post a hot take. Mamdani and Trump actually have very little in common, but they do share one attribute: They don't tack to the center in an effort to avoid being hated. They take positions that arouse strong feelings on both sides. They're okay with being fervently disliked because they're also strongly admired.

Trump is president, so we know this approach is working for him. It's working for Mamdani, too:

Zohran Mamdani has opened a commanding lead in the race for mayor of New York City, buoyed by support for his affordability platform and by the splintered opposition, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena University.

The poll found that 46 percent of likely voters currently planned to choose Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, in a four-way race....

By comparison, 24 percent of likely voters in New York City said they would support former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing June’s Democratic primary; 15 percent would back the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa; and 9 percent favored Mayor Eric Adams, the scandal-scarred incumbent who is also running on an independent line.

There have been efforts to nudge Adams out of the race, but if he's at 9% and Mamdani has a 22-point lead, that won't help the anti-Mamdani forces much. The poll doesn't test a three-way race without Adams, but it does test a race limited to the two front-runners:

The survey suggested that would lead to an extremely tight race, with 48 percent supporting Mr. Mamdani and 44 percent supporting Mr. Cuomo.

Mamdani still wins.

As it turns out, Mamdani is the most liked candidate.

Around 60 percent of likely voters said Mr. Mamdani was inspirational, had good character and cared about people like them. He is the only candidate viewed positively by a majority of voters, despite months of attacks against him.

Mamdani has ideas that excite many voters and are off-putting to others -- if you dig into the numbers, you find that more people say they wouldn't consider voting for Mamdani (52%) than say the same thing about his three challengers (Adams 50%, Sliwa 40%, Cuomo 38%).

Mamdani isn't really like Trump at all. Mamdani is an idealist who sincerely wants to make the city better. Trump is an amoral narcissist with a head full of prejudices and Fox News grievances, surrounded by white supremacists, sexists, fossil-fuel absolutists, and Christian nationalists.

But they've both found that it's possible to win elections even if only a portion of the electorate is cheering you on, and that it might be easier to win that way than to win by seeming like an ordinary politician and trying not to give offense.

That's the approach of the Democratic Party's mainstream wing. Democratic consultants recommend "popularism," an effort to avoid advocating any policy position that isn't carefully poll-tested. The Democrats' leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, has spent his political career trying to win the approval of a fictional couple he invented, the Baileys, who frequently disagree with him.

What mainstream Democrats don't seem to understand is that struggling to avoid giving offense is an exercise in futility. Some voters will still hate you if you're a Democrat, because the entire Republican messaging apparatus is built to make million of voters believe that even the most inoffensive Democrat is unspeakably evil and extreme.

Zohran Mamdani can see that the best defense against being hated by some voters is giving other voters something to cheer on and rally around -- and if he's successful as mayor, maybe other voters will rally around him too. The Democratic mainstream needs to recognize that taking strong stands can win them strong support, while appearing to stand for nothing, and thus alienating large portions of the electorate, might be the riskiest approach of all.