Steve Bannon isn’t gloating about being right about politics’ ongoing transformation. He’s worried Republicans haven’t figured out how to respond.
Last fall, the former White House chief strategist told POLITICO that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win should be “flashing red lights” for the right, a warning Republicans flirted with and then waved off as mostly a New York story. Even after three Mamdani-backed candidates won Democratic primaries in the city last week, the argument still held: New York is New York.
Then, on Tuesday, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old, Bernie Sanders-backed democratic socialist, beat an incumbent Democrat who has been in Congress longer than Kiros has been alive — in a Denver primary.
To Bannon, it's proof of something he's said for months: The U.S. is in a transformational political moment, and leadership in both parties is way behind.
“We are facing a new politics. We’re seeing the dying of the old politics before us,” Bannon said in a Tuesday interview. “You’re seeing it burn to the ground before you.”
Bannon argues that Mamdani and his allies have tapped into a base enthusiasm the Democratic establishment has been sleeping on. And the Republican establishment isn’t faring much better, he says, especially when it comes to their response to the left’s “free rent” push. The GOP, Bannon argues, needs to lean into right-wing populist policies of their own.
In a wide-ranging conversation with POLITICO, Bannon also laid out why he thinks money is no longer the key to winning elections, why traditional Republicans can't beat the left's economic message and why he thinks anyone still playing "the old politics" — tax cuts, foreign wars — is finished.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Last fall, you told me Mamdani's win should be "flashing red lights" for the right. We now see the populist left winning not just in New York, but in Colorado — the American West. What makes this significant in a way the New York primary results weren’t?
The establishment has finally awakened to, it’s not New York City, it’s not inner city Manhattan, it’s not just the immigrants or the illegal aliens in the boroughs, this is going to be nationwide. Yes, clearly, it’s Denver. It’s one of the more liberal cities, but it’s still the American West. It’s still Colorado.
When I went and talked to donors about what was coming, they laughed in my face. They said, “You don't understand Democratic politics, you don't understand that [former New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo has $40 million, that Cuomo has the New York Post and the New York Times endorsements, he's got all the big Jewish organizations, he's got the Catholic Church, he's got the firemen, he's got the cops, he's got every endorsement.” And I said, “I don't care about that. What Mamdani has is today 1,000 people canvassing, going door-to-door in the boroughs, in Queens, in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, that's what's going to determine this.” And they just laughed and said, “We have $40 million and Fox loves us.” And Cuomo got smoked.
People don't understand that they've taken — really, the Obama playbook, and the Trump playbook. Modern politics shows you it's not about the money. It's about voter engagement by people, one on one. They have momentum because they engage people with their message.
These people believe this, and they’re prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to connect with people and to sell people on their ideas, and that is the coin of the realm in modern politics. Your money is not only not going to help you, it is going to be turned against you. They’ve been outgunned monetarily everywhere. It doesn’t matter.
On Tuesday, Melat Kiros — another Bernie-backed democratic socialist — unseated a Democratic incumbent. What does this tell you about how "traditional politics" has shifted?
[Democratic socialists are] a national power and they have worked below the surface to perfect a ground game and a canvassing operation. It’s too late for the Democrats to recreate that. I told people in the Republican Party, and it was dismissed that [Mamdani's] a flash in the pan, it’s clearly just a New York City thing, he’s never going to win congressional seats — that was the thing, they’ll never win any federal offices, and you saw where they took the three.
Is this more of a Trump moment or a Tea Party moment for the Dems?
Trump is more of a disruptor. This is their Tea Party moment. But remember: The Tea Party was co-opted immediately because it was a reaction to Obama and a reaction to the bailouts and a reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. That’s why I got involved in politics, because I could tell right away it was the proto-populist movement, but the Kochs came in immediately with Americans for Prosperity and they tried to guide it away, other people tried to guide it away from its anti-war, America First, more nationalistic policies.
No, this is a Tea Party, but it’s a Tea Party that is more ideological, and the ideology is not populism. This is a Marxist, jihadist movement, and they’re not going to stop.
But we saw Sen. Michael Bennet lose to the state attorney general, which wasn’t really an ideological clash. Are these candidates really winning on ideology — or on exhaustion with the establishment and Washington? Or both?
The policies they come out with — what little policies they do come out with — is kind of a happy, clappy populism of the left.
They campaign as anti-establishment. Very smartly, if you look at their campaigning, they’re not really even campaigning on 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 reason we have problems is not Trump, it’s the people that should be stopping Trump are actually co-opted by him.” It’s very sophisticated, and it clearly resonates. This is why the Democratic Party is not going to be able to stop it. They don’t fully understand it. They don’t have a response.
The president has been talking about the “communist” threat. You’ve called Mamdani and his ilk “Marxists.” Are these democratic socialist wins a boon for the GOP heading into the midterms, or a liability if Democrats are seizing the anti-establishment fervor?
It’s very helpful if it’s properly framed. Right now, only the far right is doing the framing. It has to get into the bloodstream. The consultant class of the Republican Party is always asleep and caught off guard.
To beat Mamdani, you have to have intense, ongoing and massive voter engagement. 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.
Now, people I think are starting to take my warning seriously. A year and a half after we first gave the warning, they’re now, “Oh yeah, this guy is real.”
I remember when we talked last fall, you were warning against Republicans just making someone like Mamdani a boogeyman. Do you still think there’s a danger there?
You have to come up with solutions. 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. 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.
How does this populist moment play out on both sides heading into 2028?
I tell people, don’t worry about ‘28. We are facing a new politics. We’re seeing the dying of the old politics before us. You’re seeing it burn to the ground before you. Artificial intelligence, the oligarchs and the threat of these kinds of Marxist jihadists, it’s going to redefine politics, and he who is prepared to take it on, you’re going to see the rise of these people.
If you are playing the old politics of tax cuts and wars everywhere and doing the bidding of Israel, let me be blunt — you’re finished.
I just keep telling people, it’s a flashing red light, and the [Senate Majority Leader] John Thunes of the world and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson better understand that the old politics are gone.
Are Republicans starting to take this seriously?
Behind the scenes, extremely seriously. What I’m shocked about is who’s not taking it seriously is the Democrats. It’s like they’re asleep.
If you look at how the Democrats are responding to this threat already, Cuomo was not a lesson to them. They tried to actually take Cuomo’s playbook and double down on it, and guess what? It’s not working.
If you were advising the next presidential candidate, what would you tell them they need to do to win?
You have to be absolutely relentless. People, it's not about talk anymore, it's about action. You have to show people very specifically what you're prepared to do to both stem this threat and to break the oligarchs and the big tech guys and to provide true opportunities.
Here's the thing I would tell people: We have a capitalist system with no capitalists. We have a very concentrated part of who controls capital in this country, and 80 percent of the people have no participation in, really, the capitalist system. You must be prepared to make radical changes to our system, and you must be prepared to stand in the breach, and to basically beat these people down, not just at the polls, but by government policy.
I would say this about politics going forward: If you're not ready to be battle-hardened, it's the wrong line of work. The whole thing of, you go back and look 10 years, where we're talking about Obamacare and tax cuts, that's all in the past.
We're in a fourth turning. And Mamdani and his troops, his forces, they understand that they're playing for keeps. They believe that they are on the rise, and they have within their grasp to take control of the most powerful nation in the history of the Earth in its 250th year.
In the next three to five years, they believe they will get ultimate power, and if you don't stop it, they just might.
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