Populism is popular because it speaks to voters in concrete terms and tells them that their first instincts—about economics and more—are correct. This year, at least one person solved the puzzle of creating a successful left-wing populist message: New York Mayor–Elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who rose from 1 percent in early primary polls to more than 50 percent of the general-election vote, explicitly promised to make groceries cheaper and freeze rents. Many Democrats would love to know how to bottle the Mamdani lightning.

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[...] Populist politicians focus on primary representations of the world, such as the price of groceries, rather than abstract concepts, such as affordability. Everyone can picture the price of orange juice or bread on the supermarket shelf. During his presidential campaign last year, President Donald Trump spent a great deal of time summoning such mental images. “Groceries, such a simple word,” he has repeatedly said by way of explaining his victory. Many liberals made fun of his rhetoric.

Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of mocking him, perhaps the left should also be talking about groceries. So one of the major promises Mamdani made was to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly owned, city-run grocery stores. Experts objected that grocery stores typically operate on slim margins and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. Like most educated people, Mamdani probably knows this. The problem is that a supply chain is an entirely abstract concept, and so might as well not exist for the average person. Nobody gets worked up about a supply chain.

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To do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about; by and large, they must also accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, left-wing politicians struggle to find issues on which they can be authentically populist. Many of the problems that they hope to resolve, such as climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs, are complicated. This means that the policies needed to fix them are also complicated, and cannot be explained without ascending to the realm of abstraction. Slogans that resonate with the public seldom translate literally into successful policy.