One month before Charlie Kirk‘s death, Tucker Carlson released an interview with the right-wing activist where the two spoke about how economic anxiety and debt has become a major issue for young and millennial adults in America, comparing Donald Trump‘s 2016 appeal with economically disenfranchised young voters to Zohran Mamdani‘s rising popularity among young New Yorkers.
“The Muslim communist that is running for mayor in New York City… He looks like he’s from central casting, his ideas are terrible, he wants the city to run the grocery stores,” Kirk said in the clip surfaced by Spencer Hakimian on X, formerly Twitter. Mamdani is a self-described democratic socialist, not a communist, and he has proposed five city-run grocery stores, one in each borough, to help New Yorkers afford food.
“This is yet another distress signal by young people to say, ‘Hey, if you’re not gonna fix our life economically, we’re gonna get very radical politically,” Kirk told Carlson.
“Let’s take a step back,” Kirk said. “President Trump won the youth vote… in many battleground states. Now, Tucker, 12-13 years ago, when I started Turning Point, if you would have told me that a Republican running for the presidency would be winning the youth vote in Michigan and in Arizona, I’d say, ‘No way.’ … One of the reasons he was able to win younger voters, and younger men, especially, in big numbers, is they were trying to get their leaders’ attention… Donald Trump was a distress signal by a lot of young people, especially a lot of young men, that were stuck in a credit-centric renter economy.”
He then called Mamdani “just another iteration of this, only from the left.”
Kirk then pointed out that it is harder than ever for young people to buy a home, and D.C. politicians he speaks to — likely those on the right — are disconnected from this issue.
“The purchasing power of every generation is getting weaker,” Kirk said.
The two conservative provocateurs continued their nearly two-hour conversation, which covered controversial topics near and dear to the far right, such as the so-called “Deep State,” immigration, the “power” of young white men in this country, and the “hyper-feminization” of the workforce (a boogeyman phrase to describe women’s increased participation in the labor economy, something Kirk decried just two days before his death, saying young women “don’t value having children” and are prioritizing their careers, causing “a fertility collapse in the west”). But when it comes to the economic situation many young adults face, Kirk was correct that purchasing power is decreasing while prices and interest rates are rising, making housing increasingly unaffordable, and young voters are attracted to candidates who promise to address those issues.
The age — and price — at which buyers purchase their first home continues to rise. According to Bankrate, as reported by CNBC, Americans needed a salary of at least $111,000 in 2024 to afford a median-priced home with a 20 percent down payment — an increase of 50 percent in just the last four years. Increasingly, millennials are receiving help from family to cover those down payments. In 2024, 36 percent of millennial and young homebuyers needed family help to make a down payment, doubling from 18 percent in 2019, Redfin found.
That’s leaving a lot of would-be homeowners out in the cold to face rising rents. It’s no wonder that Mamdani, who has pledged to pursue a rent freeze for all stabilized tenants and to build new housing for renters while bringing down rents.
“The number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis,” Mamdani says in his platform. “The mayor has the power to change that.”
