As public trust declines, Muslim politicians are rising to the occasion

Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory was not only a milestone for Muslim Americans. It was also a window into a moment when voters increasingly turned to outsiders as their confidence in established institutions declined.

The easy explanation for the wave of Muslim American political success — Mamdani in New York, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) in the House, Abdul El-Sayed running for the Senate in Michigan — is that the country has simply grown more tolerant. That’s part of it. 

But tolerance alone can’t explain why these particular candidates are winning, or why it’s happening at a moment when Americans of every background have grown skeptical of those who claim to represent them.

Start with trust. In 1958, 73 percent of Americans told pollsters they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Today that figure sits at 17 percent, according to Pew Research Center — near the lowest point ever recorded. Layer on economic strain: A record 55 percent of Americans say their financial situation is getting worse, the fifth straight year that trend has held, per Gallup. 

People who believe their government doesn’t work for them, and whose finances keep deteriorating anyway, are people primed to look past the usual political class for someone new. This is where the real mechanism lives, and it’s more precise than the idea that Americans vote for Muslim candidates because they distrust the government.

What happens instead is a chain. Declining trust in institutions widens what political scientists call the representation gap — the sense that officials, whatever their party, have drifted from the people who elected them. That gap makes voters........

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