Zohran Mamdani is favored to win New York City’s mayoral race on Tuesday, and a few Texans are not happy about it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took to X yesterday with a conservative talking point implying that New Yorkers will flee the city if Mamdani is elected.
“After the polls close tomorrow night, I will impose a 100% tariff on anyone moving to Texas from NYC,” Abbott posted.
Mamdani’s Democratic socialist’s platform of raising taxes on the wealthy to fund measures like free buses, city-owned grocery stores and no-cost childcare, has led to a wave of predictions that his victory will lead to a mass exodus of the richest New Yorkers.
Challenger Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who already lost to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, told Fox News a few weeks ago there would be “nobody left” in New York if taxes on businesses and wealthy residents increased.
In a last-minute endorsement of Cuomo last night, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that “New York City will be a Complete and Total Economic and Social Disaster should Mamdani win.”
It goes without saying that Abbott can’t really impose a tariff on people moving states (shout out to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution), and several Texans voiced their confusion online.
“Is (the tariff) based off air fare from LaGuardia?” one person commented on r/Texas. “The cost of gas? Is he going to try to tax UHaul, Pods, and other moving companies?”
Another asked, “So people fleeing from the type of government he hates…. get punished?”
“I thought NYers moving to TX already had Abbott tariffs? Like: 5x chance your children are shot to death in school. 168.4x chance the books in your kids’ school are censored,” another commenter posted.
CBS News reported this morning that the governor’s office said Abbott was “just joking” based on the assumption that New Yorkers would want to move if Mamdani became mayor.
Regardless, the fact that Abbott is talking about an unconstitutional tariff is “significant and it’s problematic of the governor’s leadership,” political influencer Aaron Parnas said in a video.
This isn’t the first time Texas politicians have felt the need to weigh in on New York City’s mayoral race. Sen. Ted Cruz posted an image on X yesterday that called Mamdani “an actual communist Jihadist” and U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill from North Texas told Mamdani to “go back to the Third World” in a viral X post in June.
It’s also worth noting that Abbott is continuing the great Texas tradition of saying and doing everything Florida does a little bit later and a lot louder. After Mamdani won the Democratic primary in July, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told Fox News he might have to charge an “entry tax” to Florida because they might not “be able to absorb everyone that’s going to flee his poor rule.”
But Abbott can rest easy knowing that millionaires will probably not try to New York his Texas. Although the wealthy fleeing in droves from the socialist takeover of New York City makes for a good scary story, Rolling Stone reported in August that history and data has shown that the rich will most likely stay right where they are. They wrote, “higher taxes make millionaires flap their wings, not fly the coop.”