Politico reports:

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. [Continue reading…]