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 more open to candidates who can credibly claim distance from the establishment, whether the outsider is Muslim, an immigrant, or neither.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) rode the same opening, and neither fits the demographic profile of a beneficiary of rising tolerance. What connected them to Mamdani wasn’t identity. It was position — all three ran as alternatives to a political class voters had already stopped believing in.

The same distrust that creates opportunities for marginalized candidates can also empower demagogues; outsider status is a political opening, not a guarantee of democratic renewal. Distrust creates the opening. It doesn’t decide who walks through it. That’s the part of the story that belongs to Muslim Americans specifically, and it has almost nothing to do with luck.

For two decades, Muslim American civic organizations — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Engage Action and others — built the unglamorous infrastructure of political power: voter registration drives, candidate training, donor networks, relationships with local party officials.

It shows up in the numbers. Voter registration among eligible Muslim Americans rose from 60 percent in 2016 to 85 percent in 2025 , according to the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. It’s a jump that didn’t happen by accident, in a community that is also now the youngest religious group in the country.

Muslim Americans did not simply benefit when the political door swung open to outsiders. They spent a decade building the institutions capable of walking through it the moment it did.

That combination — a wide-open opportunity structure plus a community that had already done the organizing work to exploit it — is a better explanation for this moment than either factor alone. Distrust without organizing capacity produces protest votes and one-off insurgent candidacies that rarely last. Organizing capacity without a receptive political climate produces well-run campaigns that lose. Muslim American political success in 2025 and 2026 sits at the intersection of both.

But there’s a limit to what any of this proves, and it’s worth being honest about it. Winning office is a measure of political belonging — whether institutions include you. It is not the same as social belonging — whether the broader society has accepted you as an unremarkable, fully legitimate part of the national fabric. Those two things move at different speeds, through different mechanisms, and one doesn’t guarantee the other.

The same year Muslim American voter registration hit a record high, 63 percent of American Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination in the past 12 months, the highest rate of any faith group surveyed by Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. A historic election is real evidence of institutional change. It is not proof that the underlying social climate has shifted to match it, and treating one as confirmation of the other is a mistake worth resisting; however good the headlines feel.

That distinction points to the larger question this moment actually raises, and it’s bigger than any single community. American democracy is not only being tested on whether it can let new groups into the rooms where power is exercised — it has been doing that, unevenly but persistently, for generations. It is being tested on something harder: whether its institutions can rebuild a working relationship with citizens across every background, who have concluded in remarkably consistent numbers that nobody in government is listening to them.

Electing outsiders is not a substitute for that repair. At best, it is evidence that voters are still willing to take a chance that someone might.

Wahid Gulrani, Ph.D. is a political sociologist and scholar of Afghanistan whose work focuses on security, migration and irregular warfare.