There are real criticisms you can make of any politician. Screaming “communism” at boilerplate heat-wave advice probably isn’t one of them.
Parker Molloy at The Present Age:
New York is hot right now. Not regular July hot. Forecasters spent the week warning that Central Park could hit 100 degrees for the first time since 2012 (and it did!), with a heat index that could make it feel as hot as 112 through the holiday weekend. So the city did what cities do when the weather turns dangerous: it opened more cooling centers, extended pool hours, and added 150 outreach volunteers to check on the people most likely to die in this kind of heat. And on Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this to X:
[“New York: it’s hot out there, and the power grid is working overtime to keep us cool. Set your AC to 78 degrees, turn off lights/electronics you’re not using, and unplug what you can. Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment. A stable grid means the AC stays on, and lives are saved. Let’s ease demand — and get through the heat — together.”]
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A request. “The City is asking every business and every New Yorker to do their part,” is how the mayor’s press office put it to Newsweek. Asking. Con Edison, the utility company, made the same plea to its customers. There’s no mandate here, no fine, no inspector coming to look at your thermostat. You can read that post, mutter “absolutely not,” crank your AC to 65, and nothing will happen to you.
You wouldn’t know any of that from the reaction on the right. “78 degrees??? Welcome to communism people! Hope you enjoy!” wrote Barstool’s Dave Portnoy. Sen. Rand Paul declared the post “Proof that communism is (unfortunately) alive and well,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham warned, “This is the future that WOKE Democrats want not just for NYC but for South Carolina too!” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went with “Is this what was meant by the warmth of collectivism?” (all three via The Hill). The post has been viewed more than 58.4 million times as of this writing, and seemingly every Republican with a working phone showed up to explain that a suggestion about air conditioning is what the breadlines were like.
[...]
Their own states say the same thing
Start close to home. In July 2025, with a heat advisory in effect, then-Mayor Eric Adams told New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to, you guessed it, 78 degrees. City Hall says the practice goes back a lot further than that. A Mamdani spokesperson told TMZ the city was following utility recommendations that had been “implemented under previous Mayors, including Adams, De Blasio, Bloomberg, and Giuliani”. Then there’s the federal government. Like I said, until this week, the Department of Energy’s home cooling guidance told Americans to “Start with an indoor temperature between 75-78°F during the day.” The standing recommendation of a federal agency that answers to Donald Trump sat right there on a government website while the president’s allies spent two days calling the same number communism. Apparently, the page was deleted some time after Bulwark reporter Sam Stein posted about the Trump government’s guidance being the same as the NYC guidance being torn to shreds by the right on Thursday morning. And then there’s Texas. ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, asked Texans to raise their thermostats to 78 over and over through the brutal summer of 2022, and raising your thermostat during peak demand remains standing guidance on ERCOT’s website today. Back in 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott personally appealed to Texans to “set air conditioning thermostats to 78 degrees or higher.” Which brings us to Ted Cruz, who fired off “In a first-world country, you could turn on the A/C.” This is the senator from the state whose grid failed so completely in February 2021 that Texans froze to death waiting for the power to come back, and whose grid operator has spent every summer since asking residents to do precisely what Mamdani asked. Cruz’s post promptly got hit with a community note laying all of this out.
The right-wing faux outrage machine doing what it does best: cry and whine about NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) recommending New Yorkers set their ACs to 78℉, something his mayoral predecessors, ERCOT, and even the US Dept. of Energy have also recommended.
