I feel like this article is almost self-parody. Not saying it is invalid to criticize Mandami’s position. But he has been able to go toe to toe with the folks on Fox News discussing these issues, and has demonstrated he listens even to those who don’t think like them (such his changing position on policing). He has been able to his messages across mainly because people feel he believes in something and not just doing “electoral tactics”.
The whole “the Democrats must pivot to the center” as a strategical and not an ideological or policy argument is part of the reason some people feel disconnected from Dems and tend to overvalue the “authenticity” of MAGAs.
If you think Mandami policies are wrong say it, we need more debate and discussion between the center and the left. I personally distrusts rent control and it only works as an “emergency button” while incentivizing more housing development. But reducing political positions to mere electoral strategy is the problem, not the solution.
I have same criticism. The author seems to say that MOST of the dems problem is messaging, not the message. As if they just need more influencers and social media likes. He claims Kamala losing was a vote against gerontocracy, forgetting that she was decades younger than Trump. What about policies? And dont underestimate the harm the covid over reach did to credibility. Including Cuomo who managed to both kill people by sending them to nursing homes AND support over reach, long school closures, long vaccine and mandates etc. He won an Emmy for his daily (!) covid performative press conferences, and now he cant win a primary against a socialist with no political experience.
1. You're way underestimating how charismatic Zohran is. For instance go watch his live-on-Fox apology to the NYPD (did you know he did that apology in the middle of the interview on Fox?)
2. You're ignoring that he's rapidly pivoted to moderate on every issue. Such as NYPD, which I know you know about from previous point. This invalidates at least one of, but not neither, of your criticisms about perception and governance. He's so damn charismatic as an un-politician that his base gives him a pretty long leash to redo his policies. Sound like any politician on the right you can think of?
3. You're ignoring he's penetrated into what should be Cuomo's base, for instance Jews who you think would be skeezed out by antisemitism but that's evidently not how many of them voted in the primary. I feel that should fuel into your thesis that all the Fox News viewers who are apparently voting for him think he's too extreme.
4. I thought you would at least bring up who the establishment ran against him, namely a corrupt sex criminal gerontocrat who spent his governor terms screwing over NYC at every step and has more or less kowtowed to Trump by now. You brought up Cuomo one time, for when he sort of landed a punch against Zohran during the debate. Zohran's best punch was probably "Cuomo just admit the state was screwing over the city. Who was leading the state???" Cuomo tried blaming his successor for screwing over NYC instead of saying anything remotely resembling "I was good for NYC."
5. You're advocating for moderate in the worst way possible -- like if R offer pizza and D offer burgers, you say why not put American cheese and ground beef on a pizza to appeal to everyone. Or better yet -- Trump was 78, Biden was 80. Was it really that hard to get a 79 year old to appeal to everyone?
6. The best way to be moderate is to absolutely incense the opposition by advocating for common sense. Let me annotate:
As you say Fox News is talking about: "And then there are the city-run grocery stores (the affordability crisis), the millionaires’ tax (the affordability crisis), the rent freezes (the affordability crisis), none of which he likely has the authority to enact but which so perfectly confirm every wild stereotype that every Fox News host has of what Democrats really want (a solution to the affordability crisis)."
Conversely, What exactly do you want Fox News attacking Democrats for besides their solution to the affordability crisis? Drag story hour? Like you really need to answer this if you're going to use that attack by Fox News as the centerpiece of your thesis. As far as I can tell you think Democrats need to move just right enough to start getting plaudits from Fox News.
7. Kinda telling your metaphor is "to use a smartphone" not "to use Tiktok." Like that attack would have made sense in 2010, back when we still called them smartphones and not just phones.
One Zohran ad on YT: "I'm going to say something a politician has never said to you before. (go on.) I don't want your money. (??)" then he explains he needs volunteers. Also literally that's just true. There's basically two people who can instantly reach me by text, my wife and every f*** Democrat running for office in the country.
The establishment thing to do would be to say -- look, some of our voters are [some euphemism for] broke-ass. We still need their money but we should lower the ask to $4.33 or some number like that." Zohran appalled the establishment by connecting with voters on affordability instead.
8. Of course the biggest way you personally are being a Democrat who never learns is you're mad at the establishment for failing to rig voter preferences out of the primary. In this telling, the problem isn't that we got Hillary instead of a real primary -- it's that the gerontocrat establishment class simply didn't hire the right consultants to tell them to not run Hillary.
9. Do you actually believe millionaires are going to flee NYC over a millionaires tax? Do you really think the world is a better place if no one in the world ever takes a stab at calling this bluff?
10. What risks do you think Democrats should take? You know what's weird, you literally should not nominate Democrats who are not a bad idea. The reason is you're losing. Good ideas are not enough. You need weird ideas that look bad and hope you get lucky.
And obviously you should be learning from his victory instead of hardening the establishment's defense. When will Democrats learn to even bother trying to learn?
I remember Tip O’Neil (House speaker in the 80s) saying “All politics is local,” but apparently now we’ve decided that all politics is national, thanks to social media and all kinds of people having strong opinions about local policy choices in states and cities that they’ve never set foot in. The fact is, this is a municipal election in New York City, not a meeting of the DNC. Mamdani is ahead because he is charismatic candidate who speaks to NYC voters and reflects their concerns (and incidentally has a deft touch with social media, one of the biggest deficits the national party is trying to deal with). Berating NYC voters for not triangulating their choices with a view to satisfying the presumed wishes of the national electorate is a ridiculous take, no less because it is so common. The notion that Mamdani is a “communist” or “loony left” as he is furiously backpedaling many of his past positions and doing all the right things to appeal to moderates shows great lack of awareness of where voters are at…we didn’t end up with Trump because Democrats were “communist,” but because Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan technocratic elite, obsessed with virtue signaling rather than being responsive to voters’ needs.
I'm not a Mamdani supporter. That said, why are you letting Fox News of all people define things? If the voters of NYC didn't want Mandami, they would have voted for someone else.
And, frankly, the rent in NYC is too damn high for *everyone* but the very wealthy. You can literally be a Google engineer making a quarter of a million dollars a year and not be able to afford a house in a reasonable commute to work there. Not to mention a schoolteacher.
So of course a candidate who makes promises to ease burdens is going to win. It's the same thing literally that Trump promises the MAGAs (and doesn't deliver on either).
Mamdani is a mayor, not a national politician. He will answer to the whopping 2.5% of Americans who live in New York City and no one else. Are there no longer any local elections or issues? Why should this reflect on anyone outside New York City?
Part of the whole "abundance" thesis is voters across the country actually do look at NY and CA and ask themselves if they want those sorts of Democrats governing the whole country. And also just yes, literally people show NYC on TV around the country.
I get it. NY is a meme in our current political environment. I guess I would still push back on this. Cities in red states are on average much more crime ridden. NY is in fact safer than the entire country as a whole, including all rural and urban areas, judging by the murder rate.
I think the fact you can't really build stuff in CA and NY is more substantive and an actual argument you should not elect D nationally. I also think a lot of woke social justice culture needed (and got) a loss at the ballot box and it's the same principle of not letting the nation be turned into the worst excesses of its most liberal states. So it's just the argument of "let liberal places do their liberal stuff" doesn't fly as much, with a more informed voter populace.
The biggest local distortion is that Cuomo basically hated NYC when he was governor of NY and I'm not sure if national bloggers really grasp how deep the hatred for him is. Like I'm surprised he did as well as he did but then when I see Jewish voters break for Zohran because they like, are worried about antisemitism but also remember how much Cuomo fucked the subways out of spite, I'm less surprised.
Fair enough, but as I said, the murder rate in NY is lower than the US average and is also well in the bottom half of that list.
Protecting single family zoning is more a red coded issue than blue coded. Trump decried the “war on suburbs.” Red state cities just tend to have a lot of land on which to keep building single family homes.
NY is in fact more built up than any other large US city per square mile, and is middle of the road (35 among 53 large metros) in the rankings of new housing being built as a percent of existing stock. It does not build as much as several Texas cities and Florida cities, but it does beat Miami, which is the densest Florida city, and which is the most New York-like city in Florida in that it does not have lot of room left to build out.
NY should not be confused with the Bay Area, which has well known zoning problems and is at the bottom of the list of housing construction rates, producing housing at only half the rate of New York. The biggest problem with housing supply in NY is not so much zoning or permitting as much as land availability and rent control (one of the issues Mamdani gets wrong)
Exactly correct on your analysis, voters have more trust in Republicans currently regarding immigration, crime, the economy and even somehow the issue of which party is more corrupt.
Have enough Democrats truly internalized why voters preferred Trump in 2024. Mandami leaning into socialism and trafficking in boutique social justice statements does not help the Democratic brand win nation wide elections.
Have YOU internalized why Democrats lost in 2024? Inflation is up there. Zohran talks about affordability constantly which I think is a bare minimum "Democratic brand" requirement now. (Contrast the shutdown which is "about healthcare subsidies" or something, it's hard to keep track.) I really don't think you're following this race if you think "boutique social justice statements" have come up more than zero times, it's basically Zohran talking about affordability and Cuomo talking about how he's more experienced.
Another issue is failing to pick a candidate via a primary, which led to a bad candidate and also some number of voters who felt the process was undemocratic (it was). This isn't even 2024, it's also 2016. Shouldn't the lesson be assuming voters know more than you, not trying to find a way to rig it more effectively next time.
If you want to come up with some non-socialist Zohran who is *as effective* at talking about affordability, go for it, but what the establishment actually came up with is a corrupt sex criminal who just talks about how great he is because he's experienced.
"Don't compare [Mamdani] to the Almighty, compare him to the alternative." And if they couldn't come up with a better alternative than Cuomo, maybe that's the bigger own goal.
So it is a truism that a whole half of the electorate can surely be extreme extremist- as long as it is demonstrably rightwing cruel, goons- on - streets model , war monger, never-accept- voting- results AND endless shameless demonstrably LIAR?
The Republican strategy is to help get Mamdani elected now so he fucks up New York City more than it is already fucked up so that it becomes great campaign fodder for the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.
That's a bit hallucinated. Money is on Cuomo's side. Trump tried consolidating the race for Cuomo and probably succeeded with Adams. Cuomo embraces Trump now.
Seems to me the problem here is that the article has too few dimensions, namely one. Let's try increasing that to two: Yes, the Rats should return to 'the center' but not all centers are the same. What we see in NY isn't a rejection of moderation and common sense, but of a corrupt establishment. If I were a Newyorker I'd be voting for this guy simply because he's young, energetic and seems to believe in something. Yes he's 'far left' but again we need more dimensions: The BLM/woke/SJW people are 'far left' but they have almost nothing in common with paleo socialism which was about worker solidarity, not about men in women's prisons. To the woke, race and gender are almost everything, to the paleo socialist they are distractions. The old Rats are an exhausted and corrupt relic, this guy has blood in his veins and I hope he wins and let's just see what he does. If it's a disaster then let's see the disaster unfold and learn from it. Trump and Mamdani have much in common -- both were looked to in desperation for real change. I'd take this guy over Hillary any day.
Let the MAGA Republicans make of Mamdani what they will, but has anyone ever said or even thought "As New York City goes, so goes the nation." Democrats must begin thinking of themselves and acting as if they represent the entire country even areas that are solidly red.
Fox News isn't talking to swing voters. And people who live in the New York-Wash corridor are way too interested in who's mayor of NYC, an office that is decidedly less national than even AOC's congressional seat. If you don't like Mamdani--or don't like being associated with him--start lavishing some of that attention on Democrats in jobs that might actually lead to the White House.
I feel like this article is almost self-parody. Not saying it is invalid to criticize Mandami’s position. But he has been able to go toe to toe with the folks on Fox News discussing these issues, and has demonstrated he listens even to those who don’t think like them (such his changing position on policing). He has been able to his messages across mainly because people feel he believes in something and not just doing “electoral tactics”.
The whole “the Democrats must pivot to the center” as a strategical and not an ideological or policy argument is part of the reason some people feel disconnected from Dems and tend to overvalue the “authenticity” of MAGAs.
If you think Mandami policies are wrong say it, we need more debate and discussion between the center and the left. I personally distrusts rent control and it only works as an “emergency button” while incentivizing more housing development. But reducing political positions to mere electoral strategy is the problem, not the solution.
I have same criticism. The author seems to say that MOST of the dems problem is messaging, not the message. As if they just need more influencers and social media likes. He claims Kamala losing was a vote against gerontocracy, forgetting that she was decades younger than Trump. What about policies? And dont underestimate the harm the covid over reach did to credibility. Including Cuomo who managed to both kill people by sending them to nursing homes AND support over reach, long school closures, long vaccine and mandates etc. He won an Emmy for his daily (!) covid performative press conferences, and now he cant win a primary against a socialist with no political experience.
1. You're way underestimating how charismatic Zohran is. For instance go watch his live-on-Fox apology to the NYPD (did you know he did that apology in the middle of the interview on Fox?)
2. You're ignoring that he's rapidly pivoted to moderate on every issue. Such as NYPD, which I know you know about from previous point. This invalidates at least one of, but not neither, of your criticisms about perception and governance. He's so damn charismatic as an un-politician that his base gives him a pretty long leash to redo his policies. Sound like any politician on the right you can think of?
3. You're ignoring he's penetrated into what should be Cuomo's base, for instance Jews who you think would be skeezed out by antisemitism but that's evidently not how many of them voted in the primary. I feel that should fuel into your thesis that all the Fox News viewers who are apparently voting for him think he's too extreme.
4. I thought you would at least bring up who the establishment ran against him, namely a corrupt sex criminal gerontocrat who spent his governor terms screwing over NYC at every step and has more or less kowtowed to Trump by now. You brought up Cuomo one time, for when he sort of landed a punch against Zohran during the debate. Zohran's best punch was probably "Cuomo just admit the state was screwing over the city. Who was leading the state???" Cuomo tried blaming his successor for screwing over NYC instead of saying anything remotely resembling "I was good for NYC."
5. You're advocating for moderate in the worst way possible -- like if R offer pizza and D offer burgers, you say why not put American cheese and ground beef on a pizza to appeal to everyone. Or better yet -- Trump was 78, Biden was 80. Was it really that hard to get a 79 year old to appeal to everyone?
6. The best way to be moderate is to absolutely incense the opposition by advocating for common sense. Let me annotate:
As you say Fox News is talking about: "And then there are the city-run grocery stores (the affordability crisis), the millionaires’ tax (the affordability crisis), the rent freezes (the affordability crisis), none of which he likely has the authority to enact but which so perfectly confirm every wild stereotype that every Fox News host has of what Democrats really want (a solution to the affordability crisis)."
Conversely, What exactly do you want Fox News attacking Democrats for besides their solution to the affordability crisis? Drag story hour? Like you really need to answer this if you're going to use that attack by Fox News as the centerpiece of your thesis. As far as I can tell you think Democrats need to move just right enough to start getting plaudits from Fox News.
7. Kinda telling your metaphor is "to use a smartphone" not "to use Tiktok." Like that attack would have made sense in 2010, back when we still called them smartphones and not just phones.
One Zohran ad on YT: "I'm going to say something a politician has never said to you before. (go on.) I don't want your money. (??)" then he explains he needs volunteers. Also literally that's just true. There's basically two people who can instantly reach me by text, my wife and every f*** Democrat running for office in the country.
The establishment thing to do would be to say -- look, some of our voters are [some euphemism for] broke-ass. We still need their money but we should lower the ask to $4.33 or some number like that." Zohran appalled the establishment by connecting with voters on affordability instead.
8. Of course the biggest way you personally are being a Democrat who never learns is you're mad at the establishment for failing to rig voter preferences out of the primary. In this telling, the problem isn't that we got Hillary instead of a real primary -- it's that the gerontocrat establishment class simply didn't hire the right consultants to tell them to not run Hillary.
9. Do you actually believe millionaires are going to flee NYC over a millionaires tax? Do you really think the world is a better place if no one in the world ever takes a stab at calling this bluff?
10. What risks do you think Democrats should take? You know what's weird, you literally should not nominate Democrats who are not a bad idea. The reason is you're losing. Good ideas are not enough. You need weird ideas that look bad and hope you get lucky.
And obviously you should be learning from his victory instead of hardening the establishment's defense. When will Democrats learn to even bother trying to learn?
I remember Tip O’Neil (House speaker in the 80s) saying “All politics is local,” but apparently now we’ve decided that all politics is national, thanks to social media and all kinds of people having strong opinions about local policy choices in states and cities that they’ve never set foot in. The fact is, this is a municipal election in New York City, not a meeting of the DNC. Mamdani is ahead because he is charismatic candidate who speaks to NYC voters and reflects their concerns (and incidentally has a deft touch with social media, one of the biggest deficits the national party is trying to deal with). Berating NYC voters for not triangulating their choices with a view to satisfying the presumed wishes of the national electorate is a ridiculous take, no less because it is so common. The notion that Mamdani is a “communist” or “loony left” as he is furiously backpedaling many of his past positions and doing all the right things to appeal to moderates shows great lack of awareness of where voters are at…we didn’t end up with Trump because Democrats were “communist,” but because Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan technocratic elite, obsessed with virtue signaling rather than being responsive to voters’ needs.
Almost all the comments thus far are stark evidence for the author's argument...
So the Dem voters should instead select an utterly corrupt Cuomo who also has not succeeded at anything?
I'm not a Mamdani supporter. That said, why are you letting Fox News of all people define things? If the voters of NYC didn't want Mandami, they would have voted for someone else.
And, frankly, the rent in NYC is too damn high for *everyone* but the very wealthy. You can literally be a Google engineer making a quarter of a million dollars a year and not be able to afford a house in a reasonable commute to work there. Not to mention a schoolteacher.
So of course a candidate who makes promises to ease burdens is going to win. It's the same thing literally that Trump promises the MAGAs (and doesn't deliver on either).
Mamdani is a mayor, not a national politician. He will answer to the whopping 2.5% of Americans who live in New York City and no one else. Are there no longer any local elections or issues? Why should this reflect on anyone outside New York City?
Part of the whole "abundance" thesis is voters across the country actually do look at NY and CA and ask themselves if they want those sorts of Democrats governing the whole country. And also just yes, literally people show NYC on TV around the country.
I get it. NY is a meme in our current political environment. I guess I would still push back on this. Cities in red states are on average much more crime ridden. NY is in fact safer than the entire country as a whole, including all rural and urban areas, judging by the murder rate.
That's not actually true, violent crime rate is about 2x in large versus small cities. Within the top 200 largest cities (so population down to ~130k), New York is in the top 1/3 most dangerous by violent crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate.
I think the fact you can't really build stuff in CA and NY is more substantive and an actual argument you should not elect D nationally. I also think a lot of woke social justice culture needed (and got) a loss at the ballot box and it's the same principle of not letting the nation be turned into the worst excesses of its most liberal states. So it's just the argument of "let liberal places do their liberal stuff" doesn't fly as much, with a more informed voter populace.
The biggest local distortion is that Cuomo basically hated NYC when he was governor of NY and I'm not sure if national bloggers really grasp how deep the hatred for him is. Like I'm surprised he did as well as he did but then when I see Jewish voters break for Zohran because they like, are worried about antisemitism but also remember how much Cuomo fucked the subways out of spite, I'm less surprised.
Fair enough, but as I said, the murder rate in NY is lower than the US average and is also well in the bottom half of that list.
Protecting single family zoning is more a red coded issue than blue coded. Trump decried the “war on suburbs.” Red state cities just tend to have a lot of land on which to keep building single family homes.
NY is in fact more built up than any other large US city per square mile, and is middle of the road (35 among 53 large metros) in the rankings of new housing being built as a percent of existing stock. It does not build as much as several Texas cities and Florida cities, but it does beat Miami, which is the densest Florida city, and which is the most New York-like city in Florida in that it does not have lot of room left to build out.
NY should not be confused with the Bay Area, which has well known zoning problems and is at the bottom of the list of housing construction rates, producing housing at only half the rate of New York. The biggest problem with housing supply in NY is not so much zoning or permitting as much as land availability and rent control (one of the issues Mamdani gets wrong)
https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-most-in-new-housing
But it is easy to find signs of disorder in NY as it is a famously gritty place.
Exactly correct on your analysis, voters have more trust in Republicans currently regarding immigration, crime, the economy and even somehow the issue of which party is more corrupt.
Have enough Democrats truly internalized why voters preferred Trump in 2024. Mandami leaning into socialism and trafficking in boutique social justice statements does not help the Democratic brand win nation wide elections.
Have YOU internalized why Democrats lost in 2024? Inflation is up there. Zohran talks about affordability constantly which I think is a bare minimum "Democratic brand" requirement now. (Contrast the shutdown which is "about healthcare subsidies" or something, it's hard to keep track.) I really don't think you're following this race if you think "boutique social justice statements" have come up more than zero times, it's basically Zohran talking about affordability and Cuomo talking about how he's more experienced.
Another issue is failing to pick a candidate via a primary, which led to a bad candidate and also some number of voters who felt the process was undemocratic (it was). This isn't even 2024, it's also 2016. Shouldn't the lesson be assuming voters know more than you, not trying to find a way to rig it more effectively next time.
If you want to come up with some non-socialist Zohran who is *as effective* at talking about affordability, go for it, but what the establishment actually came up with is a corrupt sex criminal who just talks about how great he is because he's experienced.
"Don't compare [Mamdani] to the Almighty, compare him to the alternative." And if they couldn't come up with a better alternative than Cuomo, maybe that's the bigger own goal.
So it is a truism that a whole half of the electorate can surely be extreme extremist- as long as it is demonstrably rightwing cruel, goons- on - streets model , war monger, never-accept- voting- results AND endless shameless demonstrably LIAR?
Really, we public are that dumb?
The Republican strategy is to help get Mamdani elected now so he fucks up New York City more than it is already fucked up so that it becomes great campaign fodder for the Republicans in 2026 and 2028.
That's a bit hallucinated. Money is on Cuomo's side. Trump tried consolidating the race for Cuomo and probably succeeded with Adams. Cuomo embraces Trump now.
Who the mayor of NYC is has literally zero relevance to defeating Trump
Some good comments below.
Seems to me the problem here is that the article has too few dimensions, namely one. Let's try increasing that to two: Yes, the Rats should return to 'the center' but not all centers are the same. What we see in NY isn't a rejection of moderation and common sense, but of a corrupt establishment. If I were a Newyorker I'd be voting for this guy simply because he's young, energetic and seems to believe in something. Yes he's 'far left' but again we need more dimensions: The BLM/woke/SJW people are 'far left' but they have almost nothing in common with paleo socialism which was about worker solidarity, not about men in women's prisons. To the woke, race and gender are almost everything, to the paleo socialist they are distractions. The old Rats are an exhausted and corrupt relic, this guy has blood in his veins and I hope he wins and let's just see what he does. If it's a disaster then let's see the disaster unfold and learn from it. Trump and Mamdani have much in common -- both were looked to in desperation for real change. I'd take this guy over Hillary any day.
Let the MAGA Republicans make of Mamdani what they will, but has anyone ever said or even thought "As New York City goes, so goes the nation." Democrats must begin thinking of themselves and acting as if they represent the entire country even areas that are solidly red.
Fox News isn't talking to swing voters. And people who live in the New York-Wash corridor are way too interested in who's mayor of NYC, an office that is decidedly less national than even AOC's congressional seat. If you don't like Mamdani--or don't like being associated with him--start lavishing some of that attention on Democrats in jobs that might actually lead to the White House.