Posted on 08/13/2025 6:21:59 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The mayoral candidate’s support comes from a young, mostly white, often childless, likely temporary population insulated from the consequences of the urban decline they’re about to cause.
There is a version of American liberalism that treats progress as a shared destiny, social improvement being the gradual and unstoppable realization of the popular hope for a better country and world. This was the rhetoric of the Obama era, a time when the arc of history was bending ever forward and when liberals saw their coming accomplishments as the just and natural fulfillment of past movements and ideas. Leaving aside Zohran Mamdani’s statement that the now widely reviled Bill de Blasio was the best New York City mayor of his lifetime, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Party mayoral candidate makes no claims to be completing something that somebody else began. Mamdani dreams of turning America’s capitalist engine into a national beacon of entitlement, a place where the authorities solve all major problems of body and spirit: “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few,” Mamdani said in his victory speech on June 24. “It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.”
Who doesn’t want “a life of dignity” guaranteed by City Hall? Reality isn’t so accommodating: Leftist experiments in American municipal governance have been a bloody and wasteful disappointment, swiftly earning the hatred of the people these projects claimed to have wanted to help. In San Francisco, progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin lost a 2022 recall election amid the city’s nationally embarrassing deterioration. By 2021, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the once-renowned progressive mayor of Atlanta, was too unpopular to run for reelection. In New York, the left-wing de Blasio, an admirer of the Sandinistas in his youth and probably beyond, struggled to break double digits in polls for a Park Slope congressional primary after two unpopular terms in Gracie Mansion.
However unpopular he may now be, de Blasio looks like a civic giant, the early-21st-century New York mayor likely to have the deepest and longest impact on the city. The charismatic inheritor of de Blasio’s unfinished and unloved ideological project, Mamdani wants a $30 minimum wage, which would strangle law-abiding businesses or drive service jobs into the selectively tolerated informal economy; an indefinite freeze on government-regulated apartment rents, which would further warp an already distorted and exorbitant housing market; a halt on hiring police officers and a focus on a new Department of Community Safety, an experiment that might jeopardize the city’s significant but fragile recent reductions in crime; and free bus service, which would deprive the Metropolitan Transit Authority of about a third of a billion dollars in annual revenue in order to turn the city’s transit fleet into a rolling homeless shelter.
These are not changes that a majority of New Yorkers seem to want. The most optimistic polls for Mamdani have him at about 40 percent support among registered voters, good enough for a commanding lead over a four-way field that includes disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, semi-disgraced current mayor Eric Adams, and 71-year-old paramilitary leader Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate. Even with this shambolic opposition, Mamdani is on pace to post the weakest showing for a Democratic mayoral nominee since Bill Thompson cracked 46 percent of the vote in his losing bid against Michael Bloomberg in 2009. It has been generations since a Democratic candidate for the city’s top office polled in the mid-30s, as Mamdani has in several post-primary surveys.
Mamdani’s soft numbers aren’t surprising: His campaign comes at a time when New York has moved steadily to the right. Elected Republicans now represent sections of Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island in the City Council, the State Assembly, or in Congress. Donald Trump went from roughly 19 percent of the vote citywide in 2016 to more than 30 percent in 2024. The single Manhattan precinct that Trump won in 2024 was in Chinatown, reflecting Asian American frustration at “equity”-driven attempts to gut merit-based programs in New York City public schools. Dozens of Jewish, Black, and Hispanic neighborhoods were more pro-Trump in 2024 than they had been four years earlier.
Mamdani should be beatable, even with a field divided between unattractive alternatives. Endorsees of the Democratic Socialists of America, the hard-left activist network that pushed Mamdani to victory in his 2021 campaign for a state assembly seat in Queens, hold two of the 51 seats on New York’s City Council, the most ideological of the elected bodies representing the Five Boroughs.
The triumph of a leftism with limited appeal in New York and poor results in the rest of the country increasingly seems inevitable in the New York City that Bill de Blasio built. Inchoate plans for multiple anti-Mamdani super PACs are currently so disorganized that the consultants involved are trashing each other in public: “The usual gaggle of members of the political industrial complex are going to grab as much cash as they can,” Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic political operative, told The New York Times. Centrist Democratic donors in finance and real estate are hesitant to oppose the new face of their party, out of fear of never again being invited to join a museum board or a gallerist dinner or of having their children targeted by private school teachers and administrators who are part of the rising Mamdani voter class. Mamdani has paid just enough lip service to the idea of government-mandated density and policies geared toward preferred private-sector clients—a mix of half-hearted or nonsensical proposals, aimed squarely at the scared and credulous, that commentators have dubbed “Halal-cart socialism”—to earn the non-opposition of the market-friendly right wing of Democratic-aligned domestic policy voices.
The city’s Jewish leaders are approaching Mamdani as if he were already in Gracie Mansion. “No one thinks it’s going to be good for the Jewish community to be hostile and to be in constant war with the next mayor,” one unnamed source told Jewish Insider in an article stacked with similarly cowering and pathetic quotes from activists and foundation officials who would rather not be named. “For the community’s sake, we have to move on.” Who cares if Mamdani remains incapable of condemning would-be globalizers of the “intifada” against Israeli Jews and their supporters, or that he’s spent his brief and unimpressive career in Albany on a quixotic mission to strip many of the state’s Jewish charities of their tax exemptions? The potential costs for these so-called communal organizations opposing a Democratic nominee who got a record 565,000 votes in a mayoral primary are too high, even with his polling average stuck in the high 30s and top Democratic Party leaders declining to endorse him.
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I hope he doesn’t win, but I think he will. I don’t think much of the average New York voter.
That great sucking sound you will be hearing is Wall Street and big banks moving their operations to Florida and Texas.
The decline started years ago when Democrats changed from a government that provides equal opportunity to improve one's lot to a government that guarantees equality of outcomes regardless of effort. History is strewn with the wreckage of such Social experiments and there is not a sane person with one neuron still firing who thinks NYC won't end up on the same ash heap.
It’s frustrating to think he might win the election with well under fifty percent of the vote.
But it’s quite possible that is what will happen.
People from the Northeast are moving to Florida in droves. Both of my neighbors moved here from Mass.
It’s amazing that New York has survived as a major metropolitan city this long. De Blasio should have been the wake-up call but just 4 years later and they’re already set to elect another grifter who will probably put the final nail in New York’s coffin.
And other red run states.
This is the end result when you allow parasites, with no skin in the game, to vote.
And bringing their failed left wing politics with them. Just because they failed in NY and CA doesn’t mean they won’t work in TX, NC, FL, IN, TN, etc.
Sounds like Mamdani can’t possibly be good for NYC, but who cares I guess. Let them find out the hard way.
Start building the fence around New York City. Call up Snake, and get ready.
Mamdani will be a disaster of epic proportions. Will NY’ers learn anything? They didn’t learn from DeBlasio….
Mamdani is no different from the current mayor's of Boston, Chicago or LA. Nobody is learning anything.
We don’t fall for that crap in TN
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