From a chronological standpoint
it makes sense why pundits look at the election of mayor of New York City as a
kind of bellwether for the country. It is one of the few major offices up for
election the first year after a Presidential one and it is one of the biggest
cities in the United States. From a political standpoint with each new cycle it
becomes more and more absurd.
It makes sense to look at the
gubernatorial and statewide elections of Virginia and New Jersey after an
election year but for the mayoral race of the biggest city in a state that
hasn't gone Republican since Reagan won reelection, it's absurd to try and take
the political temperature of the country. Those who look for it for
Presidential candidates have forgotten
no mayor of any city has eventually become President since Grover Cleveland in
1884. Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Bill De Blasio were never able to
win primaries of any kind and most had to drop out very quickly.
That's more understandable when
you consider with the sole exception of Bloomberg every mayor since David
Dinkins on has had his career clouded by either controversy, extra marital
affairs or corruption charges - and
usually some combination of the three – by the time their first year in office
is finished, And the idea that being mayor of what has been classified as 'the
Ungovernable City' is nearly impossible to do and emerge untouched by the time
you're running for reelection is why most of their careers are over by the time
their terms are up. Throw in the fact that there is for all intents and
purposes the Republican party is for all intents and purposes dead at a
statewide level and that every mayoral rate has low turnout both in the primary
and the general, trying to see this as tea leaves for the electorate at large
is absurd.
It makes a certain sense that,
particularly after last year's election, the Democrats would be looking for any
sign of leadership in their party. I can assure you the mayor's office is never
that place and no matter what the left is going to read into it, the results of
last night's primary are not the mandate for progressivism they want it to be.
I have no doubt they will argue the triumph of thirty-three year old
assemblyman Zohran Mandani as an argument of the victory of progressivism over
establishment candidates. That is true only by the narrowest interpretation,
and only if you ignore what the establishment in this race represented.
For starters there's the
incumbent. Eric Adams, in case you either don't live in New York or have been
distracted by other things, was one of the most corrupt mayors in history even
by the standard of New York politicians. By the fall of 2024, most of his
cabinet had already resigned and the Justice Department had indicted him. Adams
did not resign and they were making moves to impeach him.
Then after the election, for
reasons that even by the standard of our President are baffling, the Justice
department dropped all charges against Adams. The prosecutors ended up
resigning in protest. What exactly the quid pro quo is remains to be seen – it is
inconceivable for me there wasn't one. But Adams is no longer facing indictment
and is still mayor. His one realization to how the winds were against him was
that early in 2025 he announced he would not be running in the Democratic
primary but rather would run as an Independent.
Adams knew very well if he tried
to run as a Democrat he would lose and lose badly. The polls were already bad
for him before that. But in what is the tradition for New York politicians, he
refused to let such thing as a Justice Department investigation allow him to
end his political career.
New York City was facing an
incredible crisis that made you wonder how things could possibly get worse –
and then right on cue Andrew Cuomo decided to run for mayor.
It's not uncommon for disgraced
New York politicians to try and run for elected office after being forced to
resign: Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer both tried to do sue in the
2013 election. But the baggage Cuomo has would fill a Mack Truck even before
you consider the irony of a man who was forced to resign from the Governorship
because of a possible Justice department investigation trying to run to fill
the seat of the man who should have resigned because of an actual Justice
Department investigation. As I said in an article I wrote a couple of years
back about him:
I think Andrew, unlike his
father, had his eyes on the White House and had been biding his time. I think
his liberalism is not one out of belief but designed to appeal It helped matters the National Democratic
Party was gutted in 2010 and he was one of the few Democratic governors to win
election at all and held against it in 2014. I suspected he was going to run in 2016 but I wasn’t shocked. And I think
he was only progressive as far as it affected his national profile: he wanted
to have a good liberal record when he ran for President.
…It did not shock me to learn
that Cuomo refused to listen to state health officials (during the pandemic) and that so many
resigned. The confirmation came when we learned that during July and August
Cuomo was working on a book in which he proclaimed victory over the pandemic
that came out just a month before the 2020 election. The fact that he argued
New York had ‘confronted and defeated’ the virus, even though the state had the
highest per capita hospitalization rate in the country showed that everything
he had done was purely to promote his brand. He no doubt thought Trump was
going to win reelection and was setting himself up as the face of the
Democratic Party in 2024.
Of course by the end of 2020, all
of the horror stories about Andrew Cuomo as a sexual predator had come out. In
less than three months, eight women had come forward. Despite all of
allegations and the continuing investigation Cuomo refused to resign until the
possibility of criminal charges came. Yet even now there is no sign that he
intends to step back from public life…"
In many ways I think Cuomo is the
New York Democrat equivalent of Trump: everything he's achieved is because of who his
family was, he has no loyalty to anything except himself, he will manipulate
any situation or crisis to his own advantage. The difference is while Trump has
managed to win over a vast majority of the national electorate, Cuomo has only
grudgingly won that of New York's. And he is not worshipped, nor is he admired,
respected or even tolerated by that electorate during this period as governor. We
just figured we were stuck with him and we really wished he go away – something
that Cuomo does not seem willing to accept.
So in that context Mandani's win
last night was not so much compared to a move for progressive but the
Republican Presidential primary in 2016. Many voters were willing to accept
Trump because he was an unknown political quantity compared to his major
competition Ted Cruz, who even after four years was known. No one knows
anything about Mandani but they know Andrew Cuomo and they hate him.
That was clear with the electorate leading up to primary day.
I could not bring myself to vote
either man on my ranked choice ballot (I will get to that particular joy
in another article) and I'm not particularly looking forward to election day in
five months' time. What New Yorkers will face is fear of the unknown versus
fear of the known. Because even though Cuomo conceded before the ranked choice
voting confirmed Mandani was the winner, he has made it clear he might run as
an independent in a few months' time. Considering that Adams will be on the ballot
no matter what, for the first time in my lifetime the mayoral race is wide open.
It might even lead to an opportunity for Republican Curtis Silwa, another figurehead
from the 1990s who is basically what amounts to a major Republican in Manhattan.
He was their standard bearer in 2021 and was routed by Adams that time out, barely
able to get 25 percent of the vote. This time out, it may be enough to win.
And the fact that Mandani was
able to get 43 percent of the vote against Cuomo – who still got 36 percent of
the vote – speaks very much to the limit
of the progressive reach even in New York City. This is by far the lowest
winning percentage any Democrat for either state or city wide office has gotten
in a primary for a very long time.
It took 750,000 votes for Adams
to win in 2021. It remains to be seen if Mandani can get this many votes from
the Democratic establishment, particularly with Adams (and possibly Cuomo)
drawing votes away as an independent. He'll also have to win over the 21
percent of Democratic voters who didn't vote for either him or Cuomo.
And the fact is he is a far left candidate who could not receive the
endorsement of any major New York publication, TV station or political official
save for AOC. Is it possible they will unite around him in the months to come? That's
going to be asking a lot from a man who is one of the eight members of the
socialists in Office bloc. And nearly 361,840 people voted for Cuomo last
night. I can't imagine they would be willing to swallow Mamdani now and one
could see them voting for Cuomo as an independent.
It's very difficult to believe that a city and
state that is more conservative then it's perennial blue status on the map would
be willing to elect a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose
policies are considered 'magical realism. Add to this the fact that he is a
prominent supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in a state
with a sizable Jewish-American bloc -
and that he refused to sign the annual New York Assembly resolution celebrating
Israel's founding this past year isn't going to help him. Jamaal Bowman and
Cori Bush found out just how much those remarks came back to bite them last
year; it's impossible to imagine they won't do the same this year.
Nor is that his only problem: he
has also gone out of his way to make enemies of the MTA, supports a 2 percent
tax raise on those who earn more than a million dollars a year on city
residents and in a city where the police are revered has argued for defunding
them. He also argued to eliminate property tax exemptions for NYU and Columbia
and that's not going to help him with the academic version of the left. Mamdani
will have to move to the center just to win these people back – and moving to
the center is something progressives are famously opposed to doing.
And it is one thing to elect
someone in their 20s to Congress; to elect someone this inexperienced with this
radical a point of view even in one of the bluest cities in New York might be
too much for the democratic voters of New York to be willing to swallow. And we
can tolerate a lot in our mayors behavior. But those eccentricities are almost
always due to their personalities; their policies that's not the kind of thing
that wins in New York.
To be clear it is only June. Mamdani
will have five months to try and convince the electorate to vote for him. And
to do that, he'll have to win over the more conservative sections of Staten
Island, the Bronx and Queens where he lost horribly and much of Brooklyn. Being
the Democratic nominee for Mayor has guaranteed victory in three straight
elections. Mamdani won because he had no real baggage against an opponent who
had a truckload. The problem is he now has to go from being anti-establishment
to getting the establishment behind him. Considering who he is and all the
other factors, that's a very big if.
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