I will try to keep this very short and simple. New York City Democratic primary was a one off. The rank choice voting was manipulated. The hot weather kept a lot of elderly people from the polls. Now this may be silly excuses. But the real deal is New York City is a center of democrat so called progressive issue and identity politics voters. Then you have all the so-called underserved who will vote for anything that gives them more stuff for free or subsidized. None of this will play out nationally and international Democrats will pay a huge price in the 2026 midterms when this communist in New York City becomes mayor. What I can’t understand yet I really should understand it is why so many Jews in New York City, supported the antisemitic communist.
Many others have been saying the same thing, before the election even, before the 2020 election even. The D party has many objectives besides getting elected, and that's a big part of the problem. Getting elected necessitates moderation and reality.
Zohran Mamdani won, he was elected. That's how we do things here, we vote. I'll just wait and see. People got all upset over Trump too, turns out Trump didn't turn America into a Nazi concentration camp. Mamdani might not make NYC into a Stalinist Gulag.
About economic populism though. I sure haven't seen any from my party in the last election, not for anything resembling the lower 4/5ths of the electorate. I'm not sure tax breaks and Teslas for the 10% qualify. If anything the Harris campaign was corporate Democrats. Notice Mamdani has the support of Lina Khan?
Mamdani has said some things I don't like at all, he's young. It would be very easy to ditch his more radical side, they've nowhere else to go, and are most likely to turn on him anyway. More recently he got the support of Orthodox Jews in NYC. who knows, maybe he'll gain the support of the police too, and crack down on crime. As with Trump, I'll wait and see.
There will be checks and balances on the new mayor. He still needs to get a majority from the City Council for his policy initiatives. New York Governor Kathy Hochul still has control over major assets like the MTA which need an infusion of cash to get more riders.
“But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged, especially by its cultural radicalism. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats like Rupert, Mamdani and the party’s legions of inclusive populists who don’t want to make hard choices.”
*Don’t want to make hard choices.* That is *the* test for true political leadership, for any politician or party, and it is profoundly true for the Democrats here.
Mamdani's candidacy is not the last best hope of either New York City or the Democratic Party, but more likely the final cynical and clueless nail in the coffin of a long-declining both.
The best hope now at least for the national Democratic Party may be that Mamdani wins the New York mayor's race and, in trying to force his looney and historically failed economic populism/socialism on New Yorkers, fails so decisively that the political aftershocks at last moves national Democrats back to a more sensible middle.
Exactly my sentiment. Let Momdami win and bring it on. If he can succeed with his policies and bring any positive changes, or if he wins and his policies fail to bring any positive changes, then the Dems will know what way to go.
One nit to pick. . . Ruy mentions the top 3 issues of swing voters who switched to Trump according to polling were all involving immigration, which I would argue is an economic issue, and a big one not a cultural issue at all. Hispanic immigrants feel downward pressure on wages from more recent, and often illegal immigrants, as much or more so than native born Americans.
Corporate or Sanders type populists both, no Dem can mention the most pressing issue by far for the working class. People from Mexico might speak a different language, eat different food, listen to different music, and look on many cultural issues differently, but it's impossible to dislike the people you work beside for twenty years and with whom your sons and daughters intermarry. The working class is not anti Hispanic, they are anti importing workers to drive down wages.
Immigration of low wage (not necessarily low skilled) workers is the number one economic issue, and Trump addresses it. Ham handedly, often harshly, but at least he is dealing with it. In NYC there was a backlash against faux asylum seekers being put up in hotels and given money. We'll see how it settles out.
The Democratic Party will not win back working class voters until it confronts Pride and tells them to a) get a room, and b) keep your hands off the kids.
Why would you think "it won't get past NYC?" It's already THERE. Chicago (Benghazi-by-the-Lake) is a hellhole, as is LA, SF, and Seattle. Denver isn't far behind. There can be no "good management" of cities or states when the underlying philosophies are socialistm, antisemitism, pro-illegal immigration, and wokeism. ALL of these combine to prevent ANY decent city management. You simply cannot have functioning government with any of these, let alone all.
Hence, the generic ballot this week was a shocking GOP +8 (a number I have never seen in my entire career or watching politics); Kollyfornia, in the Judicial Watch suit, is now having to scrub MILLIONS off its voter list---Shilow Marx on X has shown that nearly 1 m are already gone without Los Angeles Co. weighing in. That will by itself mean about 500,000 Democrats will fall off the voter lists there, along with perhaps 300,000 Rs and 200,000 Is. But the net gain again is in the R direction.
In short, until the fundamental root-cause problems were dealt with, the face of the Party will be Momdami, not someone else.
I hope Mamdani helps MAGA and the MAGA-adjacent understand why Trump’s current methods of governance should horrify them.
Imagine in 2028 a severely deteriorating economy allows a particularly mendacious, digitally fluent DSA upstart to win the presidency. In the first 100 days of his term hundreds of executive orders go out, declaring the federal government must act on every DSA initiative. Healthcare is nationalized; ‘national grocery stores’ immediately begin to be constructed in every municipality and county—etc. An advisory board called ‘DOGS’(Department of Government Services), which isn’t really a department, begins to act like one anyway and starts diverting money from the treasury to massively expand the Federal Workforce to carry out these initiatives.
All of it is dubiously legal, but by the time the matter of any given order’s legality gets through the courts, the government is already well into the process of carrying it out. The judges who issue injunctions to stop this process are decried as ‘obstructionists’, and the president walks the line of directly disobeying them. (And there is talk of packing the Supreme Court)
Conservatives in several cities protest all this; in response to these protests, the new president sends in the military to ‘protect government property’ owing to rumors of “disruption to public order”, and marines are soon marching through the streets of conservative neighborhoods and towns, as the government sets up surveillance systems there to “aid the troops in their duty”. The president also calls on his party, the military, the DOJ and local law enforcement to target these cities and towns legally and financially, because they are the ‘power center of the enemy.’
Government critics are doxxed and harassed and in many cases physically attacked by left-wing radicals; when they are convicted in the courts, they are immediately pardoned. And these include critics of the new president’s oft-repeated statement that “I can only lose in 2032 if Republicans cheat, and I won’t accept any outcome that is the result of cheating.”
These are the precedents Trump is setting. They are very bad precedents and MAGA-world should be against them—and the speculative future of a President Mamdani/AOC/etc. should instruct them as to why. Sure, it could “never happen”. But that’s what they said about Trump too, isn’t it?
Well I would never vote for Socialism, however I give Mr Mamdani credit for being upfront with his positions , and he ran a very good campaign against a flawed candidate. I guess it could work if the rich people don’t leave and are willing to pay even more in taxes. But the thing is would it ever be enough? And as the saying goes … with Socialism you eventually run out of other people’s money. But the beauty of America is that each state or city can be its own experiment … so good luck to NYC. But for the country as a whole I would be a hard no
Democrats in blue states should consider adopting ranked choice voting for candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for President. This reform could potentially create a more open field and a more consensus candidate.
Ranked choice resulted in a moderate, Daniel Lurie, being elected Mayor of San Francisco. One of his goals is to create affordable housing. He plans to lower the requirements for affordable housing to allow builders to either finish new projects. He also plans to use bonds to put towards housing so that public workers will be able to afford to live in the city where they work. Build, baby, build.
Thanks Ruy. Great piece. We can only hope for the Democrat Party. If Momdami could win the mayoral race and have any of his policies show positive changes and not bring more chaos, then maybe that would be enough for the rest of America to begin to TRUST the Democrat Party. I am an unaffiliated voter who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times and can only hope the Democrat Party can gain some traction somewhere to be able to offset the one party rule that is forming.
Why are leftists always held to a higher standard than MAGAts. Yes, rent-control freeze , free buses and city groceries are probably not realistic, but then again, neither are tariff wars with the rest of the world or solving the Russia/Ukraine war on day one. Hopefully Lander will run NYC with Mamdani serving as inspirational leader
Josh Barro’s comment Ruy included kind of nails it. Barro could have been describing L.A. or Chicago. I’d like to hear from a progressive Democrat about this. Why are Democrats so bad at running America’s big cities? I think of very capable Democrats like Truman, JFK, Pat Brown, Tip O’Neill… you get the idea. Democrats can be as ideological as they want, but they gave to be able to govern. What has changed? Can Democrats govern efficiently?
Big cities are inherently a mess. Except for a brief period of 1880 to 2000, they have never been able to sustain themselves demographically without mass levies from the countryside. These days, the countryside is the 3rd World. That and young people who are attracted by the sexual theme park. It is the misfortune of the Democrats to govern all of them even as they exploit the electoral advantage.
Many foreign big cities do just fine. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Stockholm, Singapore, Seoul, Copenhagen. Is the inability to manage big cities a Democrat issue or an American issue?
But not in UK, France or Germany. Italy is a bit better. I would expect the rest of Western cities to unravel. Asian society is very different so maybe not them.
It would be interesting to explore the commonalities among the Cities that are widely considered to be well-governed. In the U.S., that would be a short conversation.
Trump calls Mamdani a communist lunatic. Bernie calls him the future of the Democratic Party. These are not mutually exclusive.
I will try to keep this very short and simple. New York City Democratic primary was a one off. The rank choice voting was manipulated. The hot weather kept a lot of elderly people from the polls. Now this may be silly excuses. But the real deal is New York City is a center of democrat so called progressive issue and identity politics voters. Then you have all the so-called underserved who will vote for anything that gives them more stuff for free or subsidized. None of this will play out nationally and international Democrats will pay a huge price in the 2026 midterms when this communist in New York City becomes mayor. What I can’t understand yet I really should understand it is why so many Jews in New York City, supported the antisemitic communist.
To your point, Bob, I read that only 8% of registered voters supported Mandami.
Please expand on this
I don't remember the source, some New York publication (New Yorker online?), but that's what they said, and very low turnout overall.
Ruy - when are you just going to give up on the Democrat party?
Ruy must not give up! He is a voice for the protection against one party rule. More Democrats need to hear him, and fast!
He's been preaching for over a year (that I know of). No one is listening apparently.
1 in 75 million. There's still a chance
Many others have been saying the same thing, before the election even, before the 2020 election even. The D party has many objectives besides getting elected, and that's a big part of the problem. Getting elected necessitates moderation and reality.
I don't see any signs of moderation, if anything they're going further left.
Or at least tell us the name of one Liberal Patriot that is running for office in 2025 or 2026.
Sadly his posts just confirm my belief that I will never return to the Democratic party. Independent voter for life it seems.
Wish we had decent choices tho....
Zohran Mamdani won, he was elected. That's how we do things here, we vote. I'll just wait and see. People got all upset over Trump too, turns out Trump didn't turn America into a Nazi concentration camp. Mamdani might not make NYC into a Stalinist Gulag.
About economic populism though. I sure haven't seen any from my party in the last election, not for anything resembling the lower 4/5ths of the electorate. I'm not sure tax breaks and Teslas for the 10% qualify. If anything the Harris campaign was corporate Democrats. Notice Mamdani has the support of Lina Khan?
Mamdani has said some things I don't like at all, he's young. It would be very easy to ditch his more radical side, they've nowhere else to go, and are most likely to turn on him anyway. More recently he got the support of Orthodox Jews in NYC. who knows, maybe he'll gain the support of the police too, and crack down on crime. As with Trump, I'll wait and see.
There will be checks and balances on the new mayor. He still needs to get a majority from the City Council for his policy initiatives. New York Governor Kathy Hochul still has control over major assets like the MTA which need an infusion of cash to get more riders.
Always a good idea to wait.
No choice. Deportation looks to be off the table.
Crime in NYC ( and the rest of the US for that matter) is at historic lows . Can we all agree on that?
“But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged, especially by its cultural radicalism. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats like Rupert, Mamdani and the party’s legions of inclusive populists who don’t want to make hard choices.”
*Don’t want to make hard choices.* That is *the* test for true political leadership, for any politician or party, and it is profoundly true for the Democrats here.
Thank you Ruy Teixeira.
Mamdani's candidacy is not the last best hope of either New York City or the Democratic Party, but more likely the final cynical and clueless nail in the coffin of a long-declining both.
The best hope now at least for the national Democratic Party may be that Mamdani wins the New York mayor's race and, in trying to force his looney and historically failed economic populism/socialism on New Yorkers, fails so decisively that the political aftershocks at last moves national Democrats back to a more sensible middle.
.
Exactly my sentiment. Let Momdami win and bring it on. If he can succeed with his policies and bring any positive changes, or if he wins and his policies fail to bring any positive changes, then the Dems will know what way to go.
One nit to pick. . . Ruy mentions the top 3 issues of swing voters who switched to Trump according to polling were all involving immigration, which I would argue is an economic issue, and a big one not a cultural issue at all. Hispanic immigrants feel downward pressure on wages from more recent, and often illegal immigrants, as much or more so than native born Americans.
Corporate or Sanders type populists both, no Dem can mention the most pressing issue by far for the working class. People from Mexico might speak a different language, eat different food, listen to different music, and look on many cultural issues differently, but it's impossible to dislike the people you work beside for twenty years and with whom your sons and daughters intermarry. The working class is not anti Hispanic, they are anti importing workers to drive down wages.
Immigration of low wage (not necessarily low skilled) workers is the number one economic issue, and Trump addresses it. Ham handedly, often harshly, but at least he is dealing with it. In NYC there was a backlash against faux asylum seekers being put up in hotels and given money. We'll see how it settles out.
The Democratic Party will not win back working class voters until it confronts Pride and tells them to a) get a room, and b) keep your hands off the kids.
Why would you think "it won't get past NYC?" It's already THERE. Chicago (Benghazi-by-the-Lake) is a hellhole, as is LA, SF, and Seattle. Denver isn't far behind. There can be no "good management" of cities or states when the underlying philosophies are socialistm, antisemitism, pro-illegal immigration, and wokeism. ALL of these combine to prevent ANY decent city management. You simply cannot have functioning government with any of these, let alone all.
Hence, the generic ballot this week was a shocking GOP +8 (a number I have never seen in my entire career or watching politics); Kollyfornia, in the Judicial Watch suit, is now having to scrub MILLIONS off its voter list---Shilow Marx on X has shown that nearly 1 m are already gone without Los Angeles Co. weighing in. That will by itself mean about 500,000 Democrats will fall off the voter lists there, along with perhaps 300,000 Rs and 200,000 Is. But the net gain again is in the R direction.
In short, until the fundamental root-cause problems were dealt with, the face of the Party will be Momdami, not someone else.
I hope Mamdani helps MAGA and the MAGA-adjacent understand why Trump’s current methods of governance should horrify them.
Imagine in 2028 a severely deteriorating economy allows a particularly mendacious, digitally fluent DSA upstart to win the presidency. In the first 100 days of his term hundreds of executive orders go out, declaring the federal government must act on every DSA initiative. Healthcare is nationalized; ‘national grocery stores’ immediately begin to be constructed in every municipality and county—etc. An advisory board called ‘DOGS’(Department of Government Services), which isn’t really a department, begins to act like one anyway and starts diverting money from the treasury to massively expand the Federal Workforce to carry out these initiatives.
All of it is dubiously legal, but by the time the matter of any given order’s legality gets through the courts, the government is already well into the process of carrying it out. The judges who issue injunctions to stop this process are decried as ‘obstructionists’, and the president walks the line of directly disobeying them. (And there is talk of packing the Supreme Court)
Conservatives in several cities protest all this; in response to these protests, the new president sends in the military to ‘protect government property’ owing to rumors of “disruption to public order”, and marines are soon marching through the streets of conservative neighborhoods and towns, as the government sets up surveillance systems there to “aid the troops in their duty”. The president also calls on his party, the military, the DOJ and local law enforcement to target these cities and towns legally and financially, because they are the ‘power center of the enemy.’
Government critics are doxxed and harassed and in many cases physically attacked by left-wing radicals; when they are convicted in the courts, they are immediately pardoned. And these include critics of the new president’s oft-repeated statement that “I can only lose in 2032 if Republicans cheat, and I won’t accept any outcome that is the result of cheating.”
These are the precedents Trump is setting. They are very bad precedents and MAGA-world should be against them—and the speculative future of a President Mamdani/AOC/etc. should instruct them as to why. Sure, it could “never happen”. But that’s what they said about Trump too, isn’t it?
Well I would never vote for Socialism, however I give Mr Mamdani credit for being upfront with his positions , and he ran a very good campaign against a flawed candidate. I guess it could work if the rich people don’t leave and are willing to pay even more in taxes. But the thing is would it ever be enough? And as the saying goes … with Socialism you eventually run out of other people’s money. But the beauty of America is that each state or city can be its own experiment … so good luck to NYC. But for the country as a whole I would be a hard no
Democrats in blue states should consider adopting ranked choice voting for candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for President. This reform could potentially create a more open field and a more consensus candidate.
Rank choice voting is a scam.
Ranked choice resulted in a moderate, Daniel Lurie, being elected Mayor of San Francisco. One of his goals is to create affordable housing. He plans to lower the requirements for affordable housing to allow builders to either finish new projects. He also plans to use bonds to put towards housing so that public workers will be able to afford to live in the city where they work. Build, baby, build.
It does seem that San Francisco has really begun to pivot. If you knew the City before and now, you’d know why. Maybe NYC will do the same.
Thanks Ruy. Great piece. We can only hope for the Democrat Party. If Momdami could win the mayoral race and have any of his policies show positive changes and not bring more chaos, then maybe that would be enough for the rest of America to begin to TRUST the Democrat Party. I am an unaffiliated voter who voted for Obama twice and Trump 3 times and can only hope the Democrat Party can gain some traction somewhere to be able to offset the one party rule that is forming.
Why are leftists always held to a higher standard than MAGAts. Yes, rent-control freeze , free buses and city groceries are probably not realistic, but then again, neither are tariff wars with the rest of the world or solving the Russia/Ukraine war on day one. Hopefully Lander will run NYC with Mamdani serving as inspirational leader
Josh Barro’s comment Ruy included kind of nails it. Barro could have been describing L.A. or Chicago. I’d like to hear from a progressive Democrat about this. Why are Democrats so bad at running America’s big cities? I think of very capable Democrats like Truman, JFK, Pat Brown, Tip O’Neill… you get the idea. Democrats can be as ideological as they want, but they gave to be able to govern. What has changed? Can Democrats govern efficiently?
Big cities are inherently a mess. Except for a brief period of 1880 to 2000, they have never been able to sustain themselves demographically without mass levies from the countryside. These days, the countryside is the 3rd World. That and young people who are attracted by the sexual theme park. It is the misfortune of the Democrats to govern all of them even as they exploit the electoral advantage.
To your point, apparently Democrats govern 27 or 28 of the country's largest cities (https://www.worldpress.org/article.cfm/mayors-of-the-30-largest-cities-in-the-united-states). Exceptions are Ft Worth and Oklahoma City, which you don't hear much about.
Many foreign big cities do just fine. I'm thinking of Tokyo, Stockholm, Singapore, Seoul, Copenhagen. Is the inability to manage big cities a Democrat issue or an American issue?
But not in UK, France or Germany. Italy is a bit better. I would expect the rest of Western cities to unravel. Asian society is very different so maybe not them.
It would be interesting to explore the commonalities among the Cities that are widely considered to be well-governed. In the U.S., that would be a short conversation.
I maintain that the problem is neither Democrats nor Americans but cities
You may be right. I’m not a fan of cities. If you went to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Tokyo or Singapore, though, you might feel differently.