The whole world is looking at the victory of an avowed socialist in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary the other day with astonishment. Analysis abounds, most of it focusing on the social media/internet aspects of the Mamdani campaign. I think people are overthinking this, and I think the key to understanding lies in looking at Mamdani’s opponent.
Zohran Mamdani was an insurgent running against one of the oldest, most entrenched names in New York politics – Cuomo. In this case Andrew Cuomo, but let’s be honest, the name Cuomo has dominated New York politics and frankly media for most of my now rather long adult lifetime – perhaps with a small break during the Rudy Giuliani years in the 1990’s.
Yesterday, I wrote about California politics and quoted that rarest of things – a California Republican who said:
There’s two classes of Democrats in California,” he said. “There are the true believers who are just batshit crazy, and there are the transactional operators, who are simply corrupt and lack courage.
That’s actually true of Democrats everywhere, especially in the bluest of blue places like California and New York. The Cuomo’s are clearly part of the corrupt and cowardly crowd – and during their tenure atop the New York political mountain, NYC has been in decline. That decline has accelerated in recent years. Now, while New York does not look as awful as it did in the pre-Giuliani days (we have LA to serve as the biggest dump in the country right now) it is rapidly returning to that state, and people don’t like it.
The Cuomo’s have presided over that decline, all the while personally flourishing more and more. I think people would have voted for a gorilla before they would have voted for a Cuomo again. Combine that with the ever more astonishing revelations of the corruption that was the Biden regency, and people are going to be turned off by anything that even smells of more-of-same. Mamdani did not win, Cuomo lost – I don’t think it is any more complicated than that.
Will Mamdani lose the general election? Here’s hoping, but you cannot forget that the bat^%$# crazy crowd is significant in New York City. What is clear is that the politics-as-usual that Democrats have been running for several decades now is over – dead – kaput – pushing up daisies.
The only question is, will Democrats figure it out?
