Liberalism can't be counted on to reform itself
The mainstream left's dangerous game in New York City
Whenever a party loses an election, there seems to be a moment of genuine reckoning and introspection. This happened with the Democrats after the November election. For a moment, they seemed to be asking genuinely what they could do better to appeal to working class voters or young men. Occasionally trolly right-wing posters like myself get brought on Ezra Klein to bring home the gravity of the Democrats’ loss of their formerly most reliable voters.
But all that introspection is now being thrown out the window. We are seeing it happen in real time in New York City.
The primary is shaping up as a showdown between the scandal-plagued former governor Andrew Cuomo, who started out the prohibitive frontrunner, and Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who wants to freeze rent, have the city own grocery stores, and who does not believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.
If Mamdani wins, the city would likely have as its next mayor someone who would be Chicago’s Brandon Johnson 2.0 at best, and who flirts with antisemitism at worst.
To say the least, Cuomo vs. Mamdani is not a great choice — for mainstream liberals or for the city as a whole.
But the same mainstream liberals who appeared to be genuinely curious about how they could shed the party’s far-left image are now universally lining up with Mamdani to stop Cuomo.
Sure, the city’s mainstream liberals may not be ranking him first. There are more thoughtful, sensible options they’re ranking higher, like council president Adrienne Adams, city controller Brad Lander, Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, YIMBYite Zellnor Myrie, or self-funder Whitney Tilson. But they are almost universally ranking Mamdani while not ranking Cuomo in New York’s ranked choice primary. In any head-to-head contest, that’s a vote for Mamdani just the same as if you were a die-hard DSA member who ranked him first.
Today, Mamdani gives one pro-housing answer — after being an arch-NIMBYite — and liberal influencers are falling over themselves to convince themselves he might not be so bad after all. All in the name of stopping Cuomo at all costs.
That last post comes from an analyst at the Niskanen Center, whose institutional viewpoint can be described as YIMBY/left-libertarian. And the view coming from Armlovich and other pro-housing, pro-market people like him is that it’s fine to rank someone who favors socializing large parts of the city’s economy. Wow.
Liberals in New York have long been distrustful of Cuomo, long before the sexual harassment scandal that forced him from office. He’s a safe, transactional politician and not a reformer.
But he’s also a proven vote-getter who the left-leaning media lionized as having the model response to the Covid pandemic and who they tirelessly defended even after his decision to send senior Covid patients to die in nursing homes. At the time, the left had no problem with defending the worst things about him.
New York State Democrats were also in far better shape when Cuomo was in office. After Kathy Hochul took over and the party lurched left, they nearly lost the governorship, Republicans picked up a bunch of Congressional seats, and Democrats saw a double digit drop in its margin in 2024.
Warts and all, Cuomo is not the absolute worst choice in the primary if you’re anywhere to the right of AOC. But Mamdani clearly is.
Can you imagine the field day us Republicans will have with Mamdani as mayor? All three of the country’s largest cities will be under the control of mayors who would be poster children of liberal incompetence, the far-left ideologues Johnson in Chicago and Mamdani in NYC, and Karen Bass in LA.
This would further reinforce a narrative of a party in the clutches of the radical left, and one that doesn’t care about repairing its image among working class voters of color. Indeed, the education and race breaks in the latest pro-Mamdani poll are striking: Mamdani leads among white voters by 61-39 and loses among Black voters 28-72 and Latino voters 45-55. New York’s poorest borough, The Bronx, goes for Cuomo 60-40. College-educated voters back Mamdani 64-36 while non-college voters break for Cuomo 65-35.
It is striking the degree to which the rich and well-educated in this scenario are voting to impose socialism on the poor who have no interest in it — luxury beliefs on full display. And the mainstream liberals who were so concerned about Democratic losses with these same voters after November are doing the exact same behavior that caused Trump’s victory to begin with, throwing in with the radical left for purely aesthetic reasons rather than back a conventional politician whose main base of support is in the Black community.
Beyond the optics of this, it’s clear that electing a leftist mayor would not end well for progressives. In Chicago, Brandon Johnson sits on a 7% approval rating. When New York City itself lurched left after the Bloomberg era, it elected Bill de Blasio, widely considered one of the city’s worst mayors. But Mamdani would be worse than that: his anti-Israel positions would allow him to be painted as a kind of David Duke of the left.