It’s Official: Mamdani Defeats Cuomo
Three lies the election shattered (I believed them)
Zohran Mamdani’s shock victory explodes three of the conventional tenets of politics: that money decides, that young people don’t vote, and there are some things you just cannot say in America.
The official data, released today, shows Mamdani winning by more than 10 points(!) And yet the Empire is still fighting to ensure he doesn’t become the next mayor of New York City.
In a paragraph, let’s review: A machine politician, former governor and scion of a political dynasty lost to a 33-year-old Muslim, immigrant, and socialist who is unapologetically critical of Israel. The political ruling class and the news media assumed Andrew Cuomo, but more than that, they dismissed the people’s choice, assembling their pipe dream on the it’s-the-party-elder’s-turn proposition.
I didn’t expect Mamdani to win. I thought the Party machinery was unbeatable. I was wrong. I’ve learned some mind-bending lessons.
Money Doesn’t Decide.
Wall Street and the rich don’t run the show, and don’t get to determine who will lead the people.
While both candidates were able to raise the maximum $8 million in campaign contributions from individuals (Mamdani through small-dollar donations), Cuomo had the advantage of $25 million in Super PAC spending, the largest ever bankroll in a non-national race. Some $8.3 million of that funding came from billionaire and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the grand duke of the countless Democratic Party bigwigs who ponied up to control New York.
A lot of good that war chest did him!
Young People Do Vote
The numbers are stark, as the following chart shows: When young people turn out, they have power. Younger voters cast ballots in massive numbers, not only boosting Mamdani to victory but also upending the standard assumption of who votes.
I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is unprecedented — as though this was all some freak accident — but that isn’t true. The same thing happened when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, propelled to the White House by an upheaval of youth voter turnout.
So, young people can vote at the same rates as older voters, or even higher. And when they do, their candidates win.
Saying Controversial Things is Okay
Israel has long been regarded as a “third rail” in politics, a radioactive issue that dooms anyone who has an unsanctioned opinion. Nowhere in America would this seem to apply more than New York, home to the largest Jewish population of anywhere outside of Israel.
“I believe Israel has a right to exist and it has a right to exist also with equal rights for all,” Mamdani said during the debate in a remark widely regarded by the expert class as a death warrant. Mamdani’s view of Israel, and his support for the Palestinian people, led the big brains of the status quo to insist he wasn’t viable.
They were only off by a factor of a landslide!
Since the primary, the political ruling class has been relentless in trying to trap Mamdani. When asked three separate times on Meet The Press this week to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” Mamdani wouldn’t take the bait. (“Intifada” is Arabic for “uprising,” a term opponents say is intrinsically violent but supporters say is nonviolent.)
Mamdani pointed out that he doesn’t use the phrase, but also acknowledged that many of his supporters do. Instead of backtracking on his opposition to the war in Gaza, or uttering some mealy mouthed on-the-one-hand-this-and-the-other-that, he merely said he understood why others felt as they did. In other words, he didn’t condemn his own supporters for the sake of grabbing some piece of the center.
Similarly, Mamdani is an unapologetic “democratic socialist” and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Wall Street” has predictably freaked out over his win, and commentators are saying that billionaires will flee the city if additional taxes are levied and how unrealistic his ideas are.
When following the election, CNN asked Mamdani if he likes capitalism, he told the truth, saying simply: “No. I have many critiques of capitalism.”
In the hysterical world of social media, and judging from the right wing attacks on Mamdani, that is tantamount to saying he’s a communist. On the surface, and to the political establishment, it seems disqualifying — except that the voters intuitively understand the difference between economy and affordability. One is the world of the stock market and capital where the one percent flourishes. The other is housing and health care, and prospects for a secure future.
Cuomo isn’t the only one who lost bigly: the pollsters did, too. It’s a lesson that we already knew, but one that needs repeating. Elections pollsters and political consultants are frauds. Every major pollster, from Marist to Emerson, anticipated a Cuomo victory and often by a wide margin.
“They were straight up bad,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson observed, adding: “missing the first round by 20 points? Something is wrong.”
Nonetheless, polling also was functioning as it’s intended, to find the issues that appeal the most to guide the dishonest and disingenuous to victory.
“Polling is propaganda,” a campaign staffer once told me. As he saw it, polling is a tool to shape the impression of a candidate’s inevitability. It is not some kind of probabilistic weather forecast as they’re often presented.
He was being a little hyperbolic, but his basic point — that polls are often used to shape public perception of which campaigns are viable and which aren’t — is correct. It’s circular. It identifies where the voter is, guides the candidate to be where the voter is, and then gives the impression to the voter of who is the right candidate. That is, if you pay attention to polls.
Polling also has a more fundamental defect: it assumes a baseline of what’s happened before. But sometimes something novel comes along — someone who tells the truth about what they believe on hot-button issues like Israel, for example — and there’s no baseline. Put simply, just because something hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t.
As a result, surprising things can happen.
As Mandani said in his victory speech, “Everything is impossible until it is done.”
Mamdani is that rare politician who is honest about who he is. You might not agree with him on everything, but he’s not censoring himself in order to get votes.
Mamdani’s message of creating affordability in America’s most expensive city was what swept him to victory, but if we adhered to the truisms of modern politics, everything else he said should have led to his defeat.
Some of Mamdani’s positions are surely unpopular with various groups of voters, but not as unpopular as pretending to be something you’re not. What the election showed is that voters, contrary to mainstream depictions of them as ideologues, reward honesty and are willing to support someone who they might not agree with on everything.
The Empire is fighting back. The news media can’t help but focus on Israel and experience and what’s doable (according to them). Cuomo is contemplating running, as is Mayor Eric Adams, and there is a Republican, and there will be others.
Meanwhile, members of Mamdani’s own party have smeared him as antisemitic.
"I don't associate myself with what he has said about the Jewish people,” Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell told CNN, without offering any specifics.
Party leaders from Chuck Schumer to Hakeem Jeffries have also declined to endorse him, along with the following members of Congress representing New York:
Governor Kathy Hochul
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
Congressman Gregory Meeks
Congressman Ritchie Torres
Congresswoman Laura Gillen
CongressmanTom Suozzi
Congressman Dan Goldman
Congressman George Latimer
Congressman Adriano Espaillat
Congresswoman Grace Meng
The final lesson I draw is that the Empire is like the national security state that we spend so much time covering in this newsletter. “They” decide what is good for America. They work behind the scenes to undermine elected authority. They raise the prospects of the apocalypse if anything changes. They stifle change. They promote a future in which they are always likely to prosper.
But they aren’t invincible, as Mamdani’s victory makes clear.
Correction: NYT corrected its chart of voter turnout, which we’ve updated to reflect.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Mamdani’s victory is important for many reasons, including its reflection of the viability of socialist politics and policy prescriptions. One overlooked facet of his campaign that it should make inescapably clear is the relentless willingness of Democrats to smear candidates of color and those from the very same minority communities that the party disingenuously claims to defend. Democrats are no less racist than Republicans, just less willing to be overt about their biases. I’ve written at some length about this pattern in the past, particularly responding to reporting by Ryan Grim at The Intercept. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/democrats-vs-democracy
Democratic Establishment prior to Mamdani’s victory: “We need a bigger tent, and we need to appeal to young voters.”
Democratic Establishment after Mamdani’s victory: “Not a tent this big, and young voters don’t know what they’re talking about.”