When people think of American commerce, they think of New York. And when people think of American Jewish culture, they also think of New York, which has the largest Jewish community of any city in the world outside of Israel. But if the polls are correct, New York may soon have a mayor who is an avowed Marxist and an antisemite. (And yes, I equate anti-Zionism directly with antisemitism.)
Tomorrow is voting day in the New York Democrat party mayoral primary. This matters because the greatest likelihood is that whoever wins the Democrat primary will be New York City’s next mayor. The chances of a Republican winning, after all, are slim.
Image by Bingjiefu He. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The two main Democrat candidates are Andrew Cuomo, about whom much is known: He was the fairly competent former governor of New York, whom liberty-minded people rightly despise because of his COVID policies, especially sticking COVID-infected patients into elder care facilities, infecting the most vulnerable, and causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. However, this doesn’t mean he gets a pass from the leftists, who were completely on board with his deadly policies. Leftists also despise Cuomo because he was accused of harassing women.
In sum, Cuomo is a morally reprehensible man viewed from either side of the aisle, but he’s also a functional executive.
And then there’s Zohran Mamdani, a Uganda-born, East Asian Indian Muslim, who is an open Marxist. If elected, he promises to implement a full roster of socialist-style policies, some of which are as follows:
In addition to his hardcore socialist ideas, Mamdani really hates the Jews. At college, he co-founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that envisions Israel’s overthrow, and he supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which has long sought Israel’s economic destruction. Mamdani has relentlessly campaigned against Israel’s well-being. Significantly, he’s also refused to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” an expression that inherently calls for America’s destruction.
Despite Mamdani’s radicalism, which sees him backing policies that have brought about the decline of cities across the world, and his fairly open antisemitism, he is currently on track to win in the New York Democrat primaries thanks to the craziness of ranked-choice voting (“RCV”). Under RCV, voters don’t vote for just one candidate, and the person with the most votes doesn’t necessarily win.
In an RCV system, voters rank all the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the first-rank votes, that candidate wins. However, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the first-rank votes, a complicated algorithm starts assigning points to the various candidates. If the most popular candidate didn’t also get ranked second or third, a less popular candidate who has lots of lower rankings can actually win.
And that’s how you end up with this poll:
Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor, according to a stunning new poll released Monday.
While Cuomo has a lead, albeit small, under a traditional system where the guy with the most votes wins, he doesn’t under the RCV system. That’s because Cuomo’s poll numbers don’t take him over the magic 50% mark:
But since no one garners the more than 50% of the vote needed to win outright, the ranked choice system kicks in. That means that even if a voter’s first choice is eliminated in successive rounds of calculations, their other picks could still be in the mix and emerge as the eventual overall winner.
Mamdani finally surpasses Cuomo in the eighth round of the simulated ranked choice voting — 51.8% to 48.2% — in the latest poll conducted June 18-20.
[snip]
“In the ranked-choice simulation, Mamdani gains 18 points compared to Cuomo’s 12, putting him ahead in the final round for the first time in an Emerson poll.”
In the last three mayoral elections, few New Yorkers bothered to show up. In 2013, only 13.4% bothered to vote. The numbers were better, although still pathetic, in 2017 (25.4%) and 2021 (23%). Very few people are deciding how New York City will be governed.
It’s to be hoped that in this Democrat primary, New York City’s few remaining sane Democrats get themselves to their local polling place and cast the vote for the sleazy old person killer, rather than the antisemitic Marxist. It’s a terrible Hobson’s choice, but New York City will definitely fare better under the former than the latter.