There is surely a long list of candidates for the title of worst election in American history, but Tuesday night’s mayoral race in New York City would have to merit notice.
In terms of sheer destructive capability, Zohran Mamdani’s seven-point trouncing of Andrew Cuomo in the Democrat primary might put it fairly high on that list.
New York has had three straight calamitous mayoral terms. The eight years of Bill DeBlasio’s misrule represented self-imposed calamity, but the current term of the incumbent Eric Adams is mostly (though surely not all) a calamity inflicted from Washington, D.C, where the Corporate Joe Biden inundated the mayor with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, swamping public services, housing and other civic goods and effectively turning the city into a refugee camp.
And when Adams became cheeky over the imposition, the Corporate Joe Biden indicted him for conduct which turns out to be far less criminal than the various members of the Corporate Joe Biden were engaged in on a common basis.
Not to mention that the Corporate Joe Biden ran Adams out of the Democrat Party. The incumbent awaits a general election matchup this fall, making the race as an independent.
But New York is a Democrat town, and anyone running against the Democrat nominee is a decided underdog.
That shouldn’t be the case this time. It really shouldn’t. This election ought to be different from the norm. Because if it isn’t, a Mamdani administration will turn New York City into Persepolis, or Cahokia, or Carthage – more of an archeological site than a functioning city.
In the past, a city reduced to ruins was typically made that way due to a siege by marauding foreigners. One might argue that’s happening to New York today, but not quite in the usual manner.
Take Mamdani, an Indian Muslim who came to America by way of Uganda and whose family comes from showbiz. If that sounds to you like central casting signed him up to star in the Obama remake nobody wanted, you aren’t alone.
Except Mamdani’s platform and visible political activity makes him less an Obama remake than a Bollywood version of the November Revolution. There isn’t a box on the radical communist activity and policy checklist he doesn’t mark with his DSA-issued sharpie pen.
If you want a playbook for destroying a city, it’s hard to find one more comprehensive than Mamdani’s platform. He’s openly advertising that he’ll do for the Big Apple what Bane did for Gotham; only Mamdani’s methods of preventing outmigration are unlikely to be as thorough or efficient as the comic book villain’s were.
It won’t be long before the criminals and the huddled masses in line for stale bread and rotten fish at Mamdani’s Soviet-style bodegas will be all that’s left. Even Cynthia Nixon is sure to curb her enthusiasm.
I wonder if Cynthia will stand in line outside the empty government grocery stores for stale bread and rotten fish.
Probably not, right? https://t.co/wwYd4dFoof
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) June 25, 2025
Snake Plissken, call your office.
This was predictable, you know. The Democrats represent the politics of the blue cities, and New York is as much the epitome of a blue city as there is. DeBlasio’s reign of terror there didn’t even make a dent in the ardor of the radical left in that town, though Adams did run and win as a moderate.
But that was an anomaly, and the Left set about torching Adams’ mayorship from the beginning.
It turns out that it’s the Cynthia Nixons of the world who actually run New York, much to Cuomo’s chagrin. This race was to mark the beginning of his glorious political comeback — made necessary not because of the 15,000 senior citizens he killed by embedding COVID patients in nursing homes but because he hit on a staffer. Instead, he found himself on the wrong side of a beatdown by a 33-year-old pro-Hamas protester and Tesla vandal who says things like “Queer liberation means defund the police” and “Globalize the intifada.”
Exit polls Tuesday showed Cuomo winning by sizable margins with blacks and Hispanics. Mamdani whipped him among white voters by a 36-25 margin.
When he offers free hijabs to Cynthia Nixon and her friends with the strong suggestion they put them on, your relatives in Florida and South Carolina will soon begin to complain about the surge of cats roaming the neighborhood.
I’m not predicting Mamdani will win this fall, but certain things will need to happen to stave off the looming catastrophe he represents.
Most importantly, Cuomo, who is now advertising that he’ll run as an independent in the general election, needs to read the room and recognize that nobody is asking the question he’s the answer to. Persisting in this race is as close to the summit of destructive egomania as it’s safe to climb. He has to get out, stay out, and do what he can to back Adams.
Does anyone think a malignant narcissist like Cuomo is capable of that?
Yeah, me neither.
There is something larger to note from Tuesday’s nightmare in The City That Never Sleeps, and it’s this:
What to make of the NY mayoral race? Socialism beats neoliberalism in the new Democratic Party, just as nationalism beats neoconservatism in the new Republican Party. Those are your choices for the future. Globalism is on its way out.
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) June 25, 2025
I’ve written time and again, and did here at The American Spectator just a few days ago, that in November we saw a changeover from the Third Era of American politics, which began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932, to the Fourth Era.
Cuomo is a Third Era politician. As was Joe Crowley, who was quite surprised when he was deposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in that House race a few years ago.
As is Chuck Schumer.
But Mamdani is very much a Fourth Era Democrat, and he has all the policy idiocy and obnoxious, anti-American activism to prove it.
The uneasy political consensus between the Daniel Patrick Moynihans of the Left and William F. Buckleys of the Right that marked the majority of the Third Era is gone. In fact, the Moynihan liberals don’t exist anymore — or if they do, they tend to be part of the MAGA coalition as often as not, as Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can attest.
And we on the Right should stop using “liberal” as a pejorative to describe the enemy. It’s no longer accurate.
Zohran Mamdani isn’t a liberal. The only liberty he offers is for criminals and perverts. For everyone else, what he offers is redistributive authoritarianism.
And Zohran Mamdani is what the Fourth Era Democrat Party offers.
The entire Democratic Party is lining up behind an anti-American open borders socialist who wants to tear down the country that welcomed him and his family.
Don’t look away.
This is who they are. ???? pic.twitter.com/PtKvTvyoKX
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) June 25, 2025
If you don’t understand the necessity of ending that party as a functional political engine, it will make itself manifest in due time. Just put him in charge of New York City and the effect will be unmistakable.
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