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After Zohran Mamdani secured the Democrat nomination for mayor, millions of people around the country are wondering how the city that lived through 9/11 could have done this?
The answer is it didn’t.
Less than 30% of Democrats voted in the mayoral primary. Of those, supposedly, 43.5% voted for Mamdani. So some 12.9% of New York Democrats voted for Mamdani.
56% of registered voters in the city are Democrats so some 7.2% of city residents voted for him.
New York City has a population of 8.2 million. Of those 432,305 or 5% voted for Mamdani.
The media is doing its best to hype those numbers as a stunning mandate when what they really represent are high levels of turnout by white hipsters and Muslim immigrants who were enthused by the prospect of electing a Muslim terrorist supporter to run New York City.
Who are those 5%?They aren’t New Yorkers because polls showed us Mamdani performing poorly with anyone over 50, with African-American, Latino and working class white voters.
Mamdani’s base isn’t New Yorkers, it’s a coalition of white hipsters and Muslim immigrants, most of them weren’t even in the city during 9/11, like Mamdani, have no roots in the city, and no connection to its history. The quintessential New Yorker, as envisioned by a thousand Hollywood movies, TV shows and Broadway musicals, still exists, but is harder to find than ever. The city of those movies and shows can be glimpsed as a palimpsest under layers of chain stores, illegal migrants, social justice projects and vegan eateries before it vanishes again in the rain.
What happened to New York is what happened to legendary cities across the country and around the world, from Philly to London, which is that the revival of the 90s was the final act in driving out its working class and middle class population. Rents soared until the only young people who could afford to live there were white hipsters and third world immigrants.
And their politics became based on coalitions between the hipsters and the new arrivals. In New York City, as in London, it produced a Jihadist coalition that paved the way for a Muslim mayor.
Even by 9/11, New York City already wasn’t ‘that city’. The Giuliani revolution that swept out bums and criminals was a victim of its own success. Much of the middle class had already left which was why so many of the victims of 9/11 were commuters. Those who didn’t were soon completely priced out. The working class, the Irish, Jewish and Italian men and women who appear as comic characters in countless shows, were soon priced out of everything except projects. Even as the world mourned for New York, the New Yorkers were disappearing.
New York’s political system became a contest between establishment crooks from the old Democrat political machine and radicals from the new leftist insurgencies. Selecting Cuomo, an old crook with a venerable political lineage, to go up against a young hip radical was a political death wish. New Yorkers, with enough standards not to vote for Mamdani, were expected to go out and vote for a man they were almost certainly bound to hate and resent. The sudden unity behind Cuomo smacked of hypocrisy and made Mamdani seem like a genuine revolutionary.
Most New Yorkers didn’t vote. They stayed home and allowed the 5% of white hipsters and Islamists to have their way. Given a choice between two terrible candidates, in a city that has long since proven to be utterly corrupt, they opted out. They may have failed to protect the city, but the political establishment failed them badly and seems likely to fail all over again as it now has to revert to holding up Mayor Eric Adams as the last best hope for New York City.
In the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race between corrupt politicians Edwin Edwards and Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, bumper stickers read, “Vote for the crook, it’s important.” Voting for the crook may be important once more in New York City, but it’s not an ideal choice you want to give voters. Not unless you want below 30% turnout with the numbers favoring those who are most enthusiastic about their Neo-Neo-Nazi candidate and his plans to destroy the city.
New Yorkers needed a real choice and instead they got a choice between eating a dead rat and committing suicide. Only 5% chose to commit suicide, but most didn’t want to eat a dead rat either. And the dead rat strategy is going to be a longshot in any political campaign.
The best way to beat an evil candidate is with a better choice, not with a lesser evil.
New York’s political system, without meaningful Republican participation, has decayed into a one-party system. Its already corrupt rules were further rejiggered to favor radicals with ranked choice voting, and whose elections are as shady as those of Chicago, Philly and Los Angeles.
There’s no particular reason to trust the Mamdani election results than there is to trust the similar shady mayoral elections in Chicago and Los Angeles that gave their respective cities two radical destroyers in the form of Mayor Brandon Johnson and Mayor Karen Bass. It is all too possible that they will have a third candidate elected in a dubious election by a radical minority.
Maybe America and Europe’s big cities are beyond saving, but the low turnout shows that the city that survived 9/11 hasn’t turned evil, its people have either left or given up on politics.
New York City can be saved. But it will take a leader with a real message to do it.