After a hilariously inept attempt to push New York Democrats to a more moderate place in the city’s mayoral election, Republicans are leaning in on the upsides of having Zohran Mamdani, a loud-and-proud socialist, in charge of America’s largest city.
Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race on Sunday, a month after apparently failing to reach a deal with Trump World to leave the race in exchange for a sweet sinecure in the administration.
Had Adams left back in August, it wouldn’t have been enough to make a front-runner out of Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat now running as an independent after losing his party primary. But a high-profile departure by the incumbent might have provided some momentum for the former governor as the race was coming into focus.
For a guy who needed the president to intervene to save him from bribery charges, Adams sure seems bad at the whole payola thing. He leaves the race broke, without a cushy landing spot and without much help to Cuomo, who will have to scrap with Republican Curtis Sliwa for the sliver of voters who had been sticking with hizzoner.
That’s not to say that Cuomo won’t win, though. For all of Mamdani’s big leads in polls, he hasn’t cracked 50 percent once.
In an average of the five most recent high-quality surveys of New York voters, it’s Mamdani with 45 percent support, the other three with a combined 47 percent and 8 percent undecided. And because New York has ranked-choice voting, if Cuomo can just get to be the second choice for almost all of the Sliwa voters, it could still be a very close race.
There would certainly be some poetic parallelism in Mamdani winning a primary that he looked sure to lose and then losing a general that he looked sure to win.
But ask yourself: Who is more likely to sit out the election? A Republican who feels obliged to vote for a candidate she or he has spent decades despising to stop Mamdani or a Mamdani voter who is excited about the chance to disrupt the trajectory of a city that appears fundamentally broken?
Last week, the maker of a wearable artificial intelligence companion launched the largest-ever ad campaign on the New York subway. The signs blanketed tunnels and rail cars with stark text ads for a product that seems equally bleak in its design and purpose. The circle-shaped device is always listening in order to provide tailored interactions with the wearer, like the start of a Dave Eggers novel or a Spike Jonze movie from a decade ago.
“I know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country,” CEO Avi Schiffmann told Ad Age. “So I bought more ads than anyone has ever done with a lot of white space so that they would socially comment on the topic.”
Did you get that? The idea is to get miserable, angry, young New Yorkers to vandalize the signs in protest of what one graffitiosi called “surveillance capitalism.”
Imagine living in a place where you can’t afford the rent for a crummy apartment and the government sells ad space to a troll who’s trying to get you to deface a public space where you have to spend a big chunk of your day paying for a service that is unreliable, unpleasant and sometimes dangerous.
If you’re being treated like a rat in a Skinner box, are you really not going to take the chance to get out of the lab by single-shotting Mamdani on your November ballot?
One of the best ways to understand what happened to the Republican Party in the 2010s is through the lens of the financial panic of 2008 and the subsequent recession. As former President George W. Bush put it: “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful.”
To be clear, Bush was talking about the bank bailouts he authorized himself in a bid to stave off a worldwide depression. Economists can debate whether it was necessary, but there is no debating what Bush observed since leaving office. A lot of older Americans saw their retirement accounts and home values get nuked in the panic and then watched the institutions that had helped create the crisis get off scot-free. That begat the Tea Party which begat MAGA and a “burn it down” GOP.
Now it’s time for the children of the Tea Party generation to have their revenge. Approaching middle age themselves, these young progressives and socialists, like Mamdani, are bent on some creative destruction of their own. Millennials who watched their parents’ generation blow up the status quo with Trump are getting crushed in the rubble: unaffordable housing, persistent inflation, stagnant mobility and a broken political system.
Many Republicans believe that this revolt by the 30-somethings will work in their favor as they tie every Democrat running in next year’s midterms to Mamdani. Some GOP strategists, we are told, feel “giddy” about it. And there’s lots of reason to think they’re right. The married, suburban, affluent voters Democrats need next year are not going to be down with a party that includes a guy who’s exploring the “abolition of private property.”
It certainly worked for Democrats several times in the 2010s and 2020s, as their leaders elevated fringy populist Republicans who alienated moderate voters. The Obama White House knew the trick, which had become standard operating procedure for Democrats by the 2022 midterms.
That’s not the whole reason why Trump is back in the White House crushing every barrier erected before him, but certainly, like the Ghostbusters and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Democrats chose the means of their own destruction.
One wonders if a decade hence, we won’t say the same thing about the socialists Republicans are so keen to face now.
Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.