Today I want to disentangle personal preferences from objective analysis. Zohran Mamdani is not my cup of tea. He would not have been my first, second, third, or fourth choice.
But that doesn’t mean that what he’s selling isn’t powerful. And it doesn’t mean that he’ll be a bad mayor.
So let’s talk through the promise and peril of making a 33-year-old democratic socialist the mayor of America’s most important city.
The only thing I ask is that you try to put your own priors aside while we take this walk.
Oh, and we’re going long today. This one goes to four.
1. For Good Times, Make It Mamdani Time
Let’s start with something we can all agree on: It’s great that Andrew Cuomo has been thrown out of American politics. (Again.)
Cuomo is malignant narcissist. He made a catastrophic mistake as governor. He saw high office and party dominance as his birthright. Had he won this race, he would have immediately begun scheming on the 2028 presidential election. No one in the Democratic party asked for this guy; he just saw an opening and tried to force himself on voters like the creep he is.
So let’s start by giving Democratic voters credit: They pushed this bad actor out of the party again. The first time Democrats got rid of him it was the party elites who did it. The second time it was rank-and-file voters. This is the kind of civic hygiene that we always say we want from our political parties.
And yet, responsible people (like me) are carping about how Democrats didn’t get rid of Cuomo in precisely the way we would have preferred.
I just want to stipulate that even if you don’t like Mamdani, or think he’s a bad guy for reasons X, Y, or Z, or wish Brad Lander had won, we ought to give Democrats credit for doing (twice!) what we’ve been begging the Republican party to do with Donald Trump for a decade.
All of that said, Mamdani has a lot of upside potential. Let’s run it down:
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