The Democratic Party’s Problems, Real and Imagined
There are still some crazy Democrats out there. They are embarrassing and unserious. What if the party needs more of them?
Quick Note: No Triad tomorrow. Have some kid stuff. See you on Friday.
Today we’re going to start with New York City’s mayoral race and the total Democratic shirt-show in my town. But this is just an entry point to a larger discussion about the Democrats’ problems.
Because what if the party’s problem isn’t that it’s “outside the mainstream.” What if the actual problem is that nationally the Democrats have become hostile to the kind of voters who like shirt-shows?
This one is a bit of a ride. So let’s go.
1. Big. Apples.
In three weeks New York City Democrats will choose their nominee for mayor. There are nine candidates, but the winner in a ranked-choice primary is likely to be either:
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor; or
Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist who currently serves in the state assembly.
Cuomo needs no introduction, but I’ll just note that in addition to being a creep he was responsible for some of the worst state-level management of COVID in America.
Mamdani is like a TPUSA parody of a Democrat. He’s the child of privileged academics. His parents named him after an African socialist revolutionary. In college he founded his school’s chapter of “Students for Justice in Palestine” and majored in Africana Studies. That experience plus four years in the state assembly convinced him that he could run a city with a $112 billion budget.
It hardly needs saying but: Mamdani is campaigning mostly on rent control and taxing the rich.
Oh, and Cuomo has said that in the unlikely event he loses to Mamdani in the primary, he intends to run in the general election anyway on another party line.
But wait—it gets worse.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Bulwark to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.