The first time Emerson College polled New York City’s Democratic Party primary for mayor this February, state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani came in ninth, with just 1% of respondents supporting him. This made his trouncing of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Tuesday’s vote surprising.
But in light of his endorsements from fellow Democratic Socialists of America Rep. Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez (D-NY) and self-identified socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mamdani’s win is less of a shock. While San Francisco may have recently elected the more centrist heir to the Levi Strauss family fortune, the trend across the country is for Democrats to embrace more radically left candidates, including DSA-backed Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. Johnson has governed as he campaigned, and the results speak for themselves. We will now see if Mamdani follows through on his more populist promises or if he moderates. The future of the party hangs in the balance.
One word that characterized Mamdani’s campaign was “free.” He promised free bus rides, free child care, and free healthcare. He also promised lower housing costs through more stringent rent control and lower food costs through government-run grocery stores. These policies would be a disaster for the city.
NYC’s bus system is already not self-sufficient. It requires billions of dollars in aid from the government, and would only become less safe as the city’s already large homeless population would enjoy a new mobile shelter from the elements. A universal child care benefit would also be prohibitively expensive, as would Mamdani’s pledge to abolish private health insurance. In Chicago, Johnson’s government-run grocery store plan has already been abandoned, while his similar promise to build affordable housing has proved infeasible with single units costing over a million dollars each. Mamdani’s rent control plan would further discourage private investment in new housing, which would only raise rents overall as the city’s existing housing stock ages and declines.
Johnson has raised taxes to pay for his socialist promises, and, in turn, both wealthy individuals and major corporations have fled the city to more sane jurisdictions. NYC is a special place, but so is Chicago, and more and more individuals and businesses have realized life is better in other locations. Mamdani’s NYC will most likely suffer the same fate.
Then, there are all of the social justice features of Mamdani’s platform. While he walked back his earlier support for the “defund the police” movement, he supports creating a new “Department of Community Safety” that he says would take over certain tasks performed by the police, including “violence interruption” programs and responding to mental health-related 911 calls. While Mamdani says, “The police have a critical role to play,” in a world of limited government resources, this new department would only subtract from current police budgets. It is “defund” by another name.
Mamdani also supports other proven disasters, such as legalizing prostitution, decriminalizing drug possession, and an end to cash bail. New Yorkers should expect Mayor Eric Adams’s successes in lowering crime to be reversed.
We do not have any exit polling data to work with, but judging from preelection polls and precinct data, it appears Mamdani did best with young single college graduate voters who are seemingly whiter than the rest of the Democratic Party primary electorate. These are exactly the same voters that 2028 Democratic Party presidential primary candidates will have to excite and engage if they hope to secure the nomination. It is also the same group that powered the Sanders campaign in 2016.
ERIC ADAMS ACCUSES ZOHRAN MAMDANI OF BEING A ‘SNAKE OIL SALESMAN’
The two non-socialists most happy with Tuesday’s results have to be Adams and Vice President JD Vance. Adams, who is running as an independent, believes his best chance of mounting a political comeback and winning reelection is against an avowed soft-on-crime socialist such as Mamdani. However, NYC is still far to the left of the average American voter, and Mamdani is likely considered the favorite heading into this November’s general election.
The same is not true of the 2028 presidential election. Former Vice President Kamala Harris could not run fast enough from the far-left positions she took in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and Vance must be eager to see the 2028 field weigh in on the Johnson and Mamdani regimes. Mamdani is a far better communicator than Harris and is willing to own his socialist beliefs in a way she declined. However, defending the DSA platform in swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will be much more difficult than in New York.