The first-round result of the New York City Dem primary certainly is welcome news. This is from the New York Times:
With NYC’s ranked choice system it’s still possible for Mamdani to lose the nomination. Since he fell short of 50 percent, there will be another round of vote counting. Next week the least-popular first choice winner will be eliminated, and the second-rank choice on those ballots will be counted as firsts. The rounds continue until somebody gets more than 50 percent, or until there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. But if I were Mamdani I’d be feeling pretty good about my chances now.
The Republican nominee is Curtis Sliwa, of “Guardian Angels” fame, who ran unopposed. I have a hard time believing he can win a general election in New York City. He’s too much like Trump. Just a right-wing blowhard.
But it’s especially satisfying that Cuomo got significant top Democratic Party endorsements and way more money and he still couldn’t close the deal.
See Democratic Leaders Tried to Crush Zohran Mamdani. They Should Have Been Taking Notes. by Rebecca Kirszner Katz at the New York Times. The Democratic Party continues “to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices,” she writes, in favor of the Same Old Centrism that has been losing for them since forever.
Since their losses last fall, Democrats have obsessed over how to reverse their declining fortunes. By and large, the consensus has been that we need candidates with a sharp economic argument that can connect with young people, men, voters of color and the working class.
In the New York City mayoral race we got a candidate who checked many of those boxes: Mr. Mamdani.
My media consulting firm made ads for Mr. Mamdani, so maybe I’m a bit biased. But whether you agree with him on the issues or not, it’s clear from early results — and Mr. Cuomo’s stunning concession Tuesday night — that he succeeded. The race may not be called until next week, and the general election isn’t until November, but Mr. Mamdani indisputably managed to leap from obscurity to front-runner in mere months. He did so by staying relentlessly on message and grounding that message in affordability. Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and he or she will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”
For that matter, if you asked New Yorkers what Cuomo accomplished in his ten bleeping years as governor, you’d mostly get mumbles and head scratches. And he had to resign in disgrace. Yet as soon as he announced he was running for mayor, the Dem establishment got in line with money and endorsements and by all accounts was “terrified” by the possibility of a Mamdani win. What is wrong with these people?
See also Nate Silver, Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved.
There’s a legitimate worry that, if elected, Mamdani would fail to deliver on all his promises. Some of them will be a heavy lift, I think. But campaigning on nothing but empty pledges to “work for you” isn’t inspiring people that much.
In other news: The One Big Beautiful Bill is still stalled. Over the past few days the Senate parliamentarian has been taking lots of stuff out of it that failed to meet the “reconciliation” rules, which I believe I predicted. And which most of those Republican senators must have known would happen also.
Sarah Posner writes at Talking Points Memo,
Public support for the One Big Beautiful Bill is remarkably underwater by double digits in multiple polls, NBC reports. Similarly, bombing Iran is not popular, Greg Sargent explains at The New Republic. An analysis last week by the Pew Research Center found respondents had “mixed to negative views” on Trump’s immigration policies. The least popular actions, with the public disapproving by nine or more percentage points, were ICE raids at workplaces (-9%), building more detention facilities (-12%), ending Temporary Protected Status (-20%), suspending asylum applications (-21%), and deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador (-24%).
This morning headlines that were not about the New York mayoral race were about the intelligence assessment that said Trump’s bombing set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a few months. Naturally the administration is on the warpath to find out who leaked. And Trump is making The Usual Fool out of himself by insisting to anyone who will listen that his bombings were a brilliant military achievement comparable to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that “stopped the war.”
