22 Thoughts On The New York Mayor's Race

This comes from the cheap seats in Washington, DC, which New York-based readers might find annoying. But I did live in New York for a year back in the aughts; I cover factional Democratic politics for a living; and I think I have a decent grasp of the broader political implications of an NY mayor’s race that’s been nationalized.

So… sorry, I’m doing it. I also have no idea who’s going to win (if you’d asked me last week I would’ve guessed Andrew Cuomo) so let’s proceed as if today’s election is a tossup.

• In the head to head this race has apparently reduced to, I want Zohran Mamdani to beat Cuomo—an easy call—but on the ranked choice ballot I’d probably place Mamdani third or below, behind Zellnor Myrie, and Brad Lander.

• Some of that is about municipal policy; some is about experience; but some is also about my view that local office is a bad venue for prosecuting national-level factional disputes.

• That last critique pertains to Mamdani supporters and detractors alike, at least insofar as they are drawn to or repelled by Mamdani’s views on foreign affairs or American capitalism or other issues that aren’t really part of a mayor’s remit.

• Some of Mamdani’s big picture ideas are good, some are bad; I get why they both enthuse and alarm people. But if he wins, he and everyone else would be better off remembering that a mayor is a local official, not a federal official, and work with or against him on city governance.

• I have no problem in theory with ideologists running for and serving as mayor, but they need to be able to compartmentalize; otherwise they’ll find, as Bill DeBlasio did, that city dwellers will in practice be way more invested in whether the government is prepared for snow storms than whether their elected officials have “correct” views on national health care, climate change, geopolitics, etc.

• There’s an analogy here to the progressive prosecutor movement, which seems to work OK when it promotes prosecutors who happen to be progressive, but fails when it produces capital-P Progressives who happen to win the office of prosecutor. The former do what they were elected to do, with an eye to reform; the latter seek to embody and promote the tenets of modern progressivism, complete with its critique of power hierarchies that are inextricable from the concept of law enforcement. That doesn’t work.

• Similarly, a Progressive who happens to win the office of mayor might, say, insist any development plans be consistent with an arbitrary city-wide emissions target, and quickly fail. Not because climate change doesn’t matter to people or is always bad politics, but for basic square-peg/round-hole reasons. You’re a mayor, not, like, secretary general of the United Nations.

• A mayor who happens to be progressive, on the other hand, might be a “sewer socialist,” who channels his worldview into dramatically improving municipal services, in ways that benefit everyone but tend to be progressive. That’s the sweet spot for Mamdani.

• Center-left Mamdani critics (moderates, Israel hawks) who are working overtime to defeat him should resolve to become constructive critics if Mamdani wins—to steer him toward sewer socialism, and criticize him if he veers into quixoticism, rather than collaborate with Wall Street capitalists and right-wing fanatics to sabotage him.

• These critics should also be a bit more transparent about where their tolerance for corruption ends and their intolerance of left-wing politics begins. Would they theoretically pick Cuomo over Bernie Sanders? AOC? Would they prefer Mayor Donald Trump, Jr., over Mayor Mamdani? It’s not as though Cuomo distinguished himself as a talented administrator, so tell us about yourselves and your animating values. ...