26 Thoughts on the Mayoral race

Today is a bright day for Democratic politics

In May, I had a scooter accident where I hurt my hand (which I’ve recovered from) followed by a weird moving situation, and lately, I’m playing Lorcana, a Disney trading card game— with my dad. Suffice it to say, I’ve not been posting or following politics recently.

But imagine my surprise when I learned that a socialist was running for Mayor of NYC.

Then imagine my surprise when I found out he was the clearly best candidate!

1. I didn’t know anything about either of the candidates (I do not live in new york and am not invested in the election) but decided to research it last night anyway.

2. My impression was that Cuomo was a standard NYC politician, but Mamdani was young, attractive, and charismatic.

3. Mamdani’s ads were all centered around affordability. I saw an ad about his communist grocery stores, rent control, and a great little ad on food truck licensing restrictions.

   

   @zohran_k_mamdaniChicken over rice now costs $10 or more. It's time to make halal eight bucks again. #halal #halalfood #foodcart #nyc #nycfood #nycfoodie #Brooklyn #manhattan #ericadams #queens #bronx #statenisland #Brooklyn #zohranmamdani

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4. Importantly, Mamdani was not the union candidate, Cuomo was.

5. I was unaware of Cuomo’s sexual scandals before researching this topic.

6. Mamdani struck me as the clear and obvious choice.

7. When you have a young, charismatic candidate running against a democratic dinosaur, you should vote for the young charismatic candidate. (Bonus points if they talk about abundance and affordability.)

8. Ideology is generally overrated as an explanation for why a candidate wins. Most of the time it’s because one candidate is more attractive or charismatic than the other, but covering races on such a superficial basis is not intellectually stimulating, so age, charisma, and looks are downplayed by commentators relative to their objective importance.

9. Despite that, I do not agree with most of Mamdani’s proposals on an empirical basis. I think they are more likely than not to make affordability worse.

10. But politics isn’t about making people’s lives better. If that happens it’s entirely by accident. Politics is about telling people what they want to hear.

11. The policy that people want is generally bad.

12. Sometimes people want socially bad policy because they believe they will be on the positive end of a parasitic government transfer.

13. Take the grocery stores as an example. The point of socialism isn’t to provide food better than private businesses, that’s obviously hard to do. The point is to hand out grocery store jobs paying 100k a year to your DSA buddies as remittance for their undying loyalty to you.

14. Which is to say that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty if you want to achieve the things you want to do. Adams and Cuomo know this all too well.

15. The point of electing a socialist is that it’s important to have real leftist bonafides. Rising up in the party establishment doesn’t confer the same advantages that it used to since the Democratic party is so widely disliked.

16. Because sometimes what you need is a credible outsider who speaks directly to the people.

17. There are lots of ways to be credible. For example, why do black candidates rapidly rise in the Republican party? It’s because being called racist is a classic leftist attack, so if you can find the one black guy who supports Trump, he can credibly signal to black voters that it’s okay to be a Republican. And this works for things that aren’t purely racial.

18. What this means is that since Mamdani has real leftist credentials, he’s basically immune to criticism from the left when he uses an abundance framing of the issues.

19. This is particularly important because a common failure mode of leftists is a circular firing squad of criticism across an ever-expanding suite of differences in opinion. To put it in DnD terms, it’s like Mamdani has the Breastplate of Socialism with +5 to rolls against attacks like “you’re not left wing enough” and the Shield of Abundance which gives him resistance to centrist policy criticism. On account of his being a Muslim immigrant, he has the Winged Boots of Identitarianism.

20. What this means in practice is that while voters don’t know anything about policy, they pick up on the fact that Mamdani has an “outsider” valence, who is not an extremist— he’s focused on kitchen table issues.

21. The problem with Democrats is that they generally aren’t outsiders, and in the cases where they are like on trans sports or defunding police, they are fixated on unpopular social views that appeal to a small fraction of the electorate.

22. This is why the DSA-Abundance campaign works, it’s far enough outside of the black hole of Democratic politics that voters won’t instantly reject it, but materialist enough that people will vote for it when the alternative is a bad candidate.

23. In my scanning of Mamdani’s campaign, I didn’t see anything weird about social progressivism. He was focused on affordability. And the idea that Mamdani won because he energized the working class is probably wrong.

    

    

24. Many people will over interpret this election because it’s a Democratic primary in a non-general election year in NYC, and Cuomo is a uniquely bad candidate. That said, if you didn’t know any of that and you just look at the candidates themselves, Mamdani is the clear choice and it’s not particularly close.

25. To the extent that you want to interpret it, it’s hard to ignore that NYC just elected a socialist mayor right after lurching rightward in the general election. An economically populist shift may be what the party needs to survive.

26. I’m still skeptical about his proposals for obvious reasons and Mamdani may just be another failed mayor in a long line of failed mayors, but if he wants to make a positive difference, he is positioned well to do so.