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David Blakeman's avatar

13 is a stretch. Not every policy proposal is cynical, and not every politician automatically engages in cronyism. Lots of other great points here though.

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Ken Kovar's avatar

Yes the DSA is years away from having machine politicians 😆

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Ken Kovar's avatar

I think you nailed both Mamdanis risks and his potential for success. I think Cuomo was in fact a flawed candidate but everyone else fell short. He wisely focused on economic and affordability issues rather than being a typical leftist obsessed with targeting the social justice warriors in their activist base 😎Bernie just endorsed him and I think that both politicians have a similar strategy.

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Twirling Towards Freedom's avatar

This is a super astute take. Well done.

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Alex Potts's avatar

Part of the problem for the centrist Democrats is that they have spent so long wanging on about electability that, when electability deserts them, they have nothing left.

They have forgotten how to actually argue for centrist policies on their own merits rather than as cynical triangulation. There is a very clear case why stuff like government-run groceries are a bad idea, but there is nobody left who can credibly present that argument to voters.

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Ken Kovar's avatar

That’s very well put. People are really getting tired of these centrists that are no better than republicans when it comes to equitable policies .

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Alex Potts's avatar

"No better than Republicans."

I don't see Gavin Newsom passing tax cuts for millionaires, or Pete Buttigieg doing deportation raids.

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HobbitBuyer's avatar

I think we shouldn't write off how further increasing rent control will further entrench a bad policy across a broader swath of the public and even further worsen the rental crisis. And then there's the risk of utterly ruining the budget.

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Josh G's avatar

It's definitely bad but rent control has a super majority of support in NYC. Supporting it is a forgone conclusion for any candidate trying to win.

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Twirling Towards Freedom's avatar

It reminds me a lot of Trump - he has some super bad ideas that would be super bad for even the people that voted for him (tariffs, for example). But they signal to people he is willing to do bold new things to address issues that matter to them.

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HobbitBuyer's avatar

Yes, but he was the only one begging to make a bad situation far worse.

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Ken Kovar's avatar

Yes that’s where I think he will the biggest risk: the budget. It’s always a problem for cities because they do not have the power to tax like a state can. And he needs to have a good relationship with the state because the federal government sure ain’t gonna come to NYCs rescue 😎

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CMar's avatar

Ok, so you ARE cognizant of the fact that he isn’t actually an abundance candidate, and that his “affordability” proposals are standard freeze the rent and tax the rich leftist slop. He’s good at using an abundance *framing* but that doesn’t make him an abundance candidate, that just makes him a liar.

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Josh G's avatar

Not exactly. My thoughts are more complex than a few bullet points.

Politicians lie inherently, because they have to say that the policies people want will be good even though that’s not true— most policies regular people want are bad. So at a baseline my expectation is that policy is bad and that politicians lie.

In that sense he’s just meeting my baseline expectation

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Ken Kovar's avatar

I don’t think he really claimed to be an abundance candidate. I like that elements of the Abundance book are starting to be taken more seriously but I think that so far this idea is still more being discussed in political geek circles rather than in actual politics.

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