Despite what Sinatra would have us believe, if you can make it in New York it doesn’t mean you’ll make it in the mid west or any of the purple states. (Democrats haven’t had a vote share lower than 65% since the 00s I think)
Yes, a record number came out to support him but almost as many came out to support anyone but him :(
My hope is that for all the naysaying, Mamdani turns out to be a technocrat in the Sewer Socialist model and shows the country socialism ain’t so scary. The whole “laboratories of democracy” in action.
Getting a majority in a three way race is nothing to scoff at.
I mean, the Blue vote was split.
Exactly, 8% of the vote total did NOT go to either the Democratic nominee for mayor (50.4%) or the former Democratic governor (41.6%). By this logic, democrats are UP 27 points to 92% in NYC.
OTOH that’s mostly a paper democrat
But I’ll take the win
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The progressive candidate that we’ve been craving barely cracked 50% in one of the more progressive places in the country.
This doesn’t bode well for say, a very progressive Presidential candidate.
Lumping in former democrats as current ones seems more than a little silly.
Cuomo lost the Democrat primary, but he didn’t switch his affiliation the way Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin did. Because of the election rules in NY, he was still allowed to still be on the ballot, even after losing the primary, but was forced to be listed as an independent (because he lost the primary). Most normal people would see the loss as a sign they are unwanted, but not Cuomo.
The general election was first past the post, which in a race of more than two candidates rarely ends with one getting a majority of the votes. Had election laws prevented Cuomo from being on the ballot after he lost the primary, the options would have been Mamdani & Sliwa where all but Staten Island would have voted for Mamdani and you would expect to see the 65-70% votes for Mamdani.
Presidential election also has to deal with the Electoral College which ignores the popular vote all together, so not sure how you could focus on one stat when comparing a mayoral election to a presidential.
The argument has historically been that the Democrats don’t nominate progressive candidates and if they did, progressives would come out and vote for them overwhelmingly (despite not doing so in the primaries.)
In one of the most progressive cities, we had one of the most progressive candidates ever and barely cracked 50%.
So, it doesn’t bode well for the Dems chances if they nominate a very progressive Presidential candidate. (You would probably have the Blue vote similarly, wherein sure, some progressive would win the Democrat label, and some independent would run to the centre and split the Dem vote.
Dumb take
50.4% against a candidate supported by the Republicans, most of the Democrat establishment and deep-pocketed billionaires, and backed by social-media algorithms.
And what in that equation would change were we to try a similarly progressive candidate nationally? Except for the fact that most of the country is less progressive than New York…
The victory in NY is mostly about moving the Overton Window to the left.
He got more than 50% of New Yorkers to agree on one of three options, in the face of an opposition supported by essentially all of the millionaires and billionaires in the city. If apple pie and pumpkin pie got together and formed a super-ticket, they’d still only get 47% of the vote—and that’s without taking any soft money from Big Rhubarb into account.
I’m not making that stat up, by the way. Apple pie has a 23% vote. Pumpkin has 24%. And he did it in less than a year, on small dollar donations.
It may not have been a perfect campaign, but if it wasn’t, a perfect campaign isn’t possible.
He started 8 years ago building the campaign and working for the community
Yes, a record number came out to support him but almost as many came out to support anyone but him :(
Counterpoint
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Local NYC elections aren’t nearly as universally blue as it’s national elections, lots of conservative constituencies. This city’s self-harm history includes Michael Bloomberg, Eric Adams, and Rudy fucking Giuliani.
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It’s the finance capital of the world.
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The majority of national news media had their machine trained against him for months.
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He was up against the Cuomo political aristocracy.
By New York standards, this was a landslide.
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Considering he was polling in the 30s and 40s before the election, breaking 50% is a miracle, especially with 3 candidates.
Considering it was a three-way race, I feel like this is a bit of a doomer take.
I agree that a Mamdani victory in New York City does not translate to socialist enthusiasm everywhere else in the country. But I do think it accurately shows two things:
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Moving the Dem party is possible through the democratic process, if you actually fucking show up and vote in primaries.
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Democratic socialism, as a term, is no longer the poison pill it once was in general elections. (Thank you Bernie, for walking for forty long years so my generation can hopefully run 🙏😭)
In addition, I suspect that Mamdani’s victory can be replicated in many cities.
There’s not going to be a demsoc victory in fucking rural West Virginia anytime soon, no matter how loudly some Very Serious Commenters talk about how the only thing needed to appeal to the proletariat is going further left. Nor is it likely that purple states will be voting in demsoc candidates anytime soon - though, if a demsoc runs in the primary, one should vote for them, and if they manage to actually win the primary, that is a very, exceptionally hopeful sign for an appetite of the state’s electorate for a demsoc victory in the general.
But Mamdani’s victory also genuinely shows that the only reason that neoliberals and moderates have such a stranglehold on the party is because we let them. If we stop simply letting them, as we have in NYC, we can make a broader left-coalition Dem Party, wrested from their ghoulish gerontocratic hands.
We can’t make the Dems demsoc overnight. But we can demand a much larger voice at the table.
Exactly. Pushing for chicago and LA next should be the goal. If the agenda can be proved workable and avoid Sabotage, it’ll massively up the appeal
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Wait until they see his results, if the right doesn’t interfere. When FDR got in they couldn’t get him out because he was so wildly popular. Also, Bernie Sanders was wildly popular with the people, but no so much with corporate Dems.
Disingenuous bait characterizing an extremely atypical election with the standard ones that came before it.
These comments make me think no one here knows anything about politics
To be fair, both the democrats, republicans, and the New York bourgeois they represent did everything they could to screw him
