Victory With Strings Attached: The Mamdani Moment

Mandani's map Big win, tight leash. New York City didn't just pick a new mayor, it reconfigured the elect. According to the New York Times, Zoran Mandani, age 34, won behind a turnout surge topping 2 million. He's the first since 1969 to clear 1 million votes by uniting younger voters, working class, South Asian immigrant community and progressive strongholds in Brooklyn and northern Manhattan. Andrew Cuomo's late bid to siphon Republican votes starved the GOP nominee but couldn't blunt. Mandani's coalition super PAC spent more than $40 million back in Cuomo to about 10 million for Mandani. So he was heavily outspent and still won. A tax Mandani called naked bigotry backfired. He flipped working class, black and Latino neighborhoods and won the Bronx by double digits. The Times reports. Now comes governing New York. Power is fragmented. Albany controls big levers. Most tax changes, property tax overhaul, rent laws, even the MTA and congestion price. The city budget must balance by law. Zoning requires the full land use process and City council approval. Independent watchdog union bargaining rules, court monitors and district attorneys limit unilateral action. Translation Expect pilots and nudges more than overnight revolution. Mandate meets machinery. Okay, so what's the real message that came through from Mandani's win in New York City? It is that voters want specific change and they want the economy improve. Very similar to the message that took Trump into office last year. What Mandani did well wasn't waving the flag of socialism. It was saying, I want to improve your pocketbook. I want to make New York City less expensive. And he hammered it, and he hammered it, and he hammered it again and again with a smile on his face and a nice suit and a youthful image, and he destroyed the opposition. Let's go a little bit deeper here. I happen to think that most commentators on the left and the right are misreading this race, especially those on the right. If you watch Fox News or you look at the New York Post, you see stories about as much as 800. I literally saw this on one of the conservative channels this week, that there are supposedly 800,000 New Yorkers who are about to flee the city because they're so worried it's going to become, I guess, 1966, Fidel Castro's Cuba, where everyone is driving around in old cars held together by chewing gum. Folks, it's not going to make that much of a difference. Now am I saying no mayor can really bring down a city? No I'm not saying that mayors can make a difference, but the things that supposedly petrified and scared so many business leaders about this socialist running is the idea that he is going to raise or double the citywide income tax. Guess what? He doesn't have the power to do that. The concern that he would somehow put a huge, huge income tax on people commuting into the city to work, well, guess what? He doesn't have the power to do that. The concern that he's going to bankrupt the city by all of a sudden making all the buses and subways free, well, guess what? He doesn't have the power to do that. By law, the city has to run a balanced budget. It's not the federal government. It can't be like, you know, who in Washington who can just say, let's have the biggest tax cut ever and create trillions and trillions of dollars more debt and not worry about it. He doesn't have that luxury. So I mentioned this earlier in the week. I will mention it again. There is a history of mayors in America all across the country who may be ideologically out of the mainstream of their cities. There have been libertarian far right mayors who've done a good job. There have been socialist mayors in places like Burlington, Vermont, Democratic socialists. That's where Bernie Sanders was mayor. There have been socialist mayors in Milwaukee, and they were reelected and reelected and were perceived as doing well. Now Mandani loves quoting a very famous New York city mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, who says there's no Democratic or Republican way to fix a pothole. I'm predicting that Mandani is going to be judged not by his ideological purity or extremism, but by the quality of life in New York City. Are the potholes fixed? Is the garbage cleaned up? So much of this has nothing to do with a person's ideology. It has to do with other things like competence, tenacity, energy, drive, the willingness to actually listen, the ability to communicate your goals to the public. These are all skills that transcend ideology. I would say Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor, was really good at communicating. He was to the right of center of a lot of voters and he had an R next to him, a Republican name in a town back then. And now that's like 8 to 1 Democrats to Republican, it didn't matter. Giuliani got the streets clean. Crime fell under his tenure, and because of that, Democrats overwhelmingly voted to reelect Rudy Giuliani, even though they didn't like his perceived ideological bias of being a Republican. I'm certainly not predicting Mandani's reelected at this point, but I do predict he's going to be judged on the quality of city life. Here's the other thing that does bear repetition, which is all of these people who say, I'm going to leave New York City, it's out. I don't want to live in a socialistic town. It's ruined. It's not that easy for most people to move. I know when I left New York City for Florida a handful of years ago, it was a decision I thought about for, you know, more than a year. It wasn't done lightly, and it certainly wasn't done for any political reason. If you, for example, if you are a managing director of a trading unit, bank of America or Goldman Sachs, and you make $4 million a year, they do. And you manage 30 other traders under you, and you've got to go to the trading floor every day, you simply don't have the luxury of saying, well, I'm now moving to Florida. I'm going to do it virtually. Your bosses won't let you. Now, are there some people who own their own businesses or do everything virtually who could live anywhere? Sure. But in my experience, most of those people left New York City a long time ago. If they could live anywhere, they live in Texas or Tennessee or Florida. They already left. So I am predicting very little exit of New York City. A lot of this is hype. It is political spin that, quite frankly, Republicans in this instance are using to try to taint the Democratic brand, cause panic, cause pandemonium. And hey, if you are a party operative, it's your job to try to make the other party look. It's your job to paint in caricature and certainly has been caricaturized. Am I endorsing socialism? No. Am I endorsing Democratic socialists? No. But what I am endorsing is the United States system of government. Most of the time, other than currently in Washington, D.C. power is very diffuse. Let me give you some more facts on this situation of exactly how power is limited in New York City. So I mentioned that the mayor cannot raise income taxes or sales tax or corporate taxes unilaterally. Albany, the state capital, has to do that. So he could say, look, I'm a socialist. I think all businesses are evil. I want 100% tax on corporate profits. Wouldn't matter what he says. He's going to get actually one penny, not even one penny from that. But because the state legislature, the governor isn't going to do that if he Wants to, let's say, go after the big developers and dramatically increase property taxes. Guess what? Require property tax changes, require state laws. You have to have the governor and the legislature do that. They're not going to do it. They've already said they're not going to do it. The budget has to be balanced. He cannot simply say, well, I want to give a billion dollars of free groceries to needy people in Florida, in New York. Can't do it. It's just not in the system. The Mass Transit association is state run. The subways and buses aren't City Hall. He can't simply say it's free. Now, he can use his bully pop, he can use moral suasion, but he's got to persuade a lot of people to do it. It's not something he can unilaterally do. The way things are unilaterally being done out of Washington, D.C. right now, congestion pricing. He can't even say, we want to have an extra toll for people who come into New York City on really busy times of day because there's so much traffic. You would think a city, a mayor, would be able to control what goes on on their own city street. He can't even do that. Rent laws and all this talk about rent, rent stabilization. So much of the incentives and the laws are based in Albany. There's a rent guidelines board. It's independent of the mayor's office. You go through the list, the things the mayor can't do. It almost makes you wonder, like, why does someone even want to be the mayor of New York City? I'm not suggesting there's no power. Certainly, again, he has the ability to control attention, to get focus on problems. Now, the one thing we do know about him is he's really good at commanding attention. He ran a fantastic campaign. He was able to spotlight real concerns that people who voted for Trump had the cost of living in New York City, cost of housing. Can he do anything about it? Because let's face it, it's EAS easy to point fingers at problems. I can do any. Any pundit can do that. Any talk show host can do that. It's very hard to build coalitions of people with very different agendas to make substantive policy changes. So the jury's out on him. And so many want to just write him off and say, well, simply because he has the S name as a part of his label, he absolutely, positively is guaranteed to be an unmitigated disaster. They're being dishonest with you. They're dishonest with themselves. They're looking at the world through ideological blinder. That's not what we do here. I come to you as a sane, sensible centrist. And I have worked in political campaigns for the last 40 years, hundreds of them at this point, United States, other countries as well. And I'm here to tell you, nobody really knows what this guy's going to do. That's part of what makes politics interesting and exciting. There are people who get elected who had some flaw that people thought, well, that's. They're never going to overcome that. And they go on to great success. There are other people you think, wow, this guy. And it's typically a guy, but sometimes a woman. This person is guaranteed superstardom and they completely fizzle. You just never know. So we'll be keeping an eye on this guy because he is going to be communicating messages to not just citizens of New York City, but he's going to have a huge national audience and even international audience. He has gained a lot of attention because of his youth, because this is the first Muslim American elected mayor of New York City. And it's coming at a time where there's almost as many Muslims in New York City as Jewish people. So it is interesting, the Democratic shift, but it should be noted a lot of young Jewish people did vote for him. So it did not create some ideological religious war in this campaign. Although obviously there are some people who are supporters of Israel who are not fans of his. Let's be clear, they certainly did not appear to persuade or change many votes. Again, you have to stress this three way race. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York State, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee. So it was a three way race. Van Dami still got a majority of votes. That's extraordinarily impressive no matter how you slice it.