New York City has a mayoral election coming up, and the nine Democratic candidates held a debate Wednesday night that was marked by the unusual absence of Eric Adams, the Democratic incumbent, who — buffeted by scandal and tainted by his cooperation with the Trump administration — has chosen not to seek his party’s nomination. Instead he will run for re-election in November as an independent. In his place, former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo has assumed the mantle of frontrunner and establishment favourite. Unsurprisingly, he was the focus of attacks from the rest of the field.

This election cycle has been marked by the rise of a charismatic socialist, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, whose fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America have embraced his candidacy with cultish fervour. Mamdani, a cosmopolitan child of mixed Muslim-Hindu parents — his father a prominent academic and his mother a celebrated filmmaker — has openly pushed a hard-Left agenda of massive tax increases on the rich to fund social housing, free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. He has also taken a vocal role in the anti-Zionist movement, insisting somewhat improbably that as mayor he would have NYPD arresting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and delivering him to the International Court of Justice, a body to which the United States is not a party.

Normally, a socialist candidate for citywide office would top out around 15% in the polls, but New York’s adoption of ranked choice voting means that the Left no longer risks “splitting” its vote. As a result, Mamdani is expected to garner enough first, second, and third choices on Democratic ballots to emerge as a close second to the more moderate and well-known Andrew Cuomo. Primary elections in New York City have a notoriously low turnout, so an activated base of support such as Mamdani’s could plausibly overwhelm the polls and elevate him as nominee.

When the candidates weren’t knocking Cuomo, accusing him of murdering Covid patients, sexually brutalising women staffers, and cosying up to billionaires, they were huffing about how effectively they would marshal the resources of City Hall to combat Donald Trump. Virtually all of them proposed absurd, extraconstitutional measures such as withholding federal tax payments from New Yorkers — which don’t go through Albany to begin with — or banning the operation of ICE or other federal agents in New York City.

But stepping back from the fever swamp of intra-party purity tests and the sound and fury of ideological sword clanging, what’s remarkable is how closely the entire field agrees on basic assumptions about municipal governance. These are big-city Democrats, after all, and none of them questions the big, blue model of high taxes, expansive services, racial pandering, and tiptoeing around issues of crime, punishment, and quality of life that have led productive residents to flee traditionally-run big metros around the country.

Asked why New York City spends so much on schools, yet its students perform so abysmally, the candidates echoed each other regarding expansion of services, smaller classes, more counselors, and more spending. Asked how to reduce disorder in the subways, the candidates parroted similar verbiage about getting more social workers to perform outreach, as though that had never been done. Asked how to get e-bikes off the sidewalks, the candidates warned about criminalising immigrant deliverymen. And so on.

Andrew Cuomo is leading the race, and it appears to be his to lose. Elected three times as governor and forced out under scandal, he seeks redemption and a return to the national stage, perhaps to run for president in a few years. He isn’t a declared socialist, but he did oversee and manage a substantial portion of New York City’s recent decline. If the best we can do for leadership is to resuscitate Cuomo’s collapsed career, Gotham may be in worse shape than we think.

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Seth Barron is managing editor of The American Mind and author of The Last Days of New York.

SethBarronNYC

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