NYC Votes
This primary is more than just a battle for who will be on the Democratic ticket in November. It is about what the Democratic Party is doing.
Happy Tuesday…. Another bonus edition, on primary day in New York City. While I normally dish on all things international and foreign policy here, as a lifelong New Yorker, I’m obsessed with this race—because it is more than just about local politics.
Let’s dive in.
For those asking why there’s an election in June—it’s to determine who will run on a given party’s ticket for mayor in November. There is only one candidate on the Republican ticket, Curtis Sliwa. There are nine candidates in the Democratic one. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one, that matters.
On the Democratic side, how this primary has unfolded has revealed the blindness of the moneyed-haves and the extent they will go to control power. That does not bode well for American politics or a party that says it is eager to weaken Trump’s grip on power, but continues to embrace the status quo.
That status quo is embodied in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo—eldest son of the late Governor Mario Cuomo—resigned in 2021 following sexual harassment allegations from a dozen women. With incumbent Mayor Eric Adams tangled up in corruption charges and rescued by a Trump pardon, Cuomo spotted a chance to claw his way back from disgrace through Gracie Mansion (the NYC mayor’s residence).
As soon as Cuomo announced his candidacy earlier this year, I had assumed it was game over. With name recognition, fundraising might, and ties to key constituencies and unions throughout the NY political machine, Cuomo is the Mack Truck of politicians.
But a 33-year old social media savvy state assemblyman from Queens has made Cuomo’s resurrection harder. A poll released yesterday, June 23, shows that Mamdani edges out Cuomo, 52 percent to 48 percent.
Zohran Mamdani is a self described socialist who has captured the attention of the young and progressives, mounting an exciting campaign that has forced a discussion about affordability—and a wider one about the direction of the Democratic Party.
It’s social mobility, stupid
Once upon a time, affordability was the Democratic Party’s entire raison d’etre. Since Trump’s first presidency, the party has been caught up in messaging around the fate of democracy and the threat Trump poses. That’s what Cuomo started off his campaign on. He shifted to “law and order” and “experience” as Mamdani closed in on his lead.
“Law and order” are popular go-tos for politicians. Who doesn’t want to live in a safe community? Having grown up in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s—where I lived through the 1977 blackout and Son of Sam murders, the 1980s crack years, and the racial flashpoints in the 1990s that played out in Howard Beach and the murder of Yusef Hawkins in the Brooklyn neighborhood I grew up in, Bensonhurst,—a city cannot thrive amid crime and racial tensions.
But safety alone does not yield prosperity. A metropolis also suffocates when its people stop moving up.
Too often New York—along with many parts of America—confuses gentrification with genuine social mobility.
David Dinkins kicked off NYC’s transformation when he brought in Disney to help clean up and redevelop Times Square. Rudy Giuliani followed on with a rezoning blitz that swapped mom-and-pop shops for big box stores. Michael Bloomberg rounded things out with a luxury-tower boom. Each mayor made New York safer and richer—while pushing it further out of reach for families like mine.
My father, along with my uncles, ran an auto repair shop in Brooklyn—Bayrasli Brothers! He bought a home and sent three kids to college. Show me the commercial rent that would even let those brothers, all immigrants, start that business or my parents buy a home in 2025. It’s unlikely they would. And that’s precisely the problem, not just in NYC, but throughout America.
Social mobility has come to a grinding halt in this country. A 2017 MIT study showed that in the US, children who out-earned their parents fell from 92 percent for those born in 1940 to 57 percent for those born in 1980—a 35 percentage-point drop.
That is having serious consequences. Crime is one result. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences published research that showed that “economic mobility is a more consistent predictor of violent crime and homicide than other commonly used factors like poverty, inequality, unemployment, and even the presence of law enforcement.”
Where crime occurs, the focus is never the root cause, but the remedy—how do we stop it. Hire more police, which is what Andrew Cuomo has promised. It is how Eric Adams, a former transit cop, won in 2021. Unfortunately, more police doesn’t solve the problem of the working class being priced out of housing and pushed down the proverbial ladder.
Zohran Mamdani’s focus on social mobility and affordability has energized New York voters, particularly younger ones, in a way that I’ve never seen. Early voting numbers have already doubled from the 2021 primary. That’s thanks to ranked choice voting (RCV).
Ranked choice voting
NYC brought back RCV in 2019—after doing away with it in 1947. Following decades of Tammany Hall corruption in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city adopted RCV in 1936, to elect its city council and school board. It immediately led to an increase in representation of minorities and women. In 1941, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was elected as the first African-American councilmember. He went on to become NY’s first African American representative in Congress. Yet, by 1947, Democratic party bosses were through with not having control over candidates and elections. They forced the repeal of RCV. In 2019, NYC City Council brought it back for primaries only. That has made it possible for an outsider to mount a challenge against a political giant.
“Experience”
Currently, that giant in the NYC Democratic primary race for mayor is Andrew Cuomo. He has won endorsements from national political heavy weights such as South Carolina Congressman and head of the Congressional Black Caucus Jim Clyburn, Bill Clinton, a fellow womanizer, and former billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has contributed more than 8 million dollars into Cuomo’s campaign. Cuomo and his super PAC Fix the City have about $20 million. (Meanwhile, there isn’t enough money to buy art supplies in public schools or the several thousands I need to revive my data analysis.)
Even the New York Times has walked back its declaration to no longer weigh in on local elections and used its platform not to endorse Cuomo, but to discredit Mamdani. In an editorial on June 16, the paper noted that the Queens assemblyman does not deserve “a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots,” cataloging his inexperience and promises that do merit closer consideration. Those include free buses and a freeze on rents in rent stabilized apartments. Annie Lowrey points out in The Atlantic that the city would lose much needed money on public transportation and scare away development. Valid points.
This and Mamdani’s sparse resume does give me pause. But so does the way these figures have ruthlessly piled onto the Queens assemblyman. Errol Louis writes,
“Did any of the people and institutions now howling for Mamdani’s disqualification consider taking seriously the calls from disaffected liberals to help lower the cost of living for working families? Did their army of consultants and lobbyists consider building relationships with the firebrands we all knew were destined to seek higher office some day?”
Mamdani has pushed, much like Barack Obama did in 2008 and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did in 2019, the boundaries on who deserves to be represented and to be a representative. My friend Spogmay notes, “we’ve been programmed to always reduce our political ambitions; to reach for and to accept less than what we want and deserve. Zoran has never followed that approach; he’s stayed firm in his vision for NYC, despite the naysayers who dismiss it as ‘far-fetched.’”
Mamdani has thrown open possibilities for all, not just some, to get ahead. That may mean that real estate profits decline, corporate tax breaks disappear, and the haves go back to contributing more in taxes. Therein lies the problem—and fear among the establishment and moneyed elite, who as Rebecca Traister writes are
“so scared, so unable to conceive of a world without them and their worldview at its core, that they will, every time, choose the monsters they have known for generations over anyone they can’t imagine gaining access to.”
Roadblocks
On June 19, Mara Gay wrote in the NYT about the need for the Democratic Party to pay attention to “the rebellion unfolding in New York City...”
“Democrats have to realize that becoming the serious opposition party the country needs requires them to embrace competition and let the best talent rise to govern cities and states in a way that works for a majority of their constituents. The dinosaur wing doesn’t have the answers. It’s in the way.”
Last November, we witnessed the results of Joe Biden not stepping aside early enough to allow a primary race on the Democratic side. It wasn’t merely that Kamala Harris didn’t have a time to mount her own campaign against Donald Trump, it’s that she dutifully went along with the one Democratic elites had already mapped out—embracing Oprah and showcasing Taylor Swift’s Instagram endorsement, all the while declaring that everyone is welcome in their tent—including Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney!
Except, we saw that not everyone was welcome in their tent, particularly those who questioned or criticized Israel’s war on Gaza or who weren’t willing to toe the party line. It’s a line that since Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House in the 1990s has been centrist.
In the 1990s, Clinton dragged a skeptical party toward the political center. Many Democrats tried to resist, yet the pivot recaptured the White House and rebuilt the Democratic base. Three decades on, the ground has shifted once again. The center no longer holds. Today, the party needs to break out of the middle and defy internal orthodoxy. Clinging to the status quo may help them win the mayor’s seat in New York on Tuesday or regain the House in 2026, but it will not convincingly counter, much less defeat Trump’s MAGA coalition. Donald Trump won because he blew up the GOP status quo.
Bernie Sanders and AOC understand this and have been spurned by the party elite. The same is happening to Zohran Mamdani and my city council representative in District 39, Shahana Hanif, not only because both are progressive, but also because both are Muslim. Hanif is the first and only Muslim woman on the NYC City Council.
The Democratic establishment has stood silent while Andrew Cuomo runs ads with images of Mamdani in Indian kurtas, collarless shirts. In one poster, the Cuomo campaign doctored Mamdani’s beard to appear longer—perhaps to remind of you of someone…The War on Terror has not only undermined America’s role in the world and enabled strongmen worldwide to claim to be keeping its populations “safe,” but it has given the likes of Andrew Cuomo a useful foil to undercut a political upstart. Mamdani has been attacked for being anti-Semitic for using politically charged words on Gaza. He has seen a rise in threats against him. At a moment when political violence in the US is growing, that is not only despicable, it is unconscionable.
The future
It also makes me apprehensive for what’s ahead. Andrew Cuomo is favored to win Tuesday’s primary. In that instance the Democratic machine doesn’t merely reset to a default, going back to demonizing Trump and decrying the loss of democracy, while developers keep shaping New York’s skyline with luxury housing, private equity goes back to buying up hospitals and schools, the working class move further outside the city, and subway signals continue to malfunction.
It moves forward with Andrew Cuomo, sexual harasser and bully, who, at the start of the Covid pandemic, ordered nursing homes to readmit patients and then underreported and lied about the number of deaths; who repeatedly diverted millions, upward $200 million, from the MTA to cover the state’s debt; who used state resources for a book he got $5.1 million dollars to write—and only delayed a reckoning.
There is a strong possibility that Mamdani can pull off an upset today. While it will speak to the success of his campaign, it might not result in success. The collective establishment and elites who control resources, information, and media will test every move of a progressive mayor, especially a young, untested, and Muslim one—and work to make it impossible for him to deliver on his promises— then claim that progressivism doesn’t work.
When they do, they shouldn’t be surprised to find voters abandoning them and proving the party doesn’t either—and leaving us where we are today—at the mercy of Donald Trump. —Elmira
Editorial Team
Elmira Bayrasli - Editor-in-Chief