Zohran Mamdani

Notionally, Americans have never been better off. The ructions in tech stocks over the past few weeks cannot detract from the fact that the US economy has been outgunning other developed economies all century. The overall graph of real disposable income for Americans continues to trend upward, almost as if the sharp dip during the pandemic had not happened. That is certainly not true everywhere: in many countries, Covid has been followed by stagnation in GDP and wages. Yet, for all the wealth generated, many Americans simply do not feel that they are living in a thriving country. On the things that really matter, such as basic living costs, citizens at the lower end of the income scale feel their wages are increasingly inadequate. They are not imagining it.

Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory came as little surprise. On both the left and right comparisons to the 2008 presidential election abound; Mamdani is said to mean nothing less than the rebirth of American liberalism. Like Obama, he was initially a foe of the Democratic establishment, but then embraced. And like Obama, he gets his intellectual and cultural ballast from politically active, urban, college-educated men. Mamdani’s victory can, in a narrow sense, be explained by the demographics of New York City. But what differentiates him from Cuomo and other establishment Democrats is his ability to speak to the popular, online leftism that millennial, professional New Yorkers traffic in. This particular subculture has seen little electoral representation until now.

There is an unhappy history of left-wing Britons getting involved in US elections. Back in 2004, the Guardian – the flagship organ of the British left – organized a letter-writing campaign, urging voters in the swing state of Ohio not to re-elect George W. Bush. The good people of Ohio didn’t take kindly to a bunch of North Londoners telling them how to vote, and although the Guardian’s campaign probably can’t be given all the credit, the voters of Ohio duly went to the polls and swung firmly behind Bush. One wishes that London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s intervention in this week’s election in New York might have had a similar result.

Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City, and the progressive wing of the  Democratic party is Champagne drunk celebrating his ascension.  But should it be? Mamdani has only narrowly prevailed in a race with a clear spoiler candidate, Republican Curtis Sliwa, lead-blocking for him against a charmless opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo. With tougher, more honorable competition, it’s possible – likely, even – that he may not have even made it to the general election, much less won it. Only when compared to a corrupt, sleazy, nepobaby with blood on his hands, and a beret-clad, narcissistic cat-man whose own friends begged him to step aside, did voters view Mamdani as a much-needed alternative.

Is Maud Maron crazy? Bill Ackman certainly thought the Republican candidate for Manhattan DA was, she tells me, when she asked him for $2 million. While the billionaire hedge fund CEO said he could easily raise the money she needed to fund her campaign in a single night, ultimately he chose not to – and instead focused on backing Andrew Cuomo for mayor.Ackman thought “oh, she's a nice lady, but she's crazy,” Maron recalls. “She's running as a Republican in a Democratic city.”Fast forward six months and Cuomo is on the brink of losing to Zohran Mamdani – and Ackman has cast a vote for Maron, who he now calls “great.

Of all the people to go as for Halloween, why would you choose Bill de Blasio, an undistinguished Mayor of New York and flame-out 2020 presidential candidate?  That’s a plausible explanation for the recent howler from the Times of London – Great Britain’s newspaper of record – whose veteran US correspondent Bevan Hurley quoted a man identifying himself as de Blasio on his misgivings about Zohran Mamdani. “While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually – rest on optimistic assumptions... about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” this total imposter told Mr. Hurley, with strange eloquence. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.

New York’s Kathy Hochul isn’t a good governor. But, like a particularly empathetic house pet, she’s finely attuned to any change in the weather. A huge crowd in a Queens stadium rallied last night for Zohran Mamdani and chanted “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” over and over again. So when Hochul said, “I hear you, I hear you,” you can be sure that she actually heard them, though today she said she thought they were saying “let’s go Bills.” Sure. Either way, she got to where she is by knowing how to back a winner.  The rich, meanwhile, are in the process of moving their family photos to the Palm Beach town home or shopping for McMansions in suburban Dallas.

New Yorkers received visits from two ghosts of Christmas past and one ghost of Christmas present at its last 2025 mayoral debate on Wednesday night. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and champion of himself Andrew Cuomo lobbed Grumpy Old Man insults across the stage at each other while Zohran Mamdani stood center stage, fresh and gleaming, deflecting blows and acting with all the confidence of a football team that has a three-touchdown lead at the two-minute warning. The historical turn, potentially tragic, that will lead to the Democratic Socialists taking over America’s largest city, is reaching its conclusion, and there won’t be a final twist.

Ahead of tomorrow night’s debate with Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, Democratic socialist and future mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani appeared on Fox News this afternoon for the first time.   Anyone expecting a clash of cultures, or 15 minutes of pure ideological arguing, would have been disappointed. Fox anchor Martha MacCallum asked tough, pointed questions, but it was a respectful exchange between two New Yorkers who clearly don’t summer in the same ZIP code.   That doesn’t mean the interview lacked news value. The most shocking part came before the commercial break, when Mamdani said it was “too early” to give President Trump credit for the Middle East peace deal.

For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media, has lost control Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber.