Telegraph – The ‘democratic socialist’ Zohran Mamdani will almost certainly win in New York. But his disastrous policies will have a silver lining.
Opponents of Zohran Mamdani, the “democratic socialist” frontrunner in the race to become mayor of New York City, have begun to panic. One poll last month found that Andrew Cuomo, the the disgraced former state governor, would beat Mamdani by 11 points if the other candidates – Republican anti-crime activist Curtis Sliwa and incumbent mayor Eric Adams – dropped out. Both underperforming candidates, however, have confirmed that they have no intention of leaving the race.
Other polls suggest that Cuomo could still lose to Mamdani, even in a one-on-one. This is despite efforts of New York’s business community to energise the pro-Cuomo movement, arguing that the former governor – whose time in office was tarnished by cashless bail programmes that correlated with increased crime, Covid-19 pandemic policies widely believed to have caused high death rates among the elderly, and numerous sexual harassment allegations – is the best failsafe against the radical Leftist Mamdani.
The race has eight weeks to go, but many New Yorkers are resigning themselves to a Mamdani mandate. Indeed, it is beginning to look like his victory is a fait accompli.
But would that be such a bad thing? For the city, it quite obviously would be a disaster, at least in the short term. Some of Mamdani’s policies, such as city-owned grocery stores, would be very predictable failures. His plan to freeze rents would almost certainly wreak havoc on New York’s already tight and expensive housing market. His high tax policies would increase rates in what is already one of America’s most burdensome tax jurisdictions, and his campaign has hinted that he will target “white” neighbourhoods with higher taxation. In criminal justice, Mamdani is likely to reverse Adams’s recent policies, which have led to welcome decreases in some categories of crime. His equivocation over calls to “globalise the intifada” sounds unpromising for New York’s large Jewish population.
Under the dismal early leadership of Adams, who was then still a progressive Democrat, and his predecessor Bill DeBlasio, similar socioeconomic factors led to the departure of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for more hospitable places, along with a corresponding suppression of city tax revenues previously paid by wealthier residents. Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida, where tens of thousands of former New Yorkers now happily reside, has mocked Mamdani for being his state’s leading estate agent, in anticipation of another wave of refugees giving up on Gotham.
So far, so bad for New York.
But the upside could be that the city’s entitled millennials – who have been crucial to driving Mamdani’s support – will finally get the wake-up call they need. They have been lulled into the delusion that they can have their cake and eat it – that their lives can be materially improved by taking from wealthier taxpayers without suffering any consequences. But an even poorer, dirtier, gloomier, nastier, more dangerous, and yet more expensive New York could easily come to the same breaking point it did in 1993, when Republican Rudi Giuliani was elected mayor and famously turned the city around with strong pro-growth and anti-crime policies that continued for nearly two decades and made the city the most exciting place in the world.
Nationally, the Republicans would be likely to benefit from Mamdani’s looming failures in the months between his swearing in on New Year’s Day and the November 2026 midterm elections. Typically, the party in power loses seats in Congress in midterms. This is a tempting prospect for Democrats, who need to take only five seats in the House to win the majority in that chamber. But with Republicans broadcasting Mamdani as the face of the opposition, and with all the visible consequences to boot, that hill could be much steeper for the Democrats to climb.
It won’t be very nice for New York, but as Lenin said in a quote Mamdani may well recognise, “the worse, the better”.