A lot of us in NYC are basking in the glow of an unexpectedly decisive Zohran Mamdani victory last night. In addition to the happiness that an election night could be something to celebrate, there is some schadenfreude, or in the poetic words of Ashley Feinberg, an "incredible spite bonus" to the way that big money, the Democratic gerontocracy, and a lot of other unsavoury tactics failed to tip the scales for their preferred candidate.

I have a few reactions to this result that I wanted to write up while they're still top of mind.

The first is a personal reinforcement of an evergreen tweet and a huge part of my personal head canon, the immortal words of R. L. Stine:

I'm so glad I live in New York City and not in the United States.

I've not felt this pleasantly surprised at my fellow citizens since the 2008 election of Obama. 9/11 was still fresh in the memory, and 2008 was unfortunately a time of rampant Islamophobia, which Fox news leaned into by never failing to call Obama "Barack HUSSEIN Obama" with an implied hard-R.

Sadly, 2025 is still a time of rampant Islamophobia.

One of the rules of fascism is that the more outrageous the lies are, the more strict their acceptance will be enforced. Despite an unprecedented campaign of cruelty and ethnic cleansing by Netenyahu's government in response to the Oct 7 2023 attack, any expression of sympathy for the Palestinian cause of not being the victims of a genocide is increasingly portrayed as an expression of Antisemitism.

This works best when you can use violence to enforce acceptance. Support for anti-war protests last summer has become grounds for literal political imprisonment.

The NYC Mayoral primary became, at least among the pundit class, a similar object of enforcement, as it was briefly turned into a referendum on how enthusiastically each candidate supported Israel.

Mamdani repeatedly claimed he supported Israel's right to exist, but was pilloried for refusing to also say "as a Jewish state." His defense is that he felt Israel should be a state of equal rights for all, recalling Dr. King's call for America to live up to its own professed ideals. Setting aside how bizarre it is for the American political class to attempt to gate keep local elections based on support for a foreign nation's status as an ethnostate, you have to ask yourself how candidates would respond if we repeatedly asked them to answer to whether Iran or Saudi Arabia had the right to exist as a Muslim state, or whether they supported the forced expulsion of Jews from Muslim states in the mid 20th century.

The other main source of accusations of Antisemitism is Mamdani failing to push back against a crowd at one of his events chanting "globalize the intifada." When pressed on this, he explained that he didn't do so because his understanding of the call was as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights."

My personal feelings on this particular issue are more inline with this thread; "the intifada" is, to me, an unmistakable callback to an event and movement that is intertwined with violence targeted toward Jewish civilian populations. If we're concerned about how language impacts minorities, then it's clearly Antisemitic to single out Jews as undeserving of these protections merely due to the actions of Israel.

But it's also clear that this argument has largely been brought up in bad faith, with the hopes that it would be amplified by the "corroborating fact" that Mamdani is a Muslim. Even as the campaign came to a close, and the alliance between Mamdani and Brad Lander solidified with joint appearances on national television and cross-endorsements, Mamdani was still repeatedly made to answer for these transgressions.

Islamophobia is the silent fuel that Zohran's enemies banked on sustaining this fire, and while that doesn't mean that we're over Islamophobia any more than 2008 meant we were over anti-Black racism, I'm glad that it didn't work.

The general efficacy of attacks of this kind are somewhat in question, but to explain why I'll have to move on to discuss some structural reforms undertaken in NYC that have clearly built a more healthy electoral system in which truly representative candidates have a chance at toppling cynical runs by moneyed establishment candidates.

Two reforms in particular, the Campaign Finance Board's Matching Funds program and Ranked Choice Voting, assisted in making this victory a reality.

The Matching Funds program is an old reform, stemming from a 1988 bill, but according to the Financial Times, Mamdani received the bulk of his funding from donation matching.

This chart also reveals the breathtaking amount of Super PAC money that flooded into the race to try and prevent Mamdani from taking the nomination. The data Forbes used for this chart comes from NYC's own campaign finance data, but delving into the campaign finance summary website reinforces the characterization of Cuomo and Eric Adams as being big money candidates.

Mamdani's average contribution is just $87, while Cuomo's is $700 and Eric Adams' is north of $1000:

Cuomo and Adams' funding is considerably skewed towards outside-NYC sources, compared to Mamdani, Lander, and other candidates that the electorate considered more "local":

Finally, Mamdani received more than twice as many donations as the runner up in that category, Lander, and more than 3x as many donations as any of the other candidates, and as his average suggests, the vast majority were small-money donors:

This huge discrepancy was magnified by the Matching Funds program, and while it almost certainly wasn't decisive, it definitely didn't hurt.

In a break with some pundits, I believe that RCV did have a huge impact on this election. For months now, Zohran has been quietly building momentum against a massive polling deficit. Much of that momentum was built around many factors, but one of them surely was that there was a big enough anti-Cuomo vote out there for one of the challengers to pull this thing out. The idea that this was a Real Candidacy with an actual shot was crucial to it gathering steam and eventually prevailing.

A secondary impact of RCV which is good for our body politic in general is that it reduces the impact of attack ads. As Chris Hayes writes about in The Siren's Call, the attention economy is becoming the one that matters. Calling attention to your opponent, even if it's negative, puts their name in voters heads. In an RCV ballot where voters are asked to choose 5 candidates, chances are they'll rank the ones they've heard of. As Hayes himself remarked:

Really can’t overstate how many anti-Mamdani ads were running on local networks over the last week. Basically constant.

A lot of the reaction to this online has been that "television ads as a political tool are cooked", and while I agree that they're on the wane, it's difficult to be civically active in NYC and not run into a local TV channel like NY1, or at least see local adverts. This is the biggest local media market in the country. Have you had to wait for a doctor? Gone to a pub? You've seen this stuff.

It's an impossible task to tease apart the complex web of interactions of each of the issues that led to this result.

Cuomo is unpopular among Republicans, but he's also deeply unpopular among a lot of Democrats, who are sick of corrupt sexual predators being given a pass. They're sick of established power brokers like the New York Times running interference on energizing young Democrats because they "lack experience."

The city has struggled under an affordability crisis for decades, and the media class has been happy to focus instead on conservative pet issues like crime on the subway and unconditional support for the government of Israel.

Against this backdrop, and the over-the-top suppression of student protests against a campaign of bombing and displacement that is simply not that popular, it's no wonder that Mamdani could resonate by focusing on the City's issues with messages like "free busses" and "cheaper groceries."

It certainly worked better than Cuomo's campaign message of... well, I'm not sure what it was. Presumably he felt name recognition and a fractured progressive field would lead him to victory, like it did for Adams in 2021, but Adams was very close to losing that race to Wiley after RCV was tabulated, despite owning the first round convincingly. The perceived message that filled that vacuum, "I don't really know what part of NYC I live in" and "I hate this place and you don't deserve nice things", didn't really land.

To temper all of this happiness and enthusiasm, responsible governance is a tough job. A fascist visionary can get seemingly get his own way in America, but that's rarely worked out for progressive visionaries. It's unlikely that Mamdani will be able to execute on even half of his campaign ideas. There will be powerful forces, like.. uh, Gristedes, who will purposefully undermine civic life in this City just to "prove" him a failure, because his success represents something more fundamental and more frightening to them.

We now know in a visceral way, through these voting reforms and their results, but also particularly through congestion pricing, that good reforms and responsible urban planning can deliver real results to city residents. Let's hope Zohran Mamdani gets the opportunity to show us more.

Jun 25