Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of Hipster Socialism: City Journal Podcast

Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory has electrified New York’s hard left, and raised serious questions about where the city is heading.

In this episode, City Journal’s Rafael Mangual, Nicole Gelinas, Tal Fortgang, and Daniel Di Martino break down how Mamdani won, why moderates failed to unify, and what it means when a socialist backed by “Intifada” slogans becomes the Democratic nominee. They also take a detour to the Hamptons to ask: is it becoming the new Palm Beach?

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: The big story: Zohran Mamdani wins the Democratic primary in the mayoral contest here in New York. What do we make of that? How did this happen? Why did this happen? You know, I think that is the obvious place to start here. I mean, it’s the thing that everyone’s wondering about.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. My name is Rafael Mangual and I’m filling in for you as your host for the day. I am a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and I am delighted to be joined by my brilliant colleagues, Nicole Gelinas, Tal Fortgang and Daniel Di Martino, Manhattan Institute Fellows, all.

And while we are all Manhattan Institute Fellows and all write for City Journal on a regular basis, it’s always good, I think, to remind everybody that we are speaking in our individual capacities when we do this show. This is just our personal opinion, guys, so don’t take it too seriously. But welcome to the show, everybody. Good to see you all.

Nicole Gelinas: Cheers.

Daniel Di Martino: Thank you, thank you. Well, maybe don’t take other people’s decisions. I like to be taken seriously a little. Depends on the topic. Depends on the topic.

Tal Fortgang: Seriously, not institutionally.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Don’t take us institutionally, I guess. Right. You can take us seriously if you want to. So, I mean, news of the day, right? The big story. Zohran Mamdani wins the Democratic primary in the mayoral contest here in New York. What do we make of that? How did this happen? Why did this happen? You know, I think that is the obvious place to start here. I mean, it’s the thing that everyone’s wondering about. Some people are dismayed, some people are elated. Nicole, you probably have the best read on New York City politics than anyone I’ve ever met. And so I’m going to throw that series of questions to you. I mean, you know, what’s the how and why of his victory here?

Nicole Gelinas: Sure, and I don’t think this is as big of an earthquake in terms of New York deciding collectively that it wants to embrace socialism as people from outside may think. This was a very idiosyncratic election, and there’s just a number of factors here that made it very strange. First of all, Assemblyman Mamdani just ran the best campaign. If you want to win a campaign, launch and run a competent campaign. I think that’s the first lesson for any potential elected official. He started his get out the vote ground game really six months ago when he launched the campaign. He took advantage of early voting and mail-in voting in a way that other candidates did not do. He had a very simple message. You could just take away three things from his campaign, whereas all of his opponents had very muddled, confused, and sometimes self-contradictory messages.

There’s a backlash against President Trump in New York, similar to how AOC was elected in 2018, just ahead of the midterms in Trump’s first term. The New York voters just sort of found someone who was the exact opposite of Trump in every way and went with that person. And Mamdani’s chief opponent, former Governor Cuomo, was just a terrible candidate on many, levels. He actually wasn’t a bad governor, at least for his first two terms.

But the way in which Governor Cuomo left office four years ago left a cloud. He didn’t run a compelling campaign. There were some questions of how long he had even lived in New York City before the past few months. He hadn’t lived in New York City for 30 years and his heart just did not seem in it in many ways. So yes, of course, Mamdani won the election. That’s very clear and that has certain implications. But this is before we declare socialism’s victory over one election there’s a lot of other things to keep in mind and of course we have the general election in November where we will have a broader more moderate electorate to have another chance to make this decision or not.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I definitely want to get into the dynamics of what the general election is going to be like, but as bad a candidate as you say, you know, Andrew Cuomo was, and I agree with you, the conventional wisdom not very long ago was still that he was going to win this contest handily, and he didn’t. And so, you know, I think this is kind of becoming a growing theme of American politics over the last decade, which is that, you know, the conventional wisdom, the early reads, of supposedly easy elections to call are continuously getting it wrong. I perhaps the biggest shock to the system was the election of Donald Trump in 2016, but I think this is up there with them.

I mean, Daniel, I want to bring you into this because you came to this country to escape socialism. And here you have an avowed unabashed socialist in Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic primary. Now, Nicole says probably not the right way to read this as a full-throated endorsement of Maoism or Chavezism, however you want to say it. But what’s your sense of this? I mean, how frightened are you, if at all, or do you see this as fundamentally different from some of the socialist movements that you studied and experienced personally?

Daniel Di Martino: No, Mamdani probably would have supported Chavez and being part of the regime in Venezuela had he had the chance. I have no doubt. I have no doubt he would have even been complicit, in my opinion, in a lot of the evil human rights violations too, when his policies of expropriation of people’s properties were not complied with.

Because at the end, that’s what he wants, right? He wants government grocery stores, he wants people to live in public housing, he hates profits and businesses, and obviously he hates Israel and also has that Islamic angle that at least Venezuela didn’t have as much, but that you see very commonly in the Middle East and Africa. And so, you my concern is, I don’t think the majority of New Yorkers are socialists or even close to socialists. That is obvious from talking to people in the city. But I do think that the people who turn out in the Democratic primary, which is a small subset of the population that he motivated, right, were very, very, very much college-educated voters, who are very left-wing. And I am extremely concerned about the state of education in this country. I do think that college has become a socialist indoctrination machine and that the memes from TikTok and Instagram where you see people bragging about their degrees, seeing like these useless things, like it’s really what is happening in NYU. It is what is happening at Columbia. It is what is happening at the community colleges, even at The New School, know, this very left-wing university in Manhattan. And so that really concerns me that the young generation is just going to believe in these things and then eventually they’re going to take over. So on the one hand, that concerns me on the other, their victory I think may embolden very far left all over the country like hey we can win a primary, and if he does become mayor, maybe AOC will be nominated for 2028 for president and maybe she will beat the Republican because the economy will be in a bad state. Like that is the nightmare scenario I’m thinking about.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, you know, Daniel, you mentioned the sort of alliance that Zoran Mamdani seems to have forged with, you know, the university class in New York. And Tal, I want to bring you into this because, you know, in addition to, you know, the indoctrination into socialism that we so often see and criticize on college campuses, you know, and that the conservative movement’s been criticizing, you know, since William F. Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, back in what, 1955. But there’s another issue that I think is kind of an elephant in the room that has really kind of bubbled up on college campuses and that Zohran Mamdani’s campaign really latched onto. And that is this sort of post October 7th dispute about Zionism. Mamdani seems to have been very, very clear in his position in that debate. I mean, what’s your sense of the role, if any, that that played in kind of boosting his popularity, and sort of giving people who maybe felt uneasy about that conflict permission to sort of express their support with the allegedly oppressed by supporting his campaign?

Tal Fortgang: Yeah, wary of, excuse me, over-reading the role that the New York City mayor’s foreign policy and debates around that played in this early stage of the election. But I do think that it comes in in a more subtle way. One of the things that many people have commented on is that local and state elections now sound a lot like national elections. They’re not focused on the issues of competencies necessary to govern the actual polity that is being haggled over. They turn on things like, where do you stand relative to Donald Trump? How do you feel about immigration policies that you might have some part in enforcing or not enforcing, that, you know, broadly, how do you think the federal government should handle those things? So there’s a kind of nationalization of certain issues. And I think that what happens, here’s the theory that I’ll put forward, as issues become nationalized, they also become fuzzier, and people tend to rely on heuristics and symbols and just kind of like buzzwords about what team are you on? Are you on Team Zionism or Anti-Zionism? And it’s not really about your feelings towards Israel and your understanding of the history of the conflicts of the Middle East. It’s are you on the side of the oppressor generally or the oppressed? And we’ve seen this as…

Rafael Mangual: It’s a signaling device.

Tal Fortgang: Yeah, it’s a development that comes with the development of the Omni-Cause, right? The idea that all genders and sexualities and other movements get smushed onto one flag. Right, there’s that there could be like a Palestinian progress pride flag because it all goes together as part of one big issue. And then the question in any election or really in any number of social interactions becomes, are you for the flag? Are you against the flag?

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, Nicole, think, you know, Tal brings up a good point, right? I mean, local elections, local contests, and I’ve been noticing this for a long time now, have kind of increasingly turned on national issues. And that, I think, was especially the case in this primary contest where issues like the federal government’s immigration enforcement, you had Zohran Mamdani yelling at Tom Homan when he went to visit the New York State Assembly up in Albany. You had Brad Lander going and getting himself arrested by ICE agents. You had the sort of Israeli-Palestinian conflict playing a role in a lot of the rhetoric around here.

But one of the issues that was kind of absent, and I say kind of because it obviously came up, but it didn’t get nearly as much attention as I thought it should have, particularly because it continuously polls as New Yorkers’ biggest concern, was public safety. You know, my question to you is, you know, now that the primary is over and the general election contest is going to get underway and you’re going to have someone like Eric Adams finally starting to spend some of the money that his campaign has raised and, you know, making his case, you know, now that the primary is over, do you think that public safety is going to play a bigger role in this contest moving forward? And do you think Mamdani might actually start to experience a serious vulnerability given his prior positions on things like defunding the NYPD?

Nicole Gelinas: Well, both our polls and independent polls, including one earlier this month from the Citizens Budget Commission, show that New Yorkers still consider public safety to be the top issue rivaled by affordability. Those are neck and neck, but public safety is still usually a little bit ahead, with a little less than a third of voters saying that is their biggest concern, both public safety and public order. So it certainly hasn’t gone away as an issue. I think the problem in this primary is that there was no candidate who really ran as a centrist with a single issue of being public safety. If you look back to four years ago, Eric Adams, a former police captain, ran a consistent “I’m going to make the city safe again” campaign in the year after the COVID lockdowns when the homicide rate, for example, had gone up by 53 percent. We lost almost 20 years worth of progress on overall felony crime. That was Adams’s clear single issue and he won on that issue against, in contrast to this race, some of his opponents were higher quality opponents. His chief opponent, for example, Kathryn Garcia, former sanitation commissioner, had broad experience in running governments and yet people pick the person who was focused on public safety despite his very real demerits which people had a hint of even back then.

So this time around, the only candidate who was running a public safety campaign was really Cuomo, but he was very compromised in running this campaign. As we know, he was the architect of the pre-2020 reforms that loosened up the criminal justice laws, made it more difficult for New York City to enforce its criminal justice laws, you know, both for juvenile crime, keeping recidivists behind bars before trial, and parole, and a host of other issues that made it much harder to keep recidivist offenders off of the streets and subways. So you know if you were looking for a centrist candidate, Cuomo really wasn’t the right person, you know, he’s also sending mixed messages on closing Rikers Island. He says it can be closed, really ignored these issues about ignored these issues about the number of inmates exceeding the capacity of the new four borough jails by far. So if you were looking for that law and order candidate, it just wasn’t there. Whitney Tilson, the business person who was running, he was good on crime, but this was sort of one of many issues that he was running on, which is one of the reasons that he just didn’t get across here. So I think, you know, maybe somewhat of a leap of conclusion, but I think that a part of the democratic electorate that was focused on this issue was demoralized by just not having a candidate, and that fits into them staying home in large numbers. You know, they stayed home in droves, partly because it was 100 degrees, but the older voters, the moderate voters just didn’t come out, and maybe they will in November.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I was going to say yeah, I mean it was a hundred and something degrees that day so that probably didn’t help.

Daniel Di Martino: Well, but maybe they will, especially because this time it’s really funny that the general is going to involve a guy who wants to defund the police, who has said that, who is Zohran Mamdani, and a former cop, right? It’s kind of like a funny dichotomy going on there. And I wonder, why is it, you know, I guess this is more of like an election analysis thing, but young college-educated people, why don’t they care about public safety, especially all the women? You know how many women, young women I saw, who are obviously college-educated with a bunch of tattoos who are like, “Zohran,” you know, and like, know, do you know who gets assaulted in the street? It’s the young women. Those are the people at risk.

Rafael Mangual: Hot girls for Zohran, right? For Zohran.

Sure. But listen, I think the basic answer to a question like that just comes down to age, right? I mean, one of the things that comes with being a late-stage adolescent is a sense of invincibility, right? Teenagers don’t worry about their safety. That’s why they drink in excess and make stupid choices. I mean, you know, not too long ago, I was looking at old photos from spring break in 2008 and you know, here me and my friends clearly intoxicated climbing a hundred foot statue in Puerto Rico.

Daniel Di Martino: But you were in college, these people are not in college, these people are supposed to be adults and working. So I think there’s an extended late adolescence going on.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, but you take chances when you’re young, you know, you just do and young people tend not to really think about their mortality in that way. And, you know, I always think it’s a harder sell for that reason. But, you know, the public safety issue, I think does become more salient when, as you said, Daniel, you have, you know, Zohran having to make his case and position himself on that issue against Eric Adams, who is not just a former cop, but someone who, as mayor for the last four years, has actually demonstrated a willingness to stand by an NYPD that’s taken a more aggressive posture, who has unapologetically overseen a significant uptick in the jail population, which is now up to, think, 7,700 inmates on an average day, which is about 3.5 thousand more than what we’ll have room for in the new borough based system if in fact Rikers is shut down. Adams has campaigned against shutting down Rikers for that reason. He’s campaigned against the bail discovery and juvenile justice reforms that Governor Cuomo oversaw.

So you know, I think it’s a weird, it’s a little bit of a weird dynamic up until this point, but now that the contours have been drawn a little more clearly, mean, my question for the group is, do we think that Eric Adams rises to be the main foe? Does Cuomo drop out of this thing? Is he sufficiently embarrassed enough or do donors feel like, well, this is not the horse to back at this point? What do we think of Eric Adams’ future in this whole thing?

Nicole Gelinas: I think Adams can make a compelling case. It’s not to say that his drawbacks aren’t very real. You know, he was the first sitting mayor to be indicted. He faced some serious charges. His first spate of commissioners and deputy mayors was pretty terrible, nearly across the board. But he has turned it around in the past seven months where appointing Jessica Tisch police commissioner, she has been focused on quality of life issues. She’s significantly reduced the homicide rate where it’s actually seven homicides below where we were in 2019. As of mid-June, overall felonies are still about 30 percent higher than they were in 2019. So certainly not a perfect picture, but she is sending things in the right direction. Adams can make a case that, okay, I haven’t been a perfect mayor. In fact, yesterday, he apologized for the many mistakes that he made in this term, but do you, you know, in his telling of it, do you want to take a chance on something entirely new and entirely radical when we are at least making slow progress in the right direction? I mean, that’s basically going to be his whole pitch, coupled with the fact that in addition to public safety and order improvements, I think there’s a better mood economically in the city than there was a few years ago. Everything is reopened finally after very long lockdowns. Things feel very normal. So that will certainly be his pitch to the broader electorate.

Rafael Mangual: Tal, I mean, what do you think about that? I mean, is this really going to come down to a kind of, know, devil you know versus the devil you don’t know sort of thing? Or, I mean, can you envision a world in which, you know, the electorate becomes actually enthusiastic about Adams?

Tal Fortgang: One way that I can see that happening is to see different factions and interest groups come out of the woodwork. You know, I’m thinking of occasional City Journal contributor, Liel Leibovitz, who put out a post on social media right after the results dropped the other night where he said, like, don’t despair, you know, speaking for New York’s Jews, like, don’t be so so worried or so concerned, just get organized. We’re going to do what we always do. We’re going to organize. My first thought was, is that what we always do? I’m not really sure that Jews are always politically organizing. Conspiracy theories to the contrary notwithstanding. But Daniel’s point earlier about women being disproportionately victims of street crime that could conceivably arise under, could conceivably rise rather, under a Mamdani mayoralty leads me to think what other factions and interest groups are going to come out of the woodwork, are going to start not just spending money, but trying to actually mobilize voters come November? Will we see women’s groups? Will we see chamber of commerce type groups worried about small- and medium-sized businesses fleeing the city? I think that’s the path towards people choosing the devil they know where they say, okay, we can put all of our reservations aside, but we all have these various interests. That’s how you get a coalition.

Daniel Di Martino: That, I absolutely, no, no, absolutely, Tal. And you know, I do think the business groups need to organize, especially because, think about it, we have an election where somebody is promising freezing all rents for rent-stabilized apartments. So if you are a landlord, you’re done in this city. That’s a big group of people. If you’re a business owner who’s going to be affected by a $30 an hour minimum wage proposal, do you think restaurants are able to hire waiters at $30 an hour? Certainly the high-end restaurants will be able to pay that, but all the low-end restaurants are going to go broke with a $30 an hour minimum wage. What about the little stores like…

Rafael Mangual: Well, either that or a chopped cheese is going to end up costing you 28 bucks.

Daniel Di Martino: Maybe, maybe. It’s potential. You know, and maybe then when these places close or they’re too expensive, that Mayor Comrade Mamdani will say, we should cook at home and buy your things from the government-owned grocery store from your government-allowed quota on the day of the week that the government thinks you should go to the grocery store. And you might think this is all crazy, but that is literally what happened in Venezuela with the government-owned grocery stores. And so these ideas don’t work. It’s just going to create shortages. I am honestly very concerned about the future of New York City under a socialist agenda.

Rafael Mangual: Well, I want to stay on that theme, right? This theme that the kind of socialist pipe dream just doesn’t work in practice. And I want to talk about something that I thought was remarkable that I have not seen done really, just, I can’t remember a single time in which it’s been done. And the thing is having the editorial board of another major city’s paper of record issue a warning to the citizens of another city about a mayoral candidate before the primary. And what I’m referring to here, for those of you who don’t know, is the Chicago Tribune editorial board published an editorial warning New Yorkers about Zohran Mamdani and citing their experience with Brandon Johnson, who is probably to the right of Zohran Mamdani on at least some issues, basically, you know, saying that, these ideas don’t work, competence matters, and, you know, don’t make the same mistake we did. And I just thought, you know, that was kind of crazy, particularly, you know, given the context that the New York Times decided not to make an endorsement, although they did, you know, kind of tacitly warn against supporting Mamdani and ranking him in an editorial. But, you know, they didn’t come out and endorse a different candidate.

Nicole, what do you think about that? I mean, you write for the Times, you’ve been in the newspaper game for a really, really long time. I have you ever seen this? What do you make of it? Do you think that it was effective or that it made an impression at all?

Nicole Gelinas: Well, one striking thing about this election is that none of the newspapers really embraced former Governor Cuomo. He certainly clearly wanted the Post’s endorsement. He sat for a grueling meeting with the Post when they just, you know, ran him right over the coals, and they came out of that meeting and used all of the information from that meeting just to slam him all over again. So they did eventually come out and say, “don’t rank Mamdani,” the same position that the Times came out with, but you had the two major newspapers not really be able to settle on a satisfactory candidate, which really points up the deficiencies of the candidates on offer in this election. And I think that’s a major question we have to ask for the future is why do we have such a dearth of good choices here?

You know, the problem is the defund movement hit its nadir five years ago. It was sort of sinking to that nadir for a few years after that, starting with the de Blasio administration. So we really have a lost generation of Democratic establishment candidates because these were all the people started to come up before the defund movement. They all switched to being defunders in 2020, and then they tried to switch back and come back toward the middle and that just made them look completely non-credible. You know, you took a person like Brad Lander, the controller, one hand trying to run as a pragmatic, good manager progressive, and on the other hand, as Daniel said, getting arrested at federal court just a few days before the election. So you just have no idea what these guys stand for, and I think we need to build a better AAA team of Democrats in lower-level positions here.

But the problem is, these positions have no real responsibility. mean, if you’re a city council person or the controller or the public advocate, you can just go out there and rail against the police and criticize any subway arrests because you don’t have to answer for anything. So there’s sort of no way to move up and gain a level of competence within city government, which is why we see these outsiders come in, you know, both for better or for worse. know, both Giuliani and Bloomberg were good outsiders. And here you have Mamdani coming in as an outsider with a very different perspective.

Daniel Di Martino: With no perspective really. What jobs has he had in his life? Like really, being in a film made by his mom and his Marxist dad that named him after an African dictator, like really? This is, it’s crazy.

Rafael Mangual: He’s a rapper, didn’t you know, Daniel?

Nicole Gelinas: And he says, he said…

Rafael Mangual: He’s a rapper, we got to give him five mics, man. No, I mean that’s…

Daniel Di Martino: Through a rapper

Nicole Gelinas: He says he wants to be a messenger, but the mayor is in the end, you have to make snap management decisions and those matter a lot. The mayor is not a messenger.

Rafael Mangual: And I think that’s really what I took away from the Tribune’s kind of the editorial board’s warning there. And I want to bring Tal into this because I think the obvious question that’s begged by this is like, you know, the Tribune is issuing a warning based on its experience with Brandon Johnson. Brandon Johnson does not strike me nearly as compelling of a speaker or presenter, you know, as a Mamdani has established himself to be. So the question is, is, you know, does Mamdani actually get more done by using his charisma and social media savvy than Brandon Johnson did? In which case, you know, could we actually face the potential for more damage than Chicago’s currently experiencing?

Tal Fortgang: Yeah, not just charisma, the fact that he actually seems like he would probably be competent at trying to not necessarily achieve his goals, but at least to put them into action. He presents as someone who’s much more competent than someone like Brandon Johnson, who appears mostly bumbling, mostly overwhelmed by the problems of governing a city of several million people.

Rafael Mangual: Deer in the headlights look all the time

Tal Fortgang: Yeah, and I think this points to the way in which two related but conceptually distinct issues come into play here. One of them is competence. The other is like socialist tendencies, right? And the Tribune could easily be warning about both at the same time, right? Because Brandon Johnson kind of has socialist tendencies, but that mostly comes into play with the incompetence. Like, what do we do? We’ve got all these problems. Let’s like, you know, put price controls on various, various goods. That’s like the playbook that we reach into. Mamdani’s a little bit different, but you can see how at a moment of being overwhelmed or not knowing how to proceed, his intuitions are obviously to reach into the playbook of Daniel’s, of what Daniel suffered through in his youth, right? Like just, just national, you know, socialize more, more industry. Control more prices, interfere with the free market, take police off the streets, although I suspect that was not part of the playbook in Daniel’s youth. But that’s a real problem.

Daniel Di Martino: Actually, it was, but we can talk about that, yeah.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, look, you know,

Daniel Di Martino: Wait, sorry, Ralph. I wanted to say that, you know, since Tal was talking about incompetence and socialism, the thing is not all incompetents are socialists, but all socialists are incompetent. And that is actually usually to the favor of the people who oppose socialism because it kind of always never works. And what concerns me about the proposals that Mamdani has put forth is that if they are actually implemented, right… There’s another question and some people have said, you know, maybe they won’t be implemented as fully, but you have to take people at their word. If you have government grocery stores, they’re all going to cost us a lot of money. That’s going to contribute towards bankrupting the city. It’s going to be very bad quality food because there’s no profit motive. If you defund the police to pay for all these welfare programs, you’re going to have more crime. If you increase the minimum wage, you’re going to have fewer jobs at the low level. If you increase taxes on the rich to pay for free buses like they want, not only will you have a bunch of people who are disorderly going into the buses because they don’t have to pay, but more rich people will flee the city. So who is going to stay in New York City? It’s going to become an impoverished and dangerous city. And that’s why social distancing is so dangerous.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. That I think is really kind of the core question, right? Because if you look at Mamdani’s agenda, it really depends on collecting a lot more revenue for the city than the city currently collects. Now he says he wants to do that by taxing businesses, by taxing the rich, but one of the things that I don’t think his campaign really dealt with at all is like, well, how do you get them to stay? I mean, you can’t compel people into New York. Now he says, you know, well, if he, even if you move your business out of New York, if you do business in New York, you’ll be subject to the tax. I don’t think that flies. You know, but…

Daniel Di Martino: Then fewer people will do business in New York.

Rafael Mangual: Right, but here’s the thing, right? I mean, like it’s very, especially now in a world where you have remote work, you know, we’ve already kind of seen this, right? New York has lost a significant amount of its population in the last five or six years, you know, people can move down to Palm Beach, people can move out of the city, you know, to Long Island, to Westchester, to yeah, across the Hudson River to Jersey, to, you know, to the sunbelt cities that have been booming, right? I mean, to what degree is Mamdani underestimating, Nicole, the reliance that the city currently has on a relative handful of high earners to make its budget work.

Daniel Di Martino: The Hudson River.

Nicole Gelinas: Well, Mamdani’s whole program is new entitlements, entirely free childcare for babies six weeks old and up, the free buses, which cost about $800 million a year. The childcare, by the way, costs about $5 billion a year because he wants unionized teachers to be teaching these six-week-old babies something and the free grocery stores. So there’s a reason why municipal governments don’t guarantee entitlements because municipal governments cannot run deficits. You know, the national government does Medicare, does Medicaid, does Social Security, does all sorts of things. And, you know, there are many issues with the national government, but they can, and they do obviously, run a deficit. New York City cannot run a deficit, both by the city charter, the state constitution, and because bondholders will not let it run a deficit because it cannot print its own currency. So you cannot begin to offer billions and billions of dollars in annual new entitlements without running into almost immediate questions that the federal government doesn’t run into so immediately.

You know, what are you going to cut to make room for your program? Or what taxes are you going to raise to pay for your program? So the taxes that he wants to increase are pretty significant. know, double or the existing city income tax on wealthier earners is 4 percent. There’s already an additional state tax. So you’re well into the double digits. He wants to increase the city’s income tax by 50 percent on the wealthier earners, so you would go from 4 percent to a 6 percent income tax just for living in New York City. That is a big disincentive to stay in New York City and we’ve already seen a net loss of about 100,000 wealthier earners since COVID. You know, about half a million people left during the lockdowns. And the way it’s all shaken out, we have gained population, but that tends to be the lower-income migrant population. We’re still missing, you know, six figures worth of those higher-income earners. And it doesn’t take much to really create a budget crisis. When you think about 40,000 households paying 40 percent of the city’s income taxes, you don’t need everybody to leave in a big exodus to cause a problem. You just need a few dozen or a couple of hundred people to leave and you have already lost more money than you were trying to gain by raising that tax.

Same thing with the increase in the business tax. Mamdani says that means we’ll just have the same tax as New Jersey, but he’s not accounting for the fact that we have both a city income tax and a state income tax, so it would wind up being the highest by far in the country at a time when if you are JP Morgan or you’re AllianceBernstein, you are already creating new jobs outside of New York City.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. So, I mean, look, in New York City, for most races, for most political contests, right, the winner of the Democratic primary usually goes on to win the general. It’s kind of taken as, you know, sort of for granted. But as we’ve said on the show before, this is one of the few times, you know, in recent history where the mayoral contest is really going to come down to the general, right? I mean, you know, the Democratic primary is over, but the race is far from decided. And so I want to start to sort of take us out of this topic, but the first question that I want to ask to each of you is, mean, do we think Mamdani wins the general? And I think the answer to that question is going to come down to who sticks around for that election. And so the sort of follow-up question to that is, do you think Cuomo, Adams, Sliwa, will all stay in the race or just one of them drop out? And Tal, I will start with you.

Tal Fortgang: Yeah, look, I saw what happened to Jamaal Bowman, you know, with my own community, the pro-Israel Jews of suburban New York rallying to his opponent, like really making a very concerted informational effort, a “get out the vote” effort. I can see a similar thing happening in this scenario. I do think, you know, like tip of the red cap to Curtis Sliwa, I think he probably can’t afford to split the vote. You know, love the guy as much as you want. Like, I don’t think that many people give him a fighting chance and there will have to be, you’re going to have to rally around some candidate in order to effectively organize against Mamdani if that’s the goal. So that’s the path to it.

Rafael Mangual: So you think Sliwa is the one who drops out? Okay, Nicole, what about you?

Nicole Gelinas: I don’t think Cuomo will stay in the race. As somebody said yesterday, it is very hard to rerun the loser of a primary against the winner. The optics are just terrible to start from a losing place. So I don’t think Cuomo’s heart is in it. I think he will leave the race. Adams is not going anywhere. He’s very stubborn and persistent, and he has the whole weight of the mayoralty behind him in campaigning. I think Tal is correct. The risk is that Adams and Sliwa split the majority vote and leave Mamdani the victor from the perspective of people who want Mamdani not to come out of this victorious. And so, will there be some deal making to be had? You know, Curtis Sliwa is also a man of principle. He’s been working at this a very long time. He’s not someone that’s just going to easily give up his own center of power in having his own ballot line, but is there some way that he might have a high perch in the second Adams administration? Is there some deal to be made here? Maybe, maybe not, but clearly, you know, the math of two more moderate to conservative people running against one socialist person. You would rather have a one-on-one race in November.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think Nicole, you’re right on Cuomo dropping down. I don’t see him sticking it out to the end of the general. I think he’s kind of sufficiently embarrassed himself and I think it’s going to be really hard for him to keep support after having gotten so trounced. I mean, I think a lot of us thought we were going to be waiting several days to figure out who won the Democratic primary. The fact that it was so clear so early was pretty decisive. Daniel, what do you think?

Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, just that. This reminds me, know, in Nicaragua after the Civil War, was, know, Daniel Ortega was the socialist guerrilla fighter, right? That he lost, there was an election. Chamorro, this woman won the presidency because everybody united against socialism. And Chamorro, by the way, she died a few days ago. So this is why this is coming to mind. The first Democratic president of Nicaragua. And then the Democratic forces split in the next election. And they went two against Daniel Ortega. And Daniel Ortega won with less than 50 percent of the vote. Now Daniel Ortega then destroyed Nicaragua. He’s still president today 20 years later with his wife as co-president.

Rafael Mangual: Power couple.

Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, they are. Now I’m not saying that this is like New York City a dictatorship or anything but I am saying that it is very common for pride and personal goals to be put on top of country, values and freedom. And that I would think that that would be a real shame if that condemned New York City to live under socialism for at least four years and perhaps the entire country, that gives them momentum. And so I’m very wary of that, especially because in Latin America, there’s a long history of socialist rising to power democratically and then destroying the nation because the forces of common sense did not have common sense to unite.

Rafael Mangual: All right, so here’s the exit question for this topic. I mean, I think a lot of commentators have rightly kind of, you know, homed in on Zohram Mamdani’s kind of mastery of the vibe, right? I mean, he’s kind of created this aesthetic that’s been promoted furiously and expertly through social media. And, you know, there’s a sense that it’s going to take someone who has as much swag and style and a sense for the aesthetic to defeat him in a general election. So the question to you all is, who in the race do you think can match the swagger and sort of vibe of socialist Zohram Mamdani? Nicole?

Nicole Gelinas: I mean, that’s the thing. You end up back with Adams. Adams won partly in 2021 because he just had a lot of swager at a time when the city was just very psychologically depressed. I mean, he dresses very sharply. He’s out there getting his eyebrows waxed with the camera on him. It’s something that’s, Zohran… He’s a very strange person, but sometimes it doesn’t work.

Tal Fortgang: So weird

Nicole Gelinas: Yes, it’s…

Daniel Di Martino: But you know what? He’s authentic. He’s not an actor like the other guy who pretends to be working class and then has a wedding in Dubai. Adam, at least, is authentic.

Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, he has to bring the 2021 Adams back and just really hope that people have short memories about the indictment if he’s going to pull this off. Again, in a race with not a lot of alternatives, you are looking for the least worst alternative.

Daniel Di Martino: You know, our producer is saying, and I totally agree with this, that we need to bring back the home drug weapon search video of ours. It’s an amazing video that everybody should watch. You know, it’s like that cop energy. People like the cop energy.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right, my God. Yeah, but he has that cop that you also see in the nightclub hanging out with the perps on the weekend. Yeah, I mean, think he’s probably the one that comes closest to matching that. But Tal, what do you think?

Tal Fortgang: I’m just left wondering whether there’s a way to make the corruption charges look cool and not just in like “they’re after me, you know, I must be really,” you know, like a Trumpy kind of way? More like, you know, if I were caught up with the Yakuza like that would be really cool, right? Like if someone were like…

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Yeah, well, Trump did have—that mugshot is iconic. He actually did turn that into a kind of vibe and an aesthetic in a way that worked for him.

Tal Fortgang: Right. So, so if Adams can like really boost the coolness of Erdogan and the Turkish government, you know, step three, know, step two is obviously a bunch of question marks, but step three, vibes.

Daniel Di Martino: No. No, and also, you know, between the vibes of the Turkish candidate and the Iranian candidate, I prefer the Turkish one.

Rafael Mangual: Sure, I hear that. All right, so we always like to end with a kind of more fun, lighthearted question. And so since we’re coming up on time, I’m going to ask it. And that is especially relevant now because I think a lot of people are wary about what a Mayor Zohran Mamdani might do. It’s summertime in New York, which means everyone is flocking out to the Hamptons. The question is, is do we see the Hamptons becoming the next Palm Beach? Is that the escape from New York destination of choice, particularly for the high-tax-paying elite who may want to get out? What do we think, Tal?

Tal Fortgang: I guess so. I don’t know. They’re already kind of similar to me, in the sense that they’re both completely inaccessible. Right? Like, I’m not going to either one. Yeah, I think the cool breezes are probably better in the Hamptons. And I think it might be faster to get to Palm Beach. You know, I haven’t been on the LIE in a long time, but I think it might be faster to get to Palm Beach

Rafael Mangual: Nicole, what about you?

Nicole Gelinas: No, I don’t think so. hate to disagree with Tal, but the problem is you’re still in New York State, so you’re still subject to New York State taxes and the governor’s jurisdiction. And there’s just no real scene there, which is good. I mean, you go to Hamptons, you go to the beach, and there’s like a couple restaurants and nightclubs, but it’s not there. This is not the Palm Beach or the Miami art scene, social scene, school scene. It is a vacation spot and won’t ever be much more than that, which is probably for the best for the Hamptons.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, and from what I read, sort of Hampton’s establishment does not very much welcome anyone who tries to turn it into that kind of scene. So, Daniel, what do you think?

Daniel Di Martino: Yeah, people don’t want a city, a big city in the Hamptons. That’s why the Hamptons is the Hamptons, right? But I do think that if Mamdani were to kind of like do a nightmare scenario, destroy New York City, I think that that would give a lot more power to the Texas stock exchange alternative that already started to be built, right? That a lot of the financial industry would move to Miami, but also to Texas. I think Texas is a very, actually, and perhaps an even better alternative when it comes to housing costs, property costs, and also less risk of hurricanes and the weather and the sea, right? Dallas is probably a better place.

Rafael Mangual: The Dallas-Fort Worth area gets some pretty wild hailstorms, I will say. All my friends who have moved down there have had to replace at least one or two windshields.

Daniel Di Martino: But hey, that’s better than, like, being under the sea, you know?

Rafael Mangual: Sure. Sure. Okay, well that’s all the time we have unfortunately. I want to thank our panelists for the great commentary. I want to thank our producer Isabella Redjai. To all of you who are listening or watching, please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, hit all the buttons, do all the things for the algorithm, ask us a question, drop us a note, tell us what we got wrong, tell us what we got right. We’re looking forward to hearing from you. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal Podcast.

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