Charles Fain Lehman, Nicole Gelinas, John Ketcham, and Rafael Mangual discuss the violent protests in Los Angeles, the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, and the best Broadway musicals.
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Audio Transcript
Welcome back to a very special in-person episode of the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me today on this All-New Yorker in New York panel are my colleagues, Nicole Gelinas of Manhattan, John Ketcham of Queens, and Rafael Mangual of Long Island. I got that all right, right? Yeah.
Rafael Mangual: I’m originally from Brooklyn. Brooklyn. I gave you some New York red.
Charles Fain Lehman: That’s true. He’s originally from Brooklyn. Yeah, so we got three boroughs here.
John Ketcham: We’re all New York.
Charles Fain Lehman: Do we have any colleagues from Staten Island? We need some Staten Island representation at the Manhattan Institute.
Rafael Mangual: We used to have some. Shout out Isaac Gorodetski.
John Ketcham: It might just pervade the Institute.
Charles Fain Lehman: I love Staten Island. It’s America’s most urban deep red county and I respect them for that. I want to take us right into the news of the day.
President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard deployed in Los Angeles after anti-ICE protests turned into violence, rioting, things burning, the usual. The protests in turn come after an increase in immigration enforcement in California. Democrats are charging ICE and Trump with provoking the protests. Meanwhile, Republicans are saying, this is yet another example of Democratic lawlessness, so I’m going to throw it to the whole panel. What do we make of these events? What’s going on in Los Angeles?
Rafael Mangual: It’s not Trump who provoked the protests. It’s people like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom who made these spectacular statements using all kinds of apocalyptic language saying that, you this is a terror campaign and this is, you know, sowing chaos and they’re tearing families apart. That’s what prompts people to get angry enough to, you know, turn out in large numbers and wave foreign flags and set cars on fire and hurl, you know, large rocks at police cars passing from overpass. Like, it’s, you know, it’s infuriating. The idea, it is this sort of ongoing campaign of gaslighting that the Democrats really mastered in this kind post-Ferguson era to deal with those protests. And I don’t think people are buying it anymore and I think that’s a good thing, but it is still just no less infuriating when they try to sort of rearrange reality for you before your own eyes.
John Ketcham: You can see where the left is coming from. From their point of view, President Trump has consistently tried to push the envelope, especially when it comes to immigration matters, Kilmar Garcia being one of the examples, right? And so when you have images of Secretary Noem at CECOT in El Salvador, I think that does raise genuine fear among some people in some communities. I mean, maybe not everybody shares it. Maybe it’s unreasonable. But those are the images that get presented to some people. And I just wish that the way immigration enforcement has been had been carried out from the beginning were a little different. I wish that, for example, the Helmsley Building, right next to our office, were full of immigration courts and judges carrying out the orderly administration of justice and showing everyone that yes, immigration enforcement is being handled in an orderly, appropriate and serious way, but we didn’t really get that, and so I think you are seeing some of the ramifications.
Rafael Mangual: It’s a fair point, but I don’t think that the Trump administration would have gotten any credit had they done it that way.
John Ketcham: Fair, absolutely. I agree. I agree.
Rafael Mangual: This is all based on who is doing it, right? We didn’t hear a peep out of the far left of the Democrats, certainly nothing close to what we’re seeing now when Barack Obama was deporting way more people on a regular basis, when people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on campaign trails would say things like, “if you want to stay in this country, we’ll give you path to citizenship, but you got to get to the back of the line and learn English.” I mean, you know, that sounds like something Donald Trump might say, and nobody said a word about it. to me, this is really driven by the fact that it’s Donald Trump doing it. They hate him. They won’t give him any credit, despite the fact that the immigration enforcement campaign is the one thing that he’s doing that’s incredibly popular. It’s the reason that he was elected. Nothing about what he’s done in L.A. is surprising. It shouldn’t take anyone by surprise. I mean he said he was going to do it. This is what he ran on. This is why he was elected, and frankly, you know when I think regular Americans turn on the news and they see a sea of Mexican flags being waved, and, you know, a large group of people where you know, whose faces are lit up by fires that were set to cars, I think that only builds support for that kind of agenda. So, you know, ultimately I think this backfires on them.
Nicole Gelinas: Some of this goes back to who controls the narrative of the summer of 2020, where you had rioting in Minneapolis, you had rioting in New York City, you had rioting in Seattle and Portland and other major urban areas, and we had the Democratic narrative saying this happened on Trump’s watch, even though states are clearly responsible for maintaining their own order. So where does the political blame, blaming Governor Newsom stop, and blaming President Trump for not maintaining order begin? Because you had the Democrats want it both ways, that all of this rioting in 2020 was Trump’s fault, if it existed at all, but if he were to attempt to maintain order, that would be unconstitutional.
Now it would, I agree with John, I think it would be better not to start from here. You don’t want the National Guard deployed unless the governor asks for it. Has this risen to that level? Probably not. If you look back to Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago, it was the governor of Louisiana who specifically asked President Bush to deploy the National Guard. 50,000 troops deployed, the biggest peacetime deployment of the National Guard on U.S. soil, but that was another instance where it got so out of control, it would have been better to do it earlier, before the governor had asked for it. So where is that line where the president can ignore the governor and send the National Guard in? Maybe not here, but all of these things have to be considered when thinking about who is being blamed, how far do you let it get out of control, and so forth.
John Ketcham: We live in a very polarized country. We can recognize that Donald Trump will probably not get credit where credit would be due in certain circumstances but doing the right thing in terms of institutional stability, in terms of the rule of law, is something that he should pursue anyway. There’s no justification for the type of civil unrest, the burning of vehicles, the violence against law enforcement that we saw. No excuse or justification for that but we do have to wonder what might have been if a more measured approach from the beginning were taken but that one that still has a great deal of seriousness in that.
Charles Fain Lehman: I mean I think that, you know, the administration’s position which I find persuasive is, you know, they have a mandate more than anything else, right, they had essentially two electoral mandates. One was to get immigration under control. The other was to deal with the price level. They’ve done okay on the latter, up and down, but on the former like that’s the thing, as Ralf alludes to, is their greatest popular mandate. And so think their argument is like… And you know, I’ve argued, Daniel Di Martino and I had a piece about this saying what they need to do is scale up resources. There’s a section in the, the, uh, One Big Beautiful Bill Act, uh, trying to fund more of this. We’ll see if it gets through. Um, at the same time, I think the argument is like, we have a mandate to do this. We’re going to do this by whatever means are available to us within the sort of broad constraints of law. The other thing that I’ll say that I think is important here is the administration’s done a very good job picking its enemies. You know, this is the question to me, this is, like, how deliberate are they being about this? Like I think about Kilmer Garcia, the guy that we talked about on the show before, who they accidentally deported to El Salvador, and then it turned out they’re bringing him back for human trafficking charges. He’s been indicted by a grand jury. He beats his wife. And this is like the people that people were jumping to defend. Ditto these protesters where, you know, I don’t have strong misgiving about deploying ICE officials to do immigration raids in California, but like even if I did, I would still rather politically be on that side than on the side of the people who are burning cars. And I think that the administration comes out stronger because they are positioned against that population.
Nicole Gelinas: Well, we still haven’t settled on a definition of what is a peaceful protest. Is setting a Waymo on fire peaceful? If half of the political leadership of the country would not term that a riot, that causes issues of when would they step in to stop this. And they did not step in to stop it in 2020. We had, you know, I was in Manhattan all summer of 2020, never left. It was clearly rioting, massive property destruction all throughout Midtown and lower Manhattan, but yet the narrative was this is protesting, it is not rioting.
Rafael Mangual: They know the difference. The reason that they’re failing to draw the line is because it’s politically inconvenient for them to draw it where everybody in the world knows it is. No one thinks that setting someone else’s car on fire is peaceful. No one thinks that that’s okay. The only question here is that if it’s our side doing it, we’re going to really drag our feet to condemn it because it makes us look bad. And you see that in some of the responses on X today. I mean Governor Newsom, you know, “Angelenos, please don’t riot. You’re falling into the trap.” No, don’t riot because rioting is bad. Don’t riot because you shouldn’t set things on fire, not because it gives the other side some kind of credit. Alex, I can never pronounce his last name. The guy from Cato who’s like the open borders guy.
Charles Fain Lehman: Oh, Nowrasteh.
Rafael Mangual: Alex Nowrasteh posted on X this morning or last night, I can’t remember. Same thing. “They want chaos. You’re giving them what they want. This is only going to increase support.” It’s like, no, this is bad because it’s bad. It’s objectively bad. The only reason that they are kind of dragging their feet here is because they don’t want to admit that it’s their side doing it because they realize that they have a real political problem with violence. That’s part of the Democrats’ identity. I’ve been saying it on the show for a long time.
And it’s hard for them to walk away from it. You have the summer of 2020. You have all of the stuff that’s happened since October 7th, the shooting of two Israeli embassy employees. You have the guys set on fire out in Colorado. That was a peaceful protest. And who made it unpeaceful? The guy with the Molotov cocktails, obviously, right? You have what’s been going on on college campuses. There is just a sort of never-ending series of violence following left-wing causes wherever they go, and people are noticing.
John Ketcham: See, my worry is that this is emblematic of deeper political failures, right? And I worry about the institutional failures and the instability that breaking customs and norms causes. And, you know, we seem to be accelerating in that regard, both in terms of the willingness to break laws and to engage in these riotous acts, but also to meet that with a robust response. In this case, it remains to be seen whether the President will invoke the Insurrection Act, for example, but if that happens, that’s a major escalation. I would hope that it doesn’t come to that.
Charles Fain Lehman: I’ve been thinking, I’m going to take us out after this, because I want to make sure we have plenty of time for our second topic. But I’ve been thinking a lot about late City Journal contributor Fred Siegel’s concept of the riot ideology, which he wrote about both for CJ and elsewhere, which is, you know, in the 1960s, leading liberal political figures responded to the riots of late 60s by saying, you know, this is downstream of legitimate concerns about structural racism. This is about, you know, lack of access. This is about poverty.
And you see similar language: “Well, this is really a legitimate response or a predictable response to what the administration is doing.” And Siegel’s point was like, what you are doing—this is a classic like neoconservative insight—what you are doing when you make those arguments is creating an incentive. You’re saying, we are going to… We are willing to affect political change in response to these riots, which is a great reason to do more rioting. And, you know, I think somebody said, I forget who, at the start of Trump Two, we’ve seen much less popular protest. And the argument was like, well, we’re just going to see much more direct violent action. Cause it’s like the protests don’t seem to work. A majority of the public, at least then was on his side and ran to the side on certain issues. We got to do something more drastic to try and affect our political goals. I think it started what we’re seeing.
That, hopefully, is a good segue into our exit, which is, I want to ask everybody. I was just talking to Brian Anderson, the Editor in Chief of City Journal, and he said we should make sure we’re doing a lot of coverage on this and related topics because he thinks it’s just going to get worse over the course of the summer. So do people think this is going to be another summer of 2020? Are you worried about, on a scale of 1 to 10, how concerned are you about continued rioting over the next couple of months? I’ll throw it to Nicole first.
Nicole Gelinas: One thing that the summer of 2020 taught me was how quickly things can change and get out of control and escalate. I mean, I remember sitting in the backyard and it’s like there’s helicopters and they’re boarding up the windows and it’s kind of like, well, yesterday we would not have thought that this could happen. And today it is happening and seems normal. So I am much more wary than I would have been five years ago that right now things seem fine. The city seems under control, things are going well, but that can change very quickly, and do we have city and state leadership in place to recognize when that is changing and to step in before it gets out of control?
John Ketcham: Right. I also fear the tit for tat escalation here, and that is just going to be even more destabilizing for the country. I agree with Nicole. I’ve been here in New York City throughout the entirety of the 2020 summer. The fireworks that were going off, the riots in the streets, it was just real mayhem. it’s something we, think, as Americans should come together as and say, you know, this is just not acceptable. We do have a political mechanism to adjudicate our differences, and we should respect that.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, I think the lesson of 2020 was that we created a permission structure for this kind of violent behavior. If you look at just the year after George Floyd was killed, there was something like 130 criminal justice reforms enacted across like 40 states in a very short period of time, all following months of riots. What that tells the left, I think, was that this is a way for you to get what you want. And if that was a lesson that they drew from that, then I do think that we’ll see more of this.
What’s different here is that this is a federal issue, immigration, right? So I’m not sure that we’re going to see a ton more protests on this because what are they going to get out of it, right? The Trump administration’s not going to give them a win. At least, I don’t think so. So, you know, if the question is restricted to immigration, I don’t think we’re going to see a ton of these. But I do think that the left has sort of very problematically embraced violence as a means to an end.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I this gets to sort of the core question for me that decides this, which is like, you know, can the sort of center left walk the walk in addition to the sort of moderating talking that it has done thus far? We’ve talked about big city figures, Daniel Lurie, Eric Adams, we’ll segue into the New York City mayoralty in a second. Gavin Newsom, 2028 hopefuls who want to run away from Defund the Police and run away from the summer of 2020, and also want to run away from Donald Trump. And the question is like, can they walk that tightrope? And the only way to do that is to be dispositively in favor of law and order in such a way that Trump can’t sort of take advantage of the situation for his own political purposes. It’s like if Gavin Newsom was focused on fully suppressing the violence in LA, if the LAPD and LA civilian leadership were putting out press releases being like, this was mostly peaceful protest, it’s fine, then Donald Trump would have no opening. And can they resist the urge to fight with him over dealing with the actual riots in their streets is the core question to me.
Nicole Gelinas: Yes, I mean Trump is always a response to Democratic failure. We saw that in 2016. We’ve seen it’s been 10 years, but yet they never learn the lesson that you neutralize Trump by just being competent. Can Gavin Newsom competently control his own rioters? If he can, that neutralizes Trump’s role here.
Rafael Mangual: I think the answer is no, because he needs them.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right. All right. I want to take advantage of… I want to make sure you have plenty of time for talking about the next topic. So we’ll go from local leaders to local leaders. Listeners know that we’re very invested in the outcome of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. We all have been following with interest. Last week, the mayoral, the first mayoral debate happened. The next one is this week. We’re in between. Last week we saw nine people on stage. This week it’s supposed to be seven. One of the two who’s been excluded from the debate, Jessica Ramos, just shockingly endorsed Andrew Cuomo after spending like a decade decrying him as Satan. So what were people’s impressions of the mayoral debate? Where are we in the race and I wanted to make sure we hit this in this you know very special New York episode but I’ll throw it to the panel.
Rafael Mangual: It’s depressing. It’s depressing. This is the best that the best city in the world can do. And especially coming off of 2020, and all of the things that the city has experienced in the way of population loss and crime increases and disorder increases and people like Zohran Mamdani are skyrocketing in the polls.
Charles Fain Lehman: Friend of the pod.
Rafael Mangual: You know, and it was just, it was… It was empty. It was poorly performed.
Nicole Gelinas: But why do you think Mamdani is rising?
Rafael Mangual: Because I think he’s run an incredibly effective campaign that creates the impression that he is popular and that his ideas are popular. Just look at his social media feed. He has hundreds, if not thousands, of followers who are just religiously reposting and making sure that every one of his videos and posts is optimally ratioed and you know that and just well done, and the aesthetic is there, and I think it creates the impression that, hey this is New York, he’s a young guy, and he’s got you know a t-shirt with a blazer on and he’s cool and blah blah blah, right? But it’s like you know, he’s actually dangerous. His ideas are dangerous. The sort of people that he associates with are dangerous. His followers are exactly the kind of people that would set cars on fire and that have shut down Grand Central Station. And then you see someone like Whitney Tilson, for example, sits there and makes sense and says things that are both vanilla but also speak to core competencies of local government. And he’s what, like at 1 percent? like awesome, you know?
John Ketcham: The million-dollar question is where is Zohran Mamdani’s ceiling? I mean the conventional wisdom from several months ago would have said maybe 20 percent, 25 percent. Clearly he’s got some higher upside there and it’s because he’s got, as Ralph says, this very well calibrated machine. Many, many door knockers. They are canvassing as many Democrats as they can.
And basically, he’s able to mobilize better than all the others, I think, including Andrew Cuomo on the ground game. Now, where Jessica Ramos’ endorsement of Cuomo is very important, I took that as being more important than AOC’s endorsement of Mamdani. And why? Well, because Ramos was the only Hispanic in the race, so she brings some Hispanic votes to Cuomo. She has a lot of credibility and support with labor unions. She’s a champion of unions and will allow the unions that backed her to go with Cuomo and buck the Working Families Party. And so basically provides a shield for them allowing them to go to the more moderate candidate. And then she does have a bit of a ground game because on the more progressive side I think that she will bring some of her supporters and volunteers to go and help Andrew Cuomo. whereas by contrast the AOC endorsement is anyone who really loves AOC is going to be voting for Mamdani anyway and ranking Mamdani first.
Nicole Gelinas: I think what’s interesting that we saw in the debate that it’s a strange election and that the incumbent is waiting until the general election, but candidates can run against Cuomo as the incumbent and it leaves him vulnerable in more than just all of the baggage that he brings with the sexual harassment allegations and the nursing homes and the whole litany of things that people already know about. you know, Cuomo’s ceiling is how many people dislike him, but that is compounded by the fact that if you’re just vaguely unhappy and you don’t know why you’re unhappy, Mamdani, as the emerging leading opponent here, can say, if you are unhappy it is this guy’s fault and point to Cuomo correctly or incorrectly so he faces the vulnerability of being an incumbent even though he’s been out of office for four years and he because of that Cuomo benefits from low turnout. Mamdani benefits from and massive get out to vote operation where all of these enthusiastic people that registered to vote against Trump, do they come out or not? If they do, that’s bad for Cuomo. If they don’t and you just get your union members and your older homeowner voters and your super prime voters who vote in every election in a low turnout race, that benefits Cuomo. But after all of this and we go through June 24th, we basically have the same race over again, which is really strange. You just lose all the little candidates like Tilson who aren’t getting any attention anyway. You’re still in the general election you still have Cuomo, Mamdani,
Charles Fain Lehman: You think Mamdani is going to run?
Rafael Mangual: He has a Working Families
Nicole Gelinas: So you have a rerun of the Cuomo versus Mamdani race but with Adams as a wild card in the mix for November.
John Ketcham: Which has not happened in a multi-way general election that’s competitive since 1969.
Charles Fain Lehman: this is the re-elect, right? The liberal line.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, this is why I don’t think Mamdani ceiling in the primary is all that important because for the first time in my living memory This race is really going to come down to the general right in New York We’re so used to the race kind of being decided by the outcome of the Democratic primary because in the city this blue the Republican almost never wins, right?
John Ketcham: We should just note that New York City is a closed closed primary system So in order to participate in the Democratic primary you have to be a registered Democrat and most of the time that means that the winner of that Democratic primary goes on to an easy general election win, given the overwhelming registration advantage that Democrats have.
Rafael Mangual: even if Mamdani loses the primary, he still runs into the Working Families Party. He’s got, you’ll have name recognition by that point. And so his ceiling, it’s less important in isolation and it becomes important with respect to the potential floors of the other likely three candidates that are going to be in the race competing for the same vote.
Charles Fain Lehman: You do the math. You do the math. If Mamdani’s getting 45 percent, that’s the poll number, if Mamdani’s getting 45 percent of Democrats, Democrats are about two thirds of the you know rounding or you say Montana gets 30 percent in the general that leaves 70 percent Something like 20 percent will vote for Curtis Lee wa so that leaves 50 and you know If it goes if half of that 50 goes each to Cuomo and Adams the Mamdani wins So I think there is there is a path there which is Alarming to me.
John Ketcham: Well, the primary is ranked choice, but the general election is not right and so you do have the ability for vote splitting and plurality winner in the general election right to Charles’s point that is
Charles Fain Lehman: That is my concern. Was there anyone else, I mean this may be, you know, a non-starter question, but was there anyone else who stuck out in the Democratic in the in the primary debate? I thought there were a couple of people who were… I mean nobody was nobody was perfect, and I’m curious what people make of the other of the other candidates. Tilsen was great. Whitney Tilsen, who is really an MI Democrat, I guess.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I thought he was great, and I thought everyone else on stage was just completely unimpressive. Even Mamdani, who has sort of built, I actually thought the debate was probably one of the worst moments of his campaign because it’s such a sharp contrast between the character that we saw on stage and the character that’s been promoted on social media that seems put together and quick on his feet. He was just…
John Ketcham: He didn’t bring the charisma.
Rafael Mangual: I mean it was actually really interesting to see. I wonder if other voters, you know, picked up on it. But yeah, I mean the takeaway for me was the complete lack of anything impressive. And just in the way of things being said, of just presentation styles, charisma, you know, New Yorkers deserve better.
Nicole Gelinas: The structural difficulty is Cuomo is really vulnerable from the center and being the architect of the move toward criminal justice leniency between 2017 and 2019.
Charles Fain Lehman: Which he doesn’t want to tell anyone.
Nicole Gelinas: He doesn’t want to talk about it. I mean, someone asked him about it at the debate and he spent that time criticizing Brad Lander’s wife. And he did that on purpose because he was deflecting the question. But no one consistently on the stage criticizes Cuomo from the center because they’ve come up in their careers in low turn
low-attention elections so they can pander to the left and not get a lot of attention for that. It’s hard for them to walk back that once they’re in a higher-attention, broader race. And ironically, Cuomo, he’s not embarrassed to just completely do a U-turn on what he did and said before because he just sort of has that hutzpah to go out and do that, he’s beating them just on sheer force of personality.
John Ketcham: We were discussing this a few days ago. Andrew Cuomo is almost like the embodiment of all of humanity’s contradictions. All of us are in some way a tangle of contradictions and adept politicians can capitalize on that to remake themselves at will. Donald Trump does this pretty well too.
Rafael Mangual: That and he’s a compulsive liar.
John Ketcham: Different angles on the same thing
Charles Fain Lehman: Potato, potato
John Ketcham: I found it interesting that very few candidates really except Whitney criticized Mamdani. Yeah, and this is a dynamic. Yeah, I think brought about by ranked choice voting because they are afraid to have Mamdani voters not rank them somewhere, but to me that’s a bit misplaced because if Mamdani is ranked first, which I believe he will be on the vast majority of his supporters, anything ranked under him is just never going to count because Mamdani will wind up in the last round. So for someone like Brad Lander or Scott Stringer, I would think the approach is tell Mamdani voters, me before Mamdani, and try to rack up as much first rankings as possible. I don’t know whether that’s going to be viable, but at the same time, it seems to me a more plausible winning strategy than to simply avoid attacking Mamdani and thereby facilitate his rise indirectly.
Nicole Gelinas: And how much do people’s contradictions show up on their ballots? I mean, it’s very unpredictable. How many people who rank Mamdani also rank Cuomo fifth?
Charles Fain Lehman: But there will be some of those right? Right. This is like, right, this is like the Trump, I think the Post had coverage of somebody who’s a Trump-AOC voter who’s now a Trump-Mamdani voter.
Rafael Mangual: Oh yeah, I saw that piece. That’s strange.
Charles Fain Lehman: Similar, similar, similar population.
John Ketcham: There are a lot of low turnout, low information voters and, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s just hard. And in the Democratic primary, you don’t see any other information about the candidates on the ballot, right? If you don’t do your homework and many, many voters do not do their homework, it’s just the nature of the election, and just for context, when we say low turnout election the last one in 2021 was 26.5 percent and that was the first one—
Charles Fain Lehman: Of Democrats
John Ketcham: Of eligible Democrats, and you know there was the first one without an incumbent in a long time, and the first one using ranked choice voting too, so we’re not going to be…
Charles Fain Lehman: Do you think it’s going to higher this time?
John Ketcham: I think a bit probably
Charles Fain Lehman: Because of the Mamdani turnout effort?
John Ketcham: Mamdani and, you know, it is a really contentious race. It’s chaotic in a way that the other, I mean the other one was, but we had COVID and other things. But I wouldn’t expect to break 30 percent though.
Charles Fain Lehman: So let me take us out. We’re talking about Jessica Ramos dropping out. I suspect that there is some kind of deal that happened there. We may see Ramos in a position of influence in a future Cuomo administration. Who knows? Great questions.
Nicole Gelinas: She has at City Hall before, so I think we can assume she would want a labor negotiation or another major job in City Hall.
Charles Fain Lehman: But people are definitely starting to do the political math of if I endorse what happens. So here’s my question. Who’s next and who are they endorsing for? Who’s the next person to drop out? Or is it nobody?
John Ketcham: Ranked choice voting disincentivizes dropouts, but I think what we’re seeing is a recognition that ranked choice voting is really hard to coordinate. I know an abacus is a really powerful addition, you know, device. I don’t know how to use one, right? And so I really couldn’t make much use of it. And so I think ranked choice voting is similar. It’s very hard for candidates to coordinate support without making it look like an endorsement of the other guy. And it’s very hard for voters to know enough about up to five candidates to make an informed choice.
Nicole Gelinas: It’s especially true when our campaign finance board and board of elections continues to send out inaccurate mailings and so incompetent. They sent a little booklet to my house just this weekend, the same weekend that I got my absentee ballot, and the booklet incorrectly said Adams is in the Democratic primary. That’s just inexcusable because if I’m carefully making out my ballot and learning about these candidates and I decide, yeah, I’m going to pick Adams and I go into voting booth and he’s not there, what do I? And there will be people like that. I you cannot send people incorrect information when you are already starting early voting.
Rafael Mangual: I think if I had to make a prediction it be Adrienne Adams.
Charles Fain Lehman: That was what I was thinking too. She’s the speaker of the City Council.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah and I think she might actually throw her weight behind Mamdani.
Charles Fain Lehman: I think there’s a real possibility in terms of, and this gets to the point of who was going after Cuomo. She was, think, among the most aggressive anti-Cuomo partisans. She sure doesn’t seem to like him. I think a lot of people in New York City politics don’t like Andrew Cuomo, and there might be another star they can hitch their wagon to, to mix my metaphors.
Nicole Gelinas: So we go right from this debate to official early voting. So any dropouts and endorsements would have to happen very, very quickly.
Charles Fain Lehman: The other question is Michael Blake, who is very aggressive on Cuomo in the election. He’s not going to be on this, excuse me, in the debate. He’s not going to be on the stage either. I don’t know where he ends up. He is going to continue to fight to be on the stage, I think he said. And he’s not pulling a lot of votes, but could make some degree of difference.
All right, before we go, I’m going ask one last question. Last night, as of recording this, I think it was last night, was the 70th annual Tony Awards, celebrating the… all things Broadway. So I’ll ask our panelists, are you musical fan? if so, what are your favorite musicals? We’ll start with Nicole.
Nicole Gelinas: There was this obscure musical like 10 years ago called If/Then with Idina Menzel, who was famous of course from Wicked, and strangely the main character Idina Menzel played an urban planner in sort of Bloomberg-era New York City. It did very badly. closed after like six weeks.
Charles Fain Lehman: You were the target audience.
Nicole Gelinas: I saw her twice. If there’s a video out there I would recommend people go watch the video.
John Ketcham: You know, Nicole, every New Yorker has a side hustle, right? I think we’ve got something going here guys, okay? I like Broadway, I go a couple of times a year. Last year I saw The Great Gatsby and Stereophonic. Stereophonic had won all these awards and the critics were raving about it, and I’m sitting there I’m like okay, where are we going with this? we get to the end and I realize it’s just a critics’ play, right? Whereas Gatsby was much more of a crowd pleaser, something I would have expected to be, you know, Broadway.
Rafael Mangual: I’ve only ever seen three musicals, two by force, one out of curiosity, which was Hamilton, which I kind of enjoyed, but I have no opinion, just…
Charles Fain Lehman: You’re not a musical guy.
John Ketcham: Opera’s better.
Charles Fain Lehman: You’re an opera guy?
Rafael Mangual: I’ve been to the opera once. It was an interesting experience, but yeah, also not my thing. saw…
Charles Fain Lehman: UFC on the other hand.
Rafael Mangual: I forget the name of it.
John Ketcham: The production for Nozze di Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro?
Rafael Mangual: No.
John Ketcham: Don Giovanni?
Rafael Mangual: Don Giovanni.
Charles Fain Lehman: He wasn’t going to stop until he figured it out.
Rafael Mangual: It was Don Giovanni, yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay.
Rafael Mangual: Is that Mozart?
John Ketcham: Yes. It was the second of the three written by De Ponte. Rafel Mangual: I got that right. Yeah.
Charles Fain Lehman: You know, was raised on classic musicals. My kid, my wife has been exposing my older son too. Earlier this month it was You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and now I think it’s Cats, so she’s just really getting him into the entire repertoire, and I’ve enjoyed revisiting those. I think she’s going to take him to see a very small production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and that will be a great deal of fun. So I like musicals. I enjoy them on the merits. I’m not sure I want to pay Broadway prices, but…
With that, I believe that’s about all the time that we have for this very special in-studio episode. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you as always to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, watchers, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, or even if you haven’t, please don’t forget to like, subscribe, comment, ring the bell, do all the things, all the buttons. Press every single button available to you right now on YouTube or other platforms. If you have questions, please leave them below. If you’re on YouTube or I don’t know, you can like break into my house and leave a question there. I’m not going to tell you where I live. You can guess.
Rafael Mangual: Don’t break into my house.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, don’t break into Ralf’s house. You don’t want to break into his house. Until next time, you’ve been listening to the City Journal podcast. We hope you’ll join us again soon.
Photo: Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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