Mamdani Struggled With Working-Class Voters. Why?

Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani continues to lead the race for New York City mayor. But one group of voters remains skeptical of his promises: working-class New Yorkers. They were the voters least likely to support him in the primary, instead rallying behind former governor Andrew Cuomo.

City Journal reporter Adam Lehodey decided to visit Cuomo strongholds in the Bronx to find out why some New Yorkers are so reluctant to support Mamdani and hear about the big issues on their minds as the election approaches. Read what they had to say.

Of New York City’s more than 3 million Latino residents, about 1.7 million are eligible to vote. A record number turned out to do just that in this year’s mayoral primaries, and they will help decide the city’s next mayor in less than two weeks.

Indeed, as Santiago Vidal Calvo notes, Latinos are “no longer the sleeping giant in local politics.” And their support for Zohran Mamdani means that Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa will have to work that much harder to convince them that socialism won’t solve the city’s problems.

“Latino New Yorkers list cost of living, public safety, and housing affordability as their top concerns this election—and Mamdani has campaigned on them all,” Calvo writes. But “some Latino New Yorkers—particularly those with roots in countries scarred by authoritarian socialist regimes—are skeptical of anything labeled ‘socialist.’”

Read his take.

City Journal recently released its 2025 College Rankings, a comprehensive assessment of the quality, integrity, and values of 100 leading colleges and universities. Our rankings assess these institutions on a broad range of criteria, including whether they host a School of Civic Thought on campus.

Benjamin and Jessica Silber Storey argue that this last criterion is essential. Schools of Civic Thought educate students in the principles of citizenship. They offer classes in American civics and Western thought, introducing students to ideas that have fallen out of favor in many history and political science departments. Having such a program on campus, the Storeys argue, “is a bellwether for parents and students—a sign that an institution is determined to recover lost elements of the great American tradition of civic and liberal education, combine that inheritance with new approaches to knowledge, and create from that mix a rite of passage into responsible adult life.”

In 2012, Harvard business professor Max H. Bazerman and his fellow researchers made a startling discovery: you could get people to behave more honestly simply by asking them to promise to be truthful before beginning a task, rather than after. The discovery held out the prospect of saving businesses and governments lots of money by nudging people to be more honest when filling out documents like tax forms and insurance claims. There was just one problem: the findings were based on fabricated data. 

Bazerman’s new book, Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal, explains how he got mixed up in a dishonest honesty study, describes his and others’ subsequent efforts to uncover the truth, and offers suggestions for preventing similar cases of academic fraud in the future.

Read Manhattan Institute fellow Robert VerBruggen’s review of the book here.

“I remember when marijuana was going to cure glaucoma.”

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