What’s in Store for Mamdani Isn’t Pretty, But the Alternative is Worse
In my column this past Friday, "Democratic Bigwigs versus Their Own Voters, Mamdani, and the Future," I expanded on a couple of side comments that I have recently made here on Dorf on Law regarding the Democratic Party establishment's latest failures. Although there are many such unforced errors to discuss, I was referring specifically to their failure to capitalize on the enthusiasm that the prohibitive frontrunner in the New York mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, has generated with voters there.
Most tellingly, the bigwigs are frantically distancing themselves from their own party's nominee even though Mamdani-supporting New Yorkers are the most important groups of voters in the party's base -- young people, progressives, and everyone else who falls into what Howard Dean once famously called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
Indeed, the people who will turn out to elect Mamdani are not just "important groups of voters in the party's base," as I put it just above. They are the essential core of whatever hope the country has for a non-Trumpist (which, to be very clear, is the same thing as saying non-fascist) future for the United States. Even so, the corporate establishment types are doing everything possible to run away from Mamdani -- notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) the fact that the alternative candidate is the execrable former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo. As many others have pointed out, the so-called leaders who sternly instructed the disappointed supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 to "vote blue, no matter who" are now finally making it unmistakably obvious that they are full of shit shameless liars.
It is thus far worse than merely failing to see a great political opportunity when it bites them on their collective behind. The anti-progressives are actively opposed to Mamdani, and that is tragic (albeit entirely predictable).
Before turning to the argument that I teased in today's headline, I should add that the group attempting to kneecap Mamdani is hardly limited to office holders present (Governor Kathy Hochul, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and too many others to count) and past (Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Kamala Harris). Unsurprisingly, the power brokers behind the scenes and in the corporate media (who are not officially politicians) are also fully on board with the public dissing of Mamdani.
Consider two examples from The New York Times, one relatively small and the other huge (but somehow quickly forgotten). I see no need to recap at length the many ways in which The Times has revealed itself to be at best utterly useless and at worst the worst, especially given that its publisher ridiculously wrote this last Fall:
I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away.
As always, in both its news coverage and on the opinion side, The Times pretends to be fiercely neutral but in fact follows (or leads) the Democrats' center-right inner party. That newspaper's editorial board once claimed -- apparently with a straight face -- that "Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned." The Times's assertion of that utterly preposterous (and wholly imaginary) "fundamental right" perfectly captures the sense of oblivious entitlement that guides its decisions to thwart anything that carries even the faintest whiff of progressive values.
So back to those examples in which The Times has undermined Mamdani. Last week, after the Mayoral "debate" (as always, scare quotes are essential when describing these fake events), the editorial page went for the usual dreariness and gathered a few of their in-house opinionators to comment on the faux-debate. What caught my eye was not the commentary itself (which was predictably boring and useless) but that the headline could not have been more misleading if the editors had tried -- and I am not at all ruling out that they were being deliberately dishonest about this.
What was the problem? In the column, the pundits themselves said that Mamdani had "won" or at least done reasonably well at the event, but here was the headline: "Mamdani ‘Might Be Eaten Alive’: 3 Opinion Writers on Who Won the Mayoral Debate." Wait a minute. The event had already happened, yet the headline was written about some possible future outcome. What was that all about?
One of the invited insiders, an occasional Times contributor named Josh Barro (whose public persona is, to be kind, sometimes indistinguishable from a self-impressed teenaged smart aleck) had said this:
Mamdani is very likable. I even like him, and I think he’s way too left-wing. But some of the campaign moves that read as charming — offering New Yorkers a rose in a “Bachelor”-style ad, for example — could wear very thin once he actually is mayor if people feel their needs aren’t being met by city government. And most of the time, that is how New Yorkers feel. So I think he might be eaten alive.
Barro was actually making an interesting and important point, to which I shall return shortly. But what matters here is that that is not at all what the headline suggests, which is that "who won the mayoral debate" had something to do with Barro's prediction about what will happen to Mamdani after he becomes mayor. This is not even a little bit subtle. Faced with a faux-debate that Mamdani had either won or most definitely had not lost, the editors at The Times decided to say that Mamdani "might be eaten alive."
Again, there is more to say about the substance of Barro's prediction. And also again, I concede that this is the smaller of my two examples. Even so, it is always important to note how the nation's most important newspaper goes out of its way to make snide insinuations about political progressives. But the bigger example is a doozie, especially because it appeared on the news side of the paper rather than opinion.
After his upset win over Cuomo and the rest of the field in the Democratic primary earlier this year, this story ran in The Times: "Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application: Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat running for mayor of New York City, was born in Uganda. He doesn’t consider himself Black but said the application didn’t allow for the complexity of his background." What in the world is going on? If taken generously as a straight gotcha, this is unworthy of coverage even in a world where Donald Trump thinks that it is clever to call Senator Elizabeth Warren "Pocahantas."
The hit piece by The Times was so bad that it caused Margaret Sullivan (who used to serve as the Public Editor at that newspaper) to ask rhetorically: "Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid? With their made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani." Sullivan offers a devastating critique of the not-news problem with the piece, and she does an especially good job of highlighting the most worrisome part of the story, which is that
it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia [University]’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist. ...
The incident raises a larger issue: the Times’s apparent opposition to Mamdani’s candidacy.
On the opinion side of the paper, there’s little question about that. Even though the Times no longer makes endorsements for mayor, they published an editorial urging voters to avoid ranking Mamdani at all on their ballots because he was so unqualified. (New York City uses ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to list several candidates in order of preference.)
Remarkably, the Times stopped short of giving the same “don’t rank him” advice about disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his office in 2021 and then ran for mayor against Mamdani in the primary.
Sullivan added: "The opinion side of the Times is entitled to its opinion, however misguided. But straight news articles, by contrast, aren’t supposed to go to bat for or against candidates. They’re supposed to be neutral and non-partisan, not cheering on one candidate or kneecapping another." Exactly. But again, The Times is somehow more interested in protecting the serial sexual harassment wing of the party than giving even a fair chance to someone like Mamdani.
All of which brings me back to the headline of this column. Despite how unfair the Democratic power brokers and their media organs have been in dealing with Mamdani, it now appears to be all but certain that Mamdani will be the next Mayor of New York City. That could change, but assume for now that it does turn out that way. What then?
As soon as elections are over, pundits invariably become confused when the victorious party quickly loses public support. Even before UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer made it clear that he is a terrible politician, for example, no one in their right mind should have been surprised that his anti-Tory win would be followed by an anti-honeymoon. Buy many were. And New York City is infamously tough on its mayors, with one of the safest jokes out there being that whoever is mayor will be hated as soon as he takes office. Election night: "We love you, Dinkins/Giuliani/Bloomberg/de Blasio/Adams!" Day 1 in office: "Hey Dinkins/Giuliani/Bloomberg/de Blasio/Adams, you suck!!"
So as a matter of simple realism, Mamdani will have a hard time as mayor, because any new mayor would have a hard time making even a little bit of progress on (much less solving) the City's many problems. As Barro put it in the quote above (the one that The Times's headline writers mischaracterized), Mandani "could wear very thin once he actually is mayor if people feel their needs aren’t being met by city government. And most of the time, that is how New Yorkers feel. So I think he might be eaten alive."
That, however, would be the least of it. The Democratic Party's insiders, along with super-inside power brokers like The Times, clearly have it in for Mamdani, so an immediate post-election campaign will arise -- seemingly from nowhere, but very much guided by those who would rather live the comfortable life of the loyal opposition in post-democratic America than even to be seen standing near a genuine progressive -- and turn Mamdani into the most reviled politician in the country.
Think of what happened to the so-called progressive prosecutors who swept into office after the Black Lives Matter moment in 2020. The attacks on Larry Krasner in Philadelphia were so bad that I could not stomach watching all eight episodes of "Philly D.A.," which showed how easy it is to slime a committed public servant. And in San Francisco, the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party vocally supported an utterly dishonest recall campaign of Chesa Boudin that was financed by a Republican billionaire.
Mamdani will be a mayor, not a D.A. And he will be the mayor of New York, the most important city in the country (and arguably the world), not Philly or SF. What happens next will definitely be an ugly thing to watch. Yes, the most absurd attacks on Mamdani will come from Fox News and the entire Republican fantasyland, but the safest bet in the world is that the supposedly liberal press and its affiliated politicians will be complicit if not actively participating in the defamation.
But what is the alternative? Cuomo as mayor? Bending the knee once again to the tut-tutting Clinton/Biden insiders? Mamdani will not be given even close to a fair chance, but I am still hoping that he will indeed be New York's next leader. Such good wishes today will probably feel like a curse to him when the bad things are happening, but I will summon some small amount of optimism and say that if anyone has the apparent strength of character to come out of the maelstrom that is to come with his decency intact, Zohran Mamdani is that guy.
- Neil H. Buchanan