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The Mamdani victory in New York City — 56 Comments

  1. The polls were about as wrong for Cuomo and Mamdani as for Sliwa, with all having about the same systematic bias. All of the select pollsters with three-candidate polls presented here substantially understated Mamdani and Cuomo’s support as tabulated so far.

    Cuomo is so far over 40%, none of the 7 polls linked to had him in the 40s. Mamdani is so far over 50% and none of the 7 polls linked to had him that high. They all had Sliwa projected to do over twice as well as he actually did. None of them seem have got two of the three within their own margin of error.

    Averaging them you get

    Mamdani: 44.9% (actually 50.4%, underestimated by 5.5%)
    Cuomo: 33.0% (actually 41.6%, underestimated by 8.6%)
    Sliwa: 19.6% (actually 7.1%, overestimated by 12.5%)

    Very likely they were weighting their samples in a way that did not reflect the actual voting population, in order for seven polls to do so badly in the same direction.

  2. Mamdani will soon run into his most implacable enemy. Not Republicans, the city council. They call themselves Democrats, sure, but that’s just a cover for their selfish corruption. And, because the corrupt can never get enough and never turn over a new leaf once they’ve despoiled themselves, they’ll find every excuse to thwart any Mamdani policy that threatens their comfortable little fiefdoms.

    They’ll let him have his ideology; they’ll even applaud it, but his idealism and his grand ideas will crash against the jetty of their corruption. “My constituency,” will be the excuse, but “my beach house in Boca and my monthly envelope of cash” will be their motivation. Their goal is not to solve problems, but to continue them.

    Zohran will need more than his cheesy grin to persuade them.

  3. Mamdani is a thoroughly revolting excuse for a human being. And so, it seems, this tag applies to the vulgarians who voted for him. As an augury, this says our national future is dark and dirty.

  4. He’s not charismatic. He’s not even inspirational.
    ==
    The problem is that core city electorates are shot through with people who find joy in vandalism. Hence Chesa Boudin, Brandon Johnson, and the Somali shmucks in Minneapolis. Mamdani is an especially lurid example of the breed.

  5. “But it wasn’t just the economics that made Mamdani’s speech so chilling; it was the unmistakable tone of moral absolutism. His rhetoric wasn’t that of a mayor; it was the rhetoric of a zealot.”

    Mamdani voters have decided to jump from the frying pan into the fire. But their sin lies in dragging every other New Yorker into the fire with them.

  6. Even Van Jones and David Axelrod were concerned about Mamdani’s speech:
    ___________________________

    Zohran Mamdani’s fiery, 25-minute victory speech Tuesday night left veteran Democratic strategists David Axelrod and Van Jones a bit stunned for what, they said, it didn’t include — neither the “warmth” the Democratic socialist displayed on the campaign trail nor a call to unify the city he will need to lead come Jan. 1.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mamdani-victory-speech-van-jones-david-axelrod-b2859255.html
    ___________________________

    Yeah, it’s going to be be a rough ride.

  7. “especially to women.”

    As was pointed out on X regarding NJ and VA as well this basal pandering – worse yet, its enthusiastic reception – represents an extremely worrying Bayesian problem moving forward.

    There is a long taboo and growing aptitude problem in America’s female electorate needing attention (at least more than it’s gotten).

  8. His election highlights the role of unfettered immigration: without assimilation, mass immigration becomes invasion.

  9. What Trump was willing to do in spite of the “experts” telling him it was a sure loser was FIGHT. Did anyone see any fight by any GOP candidate in NY or VA or NJ? Even Dem Cuomo acted like a world-class wimp when Mamdani demanded, DEMANDED him to justify not visiting a mosque in NY. He might as well have said “some of my best friends are muslim, please don’t be mad at me”.
    This is the Romney style of campaigning. “We’ll just coast into this thing. Don’t offend anyone” . Wrong!!! When Sliwa couldn’t get out of single digits why didn’t he come out swinging MMA style? You have nothing to lose at this point. The floor is as low as you can go Curtis.
    Trump supplied a template but they looked to Bob Dole and John McCain for advice on how to win. Good thing I’m a man of infinite patience. (sarc)

  10. For those under 40, Communism has never been an issue. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the West believed that Democracy and capitalism had won. It was “the end of history.”

    Then in 2001, Islamism became the enemy while the Marxists continued their merch through our institutions. And since at least 2008, CAIR operatives have been burrowing into our social media and NGOs.

    The result has been a citizenry under 40 who have been propagandized by anti-America and anti-Israel information.

    The myth of a government that can provide for all the citizens’ needs while providing egalitarianism is a siren song very attractive to those under 40 with scant knowledge of what Communism actually looks like.

    So, Mamdani’s win should not surprise us. He is both a Communist and a CAIR operative.

    What needs to be done is an education effort by reforming our schools and using all forms of communication to highlight the history of Communism and its failure’s.

  11. He’s not just a socialist, he’s a Muslim socialist. And yet that fact has also been soft-pedaled. New York is the new bride that wakes up to an entirely different man and feelings of doom the morning after she’s been wedded and bedded.

    The DataRepublican is a very interesting analyst that seems to know how to get to the heart of tactics, when it comes to Democrat and NGO perfidy. Her point about these elections is that they have the indelible record of a calculated and well-informed strategy to game the political system using money and online organizational skills to achieve a goal. Read some of her compiled threads from X on Threadreader. They are extremely informative, and I would place her importance alongside Scott Pressler as a highly effective citizen organizer for conservatives. She is pointing out the structural problems with the way that Republicans are campaigning – and they are losing big, because of it. It’s not just about radical billionaires, it’s at least as much about how those billions are being deployed. The Progressive Democrats are on top of their game, and midterms are approaching.

  12. Niketas:

    I meant that the polls were not so bad in that they had Mamdani and Cuomo about 10 points apart – at least the one I wrote about that was taken close to the election. It also had Sliwa at 11%, but I believe some of those people peeled off at the last minute for either Mamdani or Cuomo. There was also a sizable undecided group that split in some proportion as well, close to the election. But I think the polls were probably fairly accurate about the situation when they were taken, and they got the margin somewhat correct. I had also read a poll that gave Mamdani about 50%, but I forget who did it.

  13. The Mandami candidate. Coming soon to a country near you.

    If President Trump’s efforts to revitalize manufacturing/job creation offering incomes that don’t require ever increasing government benefits for basic living expenses– the next Democrat candidate will be bolder x 10 at offering the quick fix of socialismc– building on the gains Democrats have made the last few years.

    Very likely Mamdani’s assertive and bold speech will embolden Congressional democrats to double down on the shutdown. After all, what they are demanding in maintaining medicare/medicaid subsidies are just Mamdani like promises. Democrats will be rushing to the microphones offering more free stuff, more control over the remnants of a free market. What is sad is a government run central command and control economy will still allow the connected class to profit, while the lowest working class to struggle, ever relying on government benefits.

    The economic civil war is on.

  14. Art Deco:

    To you, he’s not charismatic. To me, he’s not charismatic. He’s almost certainly not charismatic to the readers of this blog. But he’s charismatic to a lot of people. I wonder how long he’ll stay that way.

  15. Niketas,

    “The polls were about as wrong for Cuomo and Mamdani as for Sliwa…”

    It’s the three body problem.

  16. I am in the Sacramento CA area this week for business. Shock # 1 was arriving at SMF Sunday morning and seeing so many Sikhs and Muslims. Shock #2: I already knew the Central Valley had a large Indian population, but it seemed like an inordinate number of billboards on US 99 were advertising Sikh/Indian businesses including real estate, as well as the now notorious trucking businesses.

    My wife remarked that when she worked as a teacher in San Diego, she viewed the traditionally dressed Sikhs as merely expressing their religious and/or cultural beliefs. I observed that the numbers they seem to have in that part of CA seem to suggest not “these are my beliefs, respect them” so much as “we are going to replace you.”

  17. In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, the principal character is thrown into prison for a while. There he encounters another prisoner who’s a religious lunatic who is in for murder: “I smote the Philistine.” The progressive warden thinks he needs a creative outlet and provides him with woodworking tools. He uses the saw to behead somebody.

    Progressive politics reminds me more and more of that.

  18. “Culturally sensitive outreach” is it now? Another of the endless stream of neologisms constructed by the racialist left in order to disguise the real motive, viz., hate whitey and steal his stuff. I listened to about enough of his rant to get to the part where he congratulated every ethnic and religious group on the face of the globe (all of whom seem to have at least a few representatives among the millions of foreigners who can’t speak, write or read English but who voted for him) for their participation in his victory. Every one, that is, except for the descendants of white Europeans. Yet, females of that ethnic variety voted for him, too, in overwhelming numbers! But, just as with all members of that demographic, after they get used and abused by their dusky complexioned boyfriend, they are cast aside, often beaten and bloody. I suppose they feel fortunate that the worst they got was ignored. One might have seen this coming. I did. Still, I await the great disappointment (to borrow a felicitous phrase) that awaits when all his supporters realize that he neither can nor wants to actually deliver on any of his promises. All, that is, except for the ones he picks to receive the gift of government graft that he will bestow upon them. When nothing is neither too big nor too small for the government to “fix”, as he stated, it is not long before the tax man comes to “fix” it.

  19. Mamdani and his win are gifts to the GOP if they know what to do with them. Neo and those who don’t find him charismatic, remember most charismatic failures become heroes.

  20. Mamdani and his win are gifts to the GOP if they know what to do with them. Neo and those who don’t find him charismatic, remember most charismatic failures become heroes to those who once thought they were charismatic.

  21. FOAF on November 6, 2025 at 4:12 am said:
    “Progressive politics reminds me more and more of that.”

    The warden or the prisoner?
    ________
    It would be the warden, who is portrayed as fantasizing of how he will be remembered as a far sighted wise reformer, of historical stature.

  22. Not just Mamdani, but most Dems won. Because of the successful Dem Demonization Strategy, to blame all problems on Republicans, and govt not doing enough good.
    Just as Dem Demonization was working before Trump, it will work after, and in this election is working. Dems want quick, simple, no tradeoff-off no problem answers to problems. In the real world, all solutions have costs, and none work all the time for all.

    The many/few rich folk who leave NYC will open up some housing to reduce price increases. It’s really unlikely NY will actually create much more housing. But crime is quite likely to obviously increase, so as to be a part of the GOP campaigns. The USA needs more housing built—tho there’s a good amount of housing in low job rural areas & high crime city districts, which isn’t mentioned so often.

    NYC income was some $1 trillion (residents, not city govt). We won’t know till mid-2027 how Mamdani’s policies are affecting the city on an annual basis, tho 1 quarter will be available by May or so for 2026. My guess is a decline of about 10%, still a huge amount of income despite a big decline of $100 billion.

  23. First as tragedy, then as farce…
    We’ve been here before – especially we New Yorkers – but this time around the masks have dropped.

    Behold the first “limousine liberal” – the article nicely summarizes his failed mayoral tenure, which gutted the middle class and any remaining manufacturing base in NYC:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lindsay

    Mamdani was elected by the “progressive” grandchildren of the “liberal” New Yawk Jews who elected Lindsey… I can say that because that is my original tribe. My aunties were taken with Lindsey’s patrician image just like the grandchildren have fallen for Mamdani’s radical chic.

    The grandparents were organized-labor social-welfare “liberals”… some are shocked that the grandkids are nihilist-Marxists.
    But only some… most have full-blown TDS and have pasted anti-ICE stickers on their walkers and wheelchairs.

    I keep telling my Israeli friends that we have enough crazy Leftie Jews of our own… musn’t let these people in when it all collapses.

    The Donald hails from a similar background, and knows these types better than they know themselves…

  24. To you, he’s not charismatic. To me, he’s not charismatic. He’s almost certainly not charismatic to the readers of this blog. But he’s charismatic to a lot of people. I wonder how long he’ll stay that way.
    ==
    The term ‘charismatic’ was coined by Max Weber IIRC to refer to rare gifts, not politicians who string together applause lines.
    ==
    Look at him. He has a spotty job history, no executive experience, and no family. A man of 33 usually has only modest accomplishments; he’s an arrested development case. His public remarks indicate his self-confidence runs far ahead of his understanding of anything. Who would vote for this elderly adolescent? This isn’t ‘suicidal empathy’; it is thoroughgoing frivolity.
    ==
    By way of comparison, the younger set among our proximate relations (who are between ages 29 to 52) have had some developmental delays (median age at the birth of their first child is currently 37). However, 11 of 15 had a distinct profession or trade they were working by age 32. Of the four who did not, one (currently age 29) is at home with her pre-school children and working retail part time and two others (one who has vocational training) work retail. Of those without children, two are due for a birth in April, two have had an insuperable medical issue, two are too inept to handle child-rearing, and one is slow about everything. Two of them might consider running for some sort of public office, but they’re busy with work and family life right now.

  25. People complain about how there wasn’t anyone really winnable running against him. That assumes that he sprung out of thin air as a candidate. He got the ranked voting choice. Who was there to put up much of a race against him? People don’t like Eric Adams — he may have been a crappy mayor, but he also really had his hands tied. People weren’t fond of Andrew Cuomo after he killed the elderly during COVID, not to mention the sexual harassment scandal, but also, he was “old.” In the primary, Lander came in a distant third.

    The problem with the NYC mayoral race is intractable. Until the city hits another low, like in the 70’s, it is what it is. And even then, I am not sure that will help – we’ve moved from “low information voters” to “no information voters”: most people now seem to vote base on feelings, and what they read on social media. There is also the fact that gerrymandering has disenfranchised republican voters. (The city council is 11-12% Republican, but 22-23% of registered voters are registered as Republicans.)

    Just a random thought: I recall how everyone talked about Mamdani’s slick videos on social media, but not a single person mentioned that he probably went to mommy and used her resources for all that.

  26. Well, that didn’t take long. Prior to the election all smiles, peace and brotherhood. Now the war drums bang. How long before he blames the Jews, the Trumpers and the “wreckers” when failure strikes?

  27. It was not uncommon after Trump’s win over the incredibly dumb and ignorant Kamala “Cackling” Harris, to hear conservative commentators talk about the disarray within the democrat party.

    Well guess what folks; despite their disarray the Dems just kicked
    ass – YET AGAIN – where it counts; at election time.

    The Dems are like a cancer; they may go into remission for a while, but they are sure to re-emerge and try to kill the patient (e.g. , our constitutional republic).

    Trump got about 51% of the popular vote and the Cackler about 49% of the vote. It is easy to imagine that if Trump’s opponent had at least the brain of a slug (a slugs brain is about 10x the size of the Cackler’s brain) and was a first rate BS artist (e.g., Gavin Newsome) , Trump would have lost.

    The Dems win in Virginia, in NYC mayor’s race and yes, Alvin Bragg’s win – again – as Manhattan district attorney (where no bail is de rigueur )shows that democrat voters are not going anywhere and when it’s time to cast their ballots, absolutely nothing at all will dissuade them from voting for a Democrat.

    The dumbpublican had better concentrate on how to win elections.

  28. How long have you lived in NYC?

    10 years or less – 82% Mamdani
    10+ yrs but not born here – 54% Mamdani
    I was born in NYC – 38%

    Any questions why the Western Left Wing Governments are importing 3rd World and especially Muslim voters – legally and illegally. ????

  29. Re: Desi voters

    I know who South Asians are but Desi was a new one for me. Here’s ChatGPT’s explanation:
    _________________________________

    “Desi” is a word from several South Asian languages—Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, etc.—that literally means “from the country” or “of the land.” It comes from the Sanskrit root, meaning country or homeland.

    Over time, South Asians living abroad began using “desi” informally to describe people, culture, and things from South Asia—especially from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. So when someone says “desi voters” in a U.S. context, they’re talking about voters of South Asian origin, often Indian-, Pakistani-, or Bangladeshi-Americans.

  30. “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
    –Mamdani

    “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”
    ? Benito Mussolini

    But Republicans are the Fascists. Right.

  31. Strong Dem victories this week do not bode well for the midterm elections. As Unwillin’ Barkis rightly points out, the most significant metric was women. In Virginia men voted Republican for Miyares over Jones 58% versus 40%, whereas women voted for Jones over Miyares 52 to 40. Which doesn’t quite explain how Jones won. The larger point is that women overwhelmingly voted Democrat. And Dem candidates not only won they won by more than expected.

    Otherwise things are going well for Republicans during the second Trump administration. Election results this week however strongly suggest Republicans cannot assume the midterms will go well for them. They might experience a taste of what happened for Dems under Obama.

  32. @huxley:I know who South Asians are but Desi was a new one for me.

    I spent years working with and socializing with South Asians. Besides Desi they sometimes say “NRI” for “non-resident Indian”, and for Desis born in the US they often say “ABCD” for “American-born confused Desi”.

    Since it’s an endonym it’s somewhat incongruous for people who are not South Asian to say it, a bit like if you started calling Germans “Deutsch”.

    One thing I learned is that most of them you meet here have used English since they were small, but they don’t always know what standard English is. One friend was telling me about something and she used the work “lakh”, I said “what’s lakh”. She said it’s an English word. I begged to differ, she didn’t believe me until she looked it up.

    (“Lakh” means 100,000. You’ll see it a lot in Indian English-language financial news, as well as “crore” which is 10,000,000 = 100 lakh, used like we might use millions and billions.)

  33. MIght be worth knowing that India’s “internal” official name is Bharat, I suppose a bit like how Germans call Germany “Deutschland” and Welsh call Wales “Cymru”. Westerners learned about India from the Greeks and so our exonym is a Greek-derived word. Bharat is the Sanskrit-derived word.

  34. According to Wikipedia (!!), the Indus River, from which “India” comes, derives from Greek which got it from a Sanskrit source, so not so Western after all. “Bharat” is from the Mahabharata, an important Sanskrit text. Since the Indus, once is has descended from the Himalayas, now runs entirely through Pakistan, perhaps “Bharat” might be more appropriate; the first Pakistani leaders were surprised and perhaps a bit outraged to learn India had taken that name.

  35. @Kate: “Indus” is sindhu in Sanskrit. The Sanskrit-derived languages call it variations on sindh, they don’t call it “Indus”. You can see that Greeks were probably talking to people who said “sindhu” but they brought “indos” back to Greece with them, and that’s where we got our name for that river.

    But since the major European languages all have the same ancestry as Sanskrit sometimes when words are really old it’s not easy to know who first came up with them.

    The history of the Greek kingdoms in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan and India is very interesting. They were early adopters of Buddhism and one of the routes through which Buddhism came to China and Japan.

  36. About the bit from the Evelyn Waugh novel that I brought up above: I only mentioned the essential bit but it’s actually a fairly elaborate satire on the whole progressive impulse to sympathize with the criminal to the point of absurdity. The chapter is called “Death of a Modern Churchman.”

    Yes, it’s the warden and others running the place who are the comparison to the modern progressives, who indulge and permit evil to the point where it kills them. More specifically I was thinking of the bizarre alliance between the left and Islam.

    It’s a great and darkly hilarious novel, btw. Give it a try.

  37. This is behind a paywall for the New York Times which I do not have access to; but, if this is true it may have played some part in the outcome of the election – here is the link.
    This sample ballot shows Mamdani and Sliwa being in two places on the ballot while Cuomo is only listed once.
    How can this be legal? Is this real? or is it fake news?
    Are there any readers here who vote in New York City and can tell us what the ballot actually looked like?

  38. How can this be legal? Is this real? or is it fake news?
    ==
    New York has a scrum of minor parties and there’s no bar to circulating supplementary petitions among non-partisan registrants. Those working in the minor parties commonly cross-endorse major party candidates.
    ==
    There’s quite a raft of amendments one could make to New York election law to improve matters, but the legislature seldom does anything salutary. (I used to carry petitions in New York back in the day).

  39. People sympathize with actual criminals and then pretend ordinary people going about their business are the true criminals.
    ==
    Bad causes attract bad people, BTW.

  40. Re: Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall

    Mac:

    When I got around to reading Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” after the (brilliant) tv series, I was astonished at how underrated Waugh was as a writer. Probably because he was a conservative.

    Just one perfect sentence after another … like Joyce and Hemingway.

  41. Related?

    “Does The Democrats’ Chaos Strategy Work?”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/does-democrats-chaos-strategy-work

    + Bonus:

    The atavistic, effectively paranoid tribalism at the hysterical—delusional—heart of progressive, Marxist cross-sectionality…

    “Mamdani Announces All-Female Transition Team, Including Lina Khan”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mamdani-announces-all-female-transition-team-including-lina-khan

    File under: Mean progs.

  42. huxley: Yes, Brideshead is great. Literary Catholics tend to swoon over it. And the tv adaptation is a rare instance of a dramatization being very true to a book and very good in its own right. Decline And Fall is a very very different sort of book, written much earlier than Brideshead. Vicious and very funny satire.

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