I Love the New York City Mayoral Race

A confession: I love every single thing about this year’s New York City mayoral race. I read every story about it, hang on every update or embarrassing photograph that crosses my transom online, and check the polling and political markets daily. Why would I, a person who lives nowhere near the Empire State, be so riveted by a local election? Because it is a saga of urban political despair that sings to my own corroded soul like few others this year. I love the chaos, the insanity, the sheer hopelessness of the choices on offer for New Yorkers, as only a longtime Chicago resident truly can. Allow me to explain.

The Democratic mayoral primary approaches on June 24. New York’s current mayor, Eric Adams, is running for reelection — as an independent. His hand was forced. After a hapless tenure, a series of Biden-era federal indictments for comically small-stakes foreign bribery, and a politically toxic intervention by the Trump DOJ, Adams has conceded to the reality that he is as welcome within the New York City Democratic Party as an infestation of sewer rats. He has thus abandoned it to run on his own brand. (Perhaps he is counting on the support of his lone remaining natural constituency, the Turkish government.)

With the Dems in disarray, it was time for an old foe to swoop down upon the confused city like the ghoulish creature he has forever been: Andrew Cuomo. Where to begin with Governor Nosferatu, whose third term in Albany was cut short in the summer of 2021 by a torrent of sexual harassment allegations? He is a foul tyrant, notoriously vulgar and arrogant, a man of fundamentally low character, with the facial expression of a death’s head. New Yorkers have known all of this for years, and have made their peace with it. (In fact, they probably would have reelected him to a fourth term in 2022 had he not resigned, cursing New Yorkers with Kathy Hochul as a farewell gift.)

The general rap on Cuomo is that he is “evil but competent,” and understand that this is his candidacy’s primary selling point. (“Vote for the Scumbag — It’s Important!”) But this sort of appeal assumes far too much about the governor’s record. The Andrew Cuomo I remember is the guy who facilitated a massacre of the state’s senior citizens by forcing nursing homes to accept patients with Covid for months during the initial outbreak. That doesn’t seem very competent to me at all — in fact it seems like something he has never once properly answered or atoned for. (And I doubt he ever will.)

Meanwhile, New York City progressives hate Cuomo every bit as much as they hate Adams, and they have chosen to rally — with their typical semireligious fervor — around State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan Muslim son of a filmmaker and a Columbia University poli-sci professor, might as well have been purpose-built by Soros-funded scientists in a lab to activate every fashionably progressive erogenous zone in city politics.

A handsome and affable public speaker, Mamdani thrills crowds of educated hyper-woke young white women with his visions of a “more equitable” New York: He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He calls for universal health care and the increased use of “social workers” as opposed to police. He promises to eliminate bus fares, open city-run grocery stores, and institute rent freezes. Do you even need to ask whether Zohran embraces the full spectrum of the LGBT rainbow? He’s so woke his own biography is practically the living embodiment of the DEI ideal.

And on international affairs — something that actually matters for the mayor of New York, the world’s most important city and home of the United Nations — he is unspeakably awful.

He is a vocal supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that has plagued college campuses and academic institutions over the past 15 years. He openly labels Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” Just yesterday, in an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” saying that, when he hears those chants, “What I hear . . . is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He further embarrassed himself by saying “intifada” was how the Holocaust Museum translates the Warsaw Ghetto “uprising” into Arabic, as if the two were functionally equivalent. (The problem, of course, is that Mamdani sincerely believes they are.)

In case you were wondering: No, of course Mamdani doesn’t think Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Falling back on coded language by now familiar to all, he instead insists that Israel can only exist “as a state with equal rights” — that is to say, the infamous “right of return.” (Mamdani is at least willing to concede that antisemitism in New York City is a “real issue” — and he promises to think about a plan to address it after he has taken office.)

Be aware: All of the most insufferable New Yorkers you know are supporting this man. They will make it a point to vote for him. Even so, it probably won’t be enough. Word is that Mamdani never actually expected to run a seriously competitive campaign when he first got into the race; his goal, rather, was to raise awareness and enthusiasm for the Democratic Socialists party. Now that he has caught the crest of a wave, however, he’s making the most of his moment — attending rallies, making speeches, taking photos with celebrity loser David Hogg, and basking in the glow of the adoring throngs of Zohranians he has temporarily gathered to his cause. He’s still likely to lose; then again, ask me what I thought about Brandon Johnson’s chances back in February 2023.

Meanwhile, as the Cuomo/Mamdani face-off sucks all the media oxygen out of the room, the five other candidates in the primary are trying everything they possibly can to gain traction. Forgotten Comptroller Brad Lander pulled a page from the playbook of forgotten California Senator Alex Padilla and scheduled himself a ritual arrest for the cameras at an immigration hearing yesterday. (Watch him here, preparing to “go onstage” as his aide signals him to lock arms together to force a confrontation with ICE.) His reward? A last-second endorsement in the New York Times from Ezra Klein — searching along with his Abundance buddies for any non-Cuomo port in a storm — as well as a chance to enter eternity as a durable internet meme. It won’t win him the race.

Yes, the New York mayoral race is exactly the sort of Carnival of Fools I live for, a circus of chaos with no heroes, not even protagonists, and no possible happy ending. And the best thing about it all is that this mess won’t even end on Tuesday night; in theory, that’s only when it begins. For one thing, the needlessly complex and misleading “ranked-choice” ballot adopted in 2021 likely ensures that it will be days before we know who has actually won the race. But even more ridiculous than that is the possibility that, once the race has been won, it will continue rolling onwards with the same cast of characters.

You see, because of New York’s ridiculous ballot access laws, Mamdani and Cuomo have already secured ballot lines for the November election — with different parties. (Cuomo has his own bespoke party line called “Fight and Deliver;” Mamdani will have the Working Families Party line handed to him if he wants it.) That means that regardless of who actually wins the Democratic primary, this race will be rerun a few months from now in the general election, this time with Republican Curtis Sliwa and the incumbent mayor himself also on the ballot splitting the vote. Perhaps one or the other will drop out before then — if Cuomo is humiliated on Tuesday, I’m not sure how he can remain in the race — but the potential for an epically disastrous four-car electoral pileup in November remains tantalizingly close.

And I’ll admit that, at this point, I’m rooting for it. I’m rooting for it as only a Chicagoan can: as an embittered man who watched his own city decline over the last 20 years, mayor by mayor, until we voted to commit suicide in the spring of 2023 by electing Brandon Johnson. (In our defense, the vote to slit our own throats was a very close one.) So go ahead and try it, New Yorkers. Pledge your souls to Zohranastrianism. I double-dog dare you. I’ve already seen what happens when a major American metropolis tries this, and it’s nothing good. But why limit our imaginations? Let’s scale up, and bring the Brandon Johnson experience out of midwestern Flyover Country and to the bright lights of Broadway where it belongs. Imagine the sights we could see.