Zohran Mamdani is not an unstoppable juggernaut, but the forces arrayed against him are unimpressive.
It seems to have come as a surprise to many that Zohran Mamdani — a candidate who earned his nomination to New York City’s mayoralty by promising “free” child care, public transportation, and government-run grocery stores — is a communist. That is not an epithet but a descriptive adjective. What else would you call someone who, at the tender age of 30, called for exacerbating “class consciousness” with the “end goal” of “seizing the means of production?”
That 2021 quote is just one of several head-turning remarks unearthed by intrepid investigators — something Andrew Cuomo’s campaign apparently lacked — since New York City’s Democratic primary election. One video features Mamdani decrying the degree to which the justice system treats vandalism and property crime as a species of violence. “Violence is an artificial construction,” he insisted. What really constitutes violence, he insisted, is the work done by America’s criminal prosecutors. “We need to abolish private insurance, institute single-payer & nationalize the medical supply chain immediately,” Mamdani wrote at the outset of the Covid pandemic. “Queer liberation means defund the police,” he declared. And so on.
The mountains of evidence indicating that Mamdani shares the politics of the average left-wing campus agitator have inspired a terrible outbreak of hope among the candidate’s critics. The thinking is familiar: If Mayor Eric Adams, who is running for reelection as an independent, can transform this race from a referendum on his own incompetence and corruption into a choice between him and a return to the chaos of the de Blasio era, he may have a puncher’s chance. It’s a sound theory, but it fails to take into account Adams’s impossible weirdness.
Few political communicators can match Adams’s capacity to pull non-sequiturs from thin air. He’s fond of bizarre metaphors, for example, like the time when he produced a wet sponge on stage and advised his followers to “wring out” the “saturated sponge of despair.” He once pitched his city as an exciting place where anything can happen — including 9/11! “This is a place where everyday you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who is celebrating a new business that is open,” Adams ruminated. “How do we have a large body of people that are in our city and country that are excellent swimmers, and, at the same time, we need lifeguards?” Adams wondered aloud as he pondered the city’s immigration crisis. “All these Negroes who were asking me to step down, God, forgive them,” the mayor barked defiantly amid jeers as he faced calls to step aside over the corruption charges. “Are you stupid?”
From fabricating the identity of a dead police officer (with fake and artificially aged photos to go with it) in order to advance a political narrative to the open-and-shut corruption allegations that the Trump administration subsequently dismissed, New Yorkers have substantive reasons to resent Adams’s tenure. The mayor’s unique deficiencies as a spokesman for his own causes have shown that he is unlikely to change their mind. He just doesn’t do persuasion.
This is the guy who is going to pivot to a sustained, focused rhetorical campaign highlighting Mamdani’s parlor socialism? Are we expected to believe that Adams will metamorphose into a sober and sharp campaigner, imperturbable and laser-focused on his core issue set? Mamdani will provide his opponents ample ammunition to train on him and his candidacy, but that ordnance is useless in the hands of an inept operator.
No, Eric Adams will not be the city’s savior. Those who reluctantly recognize his shortcomings are liable to indulge in complicated fantasies in which Adams, Andrew Cuomo, Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa, or some combination of these candidates are coaxed out of the race, allowing one anti-Mamdani avatar to consolidate their support. That always sounds like a plausible theory of the case, right up until you confront the fact that each of these candidates believes he is the rightful anti-Mamdani candidate. Meanwhile, Mamdani is consolidating the Democratic Party’s constituent groups and raising funds sufficient to counter whatever narratives the loose, confused, and late-to-the-game collection of disparate anti-Mamdani interests can pull together.
Mamdani is not an unstoppable juggernaut, but the forces arrayed against him are unimpressive. New Yorkers’ apprehension over the potential for Mayor Mamdani to preside over the return of the bad old days could be harnessed and wielded by a skillful politician, but the mayor’s race is bereft of those.
As Mayor Adams is fond of saying, “All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success.” That has little to do with anything save to illustrate the folly of investing any hope in Adams to capably steward anyone’s political interests. Hope can be a terrible thing, particularly when it papers over manifestly disastrous circumstances.