The New York City primary for the Democratic Party nomination for mayor was a fantasy come true for a political junkie. The race featured a mayor saved from indictment by the intervention of a U.S. president from the opposing party, a scandal-plagued, womanizing former governor, and a genuine, honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool, larger-than-life socialist.
The problem is that this is no dream, no fantasy, and New York City is a real place with more than 8 million souls whose lives and livelihoods have been put at risk by a Jew-hating, cop-hating, rich-hating, corporation-bashing state assemblyman with no executive experience and a passel of bad ideas he will look to enact.
If he’s elected mayor.
Proud socialist Zohran Mamdani is comfortably in the lead after the first go-around of ranked choice voting. With 93% of the vote counted, Mamdani won 43.5% of first-place votes to former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 36.3%. It seems a foregone conclusion that Mamdani will achieve the 50% necessary for a primary victory next week when the next round of counting ballots occurs.
Indeed, Cuomo conceded defeat late Tuesday night.
“Tonight was not our night,” he said, appearing deflated. “Tonight was Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s night.”
Cuomo might have waited until the second round of counting was completed, but he decided to concede early and contemplate his next move. He’s on the November ballot as an independent candidate, and given the state of flux that New York politics is in, he’s not without hope.
Neither is the Republican candidate. The founder of the Guardian Angels, Curtis Sliwa, is a perennial candidate for office. Since Democratic registrations outnumber Republicans 2-1, Sliwa faces an uphill climb to victory.
Also in the mix and still alive is incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who is also running as an independent. Adams is almost an afterthought in the race, but he has a strong base of support among blacks, and in a multi-candidate race, it would be unwise to count him out.
Of the primary, Democratic Party strategist Trip Yang said, “This is the biggest upset in modern New York City history.” It’s one of the biggest upsets in modern American history, considering all factors.
The race had been volatile and bitter, with the two leading Democrats offering starkly different visions for the city and reflecting a generational divide in their party. Mr. Mamdani embodied energy and charisma, attracting droves of young, left-leaning New Yorkers; Mr. Cuomo represented the party’s older guard and ran a conservative rose-garden campaign, limiting his public appearances to churches and synagogues and supportive union halls.
The contest seemed to invigorate voters, with more than twice as many New Yorkers casting their ballots early in this year’s mayoral primary compared with the last mayoral primary in 2021, and high turnout on Primary Day that approached 1 million voters.
“We have given our city permission to believe again,” Mamdani said in his victory speech to supporters. “I pledge to you that we will remake this great city, not in my image, but in the image of every New Yorker who has only known struggle. In our New York, the power belongs to the people.”
Mamdani pledged to freeze the rent on more than a million apartments and enact a massive, $10 billion tax increase on the rich and corporations to fund free buses and create 10 city-owned grocery stores, among other pie-in-the-sky proposals. Of course, people voted for him. All that stuff is “free,” right?
New York’s wealthy, who will be asked to pony up for Mamdani’s socialist schemes, are none too thrilled.
Billionaire John Catsimatidis, the head of a Manhattan-based grocery chain, told The Free Press that if Mamdani won, he might consider closing his stores and moving to New Jersey.
“We may consider closing our supermarkets and selling the business,” the 76-year-old entrepreneur told The Free Press. “We have other businesses. Thank God, we have other businesses.”
The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold pinpoints the fear that is now gripping New York’s largest taxpayers.
“Their fear isn’t just higher taxes or stricter regulations — it’s that a democratic socialist with a history of railing against Wall Street could bring an adversarial ethos into City Hall, targeting the very class that powers the city’s economy,” Reingold wrote.
That the young voted for a socialist is hardly surprising. We’ve seen these trends for the last decade. As memories of communism fade and platitudes hide its massive failures and simple-minded class warfare, it appears that the younger voters are going to have to learn the same hard lessons about socialism that their grandparents and great-grandparents learned 100 years ago.
Editor’s Note: Radical leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump’s agenda to make America great again.
Help us hold these corrupt judges accountable for their unconstitutional rulings. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
