Boy, I have a hard time letting the comment that DeBlasio was "better than Bloomberg on some fronts, worse on others" stand unchallenged... I still reminisce about those Bloomberg years. I lived in NYC with Bloomberg as my mayor and Obama as my president, and all seemed Good and Technocratic with the world.
Bloomberg downzoned huge swaths of the city -- while upzoning certain neighborhoods near the waterfronts -- that resulted in stymying incremental housing development in less dense neighborhoods.
That one TED talk from someone in his administration bragging about not allowing more density around certain transit hubs made me want to slam my head in a drawer.
These downzonings were utterly inconsequential and ridiculously overrated. No, you were never going to get high rise multifamily housing in Midwood or Bayside. Doing those downzonings bought him room to maneuver to unlock tremendous capacity in places like Astoria, Downtown Brooklyn, and LIC. What’s that? The slow boring of hard boards sometimes requires tradeoffs and prioritization? I’ve never heard that before!
I think what we got was an overall loss in housing capacity, because the value of turning single family homes into small apartment buildings in places like Midwood and Bayside wasn't made up for by those big upzonings (where, remember, every project needs to make more to pencil out because larger buildings are more expensive).
Again I struggle to live in the world that Bloomberg critics live in where uniform SFH blocks were going to suddenly sprout 4 story multifamily - much less a world in which this makes anything resembling a dent in housing supply. I don’t even know where to begin.
I can confirm that if you let it happen, it will happen and happen fast, and while it's great in the long term for the city as a whole, I am finding that living around it in the short term is truly the NIMBY villain origin story. Especially in neighborhoods where the change has been as rapid as it has been in mine, where someone who bought here when it was blue collar and has been upzoned suddenly gets a property tax bill they can't afford and, even with the profits from selling, can't afford to buy anywhere in the city, forcing them to move out and adding a commute. This was a long discussion in one of my neighborhood groups a couple of years ago, BTW, not an imaginary scenario. Goes along with people losing a lot of the full sunlight in their backyards to the looming townhouses around them and no longer being able to grow their flowers and tomatoes. I have seen so many people go to the dark side as a result of the speed of change in these parts and the reduction in their quality of life. The needs of the many, blah blah blah, but it sucks to be in the outweighed few. Meanwhile, I would have loved to put a DADU in my backyard, but I have a tragically large tree that the city won't let me remove without a fight because our priorities are dumb, and now I can't afford to do that with inflation and all. So I am just hoping my block gets upzoned to allow townhouses (the upzone stopped a block and a half from me, so I have most of the downsides and none of the upsides) and our friendly neighborhood developers will pay me a lot to ditch so they can turn these 5000 sqft into four tall overpriced boxes.
I read that as "choosing his battles" - the downzoned areas were neighborhoods super resistant to development anyhow, and in return he got a ton of development near transit & waterfront. I think that was a good deal - maybe the best possible in those conditions.
But I do look forward to more upzoning in the future, fingers-crossed. Maybe this Mamdani fellow can get development back on track.
Funny, that's how I tend to think of the Biden years. A lot of terminally online people talk as if was the low point in all of US history. But I rather enjoyed 2021-2025. I feel all warm and tingly when I browse my phone photos and look back on, say, the summer of 2023.
Yes, we had inflation. But we also had a return to normalcy as the pandemic lifted. But the monster had not yet returned. A brief, golden age. Hell, there was even talk of how China might not surpass the USA in nominal GDP after all. When's the last time you heard that? (Answer, sometime before January of 2025).
The reason the Biden years count as a low point is that it was when defenders of democracy basically took a vacation when they should have been shoring up their defenses against a resurgent Trump, who was leading in polls consistently from late 2021 onwards. For the upper middle class it was a period of prosperity, since high prices were more an annoyance than a barrier to the affluent, but for working people it was watching all the wage gains of the post pandemic year get gobbled up and then some. Of course voting for Trump was literally the worst thing these people could do, but thanks to lack of trust in news media and government (which Biden’s cloistered administration contributed to), most people didn’t know that.
Out of curiosity what is your job? 2022-2024 were very dark times in the corporate world (other than AI which was steamrolling forward at such a speed that even the Biden admin couldn't stop it).
U.S. economic competitive advantage is finance and tech, and Biden admin was extremely hostile to both of those.
Under any definition other than "what Helikitty likes", those two industries add immense value and make the country substantially better off. Firms like Google and Amazon have delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer surplus. And finance creates the infrastructure for those companies to flourish in the U.S.
You think AI is "nothing of genuine value"? Are you serious? Again, Google and Amazon and others (yes, even Facebook) have produced hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer surplus each. Leftists need to understand that just because they personally find an industry "icky", doesn't mean they should try and destroy it.
Finance serves a genuine purpose (as a market-maker and ruthless pursuer of efficiency) and American industry is the best in the world. That contrasts sharply with tech.
Ok then. Don't use your phone, don't watch streaming services, don't order from Amazon, don't google anything. Hell, don't even use substack, what are you doing here!?
I moved to NYC in 1994, and I think Bloomberg was the best mayor during my time here. Still, DeBlasio was pretty good. As Matt notes, he kept crime down and made some law enforcement tactics far less alienating to the public. He also made progress on pre-k and kept charter schools going despite himself. His evidence-based investments at CUNY community colleges resulted in big improvements in graduation and successful transfer rates without lowering standards. He did all this as Cuomo tried to undermine him at every opportunity.
Deblasio "kept crime down" if you only define homicide as crime. Petty crimes lost a decade of traction under Bloomberg during Deblasio's reign of terror.
The hate for him was largely a reflection of how good things were. Ask people what they hated him for, and they probably won’t even remember, or their reasons will seem comically stupid on reflection. Ultimately, it was probably more about who he was (super rich white businessman who was also very woke-something for everyone to hate) and the disappointment of his progressive base discovering (but refusing to actually believe) that, no, the mayor cannot just wave a wand and bring about a socialist utopia.
I think of Bloomberg as a genuine technocrat but Obama and every recent influential Dem would run a mile from technocracy/empirical evidence in crime or education policy.
I chuckle when I hear "empirical evidence" related to crime (or anything sociological).
From Scott Alexander's classic Paranoid Rant:
"To make the point about academia: a recent analysis found that 91% of Harvard professors who donated to a presidential campaign donated to Hillary (with the remainder divided between Sanders and all eight GOP candidates). Jon Haidt’s does a lot of work on this at heterodoxacademy and finds that there’s a 14:1 ration of liberals to conservatives in the non-economics social sciences. Meta-analyses in psychology, psychiatry, and economics all find that the personal views of experimenters affect what results they get; the psychology study, which quantifies the results, finds a very large effect size—larger than most effect sizes actually discovered in social science, meaning we have no idea how much of what we know is real effect and how much is experimenter political bias. On a related note, only 30% to 50% of experiments in psychology persist after replication attempts (other academic disciplines are as bad or worse). On a related note, meta-analyses observe clear evidence of publication bias in politically charged domains—for example, this meta-analysis finds that papers are more likely to be published as opposed to file-drawered if they support the liberal position rather than the conservative one. Also, lots and lots of people in academia, even the very liberal people, will admit this is true if you ask them directly. Haidt, Tetlock, et al (see previously cited paper) have found lots of horrifying things like journal editors saying explicitly and proudly they’d refuse to publish articles that support conservative ideas, or professors saying that other academics whose research implies conservative ideas shouldn’t be hired or given tenture."
Mamdani's best issues are around urbanism. Things like universal daylighting, the end of parking mandates, continuing the previous administration's efforts to get trash off the streets, etc. These would be very noticeable and a mayor could actually help deliver them. I'm no fan of Mamdani, I voted for five other candidates in the primary before begrudgingly voting against the gerontocracy, but it might be nice to have a major who likes living in NYC and wants to improve life for the residents instead of New Jersey commuters. Eric Adams and De Blasio shared the trait of being a little too car brained for a city where most residents don't own one.
This was Cuomo's downfall. He just didn't seem to like or care very much about NYC. I think Mamdani is obviously a charismatic politician, but Mamdani's charisma was also magnified by Cuomo's dourness.
Would be interesting to see if Kathryn Garcia was in this race. I think she would have consolidated the anti-Mamdani vote and then picked off younger progressives who wanted a female mayor.
Ironically, part of the reason why they couldn't do it was because of Mamdani.
Before Mamdani's campaign really picked up steam, moderates didn't coalesce around anyone because they didn't care that much and could afford to sit back and let the chips fall.
Then after Mamdani's campaign picked up steam, moderates panicked and decided they couldn't risk splitting the vote. They hadn't done any of the hard work necessary to winnow the field. So they all just took the path of least resistance and settled on the non-socialist candidate with the highest name recognition, and that was Cuomo.
Collective action problems at work! Hopefully we don't see a repeat in the 2028 presidential primaries.
A huge systematic disadvantage of moderation in politics is that there rarely is an obvious reason for moderates to coalesce around one candidate other than electability. It almost is built into the process that you need plausible candidates with a chance to step aside-not a great formula for success with people with egos large enough to run for office.
The candidates in the last two mayoral primaries have been so bad. Just a complete lack of charisma. I don't know why NYC can't find replacement level politicians.
It’s a job you can only get by promising the world, that has inadequate power to deliver anything approximating the world, that requires pissing off wildly powerful people and groups just to accomplish small things who will then turn their entire purposes into destroying you, so that ultimately the city will hate you unless you are lucky enough for there to be someone or something else to hate more.
Maybe because NYC is famously impossible to govern? There are only so many people out there with the requisite charisma, and most of them would evidently rather do something else.
Koch famously said the position is cursed. The last time a mayor became a governor was in 1869. If you're a New Yorker with political ambition, becoming mayor probably just kneecaps your potential.
Cuomo prevented anyone else from running in the factional moderate lane. Everyone else in the primary was fighting for some version of the normie progressive vote and they all lost to Mamdani.
At the same time, no one was required to respect his role in the moderate lane in the primary. People like Ned Lamont didn't need to endorse him. He could have basically been this year's Weiner like in the last mayoral primary. It seemed like too many people were scared of crossing Cuomo (who is notoriously revenge-driven), but now he looks like a paper tiger.
To LaGuardia's point, though, this isn't a left or right issue, just a getting it done issue. Philadelphia Mayor Parker came to office on the similar issues, and she certainly isn't a Mamdani-style lefty. She wanted to bring in the National Guard to restore order in parts of the city (Shapiro said no). I saw her give a town hall on the city budget at a large Pentecostal church, where the pastor introduced her as a "woman of God", she said, You all believed in me when nobody else did, and everyone held out their hands to her and prayed for her, and then she did her thing. Mamdani might be a fit for NYC, but I think Parker's style of politics has more potential to transfer to other parts of the country, such as the South or elsewhere.
Which (like progressives winning big-city mayor's races) is the furthest thing from a new phenomenon. At least until very recently, the vast majority of successful black urban politicians were extremely closely connected to the black church. Some of them were literal ministers.
Interestingly, the landslide winner of the Detroit mayoral election yesterday defeated a megachurch pastor. That said, her father is a local pastor so it's not as if she is far removed from the black churches in Detroit. .
Yes, but will Tisch stay if he orders the NYPD to arrest Bibi? I think her agreeing to stay will be conditional on her being in charge of the NYPD without micromanagement. Let's see how that plays out.
*Wanting* to make public transit free won't result in any of those things. Only *actually* making public transit free will do that. And he'll probably fail.
He doesn't need to make transit free to increase disorder though. He can lean on NYPD / DAs to stop enforcing petty crime (as Deblasio did).
In 5 years there will be significantly more graffiti, vagrancy / drug use in public areas, shoplifting, etc. in comparison to a counterfactual Cuomo mayoralty.
More like: if he does the thing that all progressives/leftists campaign on and promise to do, that will be bad.
Your point was that disorder may not come because he won't be able to make public transit free. My point is that he doesn't need to do that, he'll bring disorder regardless.
Why would it result in fewer resources? The fares don’t pay for all of the cost of transit. Politicians want to deliver a set of services across the board and also have a set of revenues across the board; they never say “ok we have a fixed pool of money only for transportation, so if revenues went away we must cut services.” It’s just as likely eliminating fares will reduce spending on any other priority. And presumably to enact this they would be committing revenue to the MTA to counterbalance the cut at the time.
This implies there are some significant pools of money being spent that are easily moved to the MTA. I suspect that almost every dollar in the budget has gotten a decent amount of constituents who will howl bloody murder if you reallocate the money away from their preferred budget item.
Apropos of not all that much, it is striking to see how the Mamdani win is dominating national and global coverage of the election. For my money it was at best only the fourth most important contest yesterday:
(1) The California ballot initiative could cost Republicans the House of Representatives. And it's a big personal win that might well help propel Gavin Newsom to the presidency.
(2) Virginia is a large and important state, Democrats flipped the governorship. That's a net pick up for them, and a net loss for Trump's party, right in his own backyard. Spangerger might even have won herself a place on a future national ticket.
(3) NJ looked dicey for Democrats, and the trends in that state for some time had looked worrying for them. Mikie Sherrill didn't just win. She crushed it.
But yeah, I get it. New York City is New York City. And what happens there gets noticed. So it's hardly surprising that that Mamdani's win is getting so much coverage. But still...
Apparently there was a big shift in Hispanic and South Asian voters in NJ relative to 2024. Maybe Republican's decision to spend to the past year telling minorities that they openly despise them over and over has eroded the gains they made with minorities in 2024.
See how Republicans have kicked out Vivek Ramaswamy. See how JD Vance dehumanizes his wife and children. See how MAGA venerates state violence and criminal violations of people's Constitutional rights over melanin.
I posted this on last night's thread, but it seems apt:
I've been thinking (ok, hoping) that the Hispanic vote has become the classic "show me the deliverables swing vote" — and the elections 2020 and 2024 were simply reflective of that. Trump cannily took up the mantle of "I want to open up the economy so you can get your job back" in 2020. And in 2024 he ran on "Democrats are making food and rent too expensive."
Well, he's had ten months to deal with the cost of living crisis, and Hispanic voters aren't stupid.
Cool system we have. In order to get 30% of the vote you need to allow mass low-skill migration with zero enforcement once they step foot into the country.
Yes - inflation, pocketbook issues, not whether there is a ethnic face in the team or how Progressives are lensing supposed Vance treatment of Vance's own wife which is very doubtful anyone but Progressives & political obsessives who are already hard-coded to a party pay attention to.
It could be! But I'm a little cautious about reading too much into odd-year election results. Maybe turnout in NJ for their gov race was high, but in PA yesterday, at least, my polling place felt deserted.
When it comes to the 2028 election, the low turnout voters who will show up will not be "like" the voters who showed up yesterday, even if they might appear that way on paper.
You do wonder what percentage of MAGA voters would think they're actually voting for his father (and not in a sneaky, "he'll actually continue to be President" way) because reading isn't one of their strongest skills.
I wonder if you would talk the same snarky way about Democratic groups whose measured numeracy/skills are quantifiably lower than MAGA base. (thinking of a few...)
Why I believe Matt, Silver keep emphasizing neither party nor its partisans have actually digested the flip in patterns of voting (high-propensity, low-propensity)....
Off and mid-terms always have seen the more affluent and more educated predominate. So Democrats should be very very cautious of over-read indeed as Presential will no matter what, by just long-term mechanics be a different (as in wider) electorate.
Turnout is driven by heated, competitive races. That's why, bloviating about turnout aside, 2024 totals for Harris worsened compared to Biden: a whole lot of Harris supporters in deep red and deep blue states didn't show up. Anyway, I'm thinking that explains Pennsylvannia?
My strongest thought on immigration is that while it's true some people just don't like the number of immigrants we currently have, the most salient issue is a sense of disorder around immigration. That's part of why recent and first generation immigrant citizens could turn to Trump specifically on that issue. They're anti-disorder, not anti immigrant, but now we're getting strong anti-immigrant vibes and a new type of disorder --- the ICE raids and thuggery. And again, it's the disorder that is most disliked.
Nah, it's over. Hispanic immigrants are a big enough block now in the U.S. that there is no realistic route other than U.S. becoming demographically similar to Brazil in 50 years. We'll get the demographics of Brazil from normie dems and the economic policies of Brazil from Mamdani types. But somehow it will turn into Sweden.
I guess if you think Hispanic is a bad demographic that's a problem. I'm OK with them, as long as we don't let in any more of those damn, dirty, Irish.
Just take this fwiw, but I do have a little bit of granular data on voter registrations by race. It's limited to North Carolina, and of course registrations are not votes. But exit polls have their own problems! So again, just take this fwiw as another data point:
As far as I can tell, the only racial / immigrant segment of NC voters where the Dems aren't continuing to lose ground is white voters. The dashboard is currently showing data for 2025 drawn from Sep, but I updated it on my local machine with November's data and the the same trend is essentially continuing. The 2025 numbers will look a little weaker for Dems among minorities and voters born overseas when I eventually upload the fresher data.
It could be different in NJ, it could be different when NC voters actually vote, but for now, there's no racial / immigrant backlash brewing in NC voter registrations.
I completely agree. Which D victory is more impressive? The one who got 50.4% in a place that hasn't elected a Republican in decades? Or the one who got 57.4% (!!!) and flipped the office from R to D?
I lived in VA in the Warner/Kaine years, so I certainly knew Spanberger would likely win, but a 15 point margin is really very impressive.
I realize the context is different, but that makes Spanberger more impressive by comparison, not less. Mamdani ran against a sore loser and barely broke 50%!
I have vivid memories of the Kaine-Kilgore nail biter and being ecstatic that the race was called by midnight. To see Spanberger called as winner at like 7:15 was mind blowing.
If it's one thing I've learned from the last 7 years of American politics, it's that Democrats should recruit every woman who ever worked for the CIA and run them in every state.
Ironically, I voted against a former CIA officer who ran in a primary for a local office in Virginia since her platform was just NIMBYism in a place that needs more housing.
Alas, timing. No way she runs in 2028. She can only run in 2032 if the Democrat loses in 2028 (please god no). By 2036, she'll be the answer to a trivia question.
Spanberger didn't just win (which was expected). She obliterated Earle-Sears, and allowed Democrats to ride her coattails to elect Jones as AG (despite his violent texting scandal) and flip at least 10 (!!) seats in the House of Delegates to give Democrats a governing triumvirate with at least a 61-39 advantage in the House. She outperformed Harris --- i.e., shifted the vote left --- (often significantly) in 89 out of 93 of VA's districts.
Would love to see some more analysis of this and how transferrable it is to the midterms. VA is quirky because of having so many federal employees and contractors that are especially pissed at Trump et al for all the DOGE cuts, so I'm trying to temper my expectations about the transferability of this blue wave. But then again, Sherrill crushed it too without the same quirks, so maybe there's a case for some cautious optimism.
At least with respect to the pissed off government workers and contractors, how much less pissed are they going to be a year from now? Best case is the government is open again, but few of them will be happy in their work, and lots of them will still be unhappy at not having their old jobs.
I hope VA does not continue down the road of Californication the last Dem admin so clearly wanted. You can see the desire of NoVA dems to turn it into a progressive mess. VA's political balance has worked out well, but between progressives and an AG actively interested in murdering the children of Republicans, not looking good. (Not to say the R's did not deserve/expect a good ass-kicking based on both candidate choice and the impact of what is going on in DC. But Jones is a bridge too far for me.)
It's amazing that in order you have 1) a ballot initiative in a large state that is home to much of America's entertainment media, 2) a major state right next to DC where the Pentagon is also located and 3) a major state right next to New York, yet they are all receiving so much less news coverage. All three feature people who are much more likely to be on a national ticket than Mamdani.
Not saying that some media actors don't have other motives, but the main thing is that the media knows what's going to get clicks, and that matters to them a lot more than what's "important".
Democrats also won the PA Supreme Court election in a landslide which will prevent gerrymandering and other election shenanigans in one of the most important swing states.
It’s headline news on the BBC and Israeli papers. I am confident that there are more important things going on in Israel at the moment than the election of an anti-Israel politician to an office that has literally no influence on the US-Israel relationship. I don’t know much about British affairs, but I’m gonna guess that’s the case there too, given that the US-Israel relationship itself has no influence on British affairs! It’s weird as hell man.
When it comes to the media's fixation with all things New York City, we need some Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" infusion. Oh I so don't care about Mamdani.
You're right, Charles, all these other things are so much more important. But the most important is how Prop 50 has launched Newsom into the stratosphere of the 2028 nomination contest. I think Newsom would be a terrible candidate for the Democrats (NYT this morning: "aides said he is likely to soon pivot to the issue of climate change and cast himself as a climate champion" -- dumb idea and climate change is one of my most important issues!) But if he's now the solid frontrunner it's because the other Democratic contenders (except maybe Pritzker) are just sitting back and doing nothing. Maybe if they want to win, and deprive Newsom of the nomination, they should maybe think about getting in the game? Hey Josh, if you think it's fine to sit back and wait for your huge reelection victory in 2026 to launch you, may I introduce you to Ron "same strategy" DeSantis?
I don't give a damn who the mayor of New York is. I give many damns about who wins the White House in 2028.
And even on a local level, the YIMBY NYC charter amendments that passed last night are IMO almost as consequential as the mayoral election, since their potential impact on NYC's housing shortage is considerable. As an ex-New Yorkers, those ballot proposals were what I had my eye on.
It is amazing to me that so many people are talking about this and no one seems to mention or even notice that he got 50.4% of the vote. The last several mayors got 66 - 75%. He is a massive electorial underperformer against a scumbag.
Yes..... the fact the widely detested Cuoma got ~42% is not a sign of strength, the opposite (although one really has to credit Mamdani for great campaigning skill in overcoming his multi-handicaps - stylistically, and in his strategic open refutations of a number of his 2020isms that clearly worked to get over 50...
Even more importantly than the governorships, VA Dems picked up THIRTEEN seats in the Assembly, and the party now has trifecta control. NJ Assembly Dems will have their largest majority in 60 years. Minnesota Dems kept the Senate. Dems retained control of the PA Supreme Court. Heck, Mississippi Dems picked up three seats yesterday, breaking a supermajority.
I mean, that was true in the last few weeks, sure. I don't think it was a foregone conclusion when the measure first made it to the ballot. I recall seeing polling several months ago suggesting it was likely to be a close affair. Good on Newsom for having the balls for investing some political capital early on.
The smart people all noted that in early polls it barely cracked 50% and they noted that the standard thing in CA referenda is that the level of support tends to decline over time, so there were some serious questions about whether it would win.
I guess I should be a pundit. I knew it was a slam dunk from the gitgo. I don't think smart people pay much attention at all to early polls. Right now some alleged pundits are predicting that Harris will be the nominee. Nope.
There was a lot of doubt about it for quite a while, expressed by very smart political types. It was a real ballsy, push all your chips in move by Newsom.
I was doubtful. Yes the polling turned around in the last few weeks but I suspected that people who don't answer their phones for polling questions would be disproportionally likely to say "Vote yes on gerrymandering? What a terrible idea."
I don’t know about governing but he will probably sustain enthusiasm longer than De Baslio just because he seems better at retail politics and media. He seems like a political animal in the way of Gavin Newsom or Bill Clinton in the sense that he seems to like doing the dirty work of politics, even listening to and cajoling the wealthy! He’s very much unlike Bernie and even De Blasio in that respect.
I met him a few times when I did by reporting trip for Zellnor Myrie's campaign (RIP). He definitely had that Bill Clinton-esque ability to make you feel like the most important person in the room.
One of the secrets to De Blasio's unpopularity is that he'd always show up for events extremely late, and one of the jobs of the mayor is to show up to events.
Not a NYC resident but could see him just happily hyping small ball wins and as long as nothing rocks the boat too hard...could work for him? Work out as in he won't be viscerally disliked.
Since he wasn't born here, we also don't have to worry about him getting distracted by running for president in a few years, which was a problem we had with De Blasio.
Yes. Politicking is important even after you win. And the most important part of that is going to be his inevitable clashes with the Trump administration. Symbolic or not, that’s how you be a “progressive hero” in 2025. Mamdani has to walk a fine line between publicly standing up to Trump in a way that feels satisfying to his base while minimizing/managing the material consequences of whatever bullshit Trump may try to throw st NYC … and most importantly, while also delivering on the boring day to day governance stuff. But having Trump as foil is more blessing than curse for a progressive mayor faced with the structural difficulties Matt describes.
On #3, I think Matt underplays the massive shift in work patterns that has happened since de Blasio’s terms: specifically, that we all now know how easy it is to set up shop somewhere else. Covid and the years since taught the financial industry that, while being at the office remains important, that office does not have to be in NYC anymore. This simply was not true in 2013, or even 2017. Citadel famously left Chicago for Miami. Alliance Bernstein has mostly left NYC for Nashville. JP Morgan Chase, despite the new building, is employing more and more in Texas and other states. Others know they can easily follow.
So the threats of capital flight are indeed more credible now, not because of politics, but because of the pandemic and its lessons.
I would buy this more if it wasn’t for the fact that the NYC office market has actually bounced back strongly in the last year. Office vacancies are plummeting (please see my LinkedIn page. I do this for a living)
Please see Matt’s post “Chicago is doomed”. The reality is if office rents in NYC really do go permanently settle at a price point a bit lower than pre COVID price points, that would still likely mean NYC office market is likely going to be in healthy place. Basically, there is A LOT of room for prices to drop and for their not to be a huge drop in office occupancies. A lot of companies have back office in other locations purely because office rents in other locations are lower. If office rents are even a small degree lower in NYC, a lot of those operations will just be moved to NYC. By the way, similar dynamic with SF (see recent Wall Street journal article about tech wanting move back to SF from Austin).
Honestly, to me this is an example of the power of right wing media speaking in one voice. Even for those of us who detest Fox or Newsmax their talking points have a way of bleeding into what I’ll call more respectable outlets.
There’s office vacancies, and then there’s the tax base. Office rents dropping means that the office buildings themselves pay lower property taxes. By the same token, Ken Griffin personally might have been paying something like .1% of Chicago’s taxes, and now he’s not - the people living in the city to work at those offices being replaced by less wealthy people makes a big difference too.
I should add. Not only are office vacancies dropping rapidly (meaning the value of the office buildings going up due to much smaller lease up costs), the rents are clearly demonstrably higher than just a year ago which also in turn has meant cap-rates are dropping (also in part due to Fed rate cuts) further increasing the value of office property and thereby increasing taxes. Point being, even if office rents never reach the true tip of the peak from say 6-7 years ago, it would very hard to argue that office values aren't in much healthier place than 2020-2024. Which should pretty big boon to tax revenue vis a vis the situation from 2020-2024.
If there is a worry to be had regarding tax revenue it's with rent stabilized properties. I don't think a lot of New Yorkers realized that the 2018 change to the rent stabilization law wasn't going to create problems immediately. That's because for a variety of reasons, a lot of rent stabilized units actually had rents closer to market than you might have expected for a variety of reasons. Well we're now 7 years later, and given the complete inability to raise rents at all, we're in a situation where rent stabilized units have rents now way way below market. Add in the bout of inflation we had and we're now at a situation where rental income not only can't cover expenses but given the possibility of a lengthy rent freeze, there is real chance the rent stabilized properties could be in serious trouble very soon.
Mamdani has shown a real pragmatic streak that has helped assuage left of center people like me. I'm hoping that extends to this "rent freeze" proposal. I'm optimistic that he'll recognize this going to be a problem (also Adams stuffed rent boards with his own people, so there's a decent chance the rent freeze may not happen or at least not in the near term). But that's the real danger to the tax base way beyond anything office related.
I appreciate your insider perspective, and as an out-of-state employee of a mostly remote firm that re-upped a few years ago (at a massive discount to our prior lease), that is certainly my small firm's story. That said, zoom and remote work have undoubtedly made the bar for relocation much lower, particularly for upper middle income workers who are in search of a higher quality of life in which to raise their families. (As a corollary, the massive gains made by many Southern school systems, versus stagnation or worse - and at a higher property tax price point - in the Northeast, has also altered the equation a fair amount.)
Isn't the idea that you are correct, its unlikely that there will be a shift out of NYC *under current setup.* But to JE's point, if there is a substantial change in those circumstances tax wise, then it would be easier for firms to move...
While I think that is a good concern to flag, I’d argue the change will be in high end residential stuff. Commercial real is on a tear in NYC, they lead the nation in “office visits” and are the only major city to exceed their 2019 levels. Citadel, for all their bluster about getting out of blue states, is building a $5b tower two blocks north of that new JP Morgan building to house both the hedge fund and the market maker. These are long term bets on New York by large firms.
Yes, Citadel has plans on the block of Park between 51st and 52nd, though this is mostly relocated Chicagoans. (The Chicago office is almost entirely gone, thanks to bad government.). This decision was made during the relatively stable (for business) Adams years. Griffin does not have to go through with it, if he finds his team does not want to be in NYC going forward.
I should also note that I am writing as a distance commuter to NYC (from my hometown in a very red Southern state, where I am happy to be rearing my children). Our small team renewed our lease at a massive discount a few years ago, but we may relocate across the river - or down South - if taxes go up or the quality of life goes down. Everyone has a limit, and thanks to Zoom, our limits are much lower than they used to be.
Chicago is doing very well in terms of new and large businesses. I’m making coffee and then need to get back to work so I can’t find the link, but recently Crain’s reported on how Chicago was the top business attractor in the country.
Lots of tech companies that relocated to Miami in the wake of Covid ended up regretting it. Venture investment was way down in 2024. Anecdotally everything I've heard on this topic is it didn't really work out. Perhaps it's gone better for more established companies from cold weather cities though?
It's amazing how many tech leaders thought moving to Miami was a good idea because the mayor talked about crypto, but never stopped to think about the fact that they were based in SF in the first place because of all of the nearby top tier universities.
One of my criticisms of Matt the past few years is his insistence on (at least to my eyes) overestimating the smarts and strategic thinking of business leaders. Think this came up a lot when Elon was going off the deep end and was much more in the news. Now, I don't want to go full super left in the other direction and claim that all business leaders are "nepo baby" idiots or literally a bunch of Dr. Evil clones. But just because business leaders are likely capable people with particular talents or smarts that are well suited to rising up the ranks at a company, doesn't mean they are not susceptible to biases, blind spots and quite frankly dumb decisions based on bad information.
To that end (and fitting in with what I wrote in my post yesterday) I think Matt underestimates the number of prominent business leaders who are getting their news info from pretty dubious sources. And maybe more importantly making pretty major business decisions based on something on Fox News said. I suspect if we had a chance to talk to some of these business leaders who moved offices to places like Miami and are now reconsidering, we'd find out they were watching lots of segments on Fox about how San Francisco was complete chaos and going to literally die in like 3 years.
You've made this point about business leaders a number of times and I find it very compelling. My addition is that the same applies to government leaders! Both can have significant insight into their realms of expertise, but also be very blinkered when applying that to the real complicated world.
See my comment yesterday regarding cutting off SNAP benefits. I think it’s quite likely a disturbing number of GOP leaders actually believe SNAP benefits either only go “those people” in Chicago or NYC or that there is massive amounts of fraud being committed by illegal immigrants. Point being, it seems really clear a lot of these people are getting their info from Fox or even more extreme right wing websites (see my comment about Mike Lee. A poster child for someone who seemed smart and normal like 5-10 years ago and appears to have gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole into insanity).
The biggest shift in following politics since the late 90s is there used to be very conservative Republicans who nonetheless still had to keep up sort of kayfabe with the rubes because at the end of the day, they were college-educated elite Republicans who understood how things actually worked.
Basically all of those people have been replaced with weirdos raised on almost totally right-wing media.
It's pretty shocking how ignorant a lot of business leaders are about politics or even things like basic macro concepts. They might be good at some things but a lot of them are definitely in a bubble. Look at all the embarrassing posts from business titans who didn't understand fusion voting in NY.
Having been in house in a sub sector of tech for 10 years or so now my observation is that there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have gotten where they are more by managing to catch lightning in a bottle, being at the right place at the right time, that kind of thing. That isn't nothing and my guess is none of us in these comments will ever do it. You usually also have to have some kind of skill set to exploit your good fortune and most successful business people have an ability to manage and disposition to live with risk that is not as typical of the professional class, and certainly not what you see in the public or quasi public sector.
But to your point most of them aren't super geniuses and a not insignificant number don't fully understand the nature of how they got where they are. Just as the public sector and professional class can be overly risk averse they can be susceptible to a lot of motivated reasoning and the gambler's fallacy and any number of other human failings.
There's also the "Wyatt Earp" effect. Take enough entrepreneurs trying to create start ups and become the next Amazon, by sheer statistical chance there will be one left standing to be come NVIDIA.
Does this mean Jen-Hsun Huang is just some random idiot who by sheer blind luck is now an extraordinarily rich human being? No not at all. I actually think it's almost banal to point out that there's no way NVIDIA becomes the giant it is without Huang having some talent and brains. But there are a ton of extremely smart and capable entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And also I'm sure some idiots or fraudsters who maybe are smooth talkers who now how to get money out of investors (looking at you Adam Neumann). I'm going to guess a big reason Huang is more successful than the latter cohort (with the gigantic exception of Trump) is because he probably is genuinely smarter and more capable. But the former group? Guys (And women, although probably not as many as there should be) who have advanced degrees and are quite smart themselves? Yeah, there is almost certainly a degree of luck and "someone had to be the biggest winner almost by definition".
You make some good points, brain rot can infect even otherwise smart business leaders, and they too can also be victims of the algorithm if they are chronically online imo.
Decisioning on office and locations only occurs like that in small closely held companies.
Larger ones isn't going to be driven by "Fox News" (the Lefty omni-excuse) or even WSJ as such but doing a bunch of office rents, costs and taxes simulations.
Regret is much more to be attributed to "Excel Jockeying" regret that Excel models didn't capture other things of import and not to Fox / WSJ vibes.
Excel modeling blindness is much more fundamental explanatory except again for companies with only Founder governance.
It was a while ago but Chicago condos don’t have issues with home invasions resulting in the murder of NFL players. Lurid crime affecting the wealthy is a fact of life in Miami, they’ve made tv shows about it.
I am really stunned that someone would list “crime and public safety” in the “pro” column about Miami.
My favorite of these types of storylines was "North Korean ship trading counterfeited dollars for drugs off the coast of Miami" and American viewers basically shrugged and went "sounds like Miami."
Boston is a tech hub. They just tend to work in physical tech, not SAAS B2B tech stacks that SV made its bread and butter. It just turns out that physical tech doesn’t scale as quickly or easily because, well, physics.
Boston's big problem was the state's use of non-competes, which California lacked. It is still important for some types of tech, particularly biomedical tech, due to the universities.
Dallas is way ahead of Miami to become the second financial hub. That seems like it will stick. Both Goldman and Wells Fargo are building huge campuses there, etc.
the weather probably cuts in the opposite direction. GuyInPlace mentions SF below, but in a weather battle SF beats Miami handily. Have you been to South Florida in the summer? It's unbearable.
90% of the New Yorkers who flocked here during COVID left after experiencing their first summer down here. I've lived in South Florida my whole life an Mid June - August have me on an annual suicide watch.
The rich people coming from NY are smart enough to leave Florida for a place in the Appalachian mountains or upstate NY or Maine during the Mid May (not June) through October hot season.
JP Morgan already employs more people in Texas than New York. I do think New York has some huge advantages, but New Yorkers definitely have a NYC exceptionalism blind spot that could result in some unforced errors.
Income taxes are about 25% of total NYC tax revenue. Property taxes are larger, and so non-resident condo owners do also contribute. And sales tax is meaningful too, and likely skews toward "the rich" given their much higher total consumption, but I couldn't find a good source.
I know the answer for DC is that there is a huge base of insanely wealthy people funding the city, and this is a new thing.
DC runs “surprising” surpluses because it’s a really inconvenient fact that it’s not even the wealthy gentrifiers that drive revenues but the eyewateringly wealthy.
Exceptional QOL if you want to live in a city, are white, and wealthy. Especially considering the cost compared to NYC (I turned down a job up there because an equivalent house/brownstone cost 10x). If you want walkability and urban amenities, there aren’t a ton of choices. White educated people have the longest life expectancy in the country in DC. It’s basically Europe for a fraction of the price.
In DC, you can get a fabulous condo on the Potomac for under $5 million, a very swank flat for a fraction of that. In NY you can’t stick your chest out with seven figure real estate. Also, DC has a deep bench of highly educated professionals of both sexes if you want to date or make erudite friends.
Plus the weather is better. I have begrudgingly admitted to myself that the Southeast actually has very nice weather and much better than the north (galling, as a committed Yankee and fall enjoyer). You just get a lot more crisp but not cold sweater weather actually, and AC means the summers are not that much worse. The temperature differential is much larger in the cold months than the warm.
No. DC< NY weather wise. Much hotter in the summer, for one. NYC has coastal moderation. Even Atlanta GA has cooler midsummers than DC because of the 1000 foot altitude.
Nope, I have lived for long periods in both places and as a hot weather hater, NYC is miserable in the summer. Sun reflecting off of all the hard surfaces and the putrid garbage smell. DC is not great in the summer, it’s my least favorite season here, but its abundance of trees helps a lot and I am fortunate to live in a Rock Creek Park-adjacent location with lots of cooling shade.
I used to tell myself this too. Summer is the least pleasant season in the South, but it's not much worse than NYC (in both cases you don't want to be out in the heat unless you are swimming or something), and the delta is much larger between the two climates in the other 3 seasons.
Plus the mornings are usually very pleasant, away from the coast. Much larger temp swing during the day.
I spend a lot of time in Atlanta and have to grudgingly admit it just has much better weather, and people saying otherwise are performing cope.
One of the problems with NYC's property tax system is that condos are insanely undervalued, which is made up for by high valuations of commercial property. So a lot more on the former than the latter.
NYC has a lot of room to increase property taxes by switching to true market value assessments. But this is not politically populare and there are many entrenched interests who would invest a lot to stop it.
NYC funds itself substantially more off of income taxes (including for those who live and work out-of-state but base out of an NYC office) than off of real estate taxes. Given the proportion of taxpayers who are renters versus owners, as well as commuters, this has made sense over the years. But, again, we all now know how much easier it is to meet over Zoom, or in-person anywhere with a good airport, than it was less than a decade ago.
Part of the confusion may be that a large chunk (about 66%) of NYC taxpayer income tax is actually New York State income tax. NYC taxpayers contribute over 50% of NYS income tax revenue though are only 40% of the population.
I stand corrected - thank you! But another truth is that NYC is one of the few cities that levies an income tax at all, and NY State is one of the few states that assesses non-residents on their entire income, not just the portion of which that is earned when present in the state itself.
I imagine many of the multimillionaires actively work in finance, so they are probably deriving their income from NY and therefore paying taxes. Multi multi multi millionaires might have an NYC apartment(s) but not spend 181 days in the city for tax purposes.
Normally if you’re doing the less than 180 days thing, I presume you get any corporate payments through a non NYC office so you don’t pay NY State tax - because if the money comes from a NY source you are paying income tax on it even if you are not a resident. But if you’re some JP Morgan potentate spending less than 180 days in NYC, I presume you get paid through a Florida or Texas office or something.
This guy gets it! The substance of trying to push higher taxes in NYC is insanely more fraught; I’d argue that since we’re now 12 years removed from Occupy Wall Street, the politics are more fraught too.
100% agreed. Raising taxes is a non starter in a lot of blue cities or states. You have to focus on a few things to do well, make things better, safer and more efficient before you start thinking of raising taxes.
Can I suggest that a lot of Mamdani grossest and most bigoted critics are making a version of the same mistake that “resistance libs” like me made in 2017. Namely, you’re setting the bar to awfulness way too high and when the leader in question can’t reach it, your criticisms that are more valid and more grounded in more reality are going to fall increasingly on deaf ears.
For resistance libs it was the “Russia stuff”. It was like the centerpiece of trump criticism for like two years. And it was sort of the a dud. Now I say this full aware that a) Bill Barr did an amazing job white washing the Mueller report findings and helping shape kind of a bogus narrative going forward that the entire thing was “fake news” and b) I think there is some legitimate questions still about the Trump organizations financial ties to Russia and real questions about why he acts the way he does with Putin. Having said all that, the bar set was he was a literal Russian asset possibly since 1987 and that he was literally taking orders from Putin. When that turned out to be not true I honestly think it undermined other more trenchant criticisms about his anti democratic behavior and maybe most of all his rampant corruption (which has only been ramped up today).
For Mamdani, I can’t emphasize enough that I have met more than one person who thinks he’s going to implement Sharia law or wants to implement Sharia law. Besides the fact that this was clearly a blatant lie spread around, it also has zero percent chance of ever happening. Even if it was secretly the case he wanted to bring Sharia law, the chances he could actually implement this would be zero and anyone suggesting this is a real possibility should be laughed out of the room. Which means that more grounded warnings about other Mamdani initiatives are not going to have the oomph they should (like a 4 year rent freeze. I cannot emphasize enough this is actually his worst proposal and has a real chance to do terrible damage to the city if it is actually implemented).
My politics being what they are, I'm more inclined to be favorable to Mamdani, but yeah he was NOT my first choice in the primary for sure. But I think it's important to note that a small but significant faction of Dems likely voted for Mamdani (when it became apparent he had a real shot of winning the nomination) as a "never Cuomo" vote. That's definitely where I was at. It angers me to no end that the Dem establishment tried to stuff down our throats this odious bully who has no business being in charge of anything again. And what's crazy to me, is based on the actual election results, it's really clear to me there were probably 50 viable more moderate options Dems/centrists/establishment could have backed who would have likely won over Mamdani.
The Sliwa thing is also instructive. It's also very clear to me that if GOP nominated just a normal right of center politician who wasn't "Trumpy" or at the very least didn't emphasize right wing identity politics stuff (sort of piggybacking off of my post above, I think its likely a lot of the grosses NyPost stuff about Mamdani likely backfired and pushed a small number of people who might have voted for Cuomo to note vote for him), there is a decent chance he would have won.
Matt laments how Dems lose (or may lose) elections by not putting up candidates who are at least a little more moderate. Given he's a Dem who wants to see Democrats win, I get why that's his focus (same reason it's my focus). But I think it's underappreciated that GOP could be getting Reagan style landslides the last 8-12 years if they had someone less odious than Trump and they stopped nominating crazy Trump people for winnable swing seats. Now, the problem with this counterfactual is that its very clear that a big reason Dems (or least a faction of Dems) moved far left on identity stuff is clearly a reaction to Trump himself. If Marco Rubio wins in 2016 do some of the more far left figures who gained prominence circa 2018-2020 actually gain prominence? Not so sure. But lets say Dems really did react exact same way. Think it's likely Rubio winds a landslide in 2020. I've said before, but one of my not so hot "hot takes" is I think Trump is a pretty big electoral underperformer. He by complete accident put together an optimal coalition for winning the electoral college, but I think it's likely a Rubio wins another 5% of the popular vote...which is huge.
The ironic thing is in some ways while Silwa does seem to be a typical older ethnic racist, he was less openly racist and more respectful of Zohran and his campaign in general than Cuomo and the wider GOP ever was.
This is a good comment, and I don't just say that because my outsider perspective is that Mamdani is a completely self inflicted phenomenon. I mean who the hell else were you supposed to support? The corrupt incumbent? The nakedly cynical run by the over the hill has been with sex scandal baggage? The 70 year old dude who walks around wearing a red beret, without even a hint of irony about it?
As for me personally I agree. But now that we've had 10 years of politics dominated by an iconography inspired by the 'make your own hat' stand at the boardwalk I have come to doubt how widespread my own sensibilities are.
Totally. If someone had told me in the 90s that a dangerous cult of personality would form around the short-fingered vulgarian of Spy Magazine, I probably would have died laughing
"Now, the problem with this counterfactual is that its very clear that a big reason Dems (or least a faction of Dems) moved far left on identity stuff is clearly a reaction to Trump himself."
Didn't Hillary Clinton show this was a good way to win national primaries before Trump actually won? If Clinton doesn't go identitarian, does Bernie win the primary?
In my counterfactual, Hilary likely loses the popular vote. Maybe not like 10 points or anything, but think it's likely she loses by say 3-4 points to a normal Republican who ran a decent campaign.
But to your direct question, I actually have my doubts that Hilary's turn toward identity politics won her the primary. I don't think there was ever a poll that showed Bernie having majority support among the Democratic primary electorate. His support was clearly stronger than Hilary anticipated which likely caused a bit of overreaction. But it's again not clear to me this was strictly necessary to win the nomination.
Think another data point to consider is that it's clear a pretty significant amount of Bernie's support was just pure anti-establishment sentiment and anti-Hilary sentiment.
Hilary clearly overreacted to the threat of Bernie. She, and her team, panicked that they were seeing a redo of Obama beating her in 2008. She would have been better off being almost condescendingly pleasant about his voters feelings, like Bill's "I feel your pain", while just continuing on with her campaign as competence personified. She would have still won the nomination handily, and been less beholden to the identity part of the coalition.
Mamdani was clearly better than the other candidates even though I'm not a socialist. I would go ahead and say that after enduring a series of terrible candidates like Hillary, Trump, Biden and Harris, it's refreshing to see someone with actual political skills, even if I have very little alignment on actual policies. It should be a bare minimum requirement for a politician to be able to speak fluently in public and be likable.
“When I look back on de Blasio, I see a basically good mayor: stronger than Adams in certain areas, weaker in others”
I guess you might see that, but people really hated DeBlasio at the time and were pining for just about anyone else. From what I remember they thought he was oily and insincere.
One of my favorite Brooklyn Nine-Nine jokes is, after having successfully bugged a car driven by the local crime boss and one of his lieutenants, Jake summarizes the intelligence they gleaned and then says "...and then they hit a pothole and complained about de Blasio for twelve blocks."
I worked for the NYC government during the deBlasio administration. I and most of my colleagues hated him. City Hall operations, at least insofar as they affected my agency (which was a lot), were horrible and his sanctimonious demeanor was obnoxious.
Early in his first term, when the administration was trying to get the housing legislation through the council, he went on a local public radio show to talk about it. Asked about opposition from community boards, he basically blew them off, saying something like “they don’t matter, it’s only an advisory vote.” Which is true, but not something that a mayor trying to build support for ambitious legislation should say! I remember thinking that someone who has only ever worked in politics should do it better than this.
Not smart for the mayor to say but I'm with him. community boards should really be abolished. They literally only serve to act as a veto point but they don't even have a veto.
Oh 100%, they are actively harmful. But you don’t say that on Brian Lehrer when you’re trying to pass legislation! I might be wrong but I think there might have been a better policy outcome (less subsidy required for affordable units) had he handled it better.
It’s amazing how much demeanor matters. The sanctimoniousness you describe is exactly what my county executive gives off. So I loathe him, sometimes, I admit, to an irrational degree. Why don’t these guys figure this out?
Seriously! I guess at a certain (not very high, in my experience) level, many public figures attract sycophants and can’t resist getting high on their own supply. One of the things I loved about Obama was that he at least appeared to rise above this. Fake it until you make it, people!
Matt, I thought Slow Boring wanted to be differentiated vs. “the discourse”! While this is a unique Mamdani take, the last thing we need is more Mamdani takes. Write about Jacob Frey! Tell us about the Dems who won in Georgia! What red seats did we flip in VA and what can we learn from that? Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Dems also flipped some leg seats in ... Mississippi? And the Bucks Co., PA school board now has 0 rightwing school board members after a highly publicized post-COVID takeover. JD Vance's half brother got spanked in Cincinnati (somewhat ironically by an Indian American -- I'm sure JD is praying for his conversion to Catholicism). A couple of state-level board seats in Georgia go Dem. A few red counties in PA and NY flip. Not a bad night.
Trump has waved away his party's performance as a fluke because his name was not on the ballot last night. Not going to be there next year, either, jackass.
In my own highly Dem-dominated inner ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, the younger city council member (mid 30s) beat the older multi-term council member (late 60s) to be our second Mayor. First mayor was a bit of a petulant disaster with his first and only term ending in a successful recall campaign and his wife being arrested for trespassing. Northeast Ohio Democrats tend to be long-tenured and schlerotic (and at the county level, frequently corrupt and arrested), so it is nice to see some generational change, even at this level. Former mayor was also younger, but engaged in a lot of Six Sigma corporate speak while allowing not very popular things to be done to some of the local parks. There has been a lot of new housing going up -- most of it big apartment buildings, some of it replacing decrepit apartment complexes that served lower income residents. But it's going up in commercial districts and in residential districts, which seems good.
I'm not saying the Dems didn't do well in general, I was just answering the question that was asked.
I would assume that "regular" judicial elections in purple states have gone the way all downballot elections have gone: the Democrats do better when the Republicans have the White House, and the Republicans do better when the Democrats have the White House. That's how it has (mostly) gone in Wisconsin.
In very swingy Bucks County PA, Dems overturned Republican incumbents in the Sheriff and District Attorney races. The Sheriff race in particular centered on the incumbent's working closely with ICE. This is the county that makes up much of Brian Fitzpatrick's Congressional seat. Fitzpatrick is the Susan Collins of the House. It should be, but hasn't been, one of the easiest pick ups for the dems.
Those results were actually a little disappointing, given, as Joseph says, YES almost always wins in judicial retentions. Only one Judge has ever lost in PA, in fact, and those judges won 60-40, which isn't especially impressive to my eye.
I think we got this one because Mamdani was the only one of the big races where we were reasonably certain of the outcome and he could work on it over the past few days. Matt is fast, but I don’t think we’d get a fully formed article about the VA or NJ results this quickly.
This was almost certainly mostly written before last night. I believe he was doing various live takes last night, and even at the speed he writes he would have been hard pressed to have a good take today on the other results without keeping himself and his team awake into the predawn hours.
I find your approach to Mamdani curious. It would be easy to celebrate the things Mamdani has said regarding reforming city bureaucracy, and work to focus others on that aspect of his agenda. Likewise, NYC voters approved some key housing reforms that will help tackle the affordability issues that Mamdani centered in his campaign.
Instead, it seems that you're letting factional disputes cloud your perspective of Mamdani, who, to my mind, is much more practical than his fellow DSA members. I agree governing is hard, but he seems better positioned to do it than most.
Yes, but all of his writings about Mamdani start with a negative frame. I also think he undervalues the importance of dismantling the New York political machine (Schumer, Jeffries, etc.) which is a large part of why we're in this position. (Maybe Schumer c. 2000 is what the Dems needed, but it's a different country now).
I think its a response to being constantly bombarded online about how important Mamdani's election is when Matt's view is that 1) governance matters more; 2) NYC mayor is not representative of the country in any substantive way.
Mamdani ran on improving NYC's governance. And, NYC may not be representative of the country, but NYC plays an outsized role in our political culture, and, in particular, in the Democratic Party. I, personally, would rather have Democratic leaders be from more moderate blue-purple states (like Colorado and Virginia), but at present the party is controlled by New Yorkers. Defeating the Dem establishment is a big deal.
1) That was not the gist of what I got from Mamdani's campaign. He was very effective when speaking about lowering prices, though often suggesting doing things he doesn't control such as rent freezes, free buses, etc. Not so much on improving NYC governance.
2) NYC does play an outsized role in our political culture. That is NOT to Democrat's benefit!
3) Given #2, it would make more sense for Democrats to focus on nominating popular moderate candidates, but that's hard to do in very liberal locales.
4) You cannot defeat the establishment, you can only replace it. Do you think replacing the current Democratic establishment with a new establishment full of Mamdani's will lead to a better result for NYC?
1. There are many interviews where Mamdani talks about improving NYC governance. See, for example, his Sept. 24 interview with The New York Times, in which he suggests that progressives should focus on making government more efficient.
2. Agreed. But we want NYC to be as good as it can be, and that requires getting rid of bad leaders like Andrew Cuomo and his supporters (Schumer, etc.).
3. I think it will be easier for Dems to nominate popular moderate candidates if liberal cities aren't seen as such a liability.
4. Absolutely. I think the Mamdani vs. Cuomo contest is a classic example of progressive reformers taking on the establishment and winning. NYers defeated Tammany Hall-style politics before, and they can do it again.
>When de Blasio won, conservatives raised the specter of mass flight of the wealthy to other more business-friendly jurisdictions. That didn’t happen, and I think it probably won’t happen under Mamdani either.<
The Economist has been fulminating about the dire state of NYC's economy and fiscal situation. And I don't think they're totally wrong. When you look at rents (as you must), wage compression in the Big Apple have been especially lousy this decade. But I think they're overplaying their hand. One factoid they cite is NYC's (or NY State's) share of finance jobs. And that has indeed been dropping relative to...fast-growing states like Florida and Texas. But more people means more bank branches and more investment brokerage offices and thus more workers to fill those roles.
I think NYC will be ok at least with respect to the top jobs. The proximity to other movers and shakers pays for itself: one or two extra deals annually can *easily* pay for your higher tax bill. And you've got access to opera and ballet and theater and high end restaurants and shopping that Fort Lauderdale can't match.
All that said, I believe Mamdani's instincts as to what ails New York City are badly flawed. New Yorkers (and Democrats) will be lucky if he does no worse than Bill de Blasio.
And I'll go there: while Democrats had an absolutely fantastic night—I'll admit to having been worried about New Jersey—and while Mamdani's election in particular feels like a nice middle finger in the air to the MAGAs and Goypers—the optimal outcome for Democrats would probably have been "exact same results across the country except Cuomo pulls an upset." Andrew Cuomo is odious, mind you. And I don't blame New Yorkers one bit (even the ones who know better when it comes to policy) for voting for Mamdani. I would have, myself. But the De Blasio outcome isn't guaranteed, and it's *possible* that elevating a socialist to that role could cost Democrats votes over the next couple of cycles.
But anyway, no one likes a Debbie Downer, so I'll rejoice with everybody else for the time being!
all these races, they did it by double digits. And on everything including the CA gerrymander, which won by 25 points! Georgia utility board hasn’t had a Democratic member since 2007 - pre Obama - and they ousted two long term incumbents. It was a great night and we can only hope a harbinger of what’s to come.
2/3 of Con Edison pricing is in transmission and admin costs, not energy costs. You can shop around for wholesale energy prices and it'll do you barely any good because the cost is 2/3 related to delivery and grid maintenance.
Most of this is just a lagged effect of how utility rate cases work. They smooth out prior period spending, which exploded when interest rates were low. Also, labor wage costs for utilities have grown.
Around/over 50% of utility bills are network maintenance costs, not raw energy (electricity or gas), and the commodity prices have not actually gone up.
I agree in general, but I wonder if some of the "giving away free stuff" (sorry for sounding like a fox news-dad) Mamdani implements will actually be popular and *appear* to work in the short term, even if within the not-so-distant future it ends up eating away at the city's fiscal fabric. I realize he probably can't freeze rents or raise taxes significantly, but he could implement zero fare on buses, which has some points to recommend it, and the city-run grocery store thing could at least start out as an interesting experiment if they run it as a non-profit or something...) If so, it could help Dems' prospects in 2026 (2028 may be more iffy though, little too medium-term for my liking...).
As is my wont, this is only tangential to the central idea here, but hearing about perpetual leftist denouncing of their own factional candidates makes me think that if you are an anti-pluralist, illiberal type, there are two common pathways to justifying that position:
- "Yes, we are in fact anti-pluralist and illiberal, and this is good because our opponents lack all virtue / are subhuman and should be cast out of the polity, duh" (far-right)
- "How dare you call us anti-pluralist and illiberal! We have an impossible standard for what constitutes "democracy," which happens to be if and only if our exact theory of just governance comes to pass and anyone who disagrees is banished from the polity, but it's fascist to call that illiberal, how dare you" (far-left)
One of my biggest problems with Mamdani is that his central campaign promise — freeze the rent — is a terrible and unworkable idea. I am very concerned about how that specifically will play out.
Good news is that it’s also illegal! I think his odds of getting it through the Rent Guidelines Board and fighting off lawsuits are pretty low, especially for multiple years in a row.
Isn’t that only for rent-stabilized apartments, which are a pretty small subset of the NYC housing stock? Freezing rent on 15% of specifically allocated rent-stabilized units may not be such a big deal.
Rent control is about 15%. Rent stabilization, which is what he's talking about, is 1 million units, about half of the city's rentals. It's a big deal.
Maybe US public opinion shift on Israel was predictable in retrospect given that US public opinion previously was a massive outlier globally (which you can see in polls or all those embarrassing lopsided votes at the UN). Could this suggest that people taking “unpopular” left-wing positions should also be concerned with whether such opinions are popular globally (at least compared to other developed countries) as that could be a sign of their chances of influencing public opinion in the US? If so, “defund the police” will probably never work but positions like more gun control, a bigger welfare state even if it means somewhat higher taxes, a nicer foreign policy, even more concern with climate and environment are probably fine.
It seems pretty obvious to me that in 100 years we will have universal health care and a decarbonized electric grid. It also seems pretty obvious to me that in 5 years we will not have those things. And I have no idea how long we will have to wait. Our country is pretty good at clinging to stupid ideas for a very long time.
Agree re having those things in 100 years but it'll be mostly because those things get cheaper with better tech. I'm not at all sure people will change their takes on guns, crime, immigration, etc.
Meh, "global opinion" is wrong on a lot of things. Trump is very much a global candidate more than a traditional American candidate. Birthright citizenship is outside the global norm, but I think its good. Immigrant integration is good, but not the global norm. I could go on...
The end of stop and frisk may not have had immediate negative effects, but combined with bail reform it certainly opened the door to the high disorder environment the city developed post George Floyd. Disorder has declined but remains elevated. Does anyone really think a return of stop and frisk wouldn’t help (albeit at the expense of other priorities of libertarians and minority advocacy groups)? If people are willing to concede that point then all I’m saying is the end of stop and frisk should probably be considered a mark against BDB rather than a minor plus.
Separate from the partisan issues at-play- as a mild occasional democracy skeptic I think the idea of electing an administrator of one of the world's largest cities who has zero experience running anything is kind of idiotic. The guy's resume includes a few stints as a state Assemblyman, where I believe he managed a staff of 5. Now he's going to manage 306,000 employees, with a budget of $115 billion. A bit of experience might be helpful here!
The city manager system seems vastly preferable to me than the strong mayor one. You could get really radical and extend that idea higher up the political system as well.....
While you may not like his policies, there is no evidence of Zohran being wildly corrupt or a serial sexual harasser and drunk the way that even other Republicans claimed Hegseth was before he became DOD nominee and gained omerta.
Heck, nowadays being corrupt and a serial sexual harasser doesn’t bar you from being President of the United States of America, so, you know, there’s that.
I don't know, most of the discussion I saw during the primary was arguing about whether it was best to rank 5 other candidates, or to put one of Cuomo or Mamdani in 5th so that your vote could count against the other.
He's got another important task that hasn't come up for prior mayors, and that's protecting New Yorkers (and not just illegals!) from the Trump regime. Adams and Cuomo signaled that they weren't particularly interested in doing that.
Probably a heavier lift than most mayors will ever have to attempt; we'll see if the kid's got the juice for it.
Boy, I have a hard time letting the comment that DeBlasio was "better than Bloomberg on some fronts, worse on others" stand unchallenged... I still reminisce about those Bloomberg years. I lived in NYC with Bloomberg as my mayor and Obama as my president, and all seemed Good and Technocratic with the world.
Bloomberg downzoned huge swaths of the city -- while upzoning certain neighborhoods near the waterfronts -- that resulted in stymying incremental housing development in less dense neighborhoods.
That one TED talk from someone in his administration bragging about not allowing more density around certain transit hubs made me want to slam my head in a drawer.
These downzonings were utterly inconsequential and ridiculously overrated. No, you were never going to get high rise multifamily housing in Midwood or Bayside. Doing those downzonings bought him room to maneuver to unlock tremendous capacity in places like Astoria, Downtown Brooklyn, and LIC. What’s that? The slow boring of hard boards sometimes requires tradeoffs and prioritization? I’ve never heard that before!
I think what we got was an overall loss in housing capacity, because the value of turning single family homes into small apartment buildings in places like Midwood and Bayside wasn't made up for by those big upzonings (where, remember, every project needs to make more to pencil out because larger buildings are more expensive).
Again I struggle to live in the world that Bloomberg critics live in where uniform SFH blocks were going to suddenly sprout 4 story multifamily - much less a world in which this makes anything resembling a dent in housing supply. I don’t even know where to begin.
Idk, Seattle is absolutely full of 4 story rowhouses on former SFH parcels these days. If you let it happen, it can.
I can confirm that if you let it happen, it will happen and happen fast, and while it's great in the long term for the city as a whole, I am finding that living around it in the short term is truly the NIMBY villain origin story. Especially in neighborhoods where the change has been as rapid as it has been in mine, where someone who bought here when it was blue collar and has been upzoned suddenly gets a property tax bill they can't afford and, even with the profits from selling, can't afford to buy anywhere in the city, forcing them to move out and adding a commute. This was a long discussion in one of my neighborhood groups a couple of years ago, BTW, not an imaginary scenario. Goes along with people losing a lot of the full sunlight in their backyards to the looming townhouses around them and no longer being able to grow their flowers and tomatoes. I have seen so many people go to the dark side as a result of the speed of change in these parts and the reduction in their quality of life. The needs of the many, blah blah blah, but it sucks to be in the outweighed few. Meanwhile, I would have loved to put a DADU in my backyard, but I have a tragically large tree that the city won't let me remove without a fight because our priorities are dumb, and now I can't afford to do that with inflation and all. So I am just hoping my block gets upzoned to allow townhouses (the upzone stopped a block and a half from me, so I have most of the downsides and none of the upsides) and our friendly neighborhood developers will pay me a lot to ditch so they can turn these 5000 sqft into four tall overpriced boxes.
Yep, that's what I acknowledged -- "upzoning certain neighborhoods near the waterfronts", e.g., Astoria, Downtown Brooklyn, LIC.
I read that as "choosing his battles" - the downzoned areas were neighborhoods super resistant to development anyhow, and in return he got a ton of development near transit & waterfront. I think that was a good deal - maybe the best possible in those conditions.
But I do look forward to more upzoning in the future, fingers-crossed. Maybe this Mamdani fellow can get development back on track.
re: "better than worse than"
Funny, that's how I tend to think of the Biden years. A lot of terminally online people talk as if was the low point in all of US history. But I rather enjoyed 2021-2025. I feel all warm and tingly when I browse my phone photos and look back on, say, the summer of 2023.
Yes, we had inflation. But we also had a return to normalcy as the pandemic lifted. But the monster had not yet returned. A brief, golden age. Hell, there was even talk of how China might not surpass the USA in nominal GDP after all. When's the last time you heard that? (Answer, sometime before January of 2025).
The reason the Biden years count as a low point is that it was when defenders of democracy basically took a vacation when they should have been shoring up their defenses against a resurgent Trump, who was leading in polls consistently from late 2021 onwards. For the upper middle class it was a period of prosperity, since high prices were more an annoyance than a barrier to the affluent, but for working people it was watching all the wage gains of the post pandemic year get gobbled up and then some. Of course voting for Trump was literally the worst thing these people could do, but thanks to lack of trust in news media and government (which Biden’s cloistered administration contributed to), most people didn’t know that.
Out of curiosity what is your job? 2022-2024 were very dark times in the corporate world (other than AI which was steamrolling forward at such a speed that even the Biden admin couldn't stop it).
U.S. economic competitive advantage is finance and tech, and Biden admin was extremely hostile to both of those.
Maybe our competitive advantage should be industries that add rather than subtract value?
Under any definition other than "what Helikitty likes", those two industries add immense value and make the country substantially better off. Firms like Google and Amazon have delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer surplus. And finance creates the infrastructure for those companies to flourish in the U.S.
AI? Crypto? Come on, man. Useless industry producing almost nothing of genuine value.
You think AI is "nothing of genuine value"? Are you serious? Again, Google and Amazon and others (yes, even Facebook) have produced hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer surplus each. Leftists need to understand that just because they personally find an industry "icky", doesn't mean they should try and destroy it.
Finance serves a genuine purpose (as a market-maker and ruthless pursuer of efficiency) and American industry is the best in the world. That contrasts sharply with tech.
Ok then. Don't use your phone, don't watch streaming services, don't order from Amazon, don't google anything. Hell, don't even use substack, what are you doing here!?
I’d trade our “industry” for China’s any day of the week
You would trade high-skill services for manufacturing? I can't tell if you're a troll or just 15 years old.
Same. 😢
I moved to NYC in 1994, and I think Bloomberg was the best mayor during my time here. Still, DeBlasio was pretty good. As Matt notes, he kept crime down and made some law enforcement tactics far less alienating to the public. He also made progress on pre-k and kept charter schools going despite himself. His evidence-based investments at CUNY community colleges resulted in big improvements in graduation and successful transfer rates without lowering standards. He did all this as Cuomo tried to undermine him at every opportunity.
Deblasio "kept crime down" if you only define homicide as crime. Petty crimes lost a decade of traction under Bloomberg during Deblasio's reign of terror.
Ah, yes - those were the days. Center-left technocracy is my dream - hence why I love this Substack.
Sure, but DeBlasio also was fine.
Not just that everyone hated him but that everyone LOVED hating him was always totally illegible to everyone outside NYC.
The hate for him was largely a reflection of how good things were. Ask people what they hated him for, and they probably won’t even remember, or their reasons will seem comically stupid on reflection. Ultimately, it was probably more about who he was (super rich white businessman who was also very woke-something for everyone to hate) and the disappointment of his progressive base discovering (but refusing to actually believe) that, no, the mayor cannot just wave a wand and bring about a socialist utopia.
Every time this comes up I think about the Onion headline that pretty much sums it up. https://theonion.com/de-blasio-well-well-well-not-so-easy-to-find-a-may-1847151201/
This is literally evil:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/de-blasio-minor-offenses/
Lower penalties on public urination is “literally evil” sounds like a slight overstatement to me.
DeBlasio was terrible. What are you on about? Pushing the police to stop enforcing petty crime made the city dirtier and more disorderly.
Do you even live in NYC?
I think the point was that the difference between even a good mayor and a bad mayor is pretty small, because there is only so much you can do.
I think of Bloomberg as a genuine technocrat but Obama and every recent influential Dem would run a mile from technocracy/empirical evidence in crime or education policy.
I chuckle when I hear "empirical evidence" related to crime (or anything sociological).
From Scott Alexander's classic Paranoid Rant:
"To make the point about academia: a recent analysis found that 91% of Harvard professors who donated to a presidential campaign donated to Hillary (with the remainder divided between Sanders and all eight GOP candidates). Jon Haidt’s does a lot of work on this at heterodoxacademy and finds that there’s a 14:1 ration of liberals to conservatives in the non-economics social sciences. Meta-analyses in psychology, psychiatry, and economics all find that the personal views of experimenters affect what results they get; the psychology study, which quantifies the results, finds a very large effect size—larger than most effect sizes actually discovered in social science, meaning we have no idea how much of what we know is real effect and how much is experimenter political bias. On a related note, only 30% to 50% of experiments in psychology persist after replication attempts (other academic disciplines are as bad or worse). On a related note, meta-analyses observe clear evidence of publication bias in politically charged domains—for example, this meta-analysis finds that papers are more likely to be published as opposed to file-drawered if they support the liberal position rather than the conservative one. Also, lots and lots of people in academia, even the very liberal people, will admit this is true if you ask them directly. Haidt, Tetlock, et al (see previously cited paper) have found lots of horrifying things like journal editors saying explicitly and proudly they’d refuse to publish articles that support conservative ideas, or professors saying that other academics whose research implies conservative ideas shouldn’t be hired or given tenture."
LOL yes, the same, I was thinking exactly this.
So you have no problem living in the billionaires' world?
Mamdani's best issues are around urbanism. Things like universal daylighting, the end of parking mandates, continuing the previous administration's efforts to get trash off the streets, etc. These would be very noticeable and a mayor could actually help deliver them. I'm no fan of Mamdani, I voted for five other candidates in the primary before begrudgingly voting against the gerontocracy, but it might be nice to have a major who likes living in NYC and wants to improve life for the residents instead of New Jersey commuters. Eric Adams and De Blasio shared the trait of being a little too car brained for a city where most residents don't own one.
This was Cuomo's downfall. He just didn't seem to like or care very much about NYC. I think Mamdani is obviously a charismatic politician, but Mamdani's charisma was also magnified by Cuomo's dourness.
Would be interesting to see if Kathryn Garcia was in this race. I think she would have consolidated the anti-Mamdani vote and then picked off younger progressives who wanted a female mayor.
The inability of moderates to coalesce around a primary candidate who wasn't Cuomo is so stupid.
Ironically, part of the reason why they couldn't do it was because of Mamdani.
Before Mamdani's campaign really picked up steam, moderates didn't coalesce around anyone because they didn't care that much and could afford to sit back and let the chips fall.
Then after Mamdani's campaign picked up steam, moderates panicked and decided they couldn't risk splitting the vote. They hadn't done any of the hard work necessary to winnow the field. So they all just took the path of least resistance and settled on the non-socialist candidate with the highest name recognition, and that was Cuomo.
Collective action problems at work! Hopefully we don't see a repeat in the 2028 presidential primaries.
It’s good to see that Mamdani won a majority so that Sliwa didn’t actually spoil anything.
A huge systematic disadvantage of moderation in politics is that there rarely is an obvious reason for moderates to coalesce around one candidate other than electability. It almost is built into the process that you need plausible candidates with a chance to step aside-not a great formula for success with people with egos large enough to run for office.
The candidates in the last two mayoral primaries have been so bad. Just a complete lack of charisma. I don't know why NYC can't find replacement level politicians.
It’s a job you can only get by promising the world, that has inadequate power to deliver anything approximating the world, that requires pissing off wildly powerful people and groups just to accomplish small things who will then turn their entire purposes into destroying you, so that ultimately the city will hate you unless you are lucky enough for there to be someone or something else to hate more.
What’s not to love about the job?
Maybe because NYC is famously impossible to govern? There are only so many people out there with the requisite charisma, and most of them would evidently rather do something else.
Koch famously said the position is cursed. The last time a mayor became a governor was in 1869. If you're a New Yorker with political ambition, becoming mayor probably just kneecaps your potential.
Especially since it was a ranked choice vote where they didn’t need to specifically coalesce!
Cuomo prevented anyone else from running in the factional moderate lane. Everyone else in the primary was fighting for some version of the normie progressive vote and they all lost to Mamdani.
At the same time, no one was required to respect his role in the moderate lane in the primary. People like Ned Lamont didn't need to endorse him. He could have basically been this year's Weiner like in the last mayoral primary. It seemed like too many people were scared of crossing Cuomo (who is notoriously revenge-driven), but now he looks like a paper tiger.
Agree! I really wish Garcia or Richie Torres had run. But sadly they didn’t. So here we are.
This seems to play out with some frequency in Democratic primaries.
That massive turnout suggests to me that a Moderate message wasn’t going to sail.
To LaGuardia's point, though, this isn't a left or right issue, just a getting it done issue. Philadelphia Mayor Parker came to office on the similar issues, and she certainly isn't a Mamdani-style lefty. She wanted to bring in the National Guard to restore order in parts of the city (Shapiro said no). I saw her give a town hall on the city budget at a large Pentecostal church, where the pastor introduced her as a "woman of God", she said, You all believed in me when nobody else did, and everyone held out their hands to her and prayed for her, and then she did her thing. Mamdani might be a fit for NYC, but I think Parker's style of politics has more potential to transfer to other parts of the country, such as the South or elsewhere.
Which (like progressives winning big-city mayor's races) is the furthest thing from a new phenomenon. At least until very recently, the vast majority of successful black urban politicians were extremely closely connected to the black church. Some of them were literal ministers.
Raphael Warnock has the dual titles of “Senator” and “Reverend”.
Interestingly, the landslide winner of the Detroit mayoral election yesterday defeated a megachurch pastor. That said, her father is a local pastor so it's not as if she is far removed from the black churches in Detroit. .
Mamdani at least seems willing to keep Tisch
Yes, but will Tisch stay if he orders the NYPD to arrest Bibi? I think her agreeing to stay will be conditional on her being in charge of the NYPD without micromanagement. Let's see how that plays out.
He wants to make public transit free, which is likely going to result in fewer resources for public transit as well as an increase in disorder
*Wanting* to make public transit free won't result in any of those things. Only *actually* making public transit free will do that. And he'll probably fail.
He doesn't need to make transit free to increase disorder though. He can lean on NYPD / DAs to stop enforcing petty crime (as Deblasio did).
In 5 years there will be significantly more graffiti, vagrancy / drug use in public areas, shoplifting, etc. in comparison to a counterfactual Cuomo mayoralty.
Yes if he does something totally different from the thing we were talking about, then that thing could also be bad. Thanks for that.
If he does something else bad that will also be bad you know
More like: if he does the thing that all progressives/leftists campaign on and promise to do, that will be bad.
Your point was that disorder may not come because he won't be able to make public transit free. My point is that he doesn't need to do that, he'll bring disorder regardless.
Yes yes you don't like Mamdani. I hear you loud and clear. Should we throw a party? Should we invite Bari Weiss?
Fair enough
*Fast and Free! Hopefully he can at least accomplish the former
Why would it result in fewer resources? The fares don’t pay for all of the cost of transit. Politicians want to deliver a set of services across the board and also have a set of revenues across the board; they never say “ok we have a fixed pool of money only for transportation, so if revenues went away we must cut services.” It’s just as likely eliminating fares will reduce spending on any other priority. And presumably to enact this they would be committing revenue to the MTA to counterbalance the cut at the time.
This implies there are some significant pools of money being spent that are easily moved to the MTA. I suspect that almost every dollar in the budget has gotten a decent amount of constituents who will howl bloody murder if you reallocate the money away from their preferred budget item.
It’s theoretically possible they’d make up the gap, but I think unlikely. Happy to be proved wrong.
Best case scenario is that removing the costs of collecting revenue offsets most of the loss of revenue that isn't being collected.
Likely there is a constituency for the fare collection jobs, though.
Yeah it's an awful idea and we can only hope it doesn't happen. The choices in this election were very bad.
Absolutely I think this is the strongest case for Mamdani for people who actually live in NYC
How fun is "urbanism" if you get streets filled with drug addict vagrants?
Guessing someone who would ask that question in those words doesn't care for urbanism much in the first place.
And you'd be 100% wrong!
Apropos of not all that much, it is striking to see how the Mamdani win is dominating national and global coverage of the election. For my money it was at best only the fourth most important contest yesterday:
(1) The California ballot initiative could cost Republicans the House of Representatives. And it's a big personal win that might well help propel Gavin Newsom to the presidency.
(2) Virginia is a large and important state, Democrats flipped the governorship. That's a net pick up for them, and a net loss for Trump's party, right in his own backyard. Spangerger might even have won herself a place on a future national ticket.
(3) NJ looked dicey for Democrats, and the trends in that state for some time had looked worrying for them. Mikie Sherrill didn't just win. She crushed it.
But yeah, I get it. New York City is New York City. And what happens there gets noticed. So it's hardly surprising that that Mamdani's win is getting so much coverage. But still...
Apparently there was a big shift in Hispanic and South Asian voters in NJ relative to 2024. Maybe Republican's decision to spend to the past year telling minorities that they openly despise them over and over has eroded the gains they made with minorities in 2024.
See how Republicans have kicked out Vivek Ramaswamy. See how JD Vance dehumanizes his wife and children. See how MAGA venerates state violence and criminal violations of people's Constitutional rights over melanin.
I posted this on last night's thread, but it seems apt:
I've been thinking (ok, hoping) that the Hispanic vote has become the classic "show me the deliverables swing vote" — and the elections 2020 and 2024 were simply reflective of that. Trump cannily took up the mantle of "I want to open up the economy so you can get your job back" in 2020. And in 2024 he ran on "Democrats are making food and rent too expensive."
Well, he's had ten months to deal with the cost of living crisis, and Hispanic voters aren't stupid.
Could also be ICE raids on churches, workplaces, schools are kind of a turnoff.
Cool system we have. In order to get 30% of the vote you need to allow mass low-skill migration with zero enforcement once they step foot into the country.
What we have here is a clear failure to identify a subject-verb relationship.
Pre-programmed bot-replies on simple key word triggers...
Yes - inflation, pocketbook issues, not whether there is a ethnic face in the team or how Progressives are lensing supposed Vance treatment of Vance's own wife which is very doubtful anyone but Progressives & political obsessives who are already hard-coded to a party pay attention to.
It could be! But I'm a little cautious about reading too much into odd-year election results. Maybe turnout in NJ for their gov race was high, but in PA yesterday, at least, my polling place felt deserted.
When it comes to the 2028 election, the low turnout voters who will show up will not be "like" the voters who showed up yesterday, even if they might appear that way on paper.
One pattern I have seen is that Trump voters don't really show up without Trump on the ticket.
That's why the Republicans have no choice but to nominate Donald Trump Jr. in 2028.
You do wonder what percentage of MAGA voters would think they're actually voting for his father (and not in a sneaky, "he'll actually continue to be President" way) because reading isn't one of their strongest skills.
I wonder if you would talk the same snarky way about Democratic groups whose measured numeracy/skills are quantifiably lower than MAGA base. (thinking of a few...)
Junior just had to become Uber obese and paint himself orange and they can pretend dear leader never died.
NJ looks like it’ll be at about 80% of 2024 Presidential turnout and 125% of the last governor election.
When people vote, we win.
No, actually when the electorate is weighted to D oriented (currently) demographics you win.
When mass vote as 2024 occurs, you actually lose.
Not immutable fact but a current fact.
I was being semi-ironic. Although there *was* pretty high turnout for this type of election this year.
Still, I am *down* for poll taxes to keep the riffraff out of the voting booth.
Why I believe Matt, Silver keep emphasizing neither party nor its partisans have actually digested the flip in patterns of voting (high-propensity, low-propensity)....
Off and mid-terms always have seen the more affluent and more educated predominate. So Democrats should be very very cautious of over-read indeed as Presential will no matter what, by just long-term mechanics be a different (as in wider) electorate.
Turnout is driven by heated, competitive races. That's why, bloviating about turnout aside, 2024 totals for Harris worsened compared to Biden: a whole lot of Harris supporters in deep red and deep blue states didn't show up. Anyway, I'm thinking that explains Pennsylvannia?
My strongest thought on immigration is that while it's true some people just don't like the number of immigrants we currently have, the most salient issue is a sense of disorder around immigration. That's part of why recent and first generation immigrant citizens could turn to Trump specifically on that issue. They're anti-disorder, not anti immigrant, but now we're getting strong anti-immigrant vibes and a new type of disorder --- the ICE raids and thuggery. And again, it's the disorder that is most disliked.
Nah, it's over. Hispanic immigrants are a big enough block now in the U.S. that there is no realistic route other than U.S. becoming demographically similar to Brazil in 50 years. We'll get the demographics of Brazil from normie dems and the economic policies of Brazil from Mamdani types. But somehow it will turn into Sweden.
I guess if you think Hispanic is a bad demographic that's a problem. I'm OK with them, as long as we don't let in any more of those damn, dirty, Irish.
Just take this fwiw, but I do have a little bit of granular data on voter registrations by race. It's limited to North Carolina, and of course registrations are not votes. But exit polls have their own problems! So again, just take this fwiw as another data point:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/nc_voter_registrations
As far as I can tell, the only racial / immigrant segment of NC voters where the Dems aren't continuing to lose ground is white voters. The dashboard is currently showing data for 2025 drawn from Sep, but I updated it on my local machine with November's data and the the same trend is essentially continuing. The 2025 numbers will look a little weaker for Dems among minorities and voters born overseas when I eventually upload the fresher data.
It could be different in NJ, it could be different when NC voters actually vote, but for now, there's no racial / immigrant backlash brewing in NC voter registrations.
I very much doubt it's the messanging or the Identity Staffing that got attention.
the ongoing inflation and re-acceleration in combo with disruptive raids, but more on econ side is where one shuld look.
Matt didn't exactly help this issue!
I completely agree. Which D victory is more impressive? The one who got 50.4% in a place that hasn't elected a Republican in decades? Or the one who got 57.4% (!!!) and flipped the office from R to D?
I lived in VA in the Warner/Kaine years, so I certainly knew Spanberger would likely win, but a 15 point margin is really very impressive.
I realize the context is different, but that makes Spanberger more impressive by comparison, not less. Mamdani ran against a sore loser and barely broke 50%!
Apparently, no Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia has cracked 55% in like, I dunno, 40 years? A long time, in any case.
I have vivid memories of the Kaine-Kilgore nail biter and being ecstatic that the race was called by midnight. To see Spanberger called as winner at like 7:15 was mind blowing.
Spanberger is a real National candidate. Just closes off so many avenues of attack from the GOP.
If it's one thing I've learned from the last 7 years of American politics, it's that Democrats should recruit every woman who ever worked for the CIA and run them in every state.
It should be disqualifying NOT to own a gun.
This but unironically.
Ironically, I voted against a former CIA officer who ran in a primary for a local office in Virginia since her platform was just NIMBYism in a place that needs more housing.
Alas, timing. No way she runs in 2028. She can only run in 2032 if the Democrat loses in 2028 (please god no). By 2036, she'll be the answer to a trivia question.
I mean she's a woman though.. I'm not voting for another woman for a long time
In the primary? Or the general?
If the former, well okay I guess? If the latter, sheesh, I dunno.
Yes I meant primary
Why?
that's stupid.
Vote for talent. Not identity.
Spanberger didn't just win (which was expected). She obliterated Earle-Sears, and allowed Democrats to ride her coattails to elect Jones as AG (despite his violent texting scandal) and flip at least 10 (!!) seats in the House of Delegates to give Democrats a governing triumvirate with at least a 61-39 advantage in the House. She outperformed Harris --- i.e., shifted the vote left --- (often significantly) in 89 out of 93 of VA's districts.
Would love to see some more analysis of this and how transferrable it is to the midterms. VA is quirky because of having so many federal employees and contractors that are especially pissed at Trump et al for all the DOGE cuts, so I'm trying to temper my expectations about the transferability of this blue wave. But then again, Sherrill crushed it too without the same quirks, so maybe there's a case for some cautious optimism.
The GOP chose a gender swapped uncle Ruckus. That wasn’t going to work out for them.
Spanberger would have beat a Youngkin level candidate but the GOP didn’t even show up with that.
This made me snort. TY, I love a good Boondocks reference.
Yep. I mentioned the other day that I hope Spanberger is at least "on people's lips" for 2028 if she does well.
Well, she's a star!
At least with respect to the pissed off government workers and contractors, how much less pissed are they going to be a year from now? Best case is the government is open again, but few of them will be happy in their work, and lots of them will still be unhappy at not having their old jobs.
I hope VA does not continue down the road of Californication the last Dem admin so clearly wanted. You can see the desire of NoVA dems to turn it into a progressive mess. VA's political balance has worked out well, but between progressives and an AG actively interested in murdering the children of Republicans, not looking good. (Not to say the R's did not deserve/expect a good ass-kicking based on both candidate choice and the impact of what is going on in DC. But Jones is a bridge too far for me.)
It's amazing that in order you have 1) a ballot initiative in a large state that is home to much of America's entertainment media, 2) a major state right next to DC where the Pentagon is also located and 3) a major state right next to New York, yet they are all receiving so much less news coverage. All three feature people who are much more likely to be on a national ticket than Mamdani.
Not saying that some media actors don't have other motives, but the main thing is that the media knows what's going to get clicks, and that matters to them a lot more than what's "important".
Is it even that complicated? National news media is concentrated in New York. They're just talking about what they themselves find interesting.
Infinitely more likely!
Well, since Mamdani isn't constitutionally eligible for the national ticket, that will skew the odds a bit.
Democrats also won the PA Supreme Court election in a landslide which will prevent gerrymandering and other election shenanigans in one of the most important swing states.
It’s headline news on the BBC and Israeli papers. I am confident that there are more important things going on in Israel at the moment than the election of an anti-Israel politician to an office that has literally no influence on the US-Israel relationship. I don’t know much about British affairs, but I’m gonna guess that’s the case there too, given that the US-Israel relationship itself has no influence on British affairs! It’s weird as hell man.
When it comes to the media's fixation with all things New York City, we need some Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" infusion. Oh I so don't care about Mamdani.
You're right, Charles, all these other things are so much more important. But the most important is how Prop 50 has launched Newsom into the stratosphere of the 2028 nomination contest. I think Newsom would be a terrible candidate for the Democrats (NYT this morning: "aides said he is likely to soon pivot to the issue of climate change and cast himself as a climate champion" -- dumb idea and climate change is one of my most important issues!) But if he's now the solid frontrunner it's because the other Democratic contenders (except maybe Pritzker) are just sitting back and doing nothing. Maybe if they want to win, and deprive Newsom of the nomination, they should maybe think about getting in the game? Hey Josh, if you think it's fine to sit back and wait for your huge reelection victory in 2026 to launch you, may I introduce you to Ron "same strategy" DeSantis?
I don't give a damn who the mayor of New York is. I give many damns about who wins the White House in 2028.
And even on a local level, the YIMBY NYC charter amendments that passed last night are IMO almost as consequential as the mayoral election, since their potential impact on NYC's housing shortage is considerable. As an ex-New Yorkers, those ballot proposals were what I had my eye on.
Yes, this is super satisfying!
It is amazing to me that so many people are talking about this and no one seems to mention or even notice that he got 50.4% of the vote. The last several mayors got 66 - 75%. He is a massive electorial underperformer against a scumbag.
Yes..... the fact the widely detested Cuoma got ~42% is not a sign of strength, the opposite (although one really has to credit Mamdani for great campaigning skill in overcoming his multi-handicaps - stylistically, and in his strategic open refutations of a number of his 2020isms that clearly worked to get over 50...
Yeah, and for that reason, it was annoying that Matt focused on it today.
Even more importantly than the governorships, VA Dems picked up THIRTEEN seats in the Assembly, and the party now has trifecta control. NJ Assembly Dems will have their largest majority in 60 years. Minnesota Dems kept the Senate. Dems retained control of the PA Supreme Court. Heck, Mississippi Dems picked up three seats yesterday, breaking a supermajority.
A lot of people have to eat crow about Sherrill
Typo. You meant to write "Sheryl" right?
There was never a sliver of doubt that Californians would pass the prop. Anyone who said otherwise is either quite uninformed or a propagandist.
I mean, that was true in the last few weeks, sure. I don't think it was a foregone conclusion when the measure first made it to the ballot. I recall seeing polling several months ago suggesting it was likely to be a close affair. Good on Newsom for having the balls for investing some political capital early on.
The smart people all noted that in early polls it barely cracked 50% and they noted that the standard thing in CA referenda is that the level of support tends to decline over time, so there were some serious questions about whether it would win.
I guess I should be a pundit. I knew it was a slam dunk from the gitgo. I don't think smart people pay much attention at all to early polls. Right now some alleged pundits are predicting that Harris will be the nominee. Nope.
There was a lot of doubt about it for quite a while, expressed by very smart political types. It was a real ballsy, push all your chips in move by Newsom.
I was doubtful. Yes the polling turned around in the last few weeks but I suspected that people who don't answer their phones for polling questions would be disproportionally likely to say "Vote yes on gerrymandering? What a terrible idea."
You're selling us Californians short. At least those who bother to vote in special elections. Almost all of whom knew this was a response to Trump.
I don’t know about governing but he will probably sustain enthusiasm longer than De Baslio just because he seems better at retail politics and media. He seems like a political animal in the way of Gavin Newsom or Bill Clinton in the sense that he seems to like doing the dirty work of politics, even listening to and cajoling the wealthy! He’s very much unlike Bernie and even De Blasio in that respect.
I met him a few times when I did by reporting trip for Zellnor Myrie's campaign (RIP). He definitely had that Bill Clinton-esque ability to make you feel like the most important person in the room.
One of the secrets to De Blasio's unpopularity is that he'd always show up for events extremely late, and one of the jobs of the mayor is to show up to events.
Not a NYC resident but could see him just happily hyping small ball wins and as long as nothing rocks the boat too hard...could work for him? Work out as in he won't be viscerally disliked.
Since he wasn't born here, we also don't have to worry about him getting distracted by running for president in a few years, which was a problem we had with De Blasio.
Yes. Politicking is important even after you win. And the most important part of that is going to be his inevitable clashes with the Trump administration. Symbolic or not, that’s how you be a “progressive hero” in 2025. Mamdani has to walk a fine line between publicly standing up to Trump in a way that feels satisfying to his base while minimizing/managing the material consequences of whatever bullshit Trump may try to throw st NYC … and most importantly, while also delivering on the boring day to day governance stuff. But having Trump as foil is more blessing than curse for a progressive mayor faced with the structural difficulties Matt describes.
Also the progressive left will probably maintain more enthusiasm for him longer because of his demographics.
On #3, I think Matt underplays the massive shift in work patterns that has happened since de Blasio’s terms: specifically, that we all now know how easy it is to set up shop somewhere else. Covid and the years since taught the financial industry that, while being at the office remains important, that office does not have to be in NYC anymore. This simply was not true in 2013, or even 2017. Citadel famously left Chicago for Miami. Alliance Bernstein has mostly left NYC for Nashville. JP Morgan Chase, despite the new building, is employing more and more in Texas and other states. Others know they can easily follow.
So the threats of capital flight are indeed more credible now, not because of politics, but because of the pandemic and its lessons.
I would buy this more if it wasn’t for the fact that the NYC office market has actually bounced back strongly in the last year. Office vacancies are plummeting (please see my LinkedIn page. I do this for a living)
Please see Matt’s post “Chicago is doomed”. The reality is if office rents in NYC really do go permanently settle at a price point a bit lower than pre COVID price points, that would still likely mean NYC office market is likely going to be in healthy place. Basically, there is A LOT of room for prices to drop and for their not to be a huge drop in office occupancies. A lot of companies have back office in other locations purely because office rents in other locations are lower. If office rents are even a small degree lower in NYC, a lot of those operations will just be moved to NYC. By the way, similar dynamic with SF (see recent Wall Street journal article about tech wanting move back to SF from Austin).
Honestly, to me this is an example of the power of right wing media speaking in one voice. Even for those of us who detest Fox or Newsmax their talking points have a way of bleeding into what I’ll call more respectable outlets.
There’s office vacancies, and then there’s the tax base. Office rents dropping means that the office buildings themselves pay lower property taxes. By the same token, Ken Griffin personally might have been paying something like .1% of Chicago’s taxes, and now he’s not - the people living in the city to work at those offices being replaced by less wealthy people makes a big difference too.
I should add. Not only are office vacancies dropping rapidly (meaning the value of the office buildings going up due to much smaller lease up costs), the rents are clearly demonstrably higher than just a year ago which also in turn has meant cap-rates are dropping (also in part due to Fed rate cuts) further increasing the value of office property and thereby increasing taxes. Point being, even if office rents never reach the true tip of the peak from say 6-7 years ago, it would very hard to argue that office values aren't in much healthier place than 2020-2024. Which should pretty big boon to tax revenue vis a vis the situation from 2020-2024.
If there is a worry to be had regarding tax revenue it's with rent stabilized properties. I don't think a lot of New Yorkers realized that the 2018 change to the rent stabilization law wasn't going to create problems immediately. That's because for a variety of reasons, a lot of rent stabilized units actually had rents closer to market than you might have expected for a variety of reasons. Well we're now 7 years later, and given the complete inability to raise rents at all, we're in a situation where rent stabilized units have rents now way way below market. Add in the bout of inflation we had and we're now at a situation where rental income not only can't cover expenses but given the possibility of a lengthy rent freeze, there is real chance the rent stabilized properties could be in serious trouble very soon.
Mamdani has shown a real pragmatic streak that has helped assuage left of center people like me. I'm hoping that extends to this "rent freeze" proposal. I'm optimistic that he'll recognize this going to be a problem (also Adams stuffed rent boards with his own people, so there's a decent chance the rent freeze may not happen or at least not in the near term). But that's the real danger to the tax base way beyond anything office related.
This, I completely agree with. And your points about vacancy plummeting are good ones.
I appreciate your insider perspective, and as an out-of-state employee of a mostly remote firm that re-upped a few years ago (at a massive discount to our prior lease), that is certainly my small firm's story. That said, zoom and remote work have undoubtedly made the bar for relocation much lower, particularly for upper middle income workers who are in search of a higher quality of life in which to raise their families. (As a corollary, the massive gains made by many Southern school systems, versus stagnation or worse - and at a higher property tax price point - in the Northeast, has also altered the equation a fair amount.)
Isn't the idea that you are correct, its unlikely that there will be a shift out of NYC *under current setup.* But to JE's point, if there is a substantial change in those circumstances tax wise, then it would be easier for firms to move...
While I think that is a good concern to flag, I’d argue the change will be in high end residential stuff. Commercial real is on a tear in NYC, they lead the nation in “office visits” and are the only major city to exceed their 2019 levels. Citadel, for all their bluster about getting out of blue states, is building a $5b tower two blocks north of that new JP Morgan building to house both the hedge fund and the market maker. These are long term bets on New York by large firms.
Yes, Citadel has plans on the block of Park between 51st and 52nd, though this is mostly relocated Chicagoans. (The Chicago office is almost entirely gone, thanks to bad government.). This decision was made during the relatively stable (for business) Adams years. Griffin does not have to go through with it, if he finds his team does not want to be in NYC going forward.
I should also note that I am writing as a distance commuter to NYC (from my hometown in a very red Southern state, where I am happy to be rearing my children). Our small team renewed our lease at a massive discount a few years ago, but we may relocate across the river - or down South - if taxes go up or the quality of life goes down. Everyone has a limit, and thanks to Zoom, our limits are much lower than they used to be.
Chicago is doing very well in terms of new and large businesses. I’m making coffee and then need to get back to work so I can’t find the link, but recently Crain’s reported on how Chicago was the top business attractor in the country.
Don’t listen to Fox
I think actually the opposite effect is true. If you can work from anywhere, why not work from somewhere cool (if you can afford it)
Lots of tech companies that relocated to Miami in the wake of Covid ended up regretting it. Venture investment was way down in 2024. Anecdotally everything I've heard on this topic is it didn't really work out. Perhaps it's gone better for more established companies from cold weather cities though?
It's amazing how many tech leaders thought moving to Miami was a good idea because the mayor talked about crypto, but never stopped to think about the fact that they were based in SF in the first place because of all of the nearby top tier universities.
One of my criticisms of Matt the past few years is his insistence on (at least to my eyes) overestimating the smarts and strategic thinking of business leaders. Think this came up a lot when Elon was going off the deep end and was much more in the news. Now, I don't want to go full super left in the other direction and claim that all business leaders are "nepo baby" idiots or literally a bunch of Dr. Evil clones. But just because business leaders are likely capable people with particular talents or smarts that are well suited to rising up the ranks at a company, doesn't mean they are not susceptible to biases, blind spots and quite frankly dumb decisions based on bad information.
To that end (and fitting in with what I wrote in my post yesterday) I think Matt underestimates the number of prominent business leaders who are getting their news info from pretty dubious sources. And maybe more importantly making pretty major business decisions based on something on Fox News said. I suspect if we had a chance to talk to some of these business leaders who moved offices to places like Miami and are now reconsidering, we'd find out they were watching lots of segments on Fox about how San Francisco was complete chaos and going to literally die in like 3 years.
You've made this point about business leaders a number of times and I find it very compelling. My addition is that the same applies to government leaders! Both can have significant insight into their realms of expertise, but also be very blinkered when applying that to the real complicated world.
See my comment yesterday regarding cutting off SNAP benefits. I think it’s quite likely a disturbing number of GOP leaders actually believe SNAP benefits either only go “those people” in Chicago or NYC or that there is massive amounts of fraud being committed by illegal immigrants. Point being, it seems really clear a lot of these people are getting their info from Fox or even more extreme right wing websites (see my comment about Mike Lee. A poster child for someone who seemed smart and normal like 5-10 years ago and appears to have gone down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole into insanity).
The biggest shift in following politics since the late 90s is there used to be very conservative Republicans who nonetheless still had to keep up sort of kayfabe with the rubes because at the end of the day, they were college-educated elite Republicans who understood how things actually worked.
Basically all of those people have been replaced with weirdos raised on almost totally right-wing media.
Agree. I think Matt has also talked persuasively on how this infected the Biden administration and left them incredibly out of touch as well.
It's pretty shocking how ignorant a lot of business leaders are about politics or even things like basic macro concepts. They might be good at some things but a lot of them are definitely in a bubble. Look at all the embarrassing posts from business titans who didn't understand fusion voting in NY.
Ben Carson is a legitimate genius when it comes to surgery and saved the lives of untold number of people.
He is an absolute moron when it comes to politics.
Having been in house in a sub sector of tech for 10 years or so now my observation is that there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have gotten where they are more by managing to catch lightning in a bottle, being at the right place at the right time, that kind of thing. That isn't nothing and my guess is none of us in these comments will ever do it. You usually also have to have some kind of skill set to exploit your good fortune and most successful business people have an ability to manage and disposition to live with risk that is not as typical of the professional class, and certainly not what you see in the public or quasi public sector.
But to your point most of them aren't super geniuses and a not insignificant number don't fully understand the nature of how they got where they are. Just as the public sector and professional class can be overly risk averse they can be susceptible to a lot of motivated reasoning and the gambler's fallacy and any number of other human failings.
There's also the "Wyatt Earp" effect. Take enough entrepreneurs trying to create start ups and become the next Amazon, by sheer statistical chance there will be one left standing to be come NVIDIA.
Does this mean Jen-Hsun Huang is just some random idiot who by sheer blind luck is now an extraordinarily rich human being? No not at all. I actually think it's almost banal to point out that there's no way NVIDIA becomes the giant it is without Huang having some talent and brains. But there are a ton of extremely smart and capable entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And also I'm sure some idiots or fraudsters who maybe are smooth talkers who now how to get money out of investors (looking at you Adam Neumann). I'm going to guess a big reason Huang is more successful than the latter cohort (with the gigantic exception of Trump) is because he probably is genuinely smarter and more capable. But the former group? Guys (And women, although probably not as many as there should be) who have advanced degrees and are quite smart themselves? Yeah, there is almost certainly a degree of luck and "someone had to be the biggest winner almost by definition".
You make some good points, brain rot can infect even otherwise smart business leaders, and they too can also be victims of the algorithm if they are chronically online imo.
Decisioning on office and locations only occurs like that in small closely held companies.
Larger ones isn't going to be driven by "Fox News" (the Lefty omni-excuse) or even WSJ as such but doing a bunch of office rents, costs and taxes simulations.
Regret is much more to be attributed to "Excel Jockeying" regret that Excel models didn't capture other things of import and not to Fox / WSJ vibes.
Excel modeling blindness is much more fundamental explanatory except again for companies with only Founder governance.
Miami has insane governance problems and crime is a real issue, even compared to Chicago.
It's not like crypto would ever be used for crime. Right, right?
It was a while ago but Chicago condos don’t have issues with home invasions resulting in the murder of NFL players. Lurid crime affecting the wealthy is a fact of life in Miami, they’ve made tv shows about it.
I am really stunned that someone would list “crime and public safety” in the “pro” column about Miami.
My favorite of these types of storylines was "North Korean ship trading counterfeited dollars for drugs off the coast of Miami" and American viewers basically shrugged and went "sounds like Miami."
Hey, it's not like there's no history of criminal enterprises using the power structure of Miami, including the banks, to do crime.
Oh look, there's this documentary called Miami Vice I've been meaning to watch....
(There actually is a doc called Cocaine Cowboys but the joke was right there.)
Sure, but it’s a better place than NYC to commit white collar crime, so it all balances out in the end.
Yeah it's very funny when people from Florida or Miami bloviate about NYC crime.
Think it’s the clustering effect more than the universities. Boston would be the tech hub if it was about access to good universities.
Boston is a huge hub for pharma.
Boston is a tech hub. They just tend to work in physical tech, not SAAS B2B tech stacks that SV made its bread and butter. It just turns out that physical tech doesn’t scale as quickly or easily because, well, physics.
Boston's big problem was the state's use of non-competes, which California lacked. It is still important for some types of tech, particularly biomedical tech, due to the universities.
Dallas is way ahead of Miami to become the second financial hub. That seems like it will stick. Both Goldman and Wells Fargo are building huge campuses there, etc.
the weather probably cuts in the opposite direction. GuyInPlace mentions SF below, but in a weather battle SF beats Miami handily. Have you been to South Florida in the summer? It's unbearable.
90% of the New Yorkers who flocked here during COVID left after experiencing their first summer down here. I've lived in South Florida my whole life an Mid June - August have me on an annual suicide watch.
The rich people coming from NY are smart enough to leave Florida for a place in the Appalachian mountains or upstate NY or Maine during the Mid May (not June) through October hot season.
Funny that July is also when SF is coldest.
If I were a hedge fund bro, I would rather live in FL and pay no income tax unless I were really into modern art or opera.
If you were a hedge fund bro, you’d live where the money is, and that’s NYC
give money enough time and it will decamp to florida unless it has cultural pretensions only nyc can sustain
JP Morgan already employs more people in Texas than New York. I do think New York has some huge advantages, but New Yorkers definitely have a NYC exceptionalism blind spot that could result in some unforced errors.
To what extent does NYCs tax base depend upon upper middle class employment versus multimillionaires buying condos? I honestly don’t know.
NYC income tax revenue is highly skewed toward the highest earners. The Top 1% earners (over $815,000/year, $3.7mm average) paid 40% of NYC income tax (https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/parsing-the-impact-of-mamdanis-tax-hike-plans/). And I would bet the top 0.1% paid nearly half of that (can't find data).
Income taxes are about 25% of total NYC tax revenue. Property taxes are larger, and so non-resident condo owners do also contribute. And sales tax is meaningful too, and likely skews toward "the rich" given their much higher total consumption, but I couldn't find a good source.
I know the answer for DC is that there is a huge base of insanely wealthy people funding the city, and this is a new thing.
DC runs “surprising” surpluses because it’s a really inconvenient fact that it’s not even the wealthy gentrifiers that drive revenues but the eyewateringly wealthy.
Crazy that someone with that much money would voluntarily choose to live in DC.
Exceptional QOL if you want to live in a city, are white, and wealthy. Especially considering the cost compared to NYC (I turned down a job up there because an equivalent house/brownstone cost 10x). If you want walkability and urban amenities, there aren’t a ton of choices. White educated people have the longest life expectancy in the country in DC. It’s basically Europe for a fraction of the price.
Murder rate 4x South Africa if you’re black.
I recall 10 or 15 years ago Andrew Sullivan doing an experiment where he moved from Adams Morgan to NYC and found it to be a total nightmare.
Randomly saw him coming out of a Shake Shack right before then and took about ten minutes to realize why he looked familar.
In DC, you can get a fabulous condo on the Potomac for under $5 million, a very swank flat for a fraction of that. In NY you can’t stick your chest out with seven figure real estate. Also, DC has a deep bench of highly educated professionals of both sexes if you want to date or make erudite friends.
Plus the weather is better. I have begrudgingly admitted to myself that the Southeast actually has very nice weather and much better than the north (galling, as a committed Yankee and fall enjoyer). You just get a lot more crisp but not cold sweater weather actually, and AC means the summers are not that much worse. The temperature differential is much larger in the cold months than the warm.
No. DC< NY weather wise. Much hotter in the summer, for one. NYC has coastal moderation. Even Atlanta GA has cooler midsummers than DC because of the 1000 foot altitude.
Nope, I have lived for long periods in both places and as a hot weather hater, NYC is miserable in the summer. Sun reflecting off of all the hard surfaces and the putrid garbage smell. DC is not great in the summer, it’s my least favorite season here, but its abundance of trees helps a lot and I am fortunate to live in a Rock Creek Park-adjacent location with lots of cooling shade.
I used to tell myself this too. Summer is the least pleasant season in the South, but it's not much worse than NYC (in both cases you don't want to be out in the heat unless you are swimming or something), and the delta is much larger between the two climates in the other 3 seasons.
Plus the mornings are usually very pleasant, away from the coast. Much larger temp swing during the day.
I spend a lot of time in Atlanta and have to grudgingly admit it just has much better weather, and people saying otherwise are performing cope.
This. DC typically has a lot of False Spring energy in February and March, and real spring here is spectacular.
One of the problems with NYC's property tax system is that condos are insanely undervalued, which is made up for by high valuations of commercial property. So a lot more on the former than the latter.
NYC has a lot of room to increase property taxes by switching to true market value assessments. But this is not politically populare and there are many entrenched interests who would invest a lot to stop it.
NYC funds itself substantially more off of income taxes (including for those who live and work out-of-state but base out of an NYC office) than off of real estate taxes. Given the proportion of taxpayers who are renters versus owners, as well as commuters, this has made sense over the years. But, again, we all now know how much easier it is to meet over Zoom, or in-person anywhere with a good airport, than it was less than a decade ago.
This is not correct. Property tax revenues are almost 2x income tax revenues for NYC (https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/annual-state-of-the-citys-economy-and-finances-2024/).
Part of the confusion may be that a large chunk (about 66%) of NYC taxpayer income tax is actually New York State income tax. NYC taxpayers contribute over 50% of NYS income tax revenue though are only 40% of the population.
I stand corrected - thank you! But another truth is that NYC is one of the few cities that levies an income tax at all, and NY State is one of the few states that assesses non-residents on their entire income, not just the portion of which that is earned when present in the state itself.
I imagine many of the multimillionaires actively work in finance, so they are probably deriving their income from NY and therefore paying taxes. Multi multi multi millionaires might have an NYC apartment(s) but not spend 181 days in the city for tax purposes.
Ah, I was wondering about that - whether state/city income tax in NYC followed the job or the person
Normally if you’re doing the less than 180 days thing, I presume you get any corporate payments through a non NYC office so you don’t pay NY State tax - because if the money comes from a NY source you are paying income tax on it even if you are not a resident. But if you’re some JP Morgan potentate spending less than 180 days in NYC, I presume you get paid through a Florida or Texas office or something.
I wonder how big the ultra wealthy committed New Yorker (tm) set is. They definitely exist.
This guy gets it! The substance of trying to push higher taxes in NYC is insanely more fraught; I’d argue that since we’re now 12 years removed from Occupy Wall Street, the politics are more fraught too.
100% agreed. Raising taxes is a non starter in a lot of blue cities or states. You have to focus on a few things to do well, make things better, safer and more efficient before you start thinking of raising taxes.
Can I suggest that a lot of Mamdani grossest and most bigoted critics are making a version of the same mistake that “resistance libs” like me made in 2017. Namely, you’re setting the bar to awfulness way too high and when the leader in question can’t reach it, your criticisms that are more valid and more grounded in more reality are going to fall increasingly on deaf ears.
For resistance libs it was the “Russia stuff”. It was like the centerpiece of trump criticism for like two years. And it was sort of the a dud. Now I say this full aware that a) Bill Barr did an amazing job white washing the Mueller report findings and helping shape kind of a bogus narrative going forward that the entire thing was “fake news” and b) I think there is some legitimate questions still about the Trump organizations financial ties to Russia and real questions about why he acts the way he does with Putin. Having said all that, the bar set was he was a literal Russian asset possibly since 1987 and that he was literally taking orders from Putin. When that turned out to be not true I honestly think it undermined other more trenchant criticisms about his anti democratic behavior and maybe most of all his rampant corruption (which has only been ramped up today).
For Mamdani, I can’t emphasize enough that I have met more than one person who thinks he’s going to implement Sharia law or wants to implement Sharia law. Besides the fact that this was clearly a blatant lie spread around, it also has zero percent chance of ever happening. Even if it was secretly the case he wanted to bring Sharia law, the chances he could actually implement this would be zero and anyone suggesting this is a real possibility should be laughed out of the room. Which means that more grounded warnings about other Mamdani initiatives are not going to have the oomph they should (like a 4 year rent freeze. I cannot emphasize enough this is actually his worst proposal and has a real chance to do terrible damage to the city if it is actually implemented).
I don't envy you or the other New Yorkers who had to choose between Mamdani, Cuomo or Sliwa. No good options there in my view.
My politics being what they are, I'm more inclined to be favorable to Mamdani, but yeah he was NOT my first choice in the primary for sure. But I think it's important to note that a small but significant faction of Dems likely voted for Mamdani (when it became apparent he had a real shot of winning the nomination) as a "never Cuomo" vote. That's definitely where I was at. It angers me to no end that the Dem establishment tried to stuff down our throats this odious bully who has no business being in charge of anything again. And what's crazy to me, is based on the actual election results, it's really clear to me there were probably 50 viable more moderate options Dems/centrists/establishment could have backed who would have likely won over Mamdani.
The Sliwa thing is also instructive. It's also very clear to me that if GOP nominated just a normal right of center politician who wasn't "Trumpy" or at the very least didn't emphasize right wing identity politics stuff (sort of piggybacking off of my post above, I think its likely a lot of the grosses NyPost stuff about Mamdani likely backfired and pushed a small number of people who might have voted for Cuomo to note vote for him), there is a decent chance he would have won.
Matt laments how Dems lose (or may lose) elections by not putting up candidates who are at least a little more moderate. Given he's a Dem who wants to see Democrats win, I get why that's his focus (same reason it's my focus). But I think it's underappreciated that GOP could be getting Reagan style landslides the last 8-12 years if they had someone less odious than Trump and they stopped nominating crazy Trump people for winnable swing seats. Now, the problem with this counterfactual is that its very clear that a big reason Dems (or least a faction of Dems) moved far left on identity stuff is clearly a reaction to Trump himself. If Marco Rubio wins in 2016 do some of the more far left figures who gained prominence circa 2018-2020 actually gain prominence? Not so sure. But lets say Dems really did react exact same way. Think it's likely Rubio winds a landslide in 2020. I've said before, but one of my not so hot "hot takes" is I think Trump is a pretty big electoral underperformer. He by complete accident put together an optimal coalition for winning the electoral college, but I think it's likely a Rubio wins another 5% of the popular vote...which is huge.
The ironic thing is in some ways while Silwa does seem to be a typical older ethnic racist, he was less openly racist and more respectful of Zohran and his campaign in general than Cuomo and the wider GOP ever was.
So so instructive and also sort of confirming my feeling that whatever my apprehensions may be about Zohran, I am 100% satisfied he won over Cuomo.
This is a good comment, and I don't just say that because my outsider perspective is that Mamdani is a completely self inflicted phenomenon. I mean who the hell else were you supposed to support? The corrupt incumbent? The nakedly cynical run by the over the hill has been with sex scandal baggage? The 70 year old dude who walks around wearing a red beret, without even a hint of irony about it?
In fairness, the beret would still be risible if he were trying to be ironic
As for me personally I agree. But now that we've had 10 years of politics dominated by an iconography inspired by the 'make your own hat' stand at the boardwalk I have come to doubt how widespread my own sensibilities are.
Totally. If someone had told me in the 90s that a dangerous cult of personality would form around the short-fingered vulgarian of Spy Magazine, I probably would have died laughing
"Now, the problem with this counterfactual is that its very clear that a big reason Dems (or least a faction of Dems) moved far left on identity stuff is clearly a reaction to Trump himself."
Didn't Hillary Clinton show this was a good way to win national primaries before Trump actually won? If Clinton doesn't go identitarian, does Bernie win the primary?
In my counterfactual, Hilary likely loses the popular vote. Maybe not like 10 points or anything, but think it's likely she loses by say 3-4 points to a normal Republican who ran a decent campaign.
But to your direct question, I actually have my doubts that Hilary's turn toward identity politics won her the primary. I don't think there was ever a poll that showed Bernie having majority support among the Democratic primary electorate. His support was clearly stronger than Hilary anticipated which likely caused a bit of overreaction. But it's again not clear to me this was strictly necessary to win the nomination.
Think another data point to consider is that it's clear a pretty significant amount of Bernie's support was just pure anti-establishment sentiment and anti-Hilary sentiment.
Hilary clearly overreacted to the threat of Bernie. She, and her team, panicked that they were seeing a redo of Obama beating her in 2008. She would have been better off being almost condescendingly pleasant about his voters feelings, like Bill's "I feel your pain", while just continuing on with her campaign as competence personified. She would have still won the nomination handily, and been less beholden to the identity part of the coalition.
Mamdani was clearly better than the other candidates even though I'm not a socialist. I would go ahead and say that after enduring a series of terrible candidates like Hillary, Trump, Biden and Harris, it's refreshing to see someone with actual political skills, even if I have very little alignment on actual policies. It should be a bare minimum requirement for a politician to be able to speak fluently in public and be likable.
> Even if it was secretly the case he wanted to bring Sharia law, the chances he could actually implement this would be zero
I would suggest instead a thorough indoctrination in the works of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Especially for 8th graders.
Come to the SB comments for the political debate, stay for the high-brow jokes. Well done
Learn your algebra *and* your algorithms.
"What is Mamdani's worst proposal" could fill up a book.
I can’t even talk about him with Israeli friends. It’s weird.
And I’m pretty pro Israel and their actions in Gaza.
My favorite invocation of Sharia law in American politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y83z552NJaw
The mayor of NYC doesn't have the authority to raise taxes (right?); sharia is gonna be a lot harder than free buses.
“When I look back on de Blasio, I see a basically good mayor: stronger than Adams in certain areas, weaker in others”
I guess you might see that, but people really hated DeBlasio at the time and were pining for just about anyone else. From what I remember they thought he was oily and insincere.
Remember this Onion article?
https://theonion.com/de-blasio-well-well-well-not-so-easy-to-find-a-may-1847151201/
One of my favorite Brooklyn Nine-Nine jokes is, after having successfully bugged a car driven by the local crime boss and one of his lieutenants, Jake summarizes the intelligence they gleaned and then says "...and then they hit a pothole and complained about de Blasio for twelve blocks."
I worked for the NYC government during the deBlasio administration. I and most of my colleagues hated him. City Hall operations, at least insofar as they affected my agency (which was a lot), were horrible and his sanctimonious demeanor was obnoxious.
Early in his first term, when the administration was trying to get the housing legislation through the council, he went on a local public radio show to talk about it. Asked about opposition from community boards, he basically blew them off, saying something like “they don’t matter, it’s only an advisory vote.” Which is true, but not something that a mayor trying to build support for ambitious legislation should say! I remember thinking that someone who has only ever worked in politics should do it better than this.
Not smart for the mayor to say but I'm with him. community boards should really be abolished. They literally only serve to act as a veto point but they don't even have a veto.
Oh 100%, they are actively harmful. But you don’t say that on Brian Lehrer when you’re trying to pass legislation! I might be wrong but I think there might have been a better policy outcome (less subsidy required for affordable units) had he handled it better.
It’s amazing how much demeanor matters. The sanctimoniousness you describe is exactly what my county executive gives off. So I loathe him, sometimes, I admit, to an irrational degree. Why don’t these guys figure this out?
Seriously! I guess at a certain (not very high, in my experience) level, many public figures attract sycophants and can’t resist getting high on their own supply. One of the things I loved about Obama was that he at least appeared to rise above this. Fake it until you make it, people!
I have no idea if you live in Montgomery County, MD, but if so: same.
It feels universal and yet... someone was voting for him.
Nailed it.
also loved the "Blame DeBlasio!" bit on SNL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d7Vk_qaiB8&t=180s
Matt, I thought Slow Boring wanted to be differentiated vs. “the discourse”! While this is a unique Mamdani take, the last thing we need is more Mamdani takes. Write about Jacob Frey! Tell us about the Dems who won in Georgia! What red seats did we flip in VA and what can we learn from that? Be the change you wish to see in the world.
PA Supreme Court is another good example of Dems winning in a purple state. How did they do it?
Those were judicial retention elections. "YES" wins in elections like that roughly 98% of the time.
Dems also won both of the open seats by 10%+.
Dems also flipped some leg seats in ... Mississippi? And the Bucks Co., PA school board now has 0 rightwing school board members after a highly publicized post-COVID takeover. JD Vance's half brother got spanked in Cincinnati (somewhat ironically by an Indian American -- I'm sure JD is praying for his conversion to Catholicism). A couple of state-level board seats in Georgia go Dem. A few red counties in PA and NY flip. Not a bad night.
Trump has waved away his party's performance as a fluke because his name was not on the ballot last night. Not going to be there next year, either, jackass.
In my own highly Dem-dominated inner ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, the younger city council member (mid 30s) beat the older multi-term council member (late 60s) to be our second Mayor. First mayor was a bit of a petulant disaster with his first and only term ending in a successful recall campaign and his wife being arrested for trespassing. Northeast Ohio Democrats tend to be long-tenured and schlerotic (and at the county level, frequently corrupt and arrested), so it is nice to see some generational change, even at this level. Former mayor was also younger, but engaged in a lot of Six Sigma corporate speak while allowing not very popular things to be done to some of the local parks. There has been a lot of new housing going up -- most of it big apartment buildings, some of it replacing decrepit apartment complexes that served lower income residents. But it's going up in commercial districts and in residential districts, which seems good.
Now that I think about it, I'm curious to hear Matt's take on Maine's votes on the red flag gun issue and voter ID issue.
I'm not saying the Dems didn't do well in general, I was just answering the question that was asked.
I would assume that "regular" judicial elections in purple states have gone the way all downballot elections have gone: the Democrats do better when the Republicans have the White House, and the Republicans do better when the Democrats have the White House. That's how it has (mostly) gone in Wisconsin.
By getting more votes, I would imagine.
In very swingy Bucks County PA, Dems overturned Republican incumbents in the Sheriff and District Attorney races. The Sheriff race in particular centered on the incumbent's working closely with ICE. This is the county that makes up much of Brian Fitzpatrick's Congressional seat. Fitzpatrick is the Susan Collins of the House. It should be, but hasn't been, one of the easiest pick ups for the dems.
Those results were actually a little disappointing, given, as Joseph says, YES almost always wins in judicial retentions. Only one Judge has ever lost in PA, in fact, and those judges won 60-40, which isn't especially impressive to my eye.
I think we got this one because Mamdani was the only one of the big races where we were reasonably certain of the outcome and he could work on it over the past few days. Matt is fast, but I don’t think we’d get a fully formed article about the VA or NJ results this quickly.
This was almost certainly mostly written before last night. I believe he was doing various live takes last night, and even at the speed he writes he would have been hard pressed to have a good take today on the other results without keeping himself and his team awake into the predawn hours.
What is there to say about Jacob Frey?
I find your approach to Mamdani curious. It would be easy to celebrate the things Mamdani has said regarding reforming city bureaucracy, and work to focus others on that aspect of his agenda. Likewise, NYC voters approved some key housing reforms that will help tackle the affordability issues that Mamdani centered in his campaign.
Instead, it seems that you're letting factional disputes cloud your perspective of Mamdani, who, to my mind, is much more practical than his fellow DSA members. I agree governing is hard, but he seems better positioned to do it than most.
I mean I think Matt has voiced approval for those and opposition to free buses, etc.
Yes, but all of his writings about Mamdani start with a negative frame. I also think he undervalues the importance of dismantling the New York political machine (Schumer, Jeffries, etc.) which is a large part of why we're in this position. (Maybe Schumer c. 2000 is what the Dems needed, but it's a different country now).
I think its a response to being constantly bombarded online about how important Mamdani's election is when Matt's view is that 1) governance matters more; 2) NYC mayor is not representative of the country in any substantive way.
Mamdani ran on improving NYC's governance. And, NYC may not be representative of the country, but NYC plays an outsized role in our political culture, and, in particular, in the Democratic Party. I, personally, would rather have Democratic leaders be from more moderate blue-purple states (like Colorado and Virginia), but at present the party is controlled by New Yorkers. Defeating the Dem establishment is a big deal.
1) That was not the gist of what I got from Mamdani's campaign. He was very effective when speaking about lowering prices, though often suggesting doing things he doesn't control such as rent freezes, free buses, etc. Not so much on improving NYC governance.
2) NYC does play an outsized role in our political culture. That is NOT to Democrat's benefit!
3) Given #2, it would make more sense for Democrats to focus on nominating popular moderate candidates, but that's hard to do in very liberal locales.
4) You cannot defeat the establishment, you can only replace it. Do you think replacing the current Democratic establishment with a new establishment full of Mamdani's will lead to a better result for NYC?
1. There are many interviews where Mamdani talks about improving NYC governance. See, for example, his Sept. 24 interview with The New York Times, in which he suggests that progressives should focus on making government more efficient.
2. Agreed. But we want NYC to be as good as it can be, and that requires getting rid of bad leaders like Andrew Cuomo and his supporters (Schumer, etc.).
3. I think it will be easier for Dems to nominate popular moderate candidates if liberal cities aren't seen as such a liability.
4. Absolutely. I think the Mamdani vs. Cuomo contest is a classic example of progressive reformers taking on the establishment and winning. NYers defeated Tammany Hall-style politics before, and they can do it again.
" my mind, is much more practical than his fellow DSA members"
That's a low bar if I've ever heard one.
>When de Blasio won, conservatives raised the specter of mass flight of the wealthy to other more business-friendly jurisdictions. That didn’t happen, and I think it probably won’t happen under Mamdani either.<
The Economist has been fulminating about the dire state of NYC's economy and fiscal situation. And I don't think they're totally wrong. When you look at rents (as you must), wage compression in the Big Apple have been especially lousy this decade. But I think they're overplaying their hand. One factoid they cite is NYC's (or NY State's) share of finance jobs. And that has indeed been dropping relative to...fast-growing states like Florida and Texas. But more people means more bank branches and more investment brokerage offices and thus more workers to fill those roles.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/10/30/as-new-jobs-in-finance-dry-up-new-york-citys-fiscal-model-is-wilting
New York's barely growing, if at all.
I think NYC will be ok at least with respect to the top jobs. The proximity to other movers and shakers pays for itself: one or two extra deals annually can *easily* pay for your higher tax bill. And you've got access to opera and ballet and theater and high end restaurants and shopping that Fort Lauderdale can't match.
All that said, I believe Mamdani's instincts as to what ails New York City are badly flawed. New Yorkers (and Democrats) will be lucky if he does no worse than Bill de Blasio.
And I'll go there: while Democrats had an absolutely fantastic night—I'll admit to having been worried about New Jersey—and while Mamdani's election in particular feels like a nice middle finger in the air to the MAGAs and Goypers—the optimal outcome for Democrats would probably have been "exact same results across the country except Cuomo pulls an upset." Andrew Cuomo is odious, mind you. And I don't blame New Yorkers one bit (even the ones who know better when it comes to policy) for voting for Mamdani. I would have, myself. But the De Blasio outcome isn't guaranteed, and it's *possible* that elevating a socialist to that role could cost Democrats votes over the next couple of cycles.
But anyway, no one likes a Debbie Downer, so I'll rejoice with everybody else for the time being!
Not only did Dems win
all these races, they did it by double digits. And on everything including the CA gerrymander, which won by 25 points! Georgia utility board hasn’t had a Democratic member since 2007 - pre Obama - and they ousted two long term incumbents. It was a great night and we can only hope a harbinger of what’s to come.
The utility price spike needs its own set of articles. Shit is wild
2/3 of Con Edison pricing is in transmission and admin costs, not energy costs. You can shop around for wholesale energy prices and it'll do you barely any good because the cost is 2/3 related to delivery and grid maintenance.
Most of this is just a lagged effect of how utility rate cases work. They smooth out prior period spending, which exploded when interest rates were low. Also, labor wage costs for utilities have grown.
Around/over 50% of utility bills are network maintenance costs, not raw energy (electricity or gas), and the commodity prices have not actually gone up.
Yeah, makes me wish Newsom had gone more aggressive with the CA gerrymander in retrospect. No reason even one Republican should represent it
I think the prospect of Hochul losing her seat to Elise Stefanik just got materially more likely. Make of that what you will.
Unless Hochul gets caught on camera murdering a puppy or something, the Dems are not going to lose NY-Gov in a midterm while Trump is President.
> Unless Hochul gets caught on camera murdering a puppy or something
Might elevate her to Secretary of Homeland Security.
Especially to that extremist, MAGA firebrand.
Trump seems determined to sabotage any hope of Republicans building on their momentum from the past 2 cycles.
Stefanik is a smug prick who will go over like a wet fart at the state level.
We're going to get a year of Hochul blocking Mamdani's unpopular left wing policies, without having to deal with Cuomo.
This is not exactly a "finger on the pulse" take.
I think the Mamdani-hangover will take longer, at least if the latter plays his cards right.
I agree in general, but I wonder if some of the "giving away free stuff" (sorry for sounding like a fox news-dad) Mamdani implements will actually be popular and *appear* to work in the short term, even if within the not-so-distant future it ends up eating away at the city's fiscal fabric. I realize he probably can't freeze rents or raise taxes significantly, but he could implement zero fare on buses, which has some points to recommend it, and the city-run grocery store thing could at least start out as an interesting experiment if they run it as a non-profit or something...) If so, it could help Dems' prospects in 2026 (2028 may be more iffy though, little too medium-term for my liking...).
As is my wont, this is only tangential to the central idea here, but hearing about perpetual leftist denouncing of their own factional candidates makes me think that if you are an anti-pluralist, illiberal type, there are two common pathways to justifying that position:
- "Yes, we are in fact anti-pluralist and illiberal, and this is good because our opponents lack all virtue / are subhuman and should be cast out of the polity, duh" (far-right)
- "How dare you call us anti-pluralist and illiberal! We have an impossible standard for what constitutes "democracy," which happens to be if and only if our exact theory of just governance comes to pass and anyone who disagrees is banished from the polity, but it's fascist to call that illiberal, how dare you" (far-left)
The two types of NIMBYs…
Horseshoe theory stays winning
One of my biggest problems with Mamdani is that his central campaign promise — freeze the rent — is a terrible and unworkable idea. I am very concerned about how that specifically will play out.
Good news is that it’s also illegal! I think his odds of getting it through the Rent Guidelines Board and fighting off lawsuits are pretty low, especially for multiple years in a row.
That doesn’t make me feel better about Mamdani. It was literally the centerpiece of his campaign.
Isn’t that only for rent-stabilized apartments, which are a pretty small subset of the NYC housing stock? Freezing rent on 15% of specifically allocated rent-stabilized units may not be such a big deal.
Rent control is about 15%. Rent stabilization, which is what he's talking about, is 1 million units, about half of the city's rentals. It's a big deal.
Oh ok
Maybe US public opinion shift on Israel was predictable in retrospect given that US public opinion previously was a massive outlier globally (which you can see in polls or all those embarrassing lopsided votes at the UN). Could this suggest that people taking “unpopular” left-wing positions should also be concerned with whether such opinions are popular globally (at least compared to other developed countries) as that could be a sign of their chances of influencing public opinion in the US? If so, “defund the police” will probably never work but positions like more gun control, a bigger welfare state even if it means somewhat higher taxes, a nicer foreign policy, even more concern with climate and environment are probably fine.
It seems pretty obvious to me that in 100 years we will have universal health care and a decarbonized electric grid. It also seems pretty obvious to me that in 5 years we will not have those things. And I have no idea how long we will have to wait. Our country is pretty good at clinging to stupid ideas for a very long time.
Agree re having those things in 100 years but it'll be mostly because those things get cheaper with better tech. I'm not at all sure people will change their takes on guns, crime, immigration, etc.
Meh, "global opinion" is wrong on a lot of things. Trump is very much a global candidate more than a traditional American candidate. Birthright citizenship is outside the global norm, but I think its good. Immigrant integration is good, but not the global norm. I could go on...
The end of stop and frisk may not have had immediate negative effects, but combined with bail reform it certainly opened the door to the high disorder environment the city developed post George Floyd. Disorder has declined but remains elevated. Does anyone really think a return of stop and frisk wouldn’t help (albeit at the expense of other priorities of libertarians and minority advocacy groups)? If people are willing to concede that point then all I’m saying is the end of stop and frisk should probably be considered a mark against BDB rather than a minor plus.
This elides the whole court order and discrimination thing a bit, but the program could have been reformed rather than 95% eliminated: https://www.nyclu.org/data/stop-and-frisk-data
I'm a big law and order guy. But stop and frisk is clearly unconstitutional. You need probable cause to do a search.
For the record so are DUI checkpoints
I guess you mean *should be* unconstitutional? Because neither is true if one regards SCOTUS as the arbiter of what is constitutional.
I've always been puzzled why nobody just copy-pasted New Jersey's bail reform under Christie
Separate from the partisan issues at-play- as a mild occasional democracy skeptic I think the idea of electing an administrator of one of the world's largest cities who has zero experience running anything is kind of idiotic. The guy's resume includes a few stints as a state Assemblyman, where I believe he managed a staff of 5. Now he's going to manage 306,000 employees, with a budget of $115 billion. A bit of experience might be helpful here!
The city manager system seems vastly preferable to me than the strong mayor one. You could get really radical and extend that idea higher up the political system as well.....
Yeah, Dems rightly criticize Pete Hegseth lack of experience to run the DoD, but happily put someone like Mandami in for NYC mayor
While you may not like his policies, there is no evidence of Zohran being wildly corrupt or a serial sexual harasser and drunk the way that even other Republicans claimed Hegseth was before he became DOD nominee and gained omerta.
not being corrupt of a serial sexual harasser isn’t the bar for being mayor of NYC, or secretary of defense (at least I hope not)
Heck, nowadays being corrupt and a serial sexual harasser doesn’t bar you from being President of the United States of America, so, you know, there’s that.
Fair, but IMHO, it should be a bar to that position as well :(
It should!
You may recall the primary where Dems didn’t “happily” put Mamdani in as their candidate.
They seemed pretty happy to me
I don't know, most of the discussion I saw during the primary was arguing about whether it was best to rank 5 other candidates, or to put one of Cuomo or Mamdani in 5th so that your vote could count against the other.
Seems like city managers are really only a thing in suburban governments
Sacramento has one
He's got another important task that hasn't come up for prior mayors, and that's protecting New Yorkers (and not just illegals!) from the Trump regime. Adams and Cuomo signaled that they weren't particularly interested in doing that.
Probably a heavier lift than most mayors will ever have to attempt; we'll see if the kid's got the juice for it.