Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Dave Weigel's avatar

Mamdani was the only NYC mayoral candidate who understood how the primary electorate's concerns would change after six months of Trump.

He could have blown it. He stopped saying "defund the police" years ago, and when he introduced his new plan (cutting some NYPD expenses but not the number of cops, and adding "public safety" jobs), he was polling low enough that nobody seriously went after him.

But he also pioneered a line I'm now seeing with more moderate Democrats, that Trump's trying to turn police into deportation agents instead of letting them just solve crimes. Obviously, you need Trump in office for that to work. You need a thermostatic shift where voters stop being angry about their tax dollars funding a mini-Ellis Island at the Roosevelt Hotel, and start being angry that Trump is deporting people who aren't burdens on the city, with the "migrant crisis" long over.

Mamdani knew that shift could happen before June 24, and Cuomo ran an Adams-style 2021 campaign about crime and social cohesion. It's hard not to conclude that a more disciplined, less crooked incumbent than Adams could have run on the last two years of progress, and against Trump, and won the primary.

Expand full comment
JA's avatar

I was a bit surprised by the answer about Zohran/Cuomo. Basically, it pivoted from "charisma/likeability is important" to "issue positions/previous outcomes are the primary determinants of electoral outcomes" (which is the usual theory of elections on Slow Boring).

The reasoning seems somewhat post hoc to me -- this is definitely not how I would've updated my beliefs after this election. Matt starts from "after it became a two person race, Cuomo lost, but any of the other candidates would've beaten Zohran."

But the big puzzle for Matt's theory of elections is: if issue positions are the primary determinants of outcomes, why didn't any of the other candidates emerge as front-runners in the first place? These candidates were more boring, but I'd guess that their issue positions were much closer to those of the NYC median voter. I'd bet that Zohran edged them out *despite* his issue positions, not because of them.

Expand full comment
565 more comments...

No posts