by Patrick Lawrence, The Unz Review:
Well, the latest of these incessant polls concerning the Nov. 4 election for the mayoralty of New York are in, having arrived Thursday, Oct. 30, and if the story has changed it is only for the better. A new Emerson College survey puts Zohran Mamdani, front runner from the start, 25 percentage points ahead of Andrew Cuomo, his nearest challenger. This is a gain of 7 percentage points since the previous Emerson poll, conducted in September.
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The other survey, run by Marist University, has Mamdani leading by 16 percentage points in a race against Cuomo and, yet farther back on the track, the beret-sporting Curtis Sliwa. If the latter drops and his voters migrate as expected, Cuomo stands to narrow Mamdani’s lead to 7 points. But a margin of this size looks good only against Mamdani’s gaping lead over many months. These polls were published, to finish the point, six days before the election, early voting having already begun. Good night and good luck, you have to say to the politically shopworn Cuomo, who chose to run as an independent once it was clear there was no point contesting Mamdani to head the Democratic ticket.
We all remember the shock when, nine Novembers ago, Donald Trump triumphed and the Clinton campaign had to send all the Champagne back to the liquor store. For those of a certain age, there is the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline the Chicago Tribune ran the morning after Harry Truman upset Thomas Dewey to be elected, 77 Novembers ago, America’s 33rd president. These things happen.
But I haven’t heard of anyone who does not expect Mamdani to be declared New York’s newest mayor come next week.
Democratic Socialist, “progressive” par excellence, conscientious Muslim, exclusively educated offspring of a scholar noted for his anticolonial, anti-imperialist writings (under whom I briefly studied decades ago), altogether an intellectual in a nation what don’t like them intellectuals: You would not think such a figure would do well on the hustings, especially amid the gritty cut-and-thrust of New York City politics. And it has indeed been a slog, at times not short of brutal, since this 34–year old state assemblyman serving a working-class district in Queens began his run for City Hall a year ago last month on Oct. 23, 2024.
Altogether properly, Mamdani’s essential platform rests on those issues any serious candidate owes it to voters to address. In his case these have to do in large part — no surprise here — with how New Yorkers might still afford to live in a city, theirs, whose character and survivability have been transformed for the worse by real estate, financial and corporate interests. In this respect the 2025 race for the mayor’s office comes to a confrontation. There are a lot of ways this election has never been about New York’s five boroughs alone, and this, the sharpening contradiction between capital and society you find all over the country, is one of them.
Free bus lines, city-run grocery stores, free childcare, an ambitious housing program, a $30 minimum wage by the end of the decade: These are the prominent planks in Mamdani’s platform, and they, a menu of “progressive” causes, account for much of his appeal. And this alone was enough to get the capitalist class out of their seats from the very start of Mamdani’s campaign.
But there were, also from the beginning, larger matters on Mamdani’s mind, mentioned often in his speeches and interviews. He is vigorously supportive of the Palestinian cause. Lately he has spoken forcefully against the Islamophobia still abroad among us. “Genocide” is a term he uses often and without hesitation. Early on he said that, when he made it to City Hall, New York would arrest Bibi Netanyahu were the Israeli prime minister to set foot inside the city limits. Mamdani’s reasoning is significant on this last question. “This is a city that believes in international law,” he said while the U.N. General Assembly was in session last August. There is a largeness in this we ought not miss.
This side of Mamdani also drew voters to his side, especially but not only young ones. Max Blumenthal put it this way in an interesting interview with Nima Alkhorshid’s Dialogue Works program the other day: “New York is a magnet for young people who see Palestine as the moral test of our time. You have this new class, along with many native New Yorkers, who are rejecting the Zionist politics of the past, which have predominated in New York for decades.”
