ArcaMax

The people have a message for the establishment: We hate you. We really, really hate you.

The upset victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York's Democratic mayoral primary -- which, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, makes him the odds-on favorite to win the general election -- has profound implications for a national party still reeling from last year's defeat. It also reveals an unexpected variant of the law of unexpected consequences. When voters despise the elites, the smartest move of the ruling classes is to remain silent.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo watched his comfortable lead fade away over the last few weeks of the campaign. To no one's surprise, big business, real estate interests, the police and other 900-pound gorillas of the city's power structure did not relish the prospect of a 33-year-old self-described democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taking the reins of city government. As if Mamdani's demographic profile didn't freak them out enough -- born in Uganda, South Asian, Muslim, announced at the mayoral debate that he wouldn't go to Israel -- his proposals to freeze rents, open not-for-profit grocery stores and raise taxes on the rich, landlords and corporations threatened their bottom lines.

Frightened at the possibility of governance that might deliver for ordinary people at their expense, the billionaire class led by former mayor and failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg always does whenever left-wing populism pops up. They financed a PAC that ran racist scaremongering attack ads. But a funny thing happened on the way to crushing the progressives: The smears ("antisemitic!") didn't land.

As early voting began, Mamdani kept closing on Cuomo. So corporate Democrats pulled out all the stops. Ignoring the litany of sexual-assault allegations that prompted his recent resignation, big-league Democrats like Bill Clinton and James Clyburn (the South Carolina party boss whose machinations ended Bernie's 2020 race and gave us Joe Biden) endorsed Cuomo. So did Bloomberg and "centrist" (i.e., sellout, right-wing) labor union bosses. Although The New York Times had stopped endorsing candidates for local office in 2021, the paper's Democratic National Committee-aligned editorial board issued a bizarre, hysterical editorial anti-endorsement that urged New Yorkers to vote for anyone but Mamdani. "We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers' ballots," the editors wrote. Ouch! So they thought.

I had been uncertain about Mamdani. I worried that he was too young, wet behind the ears. Then I read the Times piece. "He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing," the paper wrote, as though apartments were affordable now. "He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing." What's the worst that could happen? Government grocery stores close too?

The establishment interests who run the city and who are represented by the Times opinion section were terrified of Mamdani and his "agenda uniquely unsuited to the city's challenges." I had to vote for him. It was also a vote against the bastards -- coddled by institutions like the Times -- who have pushed the rent for my no-view, not-extraordinary, in-a-decent-but-not-elite-neighborhood, two-bedroom apartment to over $5,000 a month, a 50% increase in four years. (And my rent is below average.)

Flailing in quicksand traps you more. When a python is wrapped around you, panicked breathing hastens suffocation. New York's bankers, brokers and media moguls experienced a similar phenomenon. Every Cuomo endorsement by a bold-face name with an eight-figure savings account turned more voters toward Mamdani. Elites painted Mamdani as dangerous; to angry voters, he looked like a rebel. Like a desperate bug in a Venus flytrap, they writhed and struggled, trying to force Cuomo down voters' throats, exhausting and defeating themselves in the process.

Cuomo would have stood a better chance without the endorsements. The tacit endorsement of the Times certainly doomed him. Some rich and powerful New Yorkers, including the ex-governor himself, understood the mood of the voters. "Cuomo ... (was) looking for (business leaders') dollars but not for public endorsement in a Democratic primary, where kind words from the business community are not helpful," Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City business group, told the New York Post.

Twenty-five percent of the voters in this race had not voted since at least 2012 -- perhaps never at all. Many of these were, as you'd expect, under 30. A quarter of these new voters were over 65, aligning with my longstanding thesis that the two-party system alienates tens of millions of Americans who boycott elections not because they are apathetic but because they find the Democrats and Republicans equally unappealing. Give them someone to vote for and they'll turn up.

In 2016 Donald Trump hitched his opportunistic wagon to Pat Buchanan/Tea Party-style right-wing populism and rode to the White House on a wave of millions of first-time voters. Country-club Republicans didn't like it -- but they preferred to belong to a party in power led by a crass outsider than to languish in the political wilderness, so they allowed him to take over the GOP.

The leadership of the Democratic Party has long taken the opposite tack. From Jesse Jackson to Howard Dean to John Edwards to Bernie Sanders -- twice -- the DNC has refused to allow left-wing populists to win presidential nominations. Their message to progressive voters and would-be voters has been clear and brutal: We don't need you, we don't want you, and we will destroy you if you get in our way. As we saw with Biden and Kamala Harris, the corporatist DNC would rather lose elections than lean left. Which made a kind of sense. They were more about the campaign donations than changing the world, and the money kept coming in as long as liberals were afraid of the big bad Republicans.

Now, however, it's possible to begin to imagine a world divided not among Democratic liberals and Republican conservatives but between populists and corporatists. As populists of the Left and Right attract more nonvoters and widening income inequality reduces the ranks and appeal of the corporatists, the mushy so-called center will increasingly look like a gaping hole.

The Democratic establishment, however, has still not learned its lesson. At this writing, the corrupt incumbent, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams -- who did not run in the primary because most New Yorkers want him to resign and only has a 20% approval rating -- is being wooed by big business bosses "who recoil at his plans for expansive new government programs funded with tax increases on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers," as the Times put it.

Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund executive, worried aloud about "the extremist, dangerous ideology of the Democratic Socialists of America."

"The question is, who can stop him?" Tilson continued.

Probably not him. The more that bullies like Tilson try to stop populists like Mamdani, the more support populists will get from ordinary people.

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Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new "What's Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems." He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

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