I hope this win signals (to both parties) that voters are receptive and will get engaged when a clear message is presented about cost of living and quality of life issues. Some of which are taken for granted in most other western countries.
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
I kinda feel Obama is more of a Trojan horse. It was not he tried and failed to get what he campaigned for implemented, it was more like he did a U turn after he got elected. e.g. he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical"
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
I think people had rose colored glasses about Obama because he was, by far, the most charismatic President we've had in modern times. His speeches still give me goose bumps, even when I disagree with what he's saying! That man has the gift of gab. Him also being intelligent further, sadly, makes him an outlier in modern times.
But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's little more than an subsidy for private insurance companies whose profits dramatically increased relatively shortly after adapting to it. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be adversarial towards private insurance, but it should not directly drive increases in profits because, especially once its mandated + subsidized, profits need to be controlled as the government is effectively guaranteeing them.
Medical loss ratios (insurers must pay a minimum percent of premium revenue on medical costs) are obviously insufficient since they do nothing to motivate lower costs. On the contrary, it directly incentivizes maximizing costs which is exactly what's happened. For one specific datum medicare administrative costs are around 2% - private insurance administrative costs start around 12%.
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Basically there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed. And now with the country so divided, it's unlikely we'll be getting anything better anytime in the foreseeable future, because whichever side tries to pass it will simply be opposed by the other, regardless of merit. Hopefully Mamdani isn't a complete failure, because more parties in power is perhaps one way to break the divides in society.
Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
> Manchun was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona
Sure. My point is both are preferable to a MAGA enabler. If you lose perspective and start aiming for perfection at the expense of the good enough, you lose power.
That was always my impression of him. It was easy to feel like he was breaking ranks, but realistically he seemed to vote exactly how his electorate wanted him to.
> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here.
The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, once the effects are borne out, win congress in a landslide.
Perhaps Obama couldn't have made it happen, but he didn't try. He could have made a speech about "how we will do because not because it's easy, but because it's possible because every other western nation has this same basic thing." But here we are with a crappy compromise.
With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements to your country, you should use your majority for even more radical things. If they'd used that same majority to pack the supreme court, pass a nationwide anti-gerrymandering law, break up hundreds of large corporations, and so on, we might have averted a ton of disaster. At the time perhaps it was hard to see, but in retrospect what we saw in the period 2008-2010 were early warning signs of how the flaws in our system of government were going to send us on a downward spiral.
I think there's an argument to be made that many of the allegedly "radical" Democratic policies fall into an uncanny valley of wonkiness, where they're enough of a reach to get people riled up emotionally but not enough to have the kind of punchy, obvious benefits that would get people to be supporting on a similarly gut-level basis. Arguments about whether the minimum wage should be $X or $X+2 seem like accounting tournaments. There's no appetite for saying stuff like "we will seize $100 billion from the wealthiest individuals and give it to everyone else as cash payments".
The other problem is that the Democrats don't seem to realize that incremental change doesn't really work when the system of government is messed up like it is. Every little small-ball policy the Dems try to push through can just be undone later by administrative gimmicks as long as we have the level of ambiguity we do about executive power. Beyond that, they can be rolled back by countervailing legislation because the Republicans are focused on gaming the system. "Substantive" radical policies like universal healthcare are unlikely to be achievable without first enacting "procedural" radical policies like anti-gerrymandering rules or abolishing the senate.
Radically changing healthcare works out great in people's heads, but then they immediately whine about their Ozempic no longer being covered like in socialized healthcare countries which don't use expensive cutting edge drugs as a first resort. No matter how competent the government is, which ours isn't, any radical change (besides just throwing more money at the problem) will make things worse before they are better and voters are the most fickle bunch there is.
Semaglutide isn’t exactly cutting edge, it’s 16 years since it was invented. GLP-1 drugs go back to the 90s. They are undeniably trendy but it’s odd to consider them cutting edge.
Semaglutide was approved in 2017. By cutting edge, I suppose I mean covered by patent. Luckily for Canada, Novo Nordisk forgot to pay their for its renewal.
I was just pointing to an example of why healthcare reform is politically difficult. One relevant to the ACA was ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions, which caused a majority of people's premiums to go up to subsidize those who are chronically ill. Morally, most people agree it's the right thing to do, but it was politically disastrous since one person gets one vote.
The ACA was essentially the Republican plan for healthcare reform. They just went scorched earth on it because they were pissy that he got the credit for their plan. That's also why they haven't been able to come up with a coherent replacement.
Obama had a plan early on to be inspired by Lincoln's cabinet of rivals and to try to unite the parties. Because of that he didn't push nearly as hard on the right wing of his party early on like Lieberman, who were the holdouts who pushed for the lack of a public option to have true universal healthcare.
Republicans in Congress never wanted or proposed anything like ACA. It is weird half truth because Massachusetts, one the more liberal states, with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, passed something similar while Mitt Romney was Governor. It was the brainchild of Jonathan Gruber, MIT Economist and Democratic consultant who worked on the ACA for Obama. You can go back and read the GOP platforms of the time, there is nothing like the ACA proposed.
The 1993 HEART Act was very much like the ACA, built around the individual mandate to purchase private health insurance, primarily through your employer. Romneycare was massaged out of this.
This line of thinking died the moment that the parties began another realignment with 2024. We are in the beginnings of the 7th party system.
Curtis Sliwa was significantly to the left of both Eric Adams and Cuomo on a whole host of issues, which is one of the many reasons why Trump refused to endorse Silwa (they hate each other). If we didn't have a Sinema or Manchin, we might have liberal republicans like a Silwa who would be objectively better if you're a liberal.
> The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
For your resume, sure.
Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
Yes, but it does not provide health care, it provides a subsidy to the health insurance companies (I.e., throwing even more money at lucrative companies that profit by denying coverage). It is sad that it is the best our government can do for us.
I'm not really arguing against the ACA in particular, just the general sentiment.
I do, however, think the passage and defense of the ACA has completely stopped any kind of healthcare reform movements from Democrats and completely turned Republicans against the idea.
The ACA was more or less the GOP's healthcare reform plan[0]. They fought so hard against it because they didn't want the Democrats to get credit for it. The ongoing animosity toward it from Republicans is ridiculous, and Democrats are even further from being able to pass any more healthcare reforms than they were when the ACA was passed. The brief excitement for Medicare For All is somewhat emblematic of that.
[0] To be fair, it did go further than previous GOP proposals. They did include individual/employer mandates and a marketplace, but not stuff like the Medicaid expansion and higher taxes on high earners to help pay for it.
No, for everyone. Some voters like politicians who pass zero legislation while holding firm to their values. Occasionally they get rewarded. Most often, they’re branded–correctly–ineffective. (And, I’d argue, unfit to lead. If you’re using millions of Americans as human shields to pass an ideologically-pure package, that’s immoral and belongs with Twitter celebrities, not leaders.)
This attitude is why Trump is president. Yeah we have a terrible leader, but we could have had a mediocre leader and I guess that is somehow worse in people's minds.
I genuinely can't believe, still, that I have to spell this out for people.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
There are plenty of instances in which Obama, despite campaigning on a platform of change from Bush-era policies, continued or even furthered those policies. A good example which is relevant here involves government surveillance:
Snowden has also spoken about this at length, saying he expected a change when Obama was elected due to his campaigning against the PATRIOT Act, but there was no change. This is only one of many policies in which Obama changed his stance after he became President.
Maybe stop addressing people in such a condescending tone and making it personal.
As for Obummer, we're all watching what's possible today. He had a mandate. He could have been a great president if he had fought for the people.
They had all three branches for two years before he sucked all the momentum out of his base by unleashing the hounds on Occupy Wall St and losing the midterms.
He hired Geithner and chose to continue the Wall Street presidency.
"President".
I hope he's still enjoying spending time with Branson and living on Martha's Vineyard.
Consider the framing today: "Trump is doing all these terrible things, making all of these drastic changes, exploiting the system to his will."
The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified abortion rights. But instead they keep it around as an outstanding issue because it is a good fundraising issue.
There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
Obama was pretty timid. Especially at the beginning of his presidency he assumed that his fellow democrats like Lieberman and Baucus were rational and wanted the best for the country and not just being pawns for the insurance industry. I bet if he had pounded the table, he would have way more success. Heck, LBJ made senators cry to get things done.
Hindsight is 20/20. I recall Obama later saying he wished he was more radical because he only realised too late that the holdouts to ACA were never going to vote for it. Essentially, they negotiated in bad faith but Obama only realised this after they’d made all the requested changes and still couldn’t get the votes.
The Affordable Care Act wasn't a complete solution - and I don't get the feeling universal health care was necessarily achievable - but it is the reason that I have health care and mental health services today. So I consider it to be a meaningful - if incremental - improvement. I imagine there are quite a few people aside from myself who are happy to have it.
Proper Obamacare wasn't implemented because healthcare industry interests held up legislation until the midterms at which point the Republicans took over congress.
Not too radical to be good and effective, too radical to break through current political constraints. You have to confront the reality of what can actually be achieved within the system you’re working in.
> [Obama] called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
Why would someone do that? Especially for presidency which is the final stage of their career? They're not beholden to or reliant on anyone no more so shouldn't have to be swayed by any adverse interests.
I think Mamdani is going to be similar unfortunately. His previous messaging and publicity have highlighted his ties to Islam, and I think he's been using these hot-button issues in NYC strategically to rise to power and begin normalizing radical Islam, as the UK and other parts of Europe have.
Islam has always dreamed of infiltrating Western nations and gradually converting them to draconian, theocratic policies under religious rule, and we're starting to see the beginnings of that in Europe today.
It's a slow and subtle process that the more politically correct types simply aren't willing to admit, because saying anything publicly would result in endless cancellation and cries of racism or some hyperbolic "phobia" far too risky for their careers or social standing -- and they won't be getting the last laugh in these scenarios.
Interestingly, the ACA can trace its roots to the Republican counter proposal to Hillarycare written by the Heritage Foundation of recent Project 2025 fame.
It's propitiously on the same day as the announcement that WMD liar, war criminal, torture advocate, and domestic-surveillance mastermind Dick Cheney died.
Obamacare being what it was is 1,000,000% Obama’s failure - he’ll tell you this same thing over coffee too. Just outmost disaster through and through how it was implemented.
Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
Obama took a mea culpa on parts of implementation, namely the federal marketplace website (they weren’t expected as many states to opt out of the marketplace) and the “keep your plan” narrative.
It was a compromise law that was in alignment with Bush era mainstream conservatives. The fatal flaw of Obama and Biden is they underestimated the power of the nutcase wing of the Republican Party. (Along with the institutional GOP folks)
that isn’t the fatal flaw. the fatal flaw is campaigning and staking your entire political career on something and the delivering something sooooo subpar.
the sad thing is, history will remember him as first black President and that’s really about it. and most of us cried watching that speech from lincoln park.
our current president is causing most of us to cry daily but will be remembered as one of the most influential presidents in the history of this country… sad, very sad, but all true
presidents don't pass legislation, and the original Obamacare was too radical even for all the Dem senators, not to mention needing some GOPs to get 60 votes
Maybe, if Obama had been as ruthless as Trump and used blatant lies and targeted attacks on senators to make them so fearful of re-election that they would play along, he might have gotten it passed, though probably not even then. Plus, as much as I wish we'd had the original Obamacare, I'd rather have a watered down version with balance of powers, than a tyrannical president who cowers the legislative branch into submission.
You guys have it all wrong. There was only one candidate for the dem party, Here's the list:
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
> his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road
Rent control is neither common sense, nor middle of the road. He's also walked back or waffled on positions like defunding the police, so it's not clear what he believes. If he does actually believe in some of the justice stuff he's claimed in the past, it's pretty extreme.
I completely understand why people in NYC would still vote for the guy over Cuomo, who is widely loathed -- people remember the overreaches of 2020-2022, in addition to his bad personal behavior -- but Mamdami isn't really doing anything more than promising a laundry list of free stuff, and extremist policies he can't accomplish.
Your broader point is well-taken: the options sucked.
It's not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing? Presumably the kids can learn from the parents, get connected, etc.
Also, Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news. Lots of people predicting that Mamdani's criminal policies, economic policies, and lack of experienced staffers will lead the city to dark days.
> not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing?
Aristocracies are more stable but less efficient. That creates an incentive for corruption when growth inevitably stalls. Which leads to catastrophic instability.
There is minimal incentive for corruption in a hereditary aristocracy. Status is determined by birthright rather than accumulation of money. And if you are a lord and do need money, you have the power to tax it legally anyway. So what incentive is there to make or take a bribe? It won't change who your parents are.
> Status is determined by birthright rather than accumulation of money. And if you are a lord and do need money, you have the power to tax it legally anyway
Lords being unconcerned with—and constrained by—wealth characterises all non-market societies that I know of. In part because basic economics constrains the society as a whole, even if they’re ignorant of its principles.
I really don't get the doom and gloom on this, NYC now has a mayor that might inadvertently fuck over the city trying to do right by working class folks instead of a mayor who does it as a matter of course. Forget policy disagreements, just the fact that we have a successful politician any side of the isle that is not currently gargling the balls of rich people and actually has some principles is so refreshing.
You are demand better of your government than "the blatant corruption you've learned to live with."
I'm against any and all political dynasties. They fly in the face of what representative government should be about. We have many people qualified to become political leaders but they never get the chance due to how the system operates.
I'm not sure NYC knows what it is getting into with this guy, but yeah, the alternatives were lousy. Sliwa? The whole Guardian Angels thing was one hell of a marketing job, I'll say that. Does anyone really believe a bunch of former gang thugs with some martial arts training accomplished very much?
The Cuomo family is corrupt to the core. Terrible for NY State.
>his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road.
Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
The minimum wage not being indexed to inflation has been theft for decades. It would take a minimum wage of almost $60/hr to maintain purchasing power from 50-60 years ago.
Edit: If the system of “we make asset prices go up while labor prices are inflated away” gets to the point where a living wage is unobtainable (we are here), we can change the system. The name is irrelevant, it’s fundamentally “what are you optimizing for?”
The minimum wage should easily be 11-13 by any inflation metric you use for the last 40 years, and doubling that for a high cost of living place is reasonable.
Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones.
Please explain how city run grocery stores are middle of the road politics. Perhaps they’re middle of the road when your road is all the way to the left.
Also, several states have state-run beer and/or liquor stores. It's not some wild unheard of experiment. We've gotten so used to the acceptable political spectrum spanning from "far right" to "extreme right" that we forget what left even means.
I'm almost 50 and the last president we ever saw that was even remotely towards the left was in office when I was born.
Whether or not public grocery stores are a good idea, the comparison to state-run liquor stores doesn't really make sense; the justification for state control of liquor sales is entirely different (arguably even kind of the opposite) as the justifications presented for public grocery stores.
Have you seen how fries are made at McDonald’s? There’s nearly zero labor involved. It’s nearly automated. You’re paying that price cause that’s what the market will bear and McDonald’s needs to see profits go up.
Plenty of red states have government run liquor stores. And army bases have government run grocery stores along with government run everything else. I don't see the problem here. Progressive version presumably would be free groceries for everyone.
When I lived in Pennsylvania, the state-run liquor stores had a monopoly on selling wine and liquor. This survived Republican and Democratic administrations for decades.
Mamdani’s proposed grocery stores aren’t a monopoly. Whether they’re a good idea remains to be seen, but they’d be competing against privately owned grocery stores. As I understand them, they’re mostly intended for areas without a local grocery store (food deserts), which seems like a reasonable thing to explore.
> Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Look, Mamdani ran a good campaign, and if I was an NYC voter (I am not) I'd probably vote for him out of the options provided.
However, this just is not true. Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road". Especially not on education and dealing with the homeless and public transit. And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
> And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
1) "intifada" has not historically meant "peaceful resistance". It has referred to events like October 7th, and the 1st and 2nd intifadas which killed more people than the Troubles did in about 1/3rd as much time, etc.
2) Also dumb shit like "queer liberation means defund the police" and "when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF"
Exactly. and don't forget the Republican candidate: a thug, a clown and a reactionary. Even with all that, Sliwa was a better candidate than Cuomo or Adams.
Mamdani was the best candidate by far in the race. Will he make a good mayor? I have no idea.
But he certainly won't be worse than "handsy" Andy, "bribe me" Eric or "let's beat the darkie on the subway" Curtis.
And folks who don't live in NYC, you didn't get a vote.
I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful. It's apparent that many people are fed up with the status quo so they're pushing towards more experimental candidates.
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
Strong agree. I think his policies are absurd but hope that more invested young people who aren’t career politicians can start trying a platform that isn’t party line and resonates with residents.
Particularly in comparison to Cuomo who by all accounts doesn’t even seem to like the city he campaigned to run. A tiny bit of joy goes a very long way.
Why look at North Korea when NYC has had rent control forever? It makes landlords neglect maintenance. That’s about it. I don’t know that I totally agree with it, but it’s fine.
Or, you know, current day European social democracies.
You can’t help but laugh at the amount of hysteria about Mamdani. No cost childcare? Free buses? Using existing rent control regulations to keep rent affordable? Oh no
There are fundamental differences between Europe and the US. The US is not magically going to become Europe by electing a "left" mayor.
Also this is a city- since when does a mayor set economic policies.
Last I checked free busses, and no cost childcare, still need someone to pay for them.
Rent control, if the rent is low, there won't be any rental property. What's the next step, forcing people to build? The city will build?
I guess we shall see. The sad thing is that people didn't vote because they considered all the ideas and the implications. The other sad thing is that maybe Mamdani was the best candidate.
The biggest takeaway to me is how ridiculous it is that the US considers Mamdani somehow "experimental" or even radical.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care
2. Fast and Free Busses
3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration"
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
You can’t find another city that even approaches NYC without moving to another country. And moving to London or Paris to escape taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense.
As further evidence to OP’s point: people paint Mamdani as an extremist for discussing rent control but it’s already the law in NYC. It’s not even remotely new.
It’s been a truly exhausting election cycle for New Yorkers who have been lectured from all sides by people who don’t even understand how the city works.
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself.
> are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.
> If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter
What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy is a ridiculous statement. People need shelter and like nice shelter. People pay for access to amenities and convenience. _incentivizing building housing in areas where people want to live or where people work is efficient_
Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes.
Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same.
Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good.
saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument.
All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.
I think this is a ridiculous statement. I don't know your background, but I grew up in extreme poverty (by Canadian standards). In the welfare complexes I lived in growing up, living in a home you owned seemed like an unattainable dream. The ability to choose between owning a home and renting a home is representative of a degree of economic freedom that is becoming unattainable for many, many people.
There is absolutely merit to the idea that choosing to rent is a good choice for many people, but in most cases the people who would make that choice are inclined to do so because they either desire or require mobility in terms of relocation, and frequently the reason people desire that is the opportunity to pursue better economic opportunities (jobs, investments, etc).
These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
> Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.
You build up. Which is expensive, so developers will want assurances and no "20% affordable units" bs.
There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.
This is another example of a little radicalism is a dangerous thing. You don't need to be friends with landlords if you're prepared to simply seize all their property.
A huge chunk of the plan is converting unused office space into housing in Manhattan, mostly in neighborhoods that were already mostly commercial, so there's relatively little NIMBY pushback.
It's easier than most people give it credit for. A lot of the complaints are from attempts to loosen the building code. There's savings of many millions of the table per refit if they manage to pass those, but they're not as needed as people say. For instance you lay down a raised floor to run utilities, and you can push sewer away from the core for relatively cheap and without shared bath/kitchen.
That being said, a return to allowing boarding house style housing would also not be the worst thing in the world for some buildings, and would probably do a lot to reduce homelessness. Hell, if I were still in my early 20s I'd be into the idea of a room to rent with shared bath/kitchen to save some money even not necessarily requiring the reduced in unit amenities.
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
> 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units
Out of 3.7mm [1].
> not directly familiar with Berlin
Not comparable. Berlin froze rents “on more than 1.5 million” apartments in 2020 [2] out of about 2mm. 25% versus 75%.
Also, Berlin’s politicians didn’t propose a construction agenda. Mamdani has. (“New York City voters on Tuesday delivered a strong message in support of building more housing, passing three proposals that pitted City Hall against the City Council in an effort to rewrite decades-old development rules” [4].)
Increasing supply brings down prices. But a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes.
A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.
You are ignorant of both the situation and the proposals.
None of the new housing (unless the builder takes advantage of specific tax breaks which requires them to make their housing "rent stabilized" for a limited time, and even then when the new housing goes on the market, it will be offered at "market rates) will be subject to any rent regulation at all.
The units targeted for a rent freeze are either:
1. Units in buildings with more than six dwelling units where the building was built before 1971 (the vast majority of units affected);
2. Buildings where the developer (knowing ahead of time that this was the case) took advantage of certain tax exemptions/abatements that require them to offer their units at market rates when first put on the market, but then are constrained (as are the units in 1 above) by the NY's rent stabilization laws[0].
To wit: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!
That article says the main benefit of rent control (besides popularity) is an increase in YIMBY sentiment, but it seems it still has the downsides detractors dislike about it.
It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.
Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit.
You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore.
Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.
Fascinating, yet rents have increased faster than inflation even as rent control has waned in NYC.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
You can also build affordable housing directly. We powered the post war period with a huge supply of starter homes.
Other countries have also directly attacked homelessness by simply building enough public housing such that anyone who wants a roof over their head can have one regardless of their ability to pay for it.
We don't mandate car manufacturers to build affordable cars (although they are free to). People with lower income rely (or should rely) on the used car market. Those cars are naturally affordable.
Car manufacturers build high margin cars for people with the money, people with the money leave a trail of used cars in their wake, people without money for a new car buy those used ones.
That's a totally sensible and functional market. No mandates or compelled charity needed.
You don't have to mandate anything of landlords. Public housing is a thing.
There are very successful examples.
And on the car side, there's plenty of very cheap new options. I can literally lease a new EV for ~$100/month. Who's voluntarily building starter homes anymore? We built fleets of those in the 50s, without the song and dance that they were luxury and required time to turn into starter homes. If anything in a lot of places, the starter homes of the 50s are the relatively expensive housing of today.
Generally speaking, legal requirements for elevated wages are another form of price fixing. The results of this price fixing are that fewer people will have jobs, the poorest people will be disenfranchised because it is not profitable to pay them a full salary, and the cost of everything in the city may very well be elevated due to more people willing/able to pay for the limited housing and other necessities. If you really want to help poor people, find a way to help them be more productive, and stop damaging the industries that get people the things they need.
"It has been almost one year since California implemented a $20 minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers, and industry experts have been debating the long-term effects the wage jump would have on the industry’s job market.
As it turns out, thus far, the 33.3% wage increase for fast-food workers in California has resulted in almost 16,000 job losses — a decline of 2.8% — across the limited-service food industry from September 2023 (when AB 1228 was signed into law) until September 2024, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since the law went into effect in April, California’s limited-service restaurant industry has seen an employment rate decline of 2.5%."
Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.
The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago.
Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants.
New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life.
“it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments.
But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
Except NYC has laws making it difficult to do. A 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost. Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant, since theyll lose money taking a loan to get units up to code.
> 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost
Source? This sounds like it only applies to stabilised apartments.
> Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant
Rental vacancies are similar to what they were in 2019 [1].
As if Cuomo was some economic genius. Look at all his campaign material - they were abject brain dead character smears and racism. If he was truly just trying to win by any means to supposedly save New Yorkers from economic disaster, he was a Machiavellian of the highest degree.
He used Orthodox Jewish communities with top down leaders as a core machine style voting bloc. The whole community turns out and did what the head guy says, just like the old Tammany Hall. I’m sure plenty of people “moved” from their upstate town back to Brooklyn. Usually the old style conservative Catholics vote for him too. (Oddly enough as his divorce and “living in sin” was scandalous)
The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.
It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.
> The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them
I voted for Zohran, but it’s worth noting that the demographic story isn’t all that clear: current counts show him losing to Cuomo in the Eastern Queens neighborhoods where those groups are significantly represented. Mamdani’s core voting base is “classic” NYC liberal: West side Manhattan, Northern Brooklyn, and Western Queens. That’s a relatively pasty set of areas, at least by NYC standards :-)
(The story with the Orthodox is also more nuanced: many of the sects like him, at least among the candidates. They like him because he’s made the right political noises around educational freedom re: yeshivas, and they absolutely despise Cuomo for his handling of COVID.)
The literal alternative, which is actually happening right now and not some textbook hypothetical is supply not keeping up anyway and landlords charging however much they want pretty much unbridled, not to mention major companies snapping up real estate and leveraging it as investment collateral rather than treating them and managing them as, you know, housing.
We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.
Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
1. New york city has rent control on 1 million units already
2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible
3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply
Two of these things are orthogonal to freezes on rent controlled units, so I don't understand your point here.
I agree that 3. Is a problem. I'm not convinced mamadani is against reconsidering zoning and regulation to increase supply. Nothing I've heard suggest he would be.
They are both price controls on rent.
The eligibility criteria are different, and the terms by which rent may increase are different, but they seem pretty close to the same thing to me.
Why is it that anytime something like this comes up, ignoramouses like you crawl out from under whatever rock you've been sliming under to offer uninformed blather?
The underlying cause of impoverishment where inflation of housing, healthcare, and education is outpacing income is an expansionist monetary policy. ZIRP (Zero interest policy) along with QE (quantitative easing) pushed ever increasing amounts of printed money into the system. No one is touching the root cause. Not Mamdani, not Democrats and not Republicans.
"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money'
December 8, 201010:39 AM ET
By
Frank James
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.
On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:
BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...
Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "
Actually demand has being going down and rents have been trending down as a result. The main reason is less immigration and international students. I recall years ago every open house I would go to ended up selling above market value for cash from someone from overseas who "invests" their money on the back of locals trying to buy a house to live in for their family. The billionaires were not the ones to blame for this.
I don't doubt that immigration has probably marginally impacted the market, that doesn't change the fact that rent in NYC is still increasing YoY and is way too expensive.
And yes, the people extracting exorbitant rent cost are in fact the ones to blame. I don't understand people who seem to occupy a fairytale land in which they feel the need to defend billionaires as though they owe some fealty to them.
Making it about "sides" is exactly why politics is as toxic as it is today.
Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?
Politics is all about sides. To think it isn't is delusional.
It's uncomfortable to take sides, but that's what politics is. It's finding out what you believe is important (e.g. helping average people make ends meet, even if it require regulation, or eliminating regulation), you will end up taking sides whether you like it or not.
I think it's incredibly naive not to consider who our choices benefit. If your choices benefit people who already have massive amounts of wealth, you should acknowledge that and be aware of that and accept the consequences of that, and vice versa. Obviously in many cases it is complicated--your choices may benefit several different classes of people and undermine others. If anything the problem with politics is that many people make choices without considering what "sides" will benefit, letting ads, propaganda, and persuasion convince them instead. This leads people to actively vote against their own interests without even realizing it.
Doesn't this also apply in reverse? How many supporters of Mamdani acknowledge the groups that this choice will potentially harm? I am instead seeing people usually get defensive and downplay the potential harm on the more controversial issues. I also haven't seen anyone acknowledge that if the risk goes awry, it could end up causing even more harm to exactly those the policies were supposed to help.
If the goal is to vote for one's self interest, isn't it assuming a lot that this will always be aligned with one side? Sometimes self-interest means supporting one side on one issue, and a different side on a different issue. The act of taking a side is in of itself a form of compromise. I see nothing wrong with that, but that's not what people usually mean when they talk of sides.
Over 50% of rented units in New York are regulated somehow. 34% “rent stabilised pre-74”, 8% “rent stabilized post-73”, 1% rent controlled, 7% public housing, 2% other
1992 is a long time gone and economists aren’t always right. I don’t know how much worse the housing stock could get so maybe it’s time to try something different.
Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.
But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.
It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.
Nice to see someone young, charismatic, and highly energized breathing life into the decrepit democratic party. Hopefully he can accomplish a ton and repudiate the DNC.
I found out his mom directed the movies "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mississipi Masala" with Denzel Washington.
Allegedly she was tapped to direct "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", but her then 14 year old son talked her out of it to do "The Namesake" instead
I’m not a New Yorker or even an American, but it’s interesting just how much coverage this election has gotten in social media.
I think most of his major policies are pretty bad, but I also think the reaction against him has been over the top.
He is going to need cooperation from the state legislature, if he wants to collect the taxes needed to fund his policies, and I’m not sure how successful he will be at that.
A lot of people are rooting both for and against him, so it’s going to be interesting either way.
Exciting times in New York City, I wish them the best, it probably will become a uphill battle now to do anything without media on every single thing out the wazooo
Who would have thought that New Yorkers didn’t appreciate out-of-state billionaires playing “Zohran did 9/11” attack ads over and over on TV for months on end. He was the only candidate with a clear plan for the city, and voters rewarded him for it.
The reality, which kinda sucks and is boring, is that generally people with money understand how money works, and why things like rent control, government grocery stores, and free [expensive service], are financially brutal policies.
Brutal to who? Wage theft is also brutal, but it's pretty obvious why the folk who "understand how money works" condone it. It's a tad credulous to think the billionaires donated against Mamdani out of a sense of noblesse oblige
I wish the people building bunkers, buying New Zealand citizenship, support razing social safety nets for tax cuts, and fetishizing about civilizational collapse (while simultaneously chipping at its foundations aggressively) realized this.
Why is that? I think many of us who are educated in history understand the risks of collectivism. It has never worked out anywhere. I see it as basically a marketing cover for oligarchy. The Western world should aspire to better than China. I'm not even a conservative, just read a lot. Humanity has had some pretty hellish experiences with communism and yet we keep "going there."
Western Europe would have been collapsing right now if daddy cold capitalist didn't show up with gas and guns to drive away the Russian bear.
Western Europe has been on vacation for 30 years. There is no future where they can stay on the path they have been on. European leaders recognize this, but how the hell do you get a generation raised with an easy life to recognize this?
Germans work 400 hours a year less than Americans, and they celebrate that. Good luck.
I wish our country was like this. A city "president" can speak against the President. A city President has the power to work without the will of the President.
I love how much Mamdani pisses people off just because he wants to buck the status quo. I don’t think he’ll get everything implemented he wants but I respect the mission.
Republicans have completely given up on cities and without being able to even field a worthy candidate it’s the sign of a dying party longer term. You simply have to have some influence in cities. But they had none after a 20 year run where they remade NYC after decades of failure. Bloomberg went independent but he got in as a Republican after a successful Giuliani admin (yes he’s tarnished that).
But what happened? Why can’t they field a competitive candidate in cities like NYC or SF or LA or Chicago after failed admin after failed admin? Why have they given up?
You need to control cities to have any future. They need to recommit to fighting for them.
It seems like the strategy is to control state legislatures through extensive gerrymandering, then use state sovereignty to control the cities from without. Blue cities in otherwise red states are not able to experiment with local policies anymore, much to everyone’s detriment.
That’s not even the point though. You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power and you’ve yielded the important structures and financial capitals. That’s not a long term strategy.
And it’s not that difficult to win these things, especially when you look at how objectively poor the oppositions performance has been in them. Historically they’ve been contested.
They don't behave like a political party any more. It's not just the business of politics as usual and a generational shift, it's something different. I've been trying to coin a term for this internal takeover - I think nihilocracy, or nihilocratic populism, is the best I've come up with.
The party as a whole is uninterested in governing beyond seeking revenge and satisfying the charismatic eschatological movement that drives them. The leaders don't believe what they preach, they don't have policy goals besides "destroy what we hate", they don't have any conventional engagement with government beyond using it towards their own ends.
"Long term strategy" is a joke in this context. They're angry, they mobilize their supporters by promising revenge on a world that seems to be defying traditional structures and changing too fast. As with many reactionary movements aligned more by being "against" than "for", there's been little thought for what happens after the enemy has been defeated, and it's likely they'll continue seeking out new enemies until the movement dies from infighting or is ousted from power.
> You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power
That's when you use the power of the purse to contractually bind private businesses, non-profits, universities, etc, to your preferred values. Capital beats cultural power (or so goes the current gamble)
It's funny how in the US, even mayors get tagged as "conservative" or "democratic socialist." I always figured their job was just to keep the city services running.
Reviewing various western democracies it looks like most mayoral candidates run affiliated with a political party. The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.
> The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.
That's not universal. The City of Vancouver for example has a party system, though the parties are largely not affiliated with provincial or federal parties. There are exceptions there as well though - the Vancouver Greens are affiliated with both the provincial and federal Green parties.
Maybe it's the exception rather than the norm, but in Canada, municipal, provincial, and federal parties are generally separate. Montreal, for example, is currently led by Projet Montréal, which has no formal ties to any provincial party. Likewise, the current provincial party, the CAQ, has no formal affiliation with any federal party.
Canada here (Ontario really, probably varies by province) - our mayors and city councilors are politicians but they're explicitly forbidden from running as part of a party. Which I honestly think works so well it should be extended to all levels of politics.
In Canada's largest city the mayor is firmly and strongly associated with the NDP. "Chow served as the New Democratic Party member of Parliament for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014."
And yet that was not the central in her run for mayor at all (I live in that city). She campaigned on policy, not on party branding, like every other candidate did.
Some cities have non-partisan mayoral elections. For example, Miami does this under Home Rule charter.
Still, it's often clear who's who. For example, Emilio González prominently displayed a POTUS lapel pin during a debate and bragged about being able to interface with Trump and DeSantis.
There are lots of small towns in the U.S. where mayors and board members' campaigns are not partisan. That is, they don't run as members of a political party. Just candidates who campaign to "keep the city services running." There are no political parties listed on the ballot for these candidates.
You don't make yourself a name by properly managing garbage trucks and street sweeping. It's not just the US either, Australian local councils went headlong into culture wars long ago.
LaGuardia was a democratic socialist but had to run as a Republican because of Tammany Hall's undemocratic stranglehold on the Democratic party then. NYC has a history of a lot of really shitty, corrupt mayors and political machinery. Let's hope ZM charts a new course.
I'm optimistic that he will actually be a positive force in reforming how the city operates. I think he is pragmatic in that he understands that efficiency in government administration is something that progressives have insufficiently prioritized. His policies are more populist than I'd prefer, but I think not the crazy socialist fever dream that Rs portray it as. The scariest thing for me is the prospect of active sabotage from the federal level, although I don't know how much they have held back.
The gov't may try to fuck with NYC using ICE or whatever, but honestly I think the fears about federal funding are overblown.
NYC generates like 2+ trillion GDP all on its own. It is the largest metropolitan economy in the world let alone the United States. I don't know how much NYC actually depends on federal money, but if there's any city that has a chance to figure out how to make it through a government funding squeeze, it's NYC.
Honestly I think the only recourse the fed has to put pressure on NYC is the actual gestapo shit they've already been pulling in Chicago.
> think not the crazy socialist fever dream that Rs portray
That's because he's a democratic socialist, not a communist like they want people to think. If people really looked into the policies of the DSA they would support it. There is a reason Einstein, Keller, and more were adamant supporters.
I watched clips from a DSA convention where they literally kept addressing each other as "comrade" lol. They are in fact communists. The distinctions between socialism and communism are rather academic and irrelevant in the long run. Communism is just the terminal form of socialist dysfunction.
I hope this turns out well for New York, but I am doubtful. Rent control is such a colossally bad idea, a rent freeze is going to be a disaster. This is going to further increase the lottery nature of New York City real estate, and reduce investment. His plans are set to drive finance and businesses out of the city in his goal to give away money to everyone, which will bankrupt the city. Socialism has a bad track record for a reason, there has never been an issue of people trying to escape market economies for socialist ones. The city already has a crime problem, defunding police and making the job unbearable wont help that. Grocery stores already run on razor thin margins, even with the logistics expertise and brutal capitalism of the likes of walmart or aldis, how does the famoisly expensive and incompetent nyc government plan on running a grocery store for cheaper (itll be at a massive loss). This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism “the boot of the nypd on your neck was laced by the idf” should have disqualified him, that kind of antisemetic talk was only on /pol/ like 2 years ago.
>This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism “the boot of the nypd on your neck was laced by the idf” should have disqualified him, that kind of antisemitic talk was only on /pol/ like 2 years ago.
Is that antisemitic? It's a fact that American cops are routinely trained by a foreign military with a track record of disregarding human rights. It's a fact that the NYPD has a recent history of police brutality. What's next? Mentioning that the US trained deathsquads in LATAM is Gringophobic?
Also I'm not that sure 4chan is worried about police brutality even if it's a excuse to say antisemitic slurs.
Zohran isn't proposing putting any new units under rent control (really rent stabilization), only temporarily halting raises to rents for existing stabilized units. This will make it harder for the city to attract new buildings to join rent stabilization in the future, but will benefit existing habitants. It won't have any effect on the ability to profitably develop market rate units at all.
Property developer here. I have zero faith that NYC would not put rent control on new units in the future. I will invest nothing in NYC and will tell every other developer I know to avoid it like the plague.
If NYC actually makes it easy to build there's practically infinity investment available. Sure dude, nobody will build >1M condos because you told them not to.
It's unfortunate because all you have to do is talk to landlords to figure out what's happening (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbGulTc4TY). Lots of people own buildings, but they're legally prevented from renting them out without taking a loss. The result is you can't bring units back onto the market after they empty, and it becomes harder to find housing.
Austin reduced rent prices by ~20% by building more housing even as the overall city population grew. Other small cities have seen rents decrease through active immigration policing. We know how to fix housing pricing there's just no motivation too, people want expensive, exclusive neighborhoods
Mamdani has said basically none of the things you claim here. These are all clearly mischaracterizations of what he's actually said aimed and convincing someone like you to think he's a bad choice. In particular Mamdani has been extremely clear that he has no plans to defund the police in any fashion. In fact, he wants to enable NYPD to get back to solving crimes rather than incidents better handled by mental health professionals (e.g. people tweaking, by themselves, all alone, on the subway platform)
How about watch some actual interviews in which Mamdani states what he wants to do rather than only get your information from third parties who clearly want to emphasize particular angles?
Socialism works in places with more or less homogenous populations. I always hear Norway/Sweden have universial everything. Yes they do cause taxes are sky high and the culture there is more or less the same.
NYC is not Norway.
People in Norway let babies sleep outside the supermarket when they go shopping. When you have that level of trust in a society, socialism has a fighting chance for sure.
I think the establishment messed up big time here and Mamdami snatched it up.
I don't know why people reflexively vote down comments like this one since it is completely reasonable in every way. Just, I guess, leftists who can't accept viewpoints they don't agree with? Like really--read some history books, maybe read up on how bad communism was in Eastern Europe and what led to its total collapse? Let's not go down that road again! There's plenty of examples out there already. I don't even get the hatred for Israel thing particularly, either--WWII was really, really bad for Jews. They deserve a homeland of their own and all these people complaining and calling everyone Nazis need to take a long look in the mirror--the major component of Nazism was ANTISEMITISM! It is morally reprehensible and it's been a struggle since 1948 because that hatred endures.
Maybe it's because you're throwing around terms like "communism" incorrectly while simultaneously telling people they need to read history books.
It's the same term Trump has been using to fear monger around Zoran's candidacy, and doesn't seem to relate to any of his actual policies.
If you can enlighten us about the relationship between 1950s soviet bloc communism in eastern europe and a fairly run-of-the-mill 2020s Bernie-styled democratic socalist platform, I'm all ears.
If you're genuinely open to this conversation - the Soviet Union funded many of the world's labor movements, giving it varying amounts of influence on them. Influence which it sometimes used to spread talking points of its own choice and to its benefit. Democratic Socialists of America was born from a branch of one of these movements. This is more visible looking at DSA's foreign policy platform, where today they use virtually identical talking points to those the Soviet Union distributed to their partners back in the 60s and 70s.
I'm happy he won. It's symbolic of voter dissatisfaction. Someone's got to take billionaires on and it might as well be a 34 year old mayor of NYC. Why not?
It's honestly staggering how much older Trump is than this guy. 45 years!
Agreed. Really hoping that a conservative candidate with a pulse can run in a city with a campaign that targets younger voters. I think that a socially aware fiscally conservative YIMBY would have a real chance in a lot of cities.
The fact that Zohran won should be a wake up call to both parties, but I won’t hold my breath.
I’m just glad that it seems like people actually care, even if I think it will end up poorly. An overall win.
While I don't 100% agree with his policies, I cannot be more excited for someone completely opposite of the corrupt establishment Republicans and Democrats.
I was sold when he was willing to back down on some of his own views publicly, admitting publicly that he was wrong on some things. That kind of admission and honesty is so refreshing.
Complete opposite of Trump, MAGA, and constant lies. Kudos NYC! Time for a new era.
Also, he deserves credit for not backing down. A major push calling you a pro-9/11 jihadist? Release an ad speaking Arabic two days before the election.
As someone not in the US that doesn't pay a whole heap of attention, is it just me or did he run mostly uncontested? Running against a republican and a disgraced politician?
No clue what mamdani is like, but it seems like NYC had little to no choice...which is a bit disappointing.
It's unusual that Cuomo ran as an independent trying to "spoil"-- but NYC has such a large number of Democrats (like many US cities) that the more competitive and important election is typically the primary election (which determines who is running for each party). NYC has had a history of sometimes going other directions (as Cuomo's relatively high vote shows; having elected Michael Bloomberg many times, for example).
Mamdani won the primary for the democrats over Cuomo, but Cuomo decided to try and do an independent run to further challenge him.
Unfortunately that's kind of the reality for NYC. Since Bloomberg left it's been a one party city and ranked choice voting is implemented in the primary but not the general election. That means Democrats can feel comfortable voting for the most radical candidate in the primary without fear they might flop in the general election. Until we get ranked choice in the general election moderates and non-democrats don't really have a voice. This is especially true if multiple candidates run against the democratic nominee like in this election.
This is not the case. His main opponent was Cuomo who was the Democrat "establishment" candidate. Zohran narrowly defeated Cuomo in the primary. Typically that's it but Cuomo took the unconventional strategy of running independently in the general with the backing of establishment Democrats.
Typically, the Republican candidate would have no chance in a city like NYC. This was the case here as well, but Cuomo calculated that with the backing of establishment Democrats AND the backing of Republicans/conservatives, he'd be able to defeat Mamdani. The Republican candidate did not agree to drop out, however. In the end it didn't matter though because Zohran Mamdani won by a larger margin than Cuomo and the Republican combined
In a typical election, the main election is the primary (which happened back in June). The Democrat nominee is pretty much guaranteed to win so the general is almost a formality. This general election was actually more contested than is typical
tl;dr: his main opponent was establishment democrats
To a reasonable person, yes, this should have been the case, but politics in America is far from reasonable.
The entire establishment marshaled what forces it could to stop mamdani's momentum. Couple this with the fact that there are (unfortunately) many people out there who would rather elect accused sex offenders than risk the chance that somebody marginally aligned with a word and ideology they don't actually understand (socialism) would be elected, or more likely, and worse, people are just racist and/or islamophobic and would sooner elect a man who would grope their daughter than a man who, god forbid, has a different religion than them.
I mean, if you call "running uncontested" going up against the current mayor, former governor, the editorial board of the NYT and WAPO, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the Speaker of the House, the Senate and House leadership of the Democratic party, not to mention the entire rightwing media apparatus, and the President of the United States himself, yeah he ran uncontested.
Silwa pretty much screwed coumo, would of been a tight race if he dropped. Curious to see what happens to NYC if some of the socialist ideas actually get implemented.
I think AOC will likely challenge Schumer for his seat now that mandami won.
More like Cuomo screwed Sliwa, if Cuomo wanted to run against the Democratic candidate, he should have ran as a Republican. He already lost the primary and took his sour grapes to the general.
Need to see how stocks will react tomorrow!! Nyc mayor mamdani ! Crash at Louisville airport and judgement on trump tariffs !! 1 billion Bitcoin liquidation!
NYC demonstrably enjoys a cost of living problem, amongst other issues. But I’m not sure how Israel is to blame, as Mamdani has claimed.
Maybe when any of his policy prescriptions fail, then we would know who should be blamed.
He has not. In fact Mamdani is the only candidate who has consistently sought to stop the incessant focus on Israel and talk about New York, something the media and the poster above are still incapable of doing. This is partly what got him elected.
I hope this win signals (to both parties) that voters are receptive and will get engaged when a clear message is presented about cost of living and quality of life issues. Some of which are taken for granted in most other western countries.
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
I kinda feel Obama is more of a Trojan horse. It was not he tried and failed to get what he campaigned for implemented, it was more like he did a U turn after he got elected. e.g. he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical"
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
I think people had rose colored glasses about Obama because he was, by far, the most charismatic President we've had in modern times. His speeches still give me goose bumps, even when I disagree with what he's saying! That man has the gift of gab. Him also being intelligent further, sadly, makes him an outlier in modern times.
But many of the things he did were dubious and ACA is a perfect example of this. It's little more than an subsidy for private insurance companies whose profits dramatically increased relatively shortly after adapting to it. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be adversarial towards private insurance, but it should not directly drive increases in profits because, especially once its mandated + subsidized, profits need to be controlled as the government is effectively guaranteeing them.
Medical loss ratios (insurers must pay a minimum percent of premium revenue on medical costs) are obviously insufficient since they do nothing to motivate lower costs. On the contrary, it directly incentivizes maximizing costs which is exactly what's happened. For one specific datum medicare administrative costs are around 2% - private insurance administrative costs start around 12%.
---
Basically there is no way this was even remotely close to the most socially motivated (I don't see radical as a desirable adjective) package he could get have gotten passed. And now with the country so divided, it's unlikely we'll be getting anything better anytime in the foreseeable future, because whichever side tries to pass it will simply be opposed by the other, regardless of merit. Hopefully Mamdani isn't a complete failure, because more parties in power is perhaps one way to break the divides in society.
Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in much of his opposition than Sinema was, and sometimes he was actually right.
> Manchun was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona
Sure. My point is both are preferable to a MAGA enabler. If you lose perspective and start aiming for perfection at the expense of the good enough, you lose power.
Manchin was a stooge who voted how he was paid. He doesn't get a pass for not being as clear a traitor as Sinema.
He voted how his electorate would have wanted him to vote. He probably also hoodwinked some rich people to pay him some bucks while he was at it.
He's about as "shades of gray" as a politician gets.
That was always my impression of him. It was easy to feel like he was breaking ranks, but realistically he seemed to vote exactly how his electorate wanted him to.
He voted in line with Democrats when it mattered, but was enough of a visible pain in the ass to satisfy his constituents.
> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
People aren’t excited by half measures that let health insurance companies generate tons of money and CONTINUOUSLY raise premiums. People still go bankrupt receiving cancer care here.
The person who gets free healthcare and cuts overall costs by destroying health insurance middle man will be massively popular and, once the effects are borne out, win congress in a landslide.
Perhaps Obama couldn't have made it happen, but he didn't try. He could have made a speech about "how we will do because not because it's easy, but because it's possible because every other western nation has this same basic thing." But here we are with a crappy compromise.
With 20/20 hindsight I'd say that's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is that if you're struggling to get 40% of the legislature to make obvious improvements to your country, you should use your majority for even more radical things. If they'd used that same majority to pack the supreme court, pass a nationwide anti-gerrymandering law, break up hundreds of large corporations, and so on, we might have averted a ton of disaster. At the time perhaps it was hard to see, but in retrospect what we saw in the period 2008-2010 were early warning signs of how the flaws in our system of government were going to send us on a downward spiral.
I do think it's worth considering that FDR got elected for 4 terms (granted, congressional control went through various flows).
The push for the ideal might have locked in something generational. Maybe.
> ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
Bad casual reasoning. There is so little evidence that voters care about policies years before they go into effect.
Fox News made damned sure the voters cared.
No. I think an honest attempt at doing something "radical" economically for the working class can cross the divides we have.
I think there's an argument to be made that many of the allegedly "radical" Democratic policies fall into an uncanny valley of wonkiness, where they're enough of a reach to get people riled up emotionally but not enough to have the kind of punchy, obvious benefits that would get people to be supporting on a similarly gut-level basis. Arguments about whether the minimum wage should be $X or $X+2 seem like accounting tournaments. There's no appetite for saying stuff like "we will seize $100 billion from the wealthiest individuals and give it to everyone else as cash payments".
The other problem is that the Democrats don't seem to realize that incremental change doesn't really work when the system of government is messed up like it is. Every little small-ball policy the Dems try to push through can just be undone later by administrative gimmicks as long as we have the level of ambiguity we do about executive power. Beyond that, they can be rolled back by countervailing legislation because the Republicans are focused on gaming the system. "Substantive" radical policies like universal healthcare are unlikely to be achievable without first enacting "procedural" radical policies like anti-gerrymandering rules or abolishing the senate.
Radically changing healthcare works out great in people's heads, but then they immediately whine about their Ozempic no longer being covered like in socialized healthcare countries which don't use expensive cutting edge drugs as a first resort. No matter how competent the government is, which ours isn't, any radical change (besides just throwing more money at the problem) will make things worse before they are better and voters are the most fickle bunch there is.
Semaglutide isn’t exactly cutting edge, it’s 16 years since it was invented. GLP-1 drugs go back to the 90s. They are undeniably trendy but it’s odd to consider them cutting edge.
Expensive, yes.
Semaglutide was approved in 2017. By cutting edge, I suppose I mean covered by patent. Luckily for Canada, Novo Nordisk forgot to pay their for its renewal.
I was just pointing to an example of why healthcare reform is politically difficult. One relevant to the ACA was ending discrimination based on preexisting conditions, which caused a majority of people's premiums to go up to subsidize those who are chronically ill. Morally, most people agree it's the right thing to do, but it was politically disastrous since one person gets one vote.
The ACA was essentially the Republican plan for healthcare reform. They just went scorched earth on it because they were pissy that he got the credit for their plan. That's also why they haven't been able to come up with a coherent replacement.
Obama had a plan early on to be inspired by Lincoln's cabinet of rivals and to try to unite the parties. Because of that he didn't push nearly as hard on the right wing of his party early on like Lieberman, who were the holdouts who pushed for the lack of a public option to have true universal healthcare.
Republicans in Congress never wanted or proposed anything like ACA. It is weird half truth because Massachusetts, one the more liberal states, with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, passed something similar while Mitt Romney was Governor. It was the brainchild of Jonathan Gruber, MIT Economist and Democratic consultant who worked on the ACA for Obama. You can go back and read the GOP platforms of the time, there is nothing like the ACA proposed.
The 1993 HEART Act was very much like the ACA, built around the individual mandate to purchase private health insurance, primarily through your employer. Romneycare was massaged out of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...
This was the Republican alternative to the time's Hillarycare proposal, and was authored by the Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame.
This line of thinking died the moment that the parties began another realignment with 2024. We are in the beginnings of the 7th party system.
Curtis Sliwa was significantly to the left of both Eric Adams and Cuomo on a whole host of issues, which is one of the many reasons why Trump refused to endorse Silwa (they hate each other). If we didn't have a Sinema or Manchin, we might have liberal republicans like a Silwa who would be objectively better if you're a liberal.
> The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
For your resume, sure.
Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
No, losing ACA matters. It's a good program that's helping people afford or qualify for life insurance. I was able to get insurance because of it.
Yes, but it does not provide health care, it provides a subsidy to the health insurance companies (I.e., throwing even more money at lucrative companies that profit by denying coverage). It is sad that it is the best our government can do for us.
It is sad, agreed, but having the ACA is better than not having it.
I'm not really arguing against the ACA in particular, just the general sentiment.
I do, however, think the passage and defense of the ACA has completely stopped any kind of healthcare reform movements from Democrats and completely turned Republicans against the idea.
The ACA was more or less the GOP's healthcare reform plan[0]. They fought so hard against it because they didn't want the Democrats to get credit for it. The ongoing animosity toward it from Republicans is ridiculous, and Democrats are even further from being able to pass any more healthcare reforms than they were when the ACA was passed. The brief excitement for Medicare For All is somewhat emblematic of that.
[0] To be fair, it did go further than previous GOP proposals. They did include individual/employer mandates and a marketplace, but not stuff like the Medicaid expansion and higher taxes on high earners to help pay for it.
> For your resume, sure
No, for everyone. Some voters like politicians who pass zero legislation while holding firm to their values. Occasionally they get rewarded. Most often, they’re branded–correctly–ineffective. (And, I’d argue, unfit to lead. If you’re using millions of Americans as human shields to pass an ideologically-pure package, that’s immoral and belongs with Twitter celebrities, not leaders.)
You didn't mention the effectiveness or positive effects of the hypothetically passed legislation at all.
You're arguing that it's good for a politician's resume.
This attitude is why Trump is president. Yeah we have a terrible leader, but we could have had a mediocre leader and I guess that is somehow worse in people's minds.
That doesn't track at all. I'm talking about legislation and, hence, legislatures.
I genuinely can't believe, still, that I have to spell this out for people.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
Please, grow a better sense of politics.
There are plenty of instances in which Obama, despite campaigning on a platform of change from Bush-era policies, continued or even furthered those policies. A good example which is relevant here involves government surveillance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_on_mass_surveilla...
Snowden has also spoken about this at length, saying he expected a change when Obama was elected due to his campaigning against the PATRIOT Act, but there was no change. This is only one of many policies in which Obama changed his stance after he became President.
Maybe stop addressing people in such a condescending tone and making it personal.
As for Obummer, we're all watching what's possible today. He had a mandate. He could have been a great president if he had fought for the people.
They had all three branches for two years before he sucked all the momentum out of his base by unleashing the hounds on Occupy Wall St and losing the midterms.
He hired Geithner and chose to continue the Wall Street presidency.
"President".
I hope he's still enjoying spending time with Branson and living on Martha's Vineyard.
Consider the framing today: "Trump is doing all these terrible things, making all of these drastic changes, exploiting the system to his will."
The Dems can no longer use the excuse that the president is handcuffed. Trump 2.0 is showing us what the president can do. The dems consistently use that excuse to prevent popular policies from being enacted. Obama even had a ~6mo super majority where he could have codified abortion rights. But instead they keep it around as an outstanding issue because it is a good fundraising issue.
There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
The u-turn came long before that acronym existed, as I remember it. The Dems had been trying to build consensus for some kind of single payer plan for almost twenty years by that point, and practically the first thing Obama said after being elected was that as a show of good faith he would take single payer was off the table.
Maybe today the ACA is thought of as progressive, especially in the sense that the right wants it to end and the left doesn't; but in its time I think it was rightly understood as the Democrats caving to a massive transfer from the public to the private sector. I recall the private insurers' stock prices all going up 10-20% that week.
Obama was pretty timid. Especially at the beginning of his presidency he assumed that his fellow democrats like Lieberman and Baucus were rational and wanted the best for the country and not just being pawns for the insurance industry. I bet if he had pounded the table, he would have way more success. Heck, LBJ made senators cry to get things done.
Hindsight is 20/20. I recall Obama later saying he wished he was more radical because he only realised too late that the holdouts to ACA were never going to vote for it. Essentially, they negotiated in bad faith but Obama only realised this after they’d made all the requested changes and still couldn’t get the votes.
The Affordable Care Act wasn't a complete solution - and I don't get the feeling universal health care was necessarily achievable - but it is the reason that I have health care and mental health services today. So I consider it to be a meaningful - if incremental - improvement. I imagine there are quite a few people aside from myself who are happy to have it.
There will be lots of pressure to on Zohran to do the same. But hopefully the cautionary tale that is Obama will be learned from.
Proper Obamacare wasn't implemented because healthcare industry interests held up legislation until the midterms at which point the Republicans took over congress.
Yeah, can you believe all those progressive bills he vetoed?
...I mean c'mon now. Congress passed what they could and it cost the Dems greatly. Why are we pretending Obama could have gotten more?
Not too radical to be good and effective, too radical to break through current political constraints. You have to confront the reality of what can actually be achieved within the system you’re working in.
> [Obama] called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
Run from the Left, govern from the Right. A pretty classic political electoral strategy of centrist liberals.
Why would someone do that? Especially for presidency which is the final stage of their career? They're not beholden to or reliant on anyone no more so shouldn't have to be swayed by any adverse interests.
Reelection
Look at Obama's net worth when he left office and now.
Look at Bill Clinton's net worth when he left office and now.
It wasn't the final stage of their career but only the beginning.
I think Mamdani is going to be similar unfortunately. His previous messaging and publicity have highlighted his ties to Islam, and I think he's been using these hot-button issues in NYC strategically to rise to power and begin normalizing radical Islam, as the UK and other parts of Europe have.
Islam has always dreamed of infiltrating Western nations and gradually converting them to draconian, theocratic policies under religious rule, and we're starting to see the beginnings of that in Europe today.
It's a slow and subtle process that the more politically correct types simply aren't willing to admit, because saying anything publicly would result in endless cancellation and cries of racism or some hyperbolic "phobia" far too risky for their careers or social standing -- and they won't be getting the last laugh in these scenarios.
Sometimes I think about what we could have had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Americans_Act
And 15 years before that was Hillarycare (1993):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
(Fuck you Bill Kristol.)
There's a long, sad, littered history of attempts at universal care in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
Bill Kristol has come a long way! He would vote for Mamdani...over Cuomo and Sliwa anyway.
https://www.cmcforum.com/post/bill-kristol-says-he-would-vot...
You can hear him discussing it here:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bill-kristol-fake-news-on-60-mi...
I'm also reminded of the time Jon Stewart got Bill Kristol to admit that a government-run health care system (the VA) was good:
https://youtu.be/rRSZiWwiBuE
Bill Kristol is the same asshole he always was.
Interestingly, the ACA can trace its roots to the Republican counter proposal to Hillarycare written by the Heritage Foundation of recent Project 2025 fame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor...
It's propitiously on the same day as the announcement that WMD liar, war criminal, torture advocate, and domestic-surveillance mastermind Dick Cheney died.
His policy proposals have been repeatedly disproven throughout recent history. Thank you for your attention in this matter.
What has been dis-proven?
Rent freezes are such a bad idea that Mamdani himself implicitly admits as such by insisting they will be temporary with no justification as to why.
Obamacare being what it was is 1,000,000% Obama’s failure - he’ll tell you this same thing over coffee too. Just outmost disaster through and through how it was implemented.
Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
Zohran is the Democratic party now? Thank god, it's about time! :P
works in NYC but in swing states “zohran is a commie” will hum along nicely enough…
Red and swing states all voted overwhelmingly towards democrats tn though
got any tips on what to look for on how obama bumbled obamacare? not too familiar on the subject myself
Despite his public persona, I read recently Obama is actually quite aloof and didnt have the patience to charm the politicians in person.
Obama took a mea culpa on parts of implementation, namely the federal marketplace website (they weren’t expected as many states to opt out of the marketplace) and the “keep your plan” narrative.
It was a compromise law that was in alignment with Bush era mainstream conservatives. The fatal flaw of Obama and Biden is they underestimated the power of the nutcase wing of the Republican Party. (Along with the institutional GOP folks)
that isn’t the fatal flaw. the fatal flaw is campaigning and staking your entire political career on something and the delivering something sooooo subpar.
the sad thing is, history will remember him as first black President and that’s really about it. and most of us cried watching that speech from lincoln park.
our current president is causing most of us to cry daily but will be remembered as one of the most influential presidents in the history of this country… sad, very sad, but all true
presidents don't pass legislation, and the original Obamacare was too radical even for all the Dem senators, not to mention needing some GOPs to get 60 votes
Maybe, if Obama had been as ruthless as Trump and used blatant lies and targeted attacks on senators to make them so fearful of re-election that they would play along, he might have gotten it passed, though probably not even then. Plus, as much as I wish we'd had the original Obamacare, I'd rather have a watered down version with balance of powers, than a tyrannical president who cowers the legislative branch into submission.
You guys have it all wrong. There was only one candidate for the dem party, Here's the list:
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
The fact that I was seeing Sliwa favourably speaks to the candidate quality in this race.
> No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young
Stupid stuff he credibly disavowed.
I’m still blown away that after De Blasio he was the only one, when asked a foreign policy question, who said he’d put city priorities first.
It is unfortunate that, after the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish refugees were welcome in Istanbul, but the current receptivity is so much colder.
This is exactly the point where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed, but common ground in so many contexts is absent.
I hope that we can put ourselves back together. We've seen the consequences this year of its lack.
> where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed
Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.
This is from Eisenhower's "Cross of Iron" speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-war/humanity-hanging...
> his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road
Rent control is neither common sense, nor middle of the road. He's also walked back or waffled on positions like defunding the police, so it's not clear what he believes. If he does actually believe in some of the justice stuff he's claimed in the past, it's pretty extreme.
I completely understand why people in NYC would still vote for the guy over Cuomo, who is widely loathed -- people remember the overreaches of 2020-2022, in addition to his bad personal behavior -- but Mamdami isn't really doing anything more than promising a laundry list of free stuff, and extremist policies he can't accomplish.
Your broader point is well-taken: the options sucked.
From a distance it looks like Cuomo is also a generational talent when it comes to being a lazy, unmotivated campaigner.
Not to mention raising and spending money campaign money.
It's not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing? Presumably the kids can learn from the parents, get connected, etc.
Also, Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news. Lots of people predicting that Mamdani's criminal policies, economic policies, and lack of experienced staffers will lead the city to dark days.
> not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing?
Aristocracies are more stable but less efficient. That creates an incentive for corruption when growth inevitably stalls. Which leads to catastrophic instability.
There is minimal incentive for corruption in a hereditary aristocracy. Status is determined by birthright rather than accumulation of money. And if you are a lord and do need money, you have the power to tax it legally anyway. So what incentive is there to make or take a bribe? It won't change who your parents are.
> Status is determined by birthright rather than accumulation of money. And if you are a lord and do need money, you have the power to tax it legally anyway
Lords being unconcerned with—and constrained by—wealth characterises all non-market societies that I know of. In part because basic economics constrains the society as a whole, even if they’re ignorant of its principles.
Right. I'm not saying anything about economics not applying, only that the incentive for corruption is absent.
You want your elected officials to "keep connections" accross generations?
You also think New York can't find someone that's at least as competent as someone in a multigenerational dynasty?
>Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news.
Which policies are "incredibly controversial?" And be specific.
Here'a a direct link to his platform for your reference"
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
No rush. I'll wait.
I really don't get the doom and gloom on this, NYC now has a mayor that might inadvertently fuck over the city trying to do right by working class folks instead of a mayor who does it as a matter of course. Forget policy disagreements, just the fact that we have a successful politician any side of the isle that is not currently gargling the balls of rich people and actually has some principles is so refreshing.
You are demand better of your government than "the blatant corruption you've learned to live with."
I'm against any and all political dynasties. They fly in the face of what representative government should be about. We have many people qualified to become political leaders but they never get the chance due to how the system operates.
I'm not sure NYC knows what it is getting into with this guy, but yeah, the alternatives were lousy. Sliwa? The whole Guardian Angels thing was one hell of a marketing job, I'll say that. Does anyone really believe a bunch of former gang thugs with some martial arts training accomplished very much?
The Cuomo family is corrupt to the core. Terrible for NY State.
Good luck, NYC. You're gonna need it!
>his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road.
Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
The minimum wage not being indexed to inflation has been theft for decades. It would take a minimum wage of almost $60/hr to maintain purchasing power from 50-60 years ago.
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wa...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/minimum-wage-york-2024-live-1...
Edit: If the system of “we make asset prices go up while labor prices are inflated away” gets to the point where a living wage is unobtainable (we are here), we can change the system. The name is irrelevant, it’s fundamentally “what are you optimizing for?”
The minimum wage should easily be 11-13 by any inflation metric you use for the last 40 years, and doubling that for a high cost of living place is reasonable.
Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones.
It’s a smaller delta than you think.
He has moderated on the police funding issue, and the rent freeze is for already rent controlled apartments.
>He has moderated on the police funding issue
So he already backtracked on a core election promise even before he got elected? Doesn’t bode well for his supporters expectations going forward.
Seems like before you’re elected is the perfect time to adjust policy positions. Or, really, any time you’re presented with new facts.
>the rent freeze is for already rent controlled apartments.
That's actually not true. The rent freeze is for rent stabilized[0] apartments. Rent control[1] is a different program and is tiny in comparison.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York#Re...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation_in_New_York#Re...
When your road is all the way to the right, then yea, none of it is middle of the road.
Please explain how city run grocery stores are middle of the road politics. Perhaps they’re middle of the road when your road is all the way to the left.
The state should step in and run anything that the private market cannot. I don’t live in NYC, but if there’s a market failure in groceries, do it.
Couldn’t do worse than the grocery stores in nyc that already exist. Terrible service, horrendous price, bad inventory, etc.
I did all my groceries in nyc via Amazon fresh for the last two years because of this.
Cities run all sorts of things. What's the big difference between garbage trucks and sewers and a grocery store?
Also, several states have state-run beer and/or liquor stores. It's not some wild unheard of experiment. We've gotten so used to the acceptable political spectrum spanning from "far right" to "extreme right" that we forget what left even means.
I'm almost 50 and the last president we ever saw that was even remotely towards the left was in office when I was born.
> several states have state-run beer and/or liquor stores
Actually could not believe this, so had to look it up. I find this wild.
Whether or not public grocery stores are a good idea, the comparison to state-run liquor stores doesn't really make sense; the justification for state control of liquor sales is entirely different (arguably even kind of the opposite) as the justifications presented for public grocery stores.
The lowest I've seen for low end jobs recently in Montana is $25/hr so $30 in NYC seems entirely reasonable.
What part?
(McDonald’s is still $17 an hour in Billings.)
$30 min wage sounds doable? CA took fast food min wage up to $20 and it’s been fine.
>fine
A medium fries is over $4 before taxes… over $1 more expensive than the rest of the country.
McDonald’s made $14 billion in profit last year. It’s not the labor driving the costs, it’s the profits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44968997
Same with Chipotle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45762671
Who pays the profits? Like tariffs, the consumer. You pay for these billions in annual profits.
I'm ok paying a little more for fries if it means the people making it and serving it to me are paid a living wage.
Regardless, the fries cost what the local market can bear, not what they "want" to charge for them.
That's probably OK when the poorest workers are making the difference ten times over per hour.
Have you seen how fries are made at McDonald’s? There’s nearly zero labor involved. It’s nearly automated. You’re paying that price cause that’s what the market will bear and McDonald’s needs to see profits go up.
> wants to defund the police
Ask Seattle how well that turned out
Why? They didn’t defund their police.
Government run grocery stores are middle of the road? What would progressive ideas look like on that spectrum?
Plenty of red states have government run liquor stores. And army bases have government run grocery stores along with government run everything else. I don't see the problem here. Progressive version presumably would be free groceries for everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_grocery_store
When I lived in Pennsylvania, the state-run liquor stores had a monopoly on selling wine and liquor. This survived Republican and Democratic administrations for decades.
Mamdani’s proposed grocery stores aren’t a monopoly. Whether they’re a good idea remains to be seen, but they’d be competing against privately owned grocery stores. As I understand them, they’re mostly intended for areas without a local grocery store (food deserts), which seems like a reasonable thing to explore.
State liquor stores are terrible, and I’ve never heard anyone say a nice word about on base grocery stores.
That’s just goal post shifting. The point is that government owned direct to consumer stores exist in areas of all political leaning.
Was going to say our state had government liquor stores until a couple of years ago. The sky remained in place.
Ration books for all?
"communism is when government do thing"
> Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Look, Mamdani ran a good campaign, and if I was an NYC voter (I am not) I'd probably vote for him out of the options provided.
However, this just is not true. Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road". Especially not on education and dealing with the homeless and public transit. And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
> And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
What "dumb comments" are you referring to? His comments to "globalize" the peaceful resistance against apartheid in the West Bank?
1) "intifada" has not historically meant "peaceful resistance". It has referred to events like October 7th, and the 1st and 2nd intifadas which killed more people than the Troubles did in about 1/3rd as much time, etc.
2) Also dumb shit like "queer liberation means defund the police" and "when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF"
Exactly. and don't forget the Republican candidate: a thug, a clown and a reactionary. Even with all that, Sliwa was a better candidate than Cuomo or Adams.
Mamdani was the best candidate by far in the race. Will he make a good mayor? I have no idea.
But he certainly won't be worse than "handsy" Andy, "bribe me" Eric or "let's beat the darkie on the subway" Curtis.
And folks who don't live in NYC, you didn't get a vote.
> his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
That's not true at all. He is not even "middle of the road" in the Democratic party.
well 40% still voted for Cuomo.
That 40% would have voted for a potato if it'd been wearing a red tie.
Manifestly not - Cuomo ran as an independent, and a Republican did run.
The Republicans in the Whitehouse told them to vote Cuomo
...Said less than 51% of voters
The "said all of NYC" wasn't the best framing, but the entire post was about Democrats' choices, not everyone's.
Also not sure what value your comment has. Interpret things charitably. Your "gotcha" is not at all that.
We can call winners this early. We can’t yet call margins.
Good point; still mathematically less than 60% if you trust AP's estimated remaining vote count.
What "stupid stuff he said" are you referring to? His comments to "globalize" the peaceful resistance against apartheid in the West Bank?
I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful. It's apparent that many people are fed up with the status quo so they're pushing towards more experimental candidates.
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
Hi
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
Strong agree. I think his policies are absurd but hope that more invested young people who aren’t career politicians can start trying a platform that isn’t party line and resonates with residents.
Particularly in comparison to Cuomo who by all accounts doesn’t even seem to like the city he campaigned to run. A tiny bit of joy goes a very long way.
Experiments have already been done. You just need to look at history. Or you can just look at north korea and Kabul .
Why look at North Korea when NYC has had rent control forever? It makes landlords neglect maintenance. That’s about it. I don’t know that I totally agree with it, but it’s fine.
Or, you know, current day European social democracies.
You can’t help but laugh at the amount of hysteria about Mamdani. No cost childcare? Free buses? Using existing rent control regulations to keep rent affordable? Oh no
There are fundamental differences between Europe and the US. The US is not magically going to become Europe by electing a "left" mayor.
Also this is a city- since when does a mayor set economic policies.
Last I checked free busses, and no cost childcare, still need someone to pay for them.
Rent control, if the rent is low, there won't be any rental property. What's the next step, forcing people to build? The city will build?
I guess we shall see. The sad thing is that people didn't vote because they considered all the ideas and the implications. The other sad thing is that maybe Mamdani was the best candidate.
The biggest takeaway to me is how ridiculous it is that the US considers Mamdani somehow "experimental" or even radical.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care 2. Fast and Free Busses 3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration"
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
You can’t find another city that even approaches NYC without moving to another country. And moving to London or Paris to escape taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense.
As further evidence to OP’s point: people paint Mamdani as an extremist for discussing rent control but it’s already the law in NYC. It’s not even remotely new.
It’s been a truly exhausting election cycle for New Yorkers who have been lectured from all sides by people who don’t even understand how the city works.
> Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy
Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself.
> are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.
> If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter
What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy is a ridiculous statement. People need shelter and like nice shelter. People pay for access to amenities and convenience. _incentivizing building housing in areas where people want to live or where people work is efficient_
Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes.
Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same.
Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good.
saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument.
All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
> I do not think that home ownership is what most people want.
I think this is a ridiculous statement. I don't know your background, but I grew up in extreme poverty (by Canadian standards). In the welfare complexes I lived in growing up, living in a home you owned seemed like an unattainable dream. The ability to choose between owning a home and renting a home is representative of a degree of economic freedom that is becoming unattainable for many, many people.
There is absolutely merit to the idea that choosing to rent is a good choice for many people, but in most cases the people who would make that choice are inclined to do so because they either desire or require mobility in terms of relocation, and frequently the reason people desire that is the opportunity to pursue better economic opportunities (jobs, investments, etc).
These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices.
I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting.
The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning.
I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
> Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy ... we should focus on productive components like building more houses
Through... rent?
The experimental part is that he's Brown and Muslim.
Experiments with communism never turn out well. Good luck, though. I doubt very much really changes.
If you actually think Mamdani is a communist, then you don't understand what communism is.
Please point to even one policy (not the stuff that his opponents disingenuously claim his policies are) that even approaches communism.
Here's a link to help you out with that:
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011
> Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
The market isn't going to function ideally in a place like New York.
In other cities, a significant market-based response to high rents and housing demand is to increase supply with another ring of suburbs. Is there anywhere within reasonable commute radius left to develop around NYC at scale?
Uncapping rents might trigger some refurbishment of idle or marginal space by dangling enough money in front of landlords, but you're not going to pull another 500,000 units out of your rear that way.
We can acknowledge that NYC housing is a finite and desirable resource, but we can also say that we don't want to turn it completely into an auction for the highest bidder. Rent control helps encourage diverse and vibrant communities, part of what makes the city compelling in the first place.
You build up. Which is expensive, so developers will want assurances and no "20% affordable units" bs.
There also is always going to be pain. NYC has incredible global draw, so demand runs deep. It might be that you can never build your way under $2k/mo apartments there.
This is another example of a little radicalism is a dangerous thing. You don't need to be friends with landlords if you're prepared to simply seize all their property.
A huge chunk of the plan is converting unused office space into housing in Manhattan, mostly in neighborhoods that were already mostly commercial, so there's relatively little NIMBY pushback.
It's often cheaper to just demolish and rebuild, which is still very expensive.
Office space is built totally differently than residential space, unless you want dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens.
It's easier than most people give it credit for. A lot of the complaints are from attempts to loosen the building code. There's savings of many millions of the table per refit if they manage to pass those, but they're not as needed as people say. For instance you lay down a raised floor to run utilities, and you can push sewer away from the core for relatively cheap and without shared bath/kitchen.
That being said, a return to allowing boarding house style housing would also not be the worst thing in the world for some buildings, and would probably do a lot to reduce homelessness. Hell, if I were still in my early 20s I'd be into the idea of a room to rent with shared bath/kitchen to save some money even not necessarily requiring the reduced in unit amenities.
My understanding is that he is proposing a 4 year freeze on about 1 million units.
https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
> 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units
Out of 3.7mm [1].
> not directly familiar with Berlin
Not comparable. Berlin froze rents “on more than 1.5 million” apartments in 2020 [2] out of about 2mm. 25% versus 75%.
Also, Berlin’s politicians didn’t propose a construction agenda. Mamdani has. (“New York City voters on Tuesday delivered a strong message in support of building more housing, passing three proposals that pitted City Hall against the City Council in an effort to rewrite decades-old development rules” [4].)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-fact...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/world/europe/berlin-gentr...
[3] https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8283996-5559700-housing-stock-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-ballot-measu...
Increasing supply brings down prices. But a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes.
A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.
You are ignorant of both the situation and the proposals.
None of the new housing (unless the builder takes advantage of specific tax breaks which requires them to make their housing "rent stabilized" for a limited time, and even then when the new housing goes on the market, it will be offered at "market rates) will be subject to any rent regulation at all.
The units targeted for a rent freeze are either:
1. Units in buildings with more than six dwelling units where the building was built before 1971 (the vast majority of units affected);
2. Buildings where the developer (knowing ahead of time that this was the case) took advantage of certain tax exemptions/abatements that require them to offer their units at market rates when first put on the market, but then are constrained (as are the units in 1 above) by the NY's rent stabilization laws[0].
To wit: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too. Yuck!
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/site/mayorspeu/programs/rent-stabilizati...
That article says the main benefit of rent control (besides popularity) is an increase in YIMBY sentiment, but it seems it still has the downsides detractors dislike about it.
It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.
The Atlantic had a good article on this and how it isn't the doom and gloom you lay out above:
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.
Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.
An alternative is Austin:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
Extra supply is helping, but I would argue back-to-office and layoffs are the primary culprit.
You're not competing with 4+ techbros to an apartment in downtown Austin anymore.
Anecdotally, the local tech meetups are WAY off in participation since about June. About 1/3 of the people who used to regularly attend have completely left the city.
Also quoting Paul Krugman -
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
Of course Krugman got that wrong. It is funny.
But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.
Here is a Khan Academy video: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
Fascinating, yet rents have increased faster than inflation even as rent control has waned in NYC.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).
Which is a total exercise in futility.
The way you fix housing is by building new housing, and letting old housing become the affordable housing.
You can also build affordable housing directly. We powered the post war period with a huge supply of starter homes.
Other countries have also directly attacked homelessness by simply building enough public housing such that anyone who wants a roof over their head can have one regardless of their ability to pay for it.
No, it's a pretty bad idea.
We don't mandate car manufacturers to build affordable cars (although they are free to). People with lower income rely (or should rely) on the used car market. Those cars are naturally affordable.
Car manufacturers build high margin cars for people with the money, people with the money leave a trail of used cars in their wake, people without money for a new car buy those used ones.
That's a totally sensible and functional market. No mandates or compelled charity needed.
You don't have to mandate anything of landlords. Public housing is a thing.
There are very successful examples.
And on the car side, there's plenty of very cheap new options. I can literally lease a new EV for ~$100/month. Who's voluntarily building starter homes anymore? We built fleets of those in the 50s, without the song and dance that they were luxury and required time to turn into starter homes. If anything in a lot of places, the starter homes of the 50s are the relatively expensive housing of today.
Generally speaking, legal requirements for elevated wages are another form of price fixing. The results of this price fixing are that fewer people will have jobs, the poorest people will be disenfranchised because it is not profitable to pay them a full salary, and the cost of everything in the city may very well be elevated due to more people willing/able to pay for the limited housing and other necessities. If you really want to help poor people, find a way to help them be more productive, and stop damaging the industries that get people the things they need.
You can see this in California with its mandated $20/hr fast food minimum wage. Restaurants responded by cutting workers or cutting hours.
https://www.nrn.com/quick-service/california-lost-16-000-res...
"It has been almost one year since California implemented a $20 minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers, and industry experts have been debating the long-term effects the wage jump would have on the industry’s job market.
As it turns out, thus far, the 33.3% wage increase for fast-food workers in California has resulted in almost 16,000 job losses — a decline of 2.8% — across the limited-service food industry from September 2023 (when AB 1228 was signed into law) until September 2024, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since the law went into effect in April, California’s limited-service restaurant industry has seen an employment rate decline of 2.5%."
Does that compare to other similar states over the same time? It hasn’t been a great year for restaurants anywhere afaik.
No they don't. Every time somebody tries to deport an illegal they scream.
Check argentina for a relative recent example of what happens when you put and then remove rent control.
Spoiler alert, the economy books and the economists are right
How does he explain Tokyo then ?
Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.
The city with declining population growth, aggressive rezoning to create supply, that still has 30 yr high rents in 2025?
Or any of these:
- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing
- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working
- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing
- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant
Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.
The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago.
Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life.
“it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments. But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
Not something I've seen in montreal
Rent stabilization (NYC jargon) already is here and is a mess. He's probably not about to make it worse.
Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
> If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble
The near-term effect will be a spike in market rates. If Mamdani delivers on new supply, rents should broadly flatten in real terms.
Oh have we thought about just seizing property at gunpoint to solve the housing prices. The Kulaks deserve it anyways.
Keeping a building rentable is a pretty reasonable criteria for… renting.
Except NYC has laws making it difficult to do. A 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost. Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant, since theyll lose money taking a loan to get units up to code.
> 2019 law they passed limits the amount a unit can have its rent increased in the case of a capital improvement at a small fraction of the capital cost
Source? This sounds like it only applies to stabilised apartments.
> Now that interest rates are higher land lords are forced to keep units vacant
Rental vacancies are similar to what they were in 2019 [1].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYRVAC
30% of housing in places like Hong Kong are rent controlled. The other 70% or so are strictly not so there’s plenty of incentive for the free market.
As if Cuomo was some economic genius. Look at all his campaign material - they were abject brain dead character smears and racism. If he was truly just trying to win by any means to supposedly save New Yorkers from economic disaster, he was a Machiavellian of the highest degree.
He used Orthodox Jewish communities with top down leaders as a core machine style voting bloc. The whole community turns out and did what the head guy says, just like the old Tammany Hall. I’m sure plenty of people “moved” from their upstate town back to Brooklyn. Usually the old style conservative Catholics vote for him too. (Oddly enough as his divorce and “living in sin” was scandalous)
The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.
It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.
> The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them
I voted for Zohran, but it’s worth noting that the demographic story isn’t all that clear: current counts show him losing to Cuomo in the Eastern Queens neighborhoods where those groups are significantly represented. Mamdani’s core voting base is “classic” NYC liberal: West side Manhattan, Northern Brooklyn, and Western Queens. That’s a relatively pasty set of areas, at least by NYC standards :-)
(The story with the Orthodox is also more nuanced: many of the sects like him, at least among the candidates. They like him because he’s made the right political noises around educational freedom re: yeshivas, and they absolutely despise Cuomo for his handling of COVID.)
One of the pieces of evidence you provided is a poll about what people thought the effects were and not the actual effects.
Isn't that odd?
What's an alternative though. It's easy to be critical and not solve people's problems
> who will be blamed?
20 bucks says Trump.
The literal alternative, which is actually happening right now and not some textbook hypothetical is supply not keeping up anyway and landlords charging however much they want pretty much unbridled, not to mention major companies snapping up real estate and leveraging it as investment collateral rather than treating them and managing them as, you know, housing.
We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.
Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
1. New york city has rent control on 1 million units already
2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible
3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply
(from wikipedia)
1. rent control is a specific, technical term which represents about 24k units
2. rent stabilized representing about 1M sets limits on rent increases in exchange for tax breaks for the building
3. corruption
Two of these things are orthogonal to freezes on rent controlled units, so I don't understand your point here.
I agree that 3. Is a problem. I'm not convinced mamadani is against reconsidering zoning and regulation to increase supply. Nothing I've heard suggest he would be.
No it doesn't. There are about 25,000 rent-controlled units, less than 1% of units in the City.
You are thinking of rent stabilization, but that's not close to the same thing.
They are both price controls on rent. The eligibility criteria are different, and the terms by which rent may increase are different, but they seem pretty close to the same thing to me.
You are woefully misinformed.
Take all of 90-120 seconds to inform yourself:
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/...
Why is it that anytime something like this comes up, ignoramouses like you crawl out from under whatever rock you've been sliming under to offer uninformed blather?
Nothing on that page contradicts anything I said.
The underlying cause of impoverishment where inflation of housing, healthcare, and education is outpacing income is an expansionist monetary policy. ZIRP (Zero interest policy) along with QE (quantitative easing) pushed ever increasing amounts of printed money into the system. No one is touching the root cause. Not Mamdani, not Democrats and not Republicans.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/12/08/13190...
"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money' December 8, 201010:39 AM ET By
Frank James
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.
On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:
BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...
Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "
Actually demand has being going down and rents have been trending down as a result. The main reason is less immigration and international students. I recall years ago every open house I would go to ended up selling above market value for cash from someone from overseas who "invests" their money on the back of locals trying to buy a house to live in for their family. The billionaires were not the ones to blame for this.
lol, going down according to who? https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york...
I don't doubt that immigration has probably marginally impacted the market, that doesn't change the fact that rent in NYC is still increasing YoY and is way too expensive.
And yes, the people extracting exorbitant rent cost are in fact the ones to blame. I don't understand people who seem to occupy a fairytale land in which they feel the need to defend billionaires as though they owe some fealty to them.
Making it about "sides" is exactly why politics is as toxic as it is today.
Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?
Politics is all about sides. To think it isn't is delusional.
It's uncomfortable to take sides, but that's what politics is. It's finding out what you believe is important (e.g. helping average people make ends meet, even if it require regulation, or eliminating regulation), you will end up taking sides whether you like it or not.
I think it's incredibly naive not to consider who our choices benefit. If your choices benefit people who already have massive amounts of wealth, you should acknowledge that and be aware of that and accept the consequences of that, and vice versa. Obviously in many cases it is complicated--your choices may benefit several different classes of people and undermine others. If anything the problem with politics is that many people make choices without considering what "sides" will benefit, letting ads, propaganda, and persuasion convince them instead. This leads people to actively vote against their own interests without even realizing it.
Doesn't this also apply in reverse? How many supporters of Mamdani acknowledge the groups that this choice will potentially harm? I am instead seeing people usually get defensive and downplay the potential harm on the more controversial issues. I also haven't seen anyone acknowledge that if the risk goes awry, it could end up causing even more harm to exactly those the policies were supposed to help.
If the goal is to vote for one's self interest, isn't it assuming a lot that this will always be aligned with one side? Sometimes self-interest means supporting one side on one issue, and a different side on a different issue. The act of taking a side is in of itself a form of compromise. I see nothing wrong with that, but that's not what people usually mean when they talk of sides.
> He is freezing rents only for select controlled units
45% of apartments in NYC
Rent-controlled units account for less than 1%. Rent-stabilized units for less than 25%.
Over 50% of rented units in New York are regulated somehow. 34% “rent stabilised pre-74”, 8% “rent stabilized post-73”, 1% rent controlled, 7% public housing, 2% other
1992 is a long time gone and economists aren’t always right. I don’t know how much worse the housing stock could get so maybe it’s time to try something different.
Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.
But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.
It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.
Nice to see someone young, charismatic, and highly energized breathing life into the decrepit democratic party. Hopefully he can accomplish a ton and repudiate the DNC.
I found out his mom directed the movies "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mississipi Masala" with Denzel Washington.
Allegedly she was tapped to direct "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", but her then 14 year old son talked her out of it to do "The Namesake" instead
Zohran's father is a famous post-colonial scholar. A college professor in my family has had him as part of curriculum for years.
TIL he is Mira Nair's son!. The namesake has a special place in my heart.
She is known for movies like Monsoon Wedding... but also Kama Sutra.
I’m not a New Yorker or even an American, but it’s interesting just how much coverage this election has gotten in social media.
I think most of his major policies are pretty bad, but I also think the reaction against him has been over the top.
He is going to need cooperation from the state legislature, if he wants to collect the taxes needed to fund his policies, and I’m not sure how successful he will be at that.
A lot of people are rooting both for and against him, so it’s going to be interesting either way.
Exciting times in New York City, I wish them the best, it probably will become a uphill battle now to do anything without media on every single thing out the wazooo
It will certainly be a lesson in economics, with hopefully some lasting effect. A decade later some will call it vaccination.
Who would have thought that New Yorkers didn’t appreciate out-of-state billionaires playing “Zohran did 9/11” attack ads over and over on TV for months on end. He was the only candidate with a clear plan for the city, and voters rewarded him for it.
I’m a big believer that the people elect the government they deserve. Let’s see how this plays out.
Honest, hardworking people deserve honest, hardworking government.
The fact that people in here (who are richer than average) disagree with his policies makes his election more hopeful
The reality, which kinda sucks and is boring, is that generally people with money understand how money works, and why things like rent control, government grocery stores, and free [expensive service], are financially brutal policies.
Brutal to who? Wage theft is also brutal, but it's pretty obvious why the folk who "understand how money works" condone it. It's a tad credulous to think the billionaires donated against Mamdani out of a sense of noblesse oblige
Brutal to everyone. Society is a chain linked web, not a loose cluster.
I wish the people building bunkers, buying New Zealand citizenship, support razing social safety nets for tax cuts, and fetishizing about civilizational collapse (while simultaneously chipping at its foundations aggressively) realized this.
Agreed. Thank you for pointing that out.
Absolutely. I love it.
Why is that? I think many of us who are educated in history understand the risks of collectivism. It has never worked out anywhere. I see it as basically a marketing cover for oligarchy. The Western world should aspire to better than China. I'm not even a conservative, just read a lot. Humanity has had some pretty hellish experiences with communism and yet we keep "going there."
Greetings from western europe. Not so bad and communist around here. They call it social capitalism.
Just don't commit blasphemy, which is literally a crime you can be charged with there.
Western Europe would have been collapsing right now if daddy cold capitalist didn't show up with gas and guns to drive away the Russian bear.
Western Europe has been on vacation for 30 years. There is no future where they can stay on the path they have been on. European leaders recognize this, but how the hell do you get a generation raised with an easy life to recognize this?
Germans work 400 hours a year less than Americans, and they celebrate that. Good luck.
I wish our country was like this. A city "president" can speak against the President. A city President has the power to work without the will of the President.
Really feels like off topic discussions are no longer enforced. I’m tired of HN being about politics :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How can not clicking on something be tiring? Coming in here to whine about it took significantly more effort.
There's no such thing as an off topic discussion on HN.
Good grief, NBC runs such shitty junk ads on their front page. What a blight on a once-great brand.
I love how much Mamdani pisses people off just because he wants to buck the status quo. I don’t think he’ll get everything implemented he wants but I respect the mission.
The DSA is finally having a moment - may they grow by the day.
Republicans have completely given up on cities and without being able to even field a worthy candidate it’s the sign of a dying party longer term. You simply have to have some influence in cities. But they had none after a 20 year run where they remade NYC after decades of failure. Bloomberg went independent but he got in as a Republican after a successful Giuliani admin (yes he’s tarnished that).
But what happened? Why can’t they field a competitive candidate in cities like NYC or SF or LA or Chicago after failed admin after failed admin? Why have they given up?
You need to control cities to have any future. They need to recommit to fighting for them.
> You need to control cities to have any future.
It seems like the strategy is to control state legislatures through extensive gerrymandering, then use state sovereignty to control the cities from without. Blue cities in otherwise red states are not able to experiment with local policies anymore, much to everyone’s detriment.
That’s not even the point though. You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power and you’ve yielded the important structures and financial capitals. That’s not a long term strategy.
And it’s not that difficult to win these things, especially when you look at how objectively poor the oppositions performance has been in them. Historically they’ve been contested.
They don't behave like a political party any more. It's not just the business of politics as usual and a generational shift, it's something different. I've been trying to coin a term for this internal takeover - I think nihilocracy, or nihilocratic populism, is the best I've come up with.
The party as a whole is uninterested in governing beyond seeking revenge and satisfying the charismatic eschatological movement that drives them. The leaders don't believe what they preach, they don't have policy goals besides "destroy what we hate", they don't have any conventional engagement with government beyond using it towards their own ends.
"Long term strategy" is a joke in this context. They're angry, they mobilize their supporters by promising revenge on a world that seems to be defying traditional structures and changing too fast. As with many reactionary movements aligned more by being "against" than "for", there's been little thought for what happens after the enemy has been defeated, and it's likely they'll continue seeking out new enemies until the movement dies from infighting or is ousted from power.
> You can always do these things but you still have no cultural power
That's when you use the power of the purse to contractually bind private businesses, non-profits, universities, etc, to your preferred values. Capital beats cultural power (or so goes the current gamble)
They are pushing Turning Point USA chapters at thousands of schools in the US.
The current Republican playbook seems to be heavily gerrymander a couple of states to dilute the city population impact. See: Texas
They all gerrymander though. But that’s not the point. The point is fleeing cities is what conquered people do. It wouldn’t even be hard to win them.
It's funny how in the US, even mayors get tagged as "conservative" or "democratic socialist." I always figured their job was just to keep the city services running.
That mayor runs a city that has the GDP of multiple nations. The scale is different even if the title is the same.
Aren’t mayors in all countries politicians? In Denmark all mayors are identified with their party association when talked about in the news.
Reviewing various western democracies it looks like most mayoral candidates run affiliated with a political party. The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.
> The exception is Canada where mayoral candidates run an independent campaign.
That's not universal. The City of Vancouver for example has a party system, though the parties are largely not affiliated with provincial or federal parties. There are exceptions there as well though - the Vancouver Greens are affiliated with both the provincial and federal Green parties.
Most of the large city mayoral races in the U.S. are partisan. But I'm not sure how it breaks down by state in the U.S. for small towns.
Maybe it's the exception rather than the norm, but in Canada, municipal, provincial, and federal parties are generally separate. Montreal, for example, is currently led by Projet Montréal, which has no formal ties to any provincial party. Likewise, the current provincial party, the CAQ, has no formal affiliation with any federal party.
Canada here (Ontario really, probably varies by province) - our mayors and city councilors are politicians but they're explicitly forbidden from running as part of a party. Which I honestly think works so well it should be extended to all levels of politics.
In Canada's largest city the mayor is firmly and strongly associated with the NDP. "Chow served as the New Democratic Party member of Parliament for Trinity—Spadina from 2006 to 2014."
And yet that was not the central in her run for mayor at all (I live in that city). She campaigned on policy, not on party branding, like every other candidate did.
in may places eg canada they don't have an explicit party affiliation. obviously they still have a political slant.
Well, define politician.
Some cities have non-partisan mayoral elections. For example, Miami does this under Home Rule charter.
Still, it's often clear who's who. For example, Emilio González prominently displayed a POTUS lapel pin during a debate and bragged about being able to interface with Trump and DeSantis.
This mayor represents more people than many state governors
There are lots of small towns in the U.S. where mayors and board members' campaigns are not partisan. That is, they don't run as members of a political party. Just candidates who campaign to "keep the city services running." There are no political parties listed on the ballot for these candidates.
I believe that in California, the political party that mayoral candidates belong to cannot be printed on the ballot next to their names.
You don't make yourself a name by properly managing garbage trucks and street sweeping. It's not just the US either, Australian local councils went headlong into culture wars long ago.
LaGuardia was a democratic socialist but had to run as a Republican because of Tammany Hall's undemocratic stranglehold on the Democratic party then. NYC has a history of a lot of really shitty, corrupt mayors and political machinery. Let's hope ZM charts a new course.
I'm optimistic that he will actually be a positive force in reforming how the city operates. I think he is pragmatic in that he understands that efficiency in government administration is something that progressives have insufficiently prioritized. His policies are more populist than I'd prefer, but I think not the crazy socialist fever dream that Rs portray it as. The scariest thing for me is the prospect of active sabotage from the federal level, although I don't know how much they have held back.
The gov't may try to fuck with NYC using ICE or whatever, but honestly I think the fears about federal funding are overblown.
NYC generates like 2+ trillion GDP all on its own. It is the largest metropolitan economy in the world let alone the United States. I don't know how much NYC actually depends on federal money, but if there's any city that has a chance to figure out how to make it through a government funding squeeze, it's NYC.
Honestly I think the only recourse the fed has to put pressure on NYC is the actual gestapo shit they've already been pulling in Chicago.
NYC will riot french style if ICE moves in en-masse
NYC will rot if it continues down this path.
> think not the crazy socialist fever dream that Rs portray
That's because he's a democratic socialist, not a communist like they want people to think. If people really looked into the policies of the DSA they would support it. There is a reason Einstein, Keller, and more were adamant supporters.
I watched clips from a DSA convention where they literally kept addressing each other as "comrade" lol. They are in fact communists. The distinctions between socialism and communism are rather academic and irrelevant in the long run. Communism is just the terminal form of socialist dysfunction.
"Comrade" didn't begin with the USSR.
So what? It is used almost exclusively by communists, in Hollywood and in real life.
That's because they are kept milquetoast as a way to nullify any left-wing movement.
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/21/fbi-colorado-springs-sur...
https://jacobin.com/2018/08/fbi-infiltration-new-left-aoki-s...
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012107432/how-a-former-spy-t...
https://indypendent.org/2019/02/lessons-from-the-fbis-secret...
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/10/deconstructed-fbi-inform...
The FBI infiltrates everything, apparently. That doesn't mean that these lunatics are all fake or insincere.
Great! Now time to get to work and see how hard it is to enact his policies.
I hope this turns out well for New York, but I am doubtful. Rent control is such a colossally bad idea, a rent freeze is going to be a disaster. This is going to further increase the lottery nature of New York City real estate, and reduce investment. His plans are set to drive finance and businesses out of the city in his goal to give away money to everyone, which will bankrupt the city. Socialism has a bad track record for a reason, there has never been an issue of people trying to escape market economies for socialist ones. The city already has a crime problem, defunding police and making the job unbearable wont help that. Grocery stores already run on razor thin margins, even with the logistics expertise and brutal capitalism of the likes of walmart or aldis, how does the famoisly expensive and incompetent nyc government plan on running a grocery store for cheaper (itll be at a massive loss). This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism “the boot of the nypd on your neck was laced by the idf” should have disqualified him, that kind of antisemetic talk was only on /pol/ like 2 years ago.
>This isnt even getting into hos antisemitism “the boot of the nypd on your neck was laced by the idf” should have disqualified him, that kind of antisemitic talk was only on /pol/ like 2 years ago.
Is that antisemitic? It's a fact that American cops are routinely trained by a foreign military with a track record of disregarding human rights. It's a fact that the NYPD has a recent history of police brutality. What's next? Mentioning that the US trained deathsquads in LATAM is Gringophobic?
Also I'm not that sure 4chan is worried about police brutality even if it's a excuse to say antisemitic slurs.
Zohran isn't proposing putting any new units under rent control (really rent stabilization), only temporarily halting raises to rents for existing stabilized units. This will make it harder for the city to attract new buildings to join rent stabilization in the future, but will benefit existing habitants. It won't have any effect on the ability to profitably develop market rate units at all.
Property developer here. I have zero faith that NYC would not put rent control on new units in the future. I will invest nothing in NYC and will tell every other developer I know to avoid it like the plague.
If NYC actually makes it easy to build there's practically infinity investment available. Sure dude, nobody will build >1M condos because you told them not to.
It's unfortunate because all you have to do is talk to landlords to figure out what's happening (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbGulTc4TY). Lots of people own buildings, but they're legally prevented from renting them out without taking a loss. The result is you can't bring units back onto the market after they empty, and it becomes harder to find housing.
Austin reduced rent prices by ~20% by building more housing even as the overall city population grew. Other small cities have seen rents decrease through active immigration policing. We know how to fix housing pricing there's just no motivation too, people want expensive, exclusive neighborhoods
Mamdani has said basically none of the things you claim here. These are all clearly mischaracterizations of what he's actually said aimed and convincing someone like you to think he's a bad choice. In particular Mamdani has been extremely clear that he has no plans to defund the police in any fashion. In fact, he wants to enable NYPD to get back to solving crimes rather than incidents better handled by mental health professionals (e.g. people tweaking, by themselves, all alone, on the subway platform)
How about watch some actual interviews in which Mamdani states what he wants to do rather than only get your information from third parties who clearly want to emphasize particular angles?
Perhaps you don't know what you are talking about?
Their profile says they’re from philly so yeah. . .
Socialism works in places with more or less homogenous populations. I always hear Norway/Sweden have universial everything. Yes they do cause taxes are sky high and the culture there is more or less the same.
NYC is not Norway.
People in Norway let babies sleep outside the supermarket when they go shopping. When you have that level of trust in a society, socialism has a fighting chance for sure.
I think the establishment messed up big time here and Mamdami snatched it up.
I don't know why people reflexively vote down comments like this one since it is completely reasonable in every way. Just, I guess, leftists who can't accept viewpoints they don't agree with? Like really--read some history books, maybe read up on how bad communism was in Eastern Europe and what led to its total collapse? Let's not go down that road again! There's plenty of examples out there already. I don't even get the hatred for Israel thing particularly, either--WWII was really, really bad for Jews. They deserve a homeland of their own and all these people complaining and calling everyone Nazis need to take a long look in the mirror--the major component of Nazism was ANTISEMITISM! It is morally reprehensible and it's been a struggle since 1948 because that hatred endures.
Maybe it's because you're throwing around terms like "communism" incorrectly while simultaneously telling people they need to read history books.
It's the same term Trump has been using to fear monger around Zoran's candidacy, and doesn't seem to relate to any of his actual policies.
If you can enlighten us about the relationship between 1950s soviet bloc communism in eastern europe and a fairly run-of-the-mill 2020s Bernie-styled democratic socalist platform, I'm all ears.
If you're genuinely open to this conversation - the Soviet Union funded many of the world's labor movements, giving it varying amounts of influence on them. Influence which it sometimes used to spread talking points of its own choice and to its benefit. Democratic Socialists of America was born from a branch of one of these movements. This is more visible looking at DSA's foreign policy platform, where today they use virtually identical talking points to those the Soviet Union distributed to their partners back in the 60s and 70s.
Crimes in the city is down in the long term and there's been a Covid spike that also happened around the country regardless of the elected officials.
I'm happy he won. It's symbolic of voter dissatisfaction. Someone's got to take billionaires on and it might as well be a 34 year old mayor of NYC. Why not?
It's honestly staggering how much older Trump is than this guy. 45 years!
Agreed. Really hoping that a conservative candidate with a pulse can run in a city with a campaign that targets younger voters. I think that a socially aware fiscally conservative YIMBY would have a real chance in a lot of cities.
The fact that Zohran won should be a wake up call to both parties, but I won’t hold my breath.
I’m just glad that it seems like people actually care, even if I think it will end up poorly. An overall win.
You're happy to find out dissatisfied people outnumber satisfied ones? Do you think his election is likely to make more people satisfied?
What's the issue with billionaires?
It is impossible to make $1 billion morally.
They shouldn’t exist
edit: unsure of how to delete this, I commented on the wrong state's election oops.
We detached/collapsed this comment. You can post the comment you meant to post where it's meant to go :)
Which high speed rail projects are you referring to?
Because their federal funding will be taken away?
While I don't 100% agree with his policies, I cannot be more excited for someone completely opposite of the corrupt establishment Republicans and Democrats.
I was sold when he was willing to back down on some of his own views publicly, admitting publicly that he was wrong on some things. That kind of admission and honesty is so refreshing.
Complete opposite of Trump, MAGA, and constant lies. Kudos NYC! Time for a new era.
> I was sold when he was willing to back down ...
Also, he deserves credit for not backing down. A major push calling you a pro-9/11 jihadist? Release an ad speaking Arabic two days before the election.
There's never been a dumber time in history to claim that Republicans and Democrats are comparable.
As someone not in the US that doesn't pay a whole heap of attention, is it just me or did he run mostly uncontested? Running against a republican and a disgraced politician?
No clue what mamdani is like, but it seems like NYC had little to no choice...which is a bit disappointing.
It's unusual that Cuomo ran as an independent trying to "spoil"-- but NYC has such a large number of Democrats (like many US cities) that the more competitive and important election is typically the primary election (which determines who is running for each party). NYC has had a history of sometimes going other directions (as Cuomo's relatively high vote shows; having elected Michael Bloomberg many times, for example).
Mamdani won the primary for the democrats over Cuomo, but Cuomo decided to try and do an independent run to further challenge him.
If there's one thing the USA needs less of, it's political dynasties.
Unfortunately that's kind of the reality for NYC. Since Bloomberg left it's been a one party city and ranked choice voting is implemented in the primary but not the general election. That means Democrats can feel comfortable voting for the most radical candidate in the primary without fear they might flop in the general election. Until we get ranked choice in the general election moderates and non-democrats don't really have a voice. This is especially true if multiple candidates run against the democratic nominee like in this election.
RCV is quickly being outlawed state wide by conservative pushes. I think it was 34 states had banned it last I checked.
This is not the case. His main opponent was Cuomo who was the Democrat "establishment" candidate. Zohran narrowly defeated Cuomo in the primary. Typically that's it but Cuomo took the unconventional strategy of running independently in the general with the backing of establishment Democrats.
Typically, the Republican candidate would have no chance in a city like NYC. This was the case here as well, but Cuomo calculated that with the backing of establishment Democrats AND the backing of Republicans/conservatives, he'd be able to defeat Mamdani. The Republican candidate did not agree to drop out, however. In the end it didn't matter though because Zohran Mamdani won by a larger margin than Cuomo and the Republican combined
In a typical election, the main election is the primary (which happened back in June). The Democrat nominee is pretty much guaranteed to win so the general is almost a formality. This general election was actually more contested than is typical
tl;dr: his main opponent was establishment democrats
> Zohran narrowly defeated Cuomo in the primary.
13% is not narrow
To a reasonable person, yes, this should have been the case, but politics in America is far from reasonable.
The entire establishment marshaled what forces it could to stop mamdani's momentum. Couple this with the fact that there are (unfortunately) many people out there who would rather elect accused sex offenders than risk the chance that somebody marginally aligned with a word and ideology they don't actually understand (socialism) would be elected, or more likely, and worse, people are just racist and/or islamophobic and would sooner elect a man who would grope their daughter than a man who, god forbid, has a different religion than them.
I mean, if you call "running uncontested" going up against the current mayor, former governor, the editorial board of the NYT and WAPO, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the Speaker of the House, the Senate and House leadership of the Democratic party, not to mention the entire rightwing media apparatus, and the President of the United States himself, yeah he ran uncontested.
Ackman, Bloomberg, ...
Silwa pretty much screwed coumo, would of been a tight race if he dropped. Curious to see what happens to NYC if some of the socialist ideas actually get implemented.
I think AOC will likely challenge Schumer for his seat now that mandami won.
More like Cuomo screwed Sliwa, if Cuomo wanted to run against the Democratic candidate, he should have ran as a Republican. He already lost the primary and took his sour grapes to the general.
Fair point, either way im not sure how they didnt see this happening. Both were the same more or less with Coumo being more moderate.
With 90% reporting Mamdami's lead is larger then Sliwa + Cuomo. Mandami won, not Cuomo and Sliwa lost.
Yeah, I looked when they called and it was very close. More stating, it was inevitable with those 3.
Need to see how stocks will react tomorrow!! Nyc mayor mamdani ! Crash at Louisville airport and judgement on trump tariffs !! 1 billion Bitcoin liquidation!
NYC demonstrably enjoys a cost of living problem, amongst other issues. But I’m not sure how Israel is to blame, as Mamdani has claimed. Maybe when any of his policy prescriptions fail, then we would know who should be blamed.
When has Mamdani claimed Israel is to blame for NYC’s cost of living problem?
He has not. In fact Mamdani is the only candidate who has consistently sought to stop the incessant focus on Israel and talk about New York, something the media and the poster above are still incapable of doing. This is partly what got him elected.