Should We Be Rooting for Zohran Mamdani?

Is it a good thing or a bad thing if Zohran Mamdani becomes the next mayor of New York City?

As a conservative, it seems to me it could be both. It’s certainly going to be a disaster for the city and the people who live there. I wouldn’t wish that on my fellow Americans, even the ones living in a deep blue city. 

On the other hand, they are asking for it. Maybe another object lesson in progressive failure is what is needed. That seems to be the only thing that works with a certain type of blue-city voter. It has worked, to some degree in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and even Los Angeles. After dabbling with defunding the police and autonomous zones and extreme takes on criminal justice reform (such as never charging minors as adults), they’ve all had second thoughts. Some of the more extreme DA’s have been recalled. It turns out you can go too far left but many voters had to actually do it before they could believe it.

I say all that by way of introducing this story at the NY Post about Zohran Mamdani. Just how extreme is this guy?

Is Zohran Mamdani a Democrat Socialists of America loyalist or not?

As best we can tell, it depends who he’s talking to — a fellow believer or the voting public.

He’s bragged that all his ideas “emanate” from the DSA, but is desperately rushing to distance himself from most of the loony DSA program of social and economic revolution.

“My platform is not the same as national DSA or any DSA organization,” he now insists, but told the opposite story less than a year ago: “I have spent the last four years being a DSA elected official,” he proudly announced at an event recruiting new members in November…

DSA-NYC has scrubbed its website of its kooky priorities, but archived versions from 2021 — after it elected Mamdani to the Assembly — call for decriminalizing all drugs; letting illegal immigrants vote and hold elected office; seizing private land to build public housing; dealing with 26-year-old criminals as youth offenders; and letting minors have sex changes without parental consent.

The Post has a companion article in which it lays out the DSA agenda circa 2021. I’m pulling together a bunch of items from that article that were DSA positions when Mamdani became a member. What’s relevant about all of these is that, so far, Mamdani has refused to say where he stands on every one of these issues.

• Expunge all convictions of drug crimes, sex work, and petty offenses and immediately release all who are incarcerated for such crimes.
• Change the use of “youthful offender” prosecutions to enable young adults up to age 26 to be kept out of the criminal justice system whenever possible.
• Replace the toothless, unaccountable Civilian Complaint Review Board with an Elected Civilian Review Board empowered to prosecute police misconduct. Institute other measures that empower direct community control of the police, such as a community board.
• Implement use of civil liberties supervisors in police precincts. 
• Expand the right to vote in local and state elections to all New Yorkers, and the ability to hold political office, regardless of immigration status.
• End state and local contracts with companies that contract with DHS and ICE and share data with ICE.
• End the use of police and school safety officers in schools.
• End teacher evaluations on the basis of standardized testing.
• Allocate funds to push DEI in public schools.
• Allow trans minors access to transition related care without parental consent.
• Pass Universal Rent Control.

Again, these aren’t things Mamdani has committed to doing but they are things his party was pushing just a few years ago. His position on all of these items remains unknown. 

When asked in detail about each of the planks on Thursday, Mamdani’s campaign refused to say whether he still ascribes to the values of the DSA, which he joined in 2017.

“Zohran’s affordability agenda is crystal clear: if Zohran has not publicly endorsed or spoken on a position during the campaign, it is not a part of his mayoral platform,” said Mamdani campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec.

Saying it’s not part of your platform isn’t the same as saying you disagree. It’s more like saying you don’t want to talk about your extreme positions which, even in NYC, might cost your votes at some point.

Are voters really going to elect this guy? This week there was the first tentative sign that some of them might be having second thoughts.

A new poll shows what could happen if the New York City mayor’s race was a head-to-head matchup between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

According to the poll by Tulchin Research, if all candidates remain in the race, Mamdani still has the lead with 42%, followed by Cuomo with 26%, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa with 17%, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams with 9% and independent candidate Jim Walden with 3%.

The tantalizing question is, what would happen if Adams, Sliwa and Walden dropped out, leaving Cuomo and Mamdani in a two-person race?

The poll says if they went at it mano a mano, Cuomo would beat Mamdani, 52% to 41%.

So who do you root for here? I can’t root for Cuomo given his previous tenure and self-promotion as the hero of the pandemic. On the other hand, it’s crazy to hand America’s biggest city over to Mamdani. But maybe this is a case where going way too far left is what New York City voters need to learn a lesson about going too far left? 

His tenure would be awful but maybe after that voters would move back to the center a bit. Of course that’s sort of how we got the current mayor after voters got tired of the previous socialist in office. I don’t live there so the choice isn’t up to me, but as an observer part of me is rooting for NYC to do this. Think of all the great blog content he would generate.