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\n Photo-Illustration: Joe Darrow\n <\/p>\n
The opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s new season may be the last place you would expect to find yet another sign that Zohran Mamdani is on a glide path to City Hall. The audience is older, more affluent, and, one can safely speculate, less socialist than most audiences for the performing arts in New York. It is the very definition of well-heeled uptown Manhattan\u2019s political and cultural status quo. Yet it turns out that even at the Met \u2014 yes, the Met, where Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s warhorse productions of La Boh\u00e8me and Turandot are both in repertory this season \u2014 there are New Yorkers clamoring for change.<\/p>\n
Such, for me at least, was the takeaway from the scene that unfolded at the September 21 premiere of the new opera inspired by Michael Chabon\u2019s Holocaust-haunted novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In keeping with tradition, the company\u2019s general manager, Peter Gelb, appeared in front of the curtain before it went up to deliver a few welcoming remarks \u2014 albeit this time spiked with an impassioned paean to artistic freedom that drew a standing ovation. Once he finished, an unexpected player popped out of the wings: Chuck Schumer, the most powerful Democrat in Washington and the most durable lion of Democratic politics in New York. Why was he there? Not for the opera. He breezed on- and offstage with the casual affect of someone dropping by before a round of pickleball. He had come to pander to the mishpocheh on the safe turf of the Upper West Side. In his brief remarks, he gave the same vow to protect artistic freedom Gelb just had, name-checking Jimmy Kimmel for good measure. But this time the audience did not cheer. \u201cDo something about it!\u201d shouted a heckler from a perch on high. Waves of boos followed, drowning out some light applause and implicitly giving Schumer the hook.<\/p>\n
Not a single word he said was in any way objectionable. The jeers were for the messenger, not the message.<\/p>\n
Why were people booing? First and foremost, I\u2019d say, out of frustration that Schumer and his fellow New Yorker in Washington\u2019s Democratic leadership, the House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, have failed to slow the damage that Donald Trump has inflicted on the Republic since Inauguration Day. That\u2019s unfair, of course: The Democratic caucus in Washington is in the minority with few cards to play. Yet Schumer\u2019s the guy in charge, so it comes with the territory that he is a sitting duck for the outrage. And heaven knows he has done his best to deserve it. He has often played his few cards badly \u2014 e.g., the previous congressional budget showdown in March \u2014 failing to pour even a modicum of sand into the well-oiled gears of Trump\u2019s fierce second administration. And he is a tone-deaf spokesman for the opposition \u2014 culturally, demographically, rhetorically, and politically, whether speaking from the well of the Senate or the stage of an opera house.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s also a local component to the hostility that greeted him at the Met, I suspect. On this late-September night, it had been three months since Mamdani had won the mayoral primary in a rout. And what had Schumer, a hometown boy who rose to be the state\u2019s senior senator, to say about it? Nothing. It was now six weeks before Election Day, barely a month before early voting, and a week after the state\u2019s middle-of-the-road Democratic governor weighed in from upstate with an endorsement. Yet Schumer was still ducking the Mamdani question on Sunday-morning talk shows with a deer-in-the-headlights panic recalling a notable Brooklyn forebear, the bus driver Ralph Kramden, when he tried to hawk a kitchen gadget in a live television commercial in a classic episode of The Honeymooners. The fact that Schumer hadn\u2019t endorsed anyone by this late date was as damning as if he had endorsed, say, Eric Adams. His Hamlet shtick on the question most roiling his hometown could be seen as a proxy for the fecklessness of Washington Democrats writ large.<\/p>\n
It was striking to see Schumer, who is nothing if not a finely tuned political animal, fail so completely to read the room. He\u2019s in good company. Another institution of liberal Democratic New York, the New York Times, has been trying to win back some of its most loyal readers ever since it ran a tortured \u201cOpinion\u201d piece titled \u201cOur Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor\u201d ahead of the primary.<\/p>\n
Only last year, after all, the paper had declared it was no longer endorsing candidates in local races. In this June missive from the editorial board, it went back on that word. The editorial dismissed both Adams (whose \u201cevident corruption and sloppy management style make clear that he does not deserve reelection\u201d) and Mamdani (\u201cWe do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers\u2019 ballots\u201d) before arriving at this verdict on Andrew Cuomo: \u201cWe have serious objections to his ethics and conduct even if he would be better for New York\u2019s future than Mr. Mamdani.\u201d Even readers who suck at Wordle could figure out the Times\u2019 non-endorsement was a backhanded endorsement of the thuggish and disgraced former governor.<\/p>\n
The outcry at the editorial board\u2019s disingenuous hedge on the mayor\u2019s race was tantamount to the pockets of boos that greeted Schumer. \u201cThis is corporate gobbledygook and basically an endorsement of Cuomo\u201d was readers\u2019 most recommended comment of the thousand-plus posted online. They knew their intelligence was being insulted. There were parallel complaints about the Times\u2019 reportage: It did not see Mamdani\u2019s electoral rout coming, and it often covered him dismissively or unfairly. Check out the paper\u2019s defensive deflection and double-talk in an attempt to explain itself \u2014 a July posting headlined \u201c21 Questions About the N.Y.C. Mayor\u2019s Race, Answered.\u201d More than a month after the primary, the Times was still trying and failing to explain why it had devoted three reporters and 32 paragraphs to a piece convicting Mamdani for having \u201cchecked a box that he was \u2018Asian\u2019 but also \u2018Black or African American\u2019\u2009\u201d in a college application whose cookie-cutter questionnaire didn\u2019t accommodate the nuanced origins of the Uganda-born child of an Indian family that moved to New York when he was 7. It was a stretch to imply that Mamdani, as a high-school senior, was pulling a fast one: The application was to Columbia, where (a) his family history is an open book (his father has been a prominent professor there since the turn of the century) and (b) he wasn\u2019t admitted (despite his father). This time, the most popular Times reader comment was \u201cThis is insanely low, racist, and desperate \u2026 Truly insane (and just unacceptable) that this was framed like this. Or reported at all! Who cares!\u201d The paper has been conspicuously backpedaling since then with ever expanding, and ever more sympathetic, coverage, culminating in mid-October when, mere weeks before Election Day, the Times Magazine ran an overdue profile that all but declared Mamdani the winner of the race.<\/p>\n
As totems of New York\u2019s liberal Establishment like the Times and Schumer have missed the point, appeal, and political prowess of Mamdani, so have many of my own specific demographic. I am a Jew, I am more than twice Mamdani\u2019s age, I have mostly voted for Democrats, I have supported Israel since I first was able to \u201cgrow\u201d trees for it while preparing for my bar mitzvah, and I will have a higher tax bill if he succeeds in his governing ambitions.<\/p>\n
I have heard my peer group\u2019s objections to Mamdani and often find them as disingenuous as the Times\u2019 \u201cAdvice to Voters.\u201d<\/p>\n
No. 1: Mamdani has little experience. Absolutely correct. He has never run a large organization of any kind and has a slender political r\u00e9sum\u00e9. This puts him on a par with Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump (the Trump Organization doesn\u2019t qualify as either \u201clarge\u201d or an \u201corganization\u201d). But unlike them, he is willing to settle for being mayor of a single city, not president of all 50 states.<\/p>\n
No. 2: His plans are impractical. Also true. Free buses? A crazy idea Mike Bloomberg also failed to make happen. Freezing stabilized rents? Yes, Bill de Blasio already did that, but even if it proves just a provocative opening gambit in addressing the crisis of affordable housing, Mamdani\u2019s relentless focus moved it to the top of the election\u2019s agenda. Five city-owned grocery stores as a pilot program to try to lower prices and expand shopping options in underserved neighborhoods? That the right-wing radio blowhard John Catsimatidis, who owns the Gristedes and D\u2019Agostino chains, is one of Mamdani\u2019s most vociferous adversaries is itself an argument for giving the experiment a shot.<\/p>\n
No. 3: He is a democratic socialist. The Democratic Party has fallen so low in public approval \u2014 63 percent disapproval, the lowest in 35 years, according to a Wall Street Journal poll in July \u2014 why not rebrand it? \u201cThe Washington Commanders\u201d has already been taken, but even \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d may be an upgrade.<\/p>\n
Socialists, after all, is not the scare word it once was. The Cold War ended the same year Mamdani was born, and socialism\u2019s political meaning has blurred ever since. A recent Cato Institute\u2013YouGov national poll found that 62 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29, Democrats and Republicans alike, have a \u201cfavorable view\u201d of it. Even Trump endorses socialism now. He claims, however deceitfully, to be the protector of Medicare and Medicaid, long demonized by his own party (along with Obamacare) as \u201csocialized medicine.\u201d He has announced a plan for a mammoth state-owned online drug supermarket, branded TrumpRx, that will exert government control over big-pharma retail prices. (Pfizer and AstraZeneca have already enlisted.) He is also semi-nationalizing Intel, Nvidia, and U.S. Steel by demanding the U.S. get a cut of their corporate profits. The favored Trump epithet \u201ccommie\u201d has likewise lost its old zing. No one in New York did more to normalize communism than Trump\u2019s stooge Adams. He and his political sidekick Winnie Greco have long been as thick as thieves with the Chinese government, its lobbyists, and its moneybags. Though Trump derides Mamdani as a communist, New York\u2019s sitting mayor was truly our Manchurian candidate, may he RIP.<\/p>\n
Even as Mamdani\u2019s political opponents and opinion gatekeepers like the Times mocked the absurdity of his policy catechism, you would be hard-pressed to find a voter during the primary campaign who could name one, let alone three, policy planks favored by Cuomo or Adams. For all the rewriting of political norms in this era, one maxim is still inviolate: You can\u2019t fight something with nothing. The Times\u2019 editorial board\u2019s veiled endorsement of Cuomo never specified which policies he was offering that promised to be \u201cbetter for New York\u2019s future\u201d for the simple reason there weren\u2019t any. He hasn\u2019t lived in the city for decades and is so out of touch that in a postprimary Times interview he couldn\u2019t name a single living Democrat he admired.<\/p>\n
No. 4: All the city\u2019s rich people are going to move to Florida. Excuse me, but weren\u2019t the same threats made when de Blasio was running? At least some of those who might move this time may be forced to dedicate some of their tax savings to a worthy cause: trying to re-eradicate the diseases that will threaten their nearest and dearest, not to mention their household staffs in Miami and Palm Beach, once Ron DeSantis\u2019s anti-vaxx MAHA public-health regime starts chipping away at Florida\u2019s previous standing as a polio-and-measles-free state.<\/p>\n
But of all the arguments wielded against Mamdani, the most vehement \u2014 and the true political epicenter of this election \u2014 has been the insinuation by Cuomo and Adams, the wealthiest donors that promoted them (Democrats and Trump billionaires alike), and the Murdoch right that Mamdani is an antisemite and a Hamas sleeper cell, an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to the city if not civilization as we know it. There is no evidence to support this fearmongering unless being a Muslim and an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s conduct of the war in Gaza counts as such. Mamdani\u2019s announcement that he will discourage Palestinian supporters from calling to \u201cGlobalize the intifada,\u201d rather than condemn its use, is another red herring. He doesn\u2019t use the phrase himself, and neither he nor anyone else can police the language of the American multitudes who sympathize with the Palestinians. Even 28 percent of Cuomo voters sympathize with Palestinians, according to the postprimary Times poll. If Cuomo wants to emulate Trump and recklessly conflate any pro-Palestinian rhetoric with Hamas, he will reap still more self-inflicted political damage on Election Day. Someone should remind him he\u2019s running for mayor of multicultural New York, not warden of Alligator Alcatraz.<\/p>\n
The fact is that Mamdani\u2019s views on Israel\u2019s conduct of the Gaza war have become majority opinion in New York, America, and most of the western world. This was the case long before most New Yorkers had heard of him, let alone cast a primary vote for him for mayor. Indeed, it was the inability of the Cuomo and Adams forces to acknowledge the rapidity of Israel\u2019s erosion in public opinion that led them (as well as Schumer and the Times) to underestimate him. They all seemed to assume he would be disqualified by New York voters from the get-go because he is a Muslim and an unstinting critic of the Israeli government. But over the two long years of war that followed the horrific atrocities of October 7, Netanyahu managed to transform America\u2019s universal support of Israel into widespread antipathy. By the time the cease-fire arrived, Israel had lost a whole generation of young American supporters and many of their elders as well. Most Americans simply did not buy the Israeli government\u2019s proposition that the righteous cause of eliminating Hamas justified slaughtering more than 67,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of them children. Rather than repulse the primary electorate and drive them to Cuomo and Adams, Mamdani\u2019s indictment of Israel made voters, especially those under 45, take a hard look at him and listen to what he was saying about other issues, starting with affordability. It\u2019s part of why he won a plurality of the city\u2019s Jewish primary voters as well as winning the primary outright.<\/p>\n
As Patrick Gaspard, the former Obama aide advising his campaign, told me, Mamdani\u2019s stand on Gaza had a similar political side effect to Obama\u2019s opposition to the Iraq War in 2008. Obama\u2019s Democratic presidential-primary rivals \u2014 Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards \u2014 as well as liberal Senate lions like Schumer, John Kerry, and Dianne Feinstein, all had supported the Iraq War resolution. Obama had not. That separated him from the pack and gave Democratic voters \u201ca permission structure,\u201d as Gaspard puts it, to look at this little-known outsider with \u201ca funny name\u201d and sample what he had to say about other issues at stake on Election Day. Once they did, they ended up spurning the birther conspiracy theories tarring Obama much as they are the Islamophobic smears wielded against Mamdani.<\/p>\n
Perhaps if the New York powers that be had glanced at polling about Israel during the primary campaigns, they might have figured out that what they deemed Mamdani\u2019s biggest political weakness was in fact his not-so-secret sauce. Perhaps Cuomo might have realized that his grandstanding offer to join Netanyahu\u2019s legal team if he were tried on war crimes was more likely to drive voters away than win them over.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what Cuomo and his camp missed while in their bubble: In July, Gallup found that only 32 percent of Americans approved of Israel\u2019s military action in Gaza (60 percent disapproved). In mid-August, a YouGov\u2013Economist poll chimed in, finding that the share of Americans \u201cwho say their sympathies in the conflict lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians had reached a 25-year low.\u201d Americans\u2019 long-held \u201clargely favorable view of Israel,\u201d as The Economist put it in a cover story, had \u201cevaporated\u201d since the war began, with 43 percent of all Americans believing that \u201cIsrael is committing a genocide in Gaza.\u201d The biggest drop is among Democrats \u2014 not just young Democrats but those over 50, \u201cwhose negative views of Israel have surged by 23 percentage points over the past three years.\u201d Israel fares better among Republicans, but they too are starting to slip away. Half of those under 50 now see Israel negatively, 48 percent positively \u2014 \u201ca stark change from 2022, when the margin was 35 percent to 63 percent,\u201d per The Economist. That shift is even starker among young Evangelical Christians. The magazine cites as the last reliable polling a UNC survey in which \u201cthe share of evangelicals under the age of 30 who supported Israelis over Palestinians plummeted from 69 percent to 34 percent between 2018 and 2021. Researchers reckon the shift is enduring, according to the magazine, though there hasn\u2019t been sufficient polling since. These findings have since been ratified by the bottom line of a late-September Times-Siena poll in which more American voters sided with Palestinians over Israelis \u201cfor the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israel is losing the support of American Jews in comparable numbers. A Washington Post poll last month found they are in virtually complete agreement (94 percent) that Hamas is guilty of war crimes. But that unity did not prevent an overwhelming majority (61 percent) of American Jews from finding Israel guilty of the same. Unsurprisingly, the New York City electorate agrees. Those in the political class who assumed Mamdani\u2019s stance on Israel was the kryptonite that would destroy him were deluding themselves. The first postprimary Times-Siena poll of registered New York City voters in early September found, by a lopsided margin (44 percent to 26 percent), that the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel sympathized more with Palestinians. (The only age group that favors Israel, the poll shows, is 65-plus.) By a slightly more lopsided amount (51 percent to 31 percent), voters agreed \u201cthat criticizing Israel is not inherently antisemitic.\u201d In what may be the understatement of the decade, the Times concluded that its poll\u2019s findings \u201cunderscore just how much Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo may have misread the electorate by expending energy to attack Mr. Mamdani\u2019s views on Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n
To put a finer point on it, Cuomo also misread the political value of playing the Islamophobia card. Facing an instant backlash, he tried to deny having any knowledge of a stunt in which Fix the City, the deep-pocketed PAC backing him, had created a campaign mailer that thickened and darkened Mamdani\u2019s beard to portray him as a jihadist. (He couldn\u2019t deny that the proposed flyer existed; a reporter for The Forward found it and posted it online.) For years, Cuomo also denied that he\u2019d had anything to do with the vote VOTE FOR CUOMO, NOT THE HOMO posters that popped up in Brooklyn and Queens when he was driving his father\u2019s 1977 mayoral race against Ed Koch. He is nothing if not consistent. Say this for Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral candidate: Unlike either Cuomo or Adams, he has never tried to portray Mamdani as a terrorist or played footsie with Trump. And in the also-ran sweepstakes, it might have paid off: In the last Marist poll before Adams (polling 9 percent) dropped out, Sliwa, at 17 percent, was far closer to Cuomo, at 24 percent, than Cuomo was to Mamdani, at 45 percent.<\/p>\n
Ostensible supporters of Israel like Cuomo and his backers have been living in denial by ignoring Israel\u2019s current plight among American voters. To try to pin any of that crisis on a 33-year-old first-time mayoral candidate unknown to the vast majority of those being polled is sheer myopia. Should Mamdani be elected, his actions won\u2019t move the needle on Israel no matter what he says or does. He has repeatedly vowed to bring passion and resources to the battle against antisemitism in his city \u2014 a cause in which a mayor may plausibly make some difference.<\/p>\n
The superrich Anyone But Mamdani Cuomo backers mostly refrain, meanwhile, from criticizing those American political figures who do have clout over Israel\u2019s future and the welfare of American Jews \u2014 starting with the current president. If Trump\u2019s efforts in fact produce a lasting peace, he may get and even deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has been coveting nearly as long as his elusive prime-time Emmy. It was revealing, however, that he at long last strong-armed Netanyahu into a cease-fire and hostages-for-prisoners deal only after the targeted Israeli air strike on senior Hamas officials in Qatar. That timing was a stark reminder, if one were needed, that a potentially less than altruistic motive driving the process was Trump\u2019s desire to make sure he, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff remain on the right side of the Gulf Arab potentates needed to enable future business deals like the crypto and real-estate get-rich-quick schemes Witkoff\u2019s son has been pitching in Qatar throughout the peace negotiations.<\/p>\n
As is always the case with the transactional Trump, his support for Israel could well wane the moment there\u2019s nothing in it for him monetarily or politically. There\u2019s already pressure from his own base to do so. The next generation of MAGA leadership has moved on. Two of Trump\u2019s most powerful allies, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, are critics of enduring U.S. support for Israel. The ever-shape-shifting J.\u2009D. Vance, who owes his vice-presidency to Carlson, may well divest from Israel once real power is in the offing post-Trump. He\u2019ll go where the votes are: \u201cEverybody under 30 is against Israel\u201d is how his loyal media booster Megyn Kelly summed up the political equation on Carlson\u2019s podcast.<\/p>\n
These anti-Israel right-wing forces will be joined by MAGA heroes trafficking in undisguised antisemitism like Kash Patel, who has appeared eight times on the podcast of the notorious Holocaust denier Stew Peters since 2021 and claimed during his confirmation hearings to be FBI director that he had no recollection of Peters. Not to mention the irrepressible Marjorie Taylor Greene, who theorized that Jewish space lasers financed by the Rothschilds caused the California wildfires in 2018 and who in July made a failed bid to cut $500 million in defense assistance to Israel. And rising young MAGA stars in the Trump administration like Kingsley Wilson, Pete Hegseth\u2019s 20-something press secretary. Wilson tweeted in 2023 that Leo Frank, the Atlanta Jew who was wrongly convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in 1913 and then kidnapped and lynched by an antisemitic mob, was in fact guilty of that murder as well as of rape. It was the Frank trial that helped inspire B\u2019nai B\u2019rith to form the Anti-Defamation League in the first place. Who would have imagined that a century later the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense would try to rewrite the history of this landmark atrocity in American antisemitism to recast Frank as the villain?<\/p>\n
We can only imagine what will be in store for Josh Shapiro from this crowd in a presidential run. Both Carlson and Hegseth are devoted followers of the powerful Christian-nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson, whose movement has the long-term goal of barring non-Christians from public office, as The Wall Street Journal reported last month. It was not happenstance that Trump\u2019s repeated broadsides about political violence did not extend to expressing public sympathy for Shapiro and his family when the Pennsylvania governor\u2019s residence was firebombed on the first night of Passover.<\/p>\n
The curious silence of Anybody But Mamdani donors of the Bill Ackman breed, especially Jewish donors, about the truly pressing threats to Israel and American Jewry by those at the pinnacle of American power has a Vichy taint to it. Rather than confront the decline of American support for Israel, they\u2019d rather throw money at a mayoral race they have probably already lost. (Ackman tossed $1 million into the Cuomo campaign as a Hail Mary pass in mid-October.) Even a poll commissioned by one of their institutional organs, the Real Estate Board of New York, found Cuomo had a negative approval rating of 50 percent. And it\u2019s likely to get worse. Trump\u2019s implicit support for Cuomo will be as toxic for him as it was for Adams, whose fatal poll collapse, triggered by Trump\u2019s gift of a GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE card, was compounded by the leaking of a failed Trump-Witkoff gambit to yank him from the race with the bribe of a Saudi ambassadorship.<\/p>\n
What we don\u2019t know and cannot know is whether Mamdani has what it takes to protect his city when Trump declares war on it either financially or literally with shock troops under the banner of ICE. What we can bet on is that the ethically challenged Cuomo, should he by some miracle pull off an upset, will surrender to Trump without a fight in some back room to save himself, much as Adams did.<\/p>\n
I confess that Mamdani, whom I ranked second to Brad Lander in my own primary vote, gives me rare hope at a time when I, like so many others, have soured on the Democratic old guard. After the primary, I was curious to meet him and did at the Brooklyn home of a mutual friend. What I saw is what he projects in his campaign. A smart, focused guy who listens to others and welcomes tough questions; who is transparent and consistent on the core political convictions that guide him; who is not an ideologue or a glib Pez dispenser of consultantspeak; and, no less important, who knows what he doesn\u2019t know. Why should we believe he can fill in the expertise he needs to manage the city? His answer, in private as in public, is that he plans to surround himself with those who have the experience he lacks, who will inevitably be older than he is in many cases. His off-camera conversations with (among others) Kathy Hochul, Jamie Dimon, and Kathryn Wylde, the powerful billionaire whisperer who leads the nonprofit Partnership for New York, have been substantive, not ceremonial, whatever their disagreements. His outreach kept expanding, including, perhaps most notably, to Bloomberg, who was willing to engage with him even though the former mayor had been the biggest contributor (some $8 million) to the Fix the City PAC that tried to slay the insurgent\u2019s campaign over the summer.<\/p>\n
But Mamdani\u2019s secret power, I\u2019d argue, is that he can never be president. As the U.S. Constitution states in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, \u201cNo person except a natural born Citizen\u201d is eligible for that high office. (I dare say that Americans of all political persuasions agree this may be the one constitutional clause Trump will not try to overturn.) Mamdani is not angling to go to Washington or be anointed the \u201csavior\u201d of the Democratic Party, does not want to broker the Middle East, and does not want to flee to Florida. An immigrant who fell in love with his family\u2019s adopted city and country, he is a politician who actually wants to do the job he is running for. That is a truly radical idea.<\/p>\n
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