New York swings leftward

There’s a shortage of national elections around now, with most of the northern hemisphere winding down for summer, so the most important election this week has been a party primary in a single municipality. But when it’s the Democratic Party in the city of New York, that’s still pretty important.

For all its familiarity to us from movies and television, New York is not a typical American city. Despite their difficulties elsewhere, Democrats in New York generally have things their own way, unless they are competing with very liberal Republicans – now a mostly extinct type. But that just puts a sharper focus onto the party’s internal issues.

The last two mayors have both been Democrats and both been seen as failures. Bill de Blasio, from the party’s left, served two undistinguished terms from 2014 to 2021. He was followed by incumbent Eric Adams, from the right, who was indicted on corruption charges last year, although they were subsequently dropped in a deal with the Trump administration. Now it’s the left’s turn again, and it presented a young charismatic candidate, state legislator Zohran Mamdani.

To try to stop Mamdani the right, for reasons unfathomable, turned to disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who had resigned in 2021 in the face of impeachment proceedings following widespread allegations of sexual harassment. But the big money in the party backed him, as did luminaries such as Bill Clinton, and for a time he enjoyed a convincing lead in the opinion polls. It wasn’t enough.

As you might remember from four years ago, New York now has preferential voting (“ranked-choice voting”, they call it) for local elections, including the primaries. Eleven candidates sought the Democrat nomination, but there was never any doubt that Cuomo and Mamdani would be the final two, and the next most serious candidate – city comptroller Bran Lander – was also from the left and asked his supporters to preference Mamdani.

Numbers are not final, with some postal votes yet to be counted and preferences to be distributed, but there’s no doubt at all about the result. With 93% in, Mamdani has a lead of more than 70,000 votes, 43.5% to 36.4%; Lander picked up 11.3% and none of the other eight topped 5%. Cuomo promptly conceded defeat and congratulated Mamdani, although he declined to give an undertaking that he would not run against him in November as an independent.

That threat should be taken seriously, since New York politicians have a habit of switching in and out of parties and clearly Mamdani has some powerful opponents. But with two strong independents already in the race, incumbent mayor Adams (who declined to contest his party’s primary) and prominent lawyer Jim Walden, plus Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa (who was unopposed for his party’s nomination), it seems likely that a Cuomo candidacy would just further divide the anti-left vote.

The more general question for the Democrats is what lesson they take from the primary. Does it suggest that their voters are looking for more aggressively left-wing policies, or for politicians willing to criticise Israel (a big issue in New York: Zamdani is a Muslim of Indo-Ugandan background), or for greater grassroots involvement (what the media sometimes call “populism”)? Or does it just suggest that none of those things are a barrier to voting against a recycled sex pest?

Many of Zamdani’s policies would wreak economic havoc in New York if implemented (as Noah Smith points out), although his rhetoric suggests that in office he may have the flexibility to realise that and make corrections as the evidence requires. Some of his positions (not necessarily the same ones) would be electoral poison in other parts of the country, but primary voters in those places must be presumed to be able to work that out for themselves.

The real issue is not about policy positions but about style: do the Democrats stick with the oligarchs and their money, despite their dubious records, or do they listen to their own voters and try to live up to their name? He may have some foolish ideas, but at a time when democracy is under threat as never before, a candidate who wins by speaking his mind and engaging people directly is at least a positive sign.

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PS: I’ve now read Nate Silver’s analysis of the result and it’s very good. You’ll get the flavor from his headline: “Zohran delivered the Democratic establishment the thrashing it deserved” (thanks to Andreas Ortmann for the tip). I should also clarify that preferential voting is used for primaries and by-elections but not for the general election: that’s why the vote-splitting that I referred to in the seventh paragraph is such a problem for the right.

Update Monday: The Guardian’s report on the primary, by Lauren Gambino and Alaina Demopoulos, is also well worth a read. I particularly liked the quote from Democrat strategist Lis Smith: “They looked around a city of more than 8 million people and said: ‘You know what, let’s nominate the guy who was run out of office 4 years ago.'”