First, as for last night’s “stunning” and “surprising” upset, I predicted it yesterday morning. It felt like any number of other left-wing party leadership elections, where, after years as a center-left party, they decide to go all in. 

So the public mood was just with him. And I predicted it.

But also: it felt like 105 degrees yesterday, and a lot of 90-year-old ladies probably decided to stay inside, in the air conditioning. Cuomo beat Mamdani among 90-year-old ladies by 70% to 20%. So the weather favored Mamdani.

What Will He Be Like as Mayor?

As a candidate, he was divisive. So maybe we’ve got our version of Ken Livingston, the former far-left mayor of London who tweaked and poked the Jewish community and others there with his embrace of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers and the International Sikh Youth Federation, but still won re-election, and imposed nearly no policies that were even moderately left wing. 

But maybe we’ve got our version of Sadiq Khan, a decidedly effective bureaucrat who, in running for election, had to overcome objections to his decidedly divisive prior statements, but who, as mayor, has launched the highest volume of new affordable homes in London since the Great Depression. 

Here are a few thoughts on this. 

Maybe Everything Will Be Fine  

Maybe everything will be ok. I mean, I like socialism. (That’s not ironic. I really do.) And I’d like to try a little more socialism here in New York. 

If you are a wealthy New York and you do not like socialism, then there is a high likelihood you will probably be happy with Mamdani’s mayoralty. 

After all, Ken Livingston didn’t introduce socialism to London. It is most likely that Mamdani will be unable to accomplish anything he tries to accomplish. The police will remain funded, apartment rents will keep going up, the wealthy will continue to rule the city. 

If he succeeds, great, in my view. If he fails, then everything will continue as is. Not great, but not bad. 

He Dresses Well

I like neckties, and I want them to come back so strong that everyone will wear them all the time, like in the old days. 

So I like it when pretty and young social media influencers, like Mamdani, wear neckties. I always thought skinny neckties were cool, like Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson in 1977, and it looks like Mamdani likes skinny neckties too. He always wears a necktie, which I really like. 

Will his followers start wearing neckties to their college classes, or out on dates? That would be great. 

There is a Better Way to Say What He Was Trying to Say

I don’t know why he could not come up with a better, more nuanced way of talking about the phrase, “globalize the intifada.” That would have gone a long way towards easing nerves. 

But this is an issue of rhetoric. He is not really going to support globalizing the intifada right here in New York. I’m sad that he’d like to, but he’s not going to. 

Ken Livingston said a lot of things like that, which made people very angry, but London is still a great place to live. It didn’t turn into Beirut.

So that’s another positive thing, probably no intifada here, and New York will still be great. 

Re-Introduce Himself to those of Us Who are Afraid

Politics is not really my “beat.” It’s not really Oblivioni’s thing. There is enough of it around. 

So I didn’t really pay much attention to the race, till I received a text from the Mamdani campaign; this was my introduction to him, the very first communication that I received from him or any candidate. 

A lot of New Yorkers received this text, which was a message from Rashida Tlaib about Israel. I won’t try to summarize it, because it is what you see in it, and you can read it yourself. I will say that it was not a particularly appealing message for those of us who hope that Israel will have  a peaceful future. 

It seemed to me that Israel was not the most important thing for a New York City mayoral candidate to emphasize as his first and top priority, and I thought, as well, that the text itself contained dog whistles designed to appeal, unconsciously or not, to antisemitism. Dog whistles are designed to provide plausible deniability (that is what makes them dog whistles), so you can make up your own mind. 

So I was upset about the message itself, concerned that his election could embolden antisemites who agreed with the message. 

But I was also concerned about the competence of a man who would send a message like that to Jewish voters. I wrote about that in these pages.

Next, a volunteer from the Mamdani campaign called me. He said that Gaza was a prison, that Israel was practicing apartheid, and that Mamdani was the only candidate who would not promise to go to Israel. He said that the other candidates were being paid and told what to say. 

He followed the call up with written messages through LinkedIn. He complained about my “shitty little article,” adding, “you’re the one calling a muslim [sic] man antisemetic [sic] because you can’t comprehend what a comma is…. you say you’re progressive but all you do is point out the imperfections of solutions instead of providing ideas for solutions. so yeah man…. grow up.” 

The volunteer was not from the city and had no real interest in our issues here. And, for the record, this was how I learned that Mamdani is Muslim. Believe me or not, but I had never thought about it before. But here, it seemed as though Mamdani’s success was empowering people throughout the country for whom the top issue was electing anti-Israel candidates — and that Mamdani had no control over his own campaign organization  —  which didn’t bode well, in my view. 

The Intifada

To be honest, I do not really disagree with his refusal to condemn his supporters who use that expression. “Intifada” is a word that means different things to different people. In its own way, it is like the word “Zionism.” To many people, it just means the right of Israel to live in peace alongside a Palestinian state. But there are different kinds of Zionists, and to some, it means conquering “Greater Israel.” So I don’t use the word, but I don’t condemn those who use it. 

Mamdani could have tried that approach. What if he had said: “I do not use that word myself. When people hear the term, ‘intifada,’ many think of the Intifada in Israel at the turn of the century, which had elements of violence that were not only morally wrong but set back the Palestinian cause, and which I do not support. Many of my friends mean something else when they say it, which is a peaceful campaign of global persuasion that would create the right environment for the creation of a Palestinian state, which is something I do support, although it is not relevant to the job of mayor. So because of the ambiguity of the way people hear it, I don’t say it, and I recommend that my fellow activists in the pro-peace movement not say it either. But I don’t condemn people who use it to mean a peaceful movement, and it won’t have any role in the way I will do my job as mayor.”  

Why I opposed him

You can see my problem here. For me, Mamdani’s campaign message was about Israel; not because any other campaign made it about Israel over Mamdani’s Muslim background, but because that was the message that the Mamdani campaign emphasized in the communications I received and heard from the campaign. 

Of course, the Cuomo campaign picked up on this. By the end, Cuomo’s implicit campaign theme was, “I love Jews. If YOU really love Jews, like I do, vote Cuomo!” 

Maybe, in retrospect, that’s not a winner, even in New York. Maybe we’re not as beloved by everyone as we think we are.

There is More to Mamdani 

As I watched the campaign unfold, my impression was of a campaign that  wanted to put anti-Zionists into power, while paying unenthusiastic lip service to inflation. 

But what the enthusiastic young of the city heard was a message about making housing affordable, and my hope is that this message will be so strong and powerful and inevitable that the powers in Albany will have to listen. 

Bill de Blasio swept into office on a promise to create universal pre-K, and he got that done. 

Maybe this is the message that will resonate. If this huge goal is the “one thing” that Mamdani makes progress on, like the mayor of London, if my kids can afford to move out and get their own place, then this election will be a good thing. I will happily vote for him next time. 

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is a novelist. He is nervous this morning.