Crossroads, watershed, turning or tipping point, whatever cliché falls just this side of revolution: that’s the way the New York Democratic mayoral primary on 24 June will be remembered decades from now if Zohran Mamdani wins. Or it will be just another occasion when the Clintonite centrist zombies of the Democratic Party – in the surly guise of the former governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, a 67-year-old man with a mug of rich Corinthian leather – preserved the status quo by stomping on the pretty faces of the millennial left. In a field of more than ten candidates, Mamdani was running a distant second for months, but polls modelling the ranked-choice voting system now show him as little as two points behind Cuomo in the event of a final run-off.

During a political season of disappointment, retrenchment and finger-pointing for the centre and barnstorming against oligarchy for the left, Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist who has represented Astoria, Queens in the state assembly since 2021, has campaigned on a simple message about affordability. Rents are too high and should be frozen for rent-stabilised tenants (about 50 per cent of units). Staple foods cost too much and the city should open its own grocery stores, keeping down the price of eggs, milk, bread, vegetables and so on. Buses should be free. The city shouldn’t be a place you have to leave if you aren’t rich.

Mamdani has whipped up a grassroots campaign with legions of canvassers knocking on doors. He’s had fundraisers at downtown clubs hosted by writers and editors of magazines such as Jacobinn+1 and the Drift, where attendees – whose politics were forged during Occupy Wall Street and fed by disillusionment with Obama and enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’s thwarted 2016 presidential campaign – listen to policy debates and quote Gramsci to one another. Sanders has yet to endorse Mamdani, but his apprentice Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw in behind him this month once he seemed a safer bet.

Mamdani knows how to talk to podcasters and influencers, unlike last autumn’s Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees, who by the end of the campaign seemed to be trying to meme their way into the White House via TikToks about their favourite snacks and posts about their hangs with the Cheneys. Mamdani has avoided cornball gimmicks and neocon posturing. In videos he almost always appears in a suit and talks frankly about New York’s jacked-up prices rather than his personal habits. The two exceptions have been an early photo in which he ate a burrito with a knife and fork on the subway after a hard day of campaigning (to each his own; I use my hands), and his stumping for the New York Knicks before their tragic defeat in the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers.

Were he to win, Mamdani would be the first Muslim mayor of New York. He’s maintained a firm pro-Palestinian stance while also appearing at synagogues and consistently denouncing antisemitism, as often if not more often than he denounces Israel’s genocide in Gaza or the federal detention of foreign students such as Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia, who has been held without charge for three months. During a debate organised by progressive Jewish groups Mamdani said he would have Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin arrested if they came to New York, in compliance with international warrants for war crimes. Mamdani’s overtures to Jewish organisations haven’t stopped the New York Post and other entities on the right from smearing him as an antisemite. A Republican city councilwoman, Vickie Paladino, has called for Mamdani’s deportation, on the grounds that he wasn’t born in the US and has been a citizen only since 2018.

The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, has declined to run in the Democratic primary and will instead be appearing on the ballot on 4 November under the lines ‘End Antisemitism’ and ‘Safe & Affordable’. (Mamdani too could be on the ballot even if he loses the primary to Cuomo, as the candidate for the Working Families Party; if Cuomo loses the primary he might himself run on ‘Fight and Deliver’.) Adams’s cynical rebranding is not uncharacteristic of the former Republican and cop who squeaked out a victory in the Democratic primary of 2021 with the support of the Black middle class, Orthodox Jews and landlords. His Republican opponent in 2021, Curtis Sliwa, a radio talk-show host and founder of the Guardian Angels – a volunteer group that patrols the subway – is again the presumptive GOP nominee, and again an als0-ran. This year the Democratic primary is the crucial contest, though there could be a rematch in the autumn.

Adams was once touted as the future of the Democratic Party for being both African American and ‘tough on crime’ (as well as amenable to corporate interests). But his indictment last year on a wide array of corruption charges – most colourfully, or so it’s alleged, accepting flights from Turkish Airlines in exchange for silence on the Armenian genocide, among other favours – rendered him a lame duck. (The Trump administration has dropped all charges against him, a move seen as a reward for his criticism of Biden’s immigration policies and willingness to play ball with ICE.) Adams’s downfall opened the door for Cuomo, who had been eyeing a return to politics since his resignation from the governorship in 2021 following eleven accusations of sexual harassment and in the face of impeachment. ‘If I had to do it again,’ he told the New York Times this month, ‘I wouldn’t have resigned.’

In Cuomo: Return of the Dark Prince (OR Books, £14.99), a new edition of a critical biography first published in 2021, the reporter Ross Barkan writes: ‘One way to understand Cuomo is Trump with intellect and discipline.’ It’s difficult to imagine Trump reading Hannah Arendt or keeping his mouth shut, but Barkan is right that Cuomo and the president have a lot in common. Both are scions of Queens dynasties. Before he entered politics in 1974 as secretary of state to Governor Hugh Carey, Cuomo’s father, Mario, was briefly Fred Trump’s lawyer. He lost the 1977 race for mayor to Ed Koch but was elected governor of New York from 1983 to 1994. By the time Mario Cuomo left office, his son, who had been his campaign manager and policy adviser, was serving in Clinton’s administration as assistant secretary of housing and urban development.

Like Trump, Andrew Cuomo brags about getting big things done. He doesn’t dwell on his time at the department of housing, where he boosted some of the dicey loans that led to the subprime mortgage crisis, as part of a policy encouraging broader home ownership over public housing or affordable rentals. As governor he can claim responsibility for the rehabilitation of LaGuardia Airport, the conversion of the old post office into the Moynihan Train Hall extension of Penn Station, and the Second Avenue subway extension on the Upper East Side, a zone whose denizens were in dire need of speedy delivery to Coney Island. There were months in 2020 when Cuomo became Trump’s liberal foil and, the presidential campaign notwithstanding, primary antagonist. He was on TV every day, calmly giving the latest advice on Covid, a voice of reason at a time when the president was not the nation’s most reliable narrator. Cuomo was the matinée idol of the moment, inspiring one feminist journalist to write a piece titled ‘Help, I think I’m in love with Andrew Cuomo???’ He received a $5 million advance for a memoir about his valour in the face of the plague. That was before the body counts came in. Cuomo’s policy of moving elderly Covid patients into nursing homes proved highly lethal, and he manipulated data to cover up the deaths. Then there were the complaints of sexual harassment. Soon enough even the writing of his memoir was under investigation. Few in power were reliable narrators that season.

But Democratic donors love Cuomo, especially landlords. Fix the City, the Super PAC that supports him and which can raise and spend money without limit (so long as it doesn’t co-ordinate directly with his campaign), has raised $13 million, including $1 million from the online food delivery service DoorDash and six-figure sums from various construction and real estate firms. Mamdani’s Super PAC has one-fiftieth of that money. The landlords own the city, and they rent its mayors. Bill de Blasio, who accomplished three rent freezes during his eight years in office (2014-21), was an exception. Cuomo is reported to have apologised recently to real estate industry figures for tenant-friendly laws he signed during his time in Albany. The most discussed political book of the season, aside from those about Biden’s senility, is Abundance (Profile, £16.99), by the policy wonks Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which claims that everything would be much better if landlords and builders weren’t afflicted by zoning rules and environmental regulations. Then the market would make everyone happy. In my experience, the market gouges you and landlords are bastards who’ll throw you out on the street the first chance they get, but that’s just me.

Though Mamdani isn’t a dynast like Cuomo, he hasn’t come from nowhere. His father is the political scientist (and contributor to this paper) Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a film director whose work includes Mississippi MasalaMonsoon Wedding and The Namesake. Mamdani, who grew up in Kampala and Cape Town and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, appeared in his mother’s 2016 Disney movie Queen of Katwe, about slum dwellers in Uganda who take up chess. He also recorded hip-hop under the name Mr Cardamom before entering politics as a foreclosure prevention specialist. The emphasis of his campaign is on easing the burdens of working-class New Yorkers and alleviating suffering. Cuomo talks instead about ‘quality of life’. ‘We are here because we love New York and we know New York City is in trouble,’ he said in a speech. ‘You feel it when you walk down the street and you see the mentally ill homeless people. You feel it when you walk down into the subway and you feel the anxiety rise up in your chest. You hear it when you hear the scream of the police sirens.’ The rhetoric is Trump-lite, scapegoating the poor and figuring out ways to remove or otherwise punish them. Fear-mongering about crime and filthy crackheads is particularly disgusting when crime has been declining for three decades and much of Manhattan is now indistinguishable from Disneyland. As for the centrist Boomers still running the Democratic Party and soaking up all the political money, perhaps the people are ready to treat them to a well-deserved retirement.

13 June

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