Why did Mamdani win?

Hint: Because anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism have taken over the Democratic Party.

In the days before the NYC Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo was thought to be the favorite, notwithstanding his forced resignation from the Governorship on account of a sexual harassment scandal, among other things. When the smoke cleared after election day, his chief opponent, Zohran Mamdani, a New York state legislator, had cleaned Cuomo’s clock. After the ranked-choice ballots were counted, Mamdani won by a crushing 56% to 44%.

Why?

A number of reasons have been offered. One that made sense to me was that mainly zealots tend to show up for a primary in July. Another was that Mamdani was particularly apt at modern, social media, TikTok-style campaigning. Until I thought more about it, probably my favorite was that Cuomo looked and sounded like an old man, complacent in advance that he was going to win and mostly just going through the motions.

Now Nate Cohn, the NYT’s chief political analyst (but decently honest anyway) comes up with the explanation that was right in front of our faces from the get-go, albeit not very trendy. Mamdani, an admitted (or is it proclaimed?) socialist, and in substance a crypto-Communist, won because he is where, in its heart, the Democratic Party is.

Cohn begins his analysis with this:

Usually, there isn’t much to learn from a single idiosyncratic primary election.

In the case of the recent New York mayoral contest, most candidates will not be able to replicate Zohran Mamdani’s viral campaign, and not many candidates will have Andrew Cuomo’s heavy baggage.

Such a superficial analysis of the candidates might be enough to tell the tale for many primaries. But not this one. The New York Democratic mayoral primary was about much more than the strengths and weaknesses of the two candidates, and as a consequence there’s a lot more to learn.

Cohn then notes the demographic, economic and technological changes over the last decade that helped make Mamdani’s victory possible, but concludes that they weren’t at the heart of it. Instead (emphasis added):

Of all these changes, the most obvious one is that the Democratic electorate has simply moved farther to the left.

…which is a fine short-run development for Republicans, elections almost always being won in the center, but a bad long-run development for the country, given that sooner or later the Democrats will return to power.

Over the last few years, this hasn’t always been obvious. To many, the last presidential election seemed to mark a new rightward turn in the culture, including among the young voters who had powered the ascent of progressives. Looking even further back, progressives mostly seemed to stall after [Bernie] Sanders’s breakthrough in 2016….

Yup, there were signs of hope that younger voters are not being hoodwinked at the speed we had reason to fear, especially given the degraded nature of what now passes for “education.” But, as usual, short run appearances need to be checked against longer term trends, especially if those trends are persistent over time and pronounced.

Today, liberal Democrats outnumber moderate and conservative ones by 12 percentage points, according to Gallup, 55 percent to 43 percent. In 2016 and 2020, liberals were essentially even with moderate and conservative Democrats.

Let me make that more specific. Thirty years ago, 25% of Democrats were liberal and and equal number were, or considered themselves to be, conservative. Just short of 50% were moderate. Today, 9% are conservative, 34% are moderate, and 55% are liberal or very liberal. Basically, a liberal or very liberal slant has overtaken the Democratic Party and has little to no serious competition.

And it gets worse.

Similarly, Democrats have moved to the left on Israel. Gallup found that 59 percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis (21 percent). This is a huge reversal from [just 12 years ago], when Democrats sympathized with Israelis over Palestinians, 55-19.

I doubt that the Hamas war (to call it what it is rather than the “Israeli war”) significantly affects the national electorate; foreign policy issues generally don’t, particularly when, as was true last year, domestic and economic issues make themselves front-and-center. On the other hand, the shift is so dramatic, and the MSM reporting so poisonous, that this issue very likely counts for more than a typical foreign policy issue. Just ask whoever is now running, inter alia, Harvard and Columbia — the breeding grounds of “journalists” who a few years later wind up writing the stuff you see on CNN, MSNBC, the WaPo and of course the New York Times itself.

With Mr. Mamdani’s victory, progressives…have another visible breakthrough. While it might be tempting to attribute this to his personal strengths and Mr. Cuomo’s weakness, much of the change can simply be attributed to today’s much more progressive electorate.

That being the sorry, and ominous, truth in a nutshell. But there is a ray of hope, namely, as Cohn acknowledges two paragraphs later, it’s not really the electorate he’s talking about.

It’s important to note that just because Democrats are moving to the left doesn’t mean the electorate is overall. This is certainly the case in New York City: That same Times/Siena poll that showed the Democratic primary electorate as far more liberal than a decade ago also showed Donald J. Trump faring better than any Republican in decades, as was ultimately borne out in the result. The poll also raised the possibility that the Democratic electorate is moving to the left in part because more moderate and conservative voters are disengaging from the party: Only 32 percent of the primary voters who didn’t vote were self-described liberals, and 21 percent backed Mr. Trump in 2024.

Trump was not my choice in the Republican primaries, but it’s becoming undeniable that he does enlarge the base as no Republican since Reagan has done, especially with black and Hispanic men.

[W]hile Mr. Mamdani’s campaign will be hard to replicate, progressives can attempt to copy much of the way he campaigned. They can try to catch fire with viral videos on social media. They can criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank with confidence that Democratic primary voters are sympathetic to their views.

Well, yes, sure. But here’s the catch.

In doing so, they would put many mainstream Democratic politicians in a difficult spot, as the general electorate still sympathizes more with Israel.

It was not for nothing that the Democrats last year pulled off the statistically unlikely feat of losing all seven closely contested states. Apart from their ideological drift per se, there is the little-mentioned but in my view critical ideology-adjacent factor that cost them: They accepted Harris as the anointed candidate rather than have a primary. A primary where she could have been challenged by, say, Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer.

And why did they pass on a primary? Timing was one thing, yes. Biden mistimed the debate and didn’t give the Party enough of a chance to think carefully about how best to choose someone who was at least a functioning adult. But the other key factor was the one it’s impolite to mention. Harris was a black female, and in the identity-obsessed Democratic Party progressives have created today, tossing aside a black female, even one as obviously deficient and empty as Harris, just cannot be done.

Mamdani will have his victory, especially now that the opposition to him in the general election has splintered. But it’s an illusion. With any luck, it’s an illusion the Democrats will follow right off the cliff in 2028.