By Robert Hornak
There’s no arguing that NYC is a blue city and votes mostly for democrats. But if you make New Yorkers unhappy enough and even angry enough, they just might vote Republican.
That’s what happened in 1993, when David Dinkins was seen as incapable of running the city, crime was sky high, the economy was struggling, and the people’s perception was that NYC was being held together by Band-Aids. Rudy Giuliani was given a chance to show what he could do, and he delivered big-time.
But after 20 years of the city appearing to have that crime thing under control and the economy booming, voters decided to give an outspoken leftist a chance to see how things would go if we had turned our attention to some of those liberal policies that we were told would make our lives measurably better but kept putting off in favor of dealing with public safety, quality of life, and the putting money in the pockets of hard working people.
Bii de Blasio had eight years to showcase those liberal policies, and most people now rate him as one of the worst mayors in modern history. Eric Adams, while he promised to be more moderate, has been either unable or unwilling to really stand up to the radical leftists in the City Council. For that, and of course the accusations of corruption and breaking campaign finance laws, his approval ratings are the worst we’ve seen for pretty much anyone in NY.
Enter Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdami, a full-blown socialist, who wants to replace Eric Adams as mayor. Mamdami comes from the one section of NYC, northwest Queens, that loves socialists, and has elected many in recent years, starting with AOC and then down ballot for city and state legislative seats, including Mamdami.
And Mamdami is clever, likely learning from the past mistakes of other far left candidates, who usually focus on telling voters how they want to run your life. But Mamdami instead focuses on the tried-and-true method that the far left uses to try to convince voters they only want to help (not dictate, the true hallmark of socialism), and that’s by offering them all kinds of freebies.
He calls his menu of giveaways his economic agenda and is promising free public transit, free childcare, a total rent freeze for tenants, and city-run supermarkets offering subsidized food (which worked so well in the Soviet Union it screams for a comeback). He plans to pay for his socialist utopia by raising the corporate tax and claims that will cover the cost of his giveaway buffet.
That worked so well in New Jersey recently, that when they raised the corporate tax to 11.5% it took only two years to cut it back to 9%. Meanwhile, New York’s 7.25% doesn’t appear low enough to keep those large corporate taxpayers here. Goldman Sachs is part of the ongoing exodus and is about to open an 800,000 sq ft corporate campus in Dallas.
Lower tax states have been reaping the reward of NYC’s high costs and bad leadership. Wall Street has been going everywhere else for years now while slowly shrinking its footprint in NYC. Big Tech dabbled in NYC but appears to be more focused on south Florida instead. And the center of the crypto universe is now in Puerto Rico. Any place but NYC.
Meanwhile, Mamdami is convinced he has the winning formula. Win them over with promises of paradise. And financially it’s paying off. He raised $643,152 in his first filing according to the Campaign Finance Board, earning him an additional $2,827,443 in public matching funds.
And while that success has him coming in second in the polls, he is still only attracting 12% support and way behind Andrew Cuomo, the candidate Democrat primary voters perceive as the most centrist in the race. And in a recent ranked choice voting simulation, Mamdami started at 11% and finished at 13%, showing that he was the second choice for almost nobody.
Even in liberal NYC, while you have a small group of dedicated socialists, most New Yorkers have more common sense and don’t see the radical socialist left as a real option to lead the city forward. And that doesn’t bode well even for Zohran Mamdami and his feel-good version of socialism.
Robert Hornak is a professional political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @RobertHornak on X.
