As I write this, I have yet to cast my vote for the mayor of New York City, where I live (a question I can answer more easily and definitively than the current mayor). In most elections, there are only two bad choices. But because New York has more of everything, from people to rats to unlicensed weed dispensaries, this time there are at least three terrible choices: The Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, the Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running on the “Fight and Deliver Party” line.
Bad candidates are like unhappy families, each awful and terrible in their own way. But by all indications, only Mamdani matters because he is going to cruise to victory next Tuesday. When that happens, Andrew Cuomo, already hounded out of Albany due to terrible COVID policies and disturbing harassment of basically everyone he ever worked with, will disappear for good. Maybe he’ll live in South Florida like the next-in-line son of a deposed Shah or, in a more just world, in a tiny, market-rate studio apartment in Crown Heights with another disgraced politician, Anthony Weiner. The beret-wearing fabulist Curtis Sliwa will continue to haunt New York’s airwaves and local TV shows, talking about his cats and whatever else rambles like tumbleweeds through his mind.
Mamdani’s win will absolutely not be good for the city, but it will also not usher in the utter, instantaneous apocalypse that some fear. Yes, he will try to make buses and child care free, create city-owned grocery stores, jack up taxes on the ultra-rich (charitably defined as anyone making more than the “many young professionals at tech start-ups, law firms and investment companies” that seem to love him the most), and “freeze the rent” on perhaps as many as 1 million rental apartments (around half the total rental market). Maybe he will even issue an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because, well, that sort of dramatic, dubiously legal action is a huge part of being the mayor of New York (and of being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America)…