I am not from New York City. In fact, I have never lived in New York if we’re excluding a scholarship-based summer camp I did in high school. While it would be a lie for me to say that I am regularly uninformed about the state of New York City (after all, like most culinarily-inclined Case Western Reserve University students, I had to activate the school-sponsored The New York Times account for the recipes), I was still surprised that, sometime during April, I started getting campaign videos from a charming New York mayoral hopeful managing to recite his campaign video in Spanish.
I had heard some news from the upcoming mayoral race: New York City Mayor Eric Adams allegedly taking millions of dollars in bribes was entertaining enough at the time that I had looked into his indictment, and I remembered vividly enough the fact that former Governor Andrew Cuomo (who I characterized mostly for his reputation as an alleged sexual harasser and granny killer) was, at the time, the front-runner in the Democratic primary race. It is safe to say that after watching that video of an extremely young (if you consider how the average age of a member of Congress is 61 years old) candidate stepping up to the plate to bat against one of the most well-established political dynasties in the state of New York, though, I was both charmed and rooting for the young politician to at least get second place in the New York Democratic mayoral primary.
When I first learned of Zohran Mamdani, I don’t believe I could’ve ever predicted what happened on June 24. Seeing a genuine, progressive politician win the Democratic candidacy for one of the most important mayoral charges in the United States gave me hope that, even as the party kept disappointing me with its multiple, endless failures to adapt both to newer generations and the second, more repressive Trump presidency, there might be some impulse to change and grow as a party. I began to believe that the Democratic Party might start to give way from the old order, which kept repeating the same insane steps of backsliding on policy in hopes to catch more conservative voters, and give into a new generation that actually got with the times and implemented policies that could actually help the general population.
I also couldn’t have expected that, on July 14, after several weeks of waffling like the buffet at the most mediocre Best Western, Andrew Cuomo decided to keep himself in the race as an Independent. While he had not received many endorsements from the main Democratic Party (unless you count the disgraced Eric Adams and former New York City mayor and notable billionaire Michael Bloomberg), the tepid-to-racist reaction that the mainstream Democratic Party has had toward Mamdani is emblematic of its worsening structural flaws.
Among the major hold-outs for endorsements of Mamdani’s campaign include New York’s two U.S. Senators: Chuck Schumer (the Senate minority leader) and Kirsten Gillibrand. Additionally, Gillibrand was widely criticized for her comments implying that Mamdani was endorsing a “global jihad” and statements that “[mean to] destroy Israel and kill all the Jews.” Gillibrand would later tepidly apologize, but these Islamophobic reactions to the first Muslim mayor of a city with over 1.5 million Muslim residents speak to a campaign that has been mired by a Democratic establishment that is out-of-touch with both its constituents and the needs of both the United States and the world as a whole.
Mamdani’s campaign—which centers itself mostly through its policies on affordability—has become a constant inquisition regarding his specific opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict. While the conflict has been recognized by several international human rights organizations as a genocide on Israel’s part, many of the leaders of the Democratic Party like the aforementioned Schumer and Gillibrand refuse to discuss it as more than a justified armed conflict. Their feckless cowardice in the face of hundreds of thousands of dead children, however, is not shared by the majority of the Democratic base, as only 8% of Democrats supported Israel’s continued military presence in Gaza per a Gallup poll released on July 26.
It seems apparent to me that in an election where Mamdani has kept such a clear-cut messaging for the economic well-being of all New Yorkers, the Democratic Party will not follow in his steps; instead, they will continue to slowly drag their image of a political base further and further right. Even if Mamdani achieves his promises for rent stabilization, free childcare and city-run grocery stores (as I am sure he will try his hardest), the leaders of the Democratic Party will continue to follow the same losing campaign policy of assuming that its voters are much more conservative than they truly are because they refuse to take into account the fact that, while their elected leaders keep getting older, the people they should be serving are staying as young as ever.