"Like, maybe don’t run terrible, tired, charmless old candidates like Cuomo?" Definitely. But also, I think Tuesday's elections represent, in part, a mandate against Trump-style Republicans. The liberals I know hate him. As in, hate him. Total TDS. I mean, I'm no fan. I think he's absolutely despicable. But that doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly vote for the Dems (which I have not, since 2020, because of the gender stuff). There's not only a lot for the Dems to learn from this; there's also a lot for Republicans to learn. I frequently chat with Republican (and former Republican) friends who also hate Trump. I think a lot of American voters would be happy if our candidates could just try to be vaguely normal humans. That's probably wildly idealistic on my part, but here we are.
Avoiding the gender issue worked this election but not for Harris. What changed? As Jeff Maurer pointed out Spanberger's opponent may have gone too often to the gender wars when people had the economy and ICE cruelty on their minds. A revulsion to MAGA cruelty also undergirds the discomfort most folks have with GOP regressive attacks on transgender folks.
I think you’re spot on with people’s “revulsion to MAGA cruelty.” That’s why it’s important for dems to develop a strong message of support for gender nonconforming people, even as they hold the line on material reality.
The lessons are clear. (1) People will vote for the person who promises them the most ideal future, regardless of how unrealistic that promise might be, especially if they are not informed of what is and is not possible. (2) The majority of people also have NO IDEA that the whole "gender" thing is a criminal scandal that is harming thousands upon thousands of innocent, vulnerable young people and their helpless families.
To me, this means any future candidate and any future campaign must, to be successful, make it very clear what can and cannot be achieved, and then must promise to achieve exactly what can be achieved, to the fullest extent possible. A somewhat realistic, but still hopeful plan for the future must be presented, and there must be a clear critique of the obvious problems with any unrealistic plan put forward by another Mamdami-like candidate (e.g. freezing rent on Rent Stabilized apartments, if possible, will not solve our housing problem and will cause its own problems, including warping of the market, putting a percentage of landlords in crisis, and, of course, this won't help anyone who is not lucky enough to be in Rent Stabilized housing, and a percentage of those in Rent Stabilized housing, such as Mamdami, don't really need it).
This also means we must - and I am a broken record here - change hearts and minds on the "gender" issue. We must educate the public, informing it that it has been lied to, and that so-called "gender-affirming care" is not kind or life-saving. Instead, GAC is a harmful, homophobic, misogynistic set of pseudo-religious beliefs (unprovable and unfalsifiable), targeted at the most vulnerable of us (autistic, mentally unwell, socially awkward, abused, etc.). In fact, nobody is born with the need to be chemically and surgically altered and the need to be lied to about their sex in order to have any semblance of happiness or avoid suicide.
My current working theory is that Mamdani won because people feel battered, they need hope, and Mamdani inspired hope. It was striking to me to see a stat where 73% of voters thought Cuomo had the greatest governing skill, with Mamdani at a much lower percent—yet that didn’t seem to matter. Cuomo was a terrible candidate. Among his many other flaws, he was incapable, throughout this campaign, of inspiring hope. Indeed his meanest self, and that’s saying something, was on full display.
Where I live, we saw this surge of hopefulness all around us: A slight mention of concern about Mamdani, and even our older normie Dem friends’ faces visibly fell (even one who voted for Giuliani instead of Dinkins back in the day). Our neighbor Y was practically levitating with hope, and she’s more often a bit of a cynic.
And our social activist neighbor and truly an all-around good person was totally in her element, in her Zohran T-shirt, just back from a round of GOTV. She was in our lobby talking with a solid, generally very clear-eyed and well-informed, Democratic member of the building staff, who is excited, too (and he has no interest in, eg, males in women’s sports, which he long ago described, at its first mention, as a “losing position”).
I am still thinking about what this means for those of us who are aware and deeply concerned about the Democratic sex-denialist stances and all the harm they are causing on so many fronts. I’ll offer this preliminary thought for those of us who live in NYC, where Democrats are practically the whole ballgame: we need to find ways to become much more effective at and significantly scale up outreach to Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. The aim would be to build much, much more support at the grassroots level, and then aim that at our D electeds, who do know, generally, how to count votes. I only wish I knew how to make this happen.
PS: on another matter—I am in CA on an overdue visit with my 97-year-old Mom (she is an old-style small government conservative). Of course my planned mode of transportation back to NYC is by air. Good times . . .
How often does a New York election predict voting in any other part of the country? In other urban areas? In areas with a different racial/ethnic breakdown? Without answers to those and similar questions it is hard to extract any lessons.
Mamdani’s win isn’t just about policy—it’s about persona. In today’s politics, the messenger is the message. Americans’ political memories are notoriously short and selective, but more than that, they’re emotionally depleted. Voters aren’t evaluating platforms; they’re grasping for relief.
And Mamdani offered it—not through a tested plan, but through the packaging of hope. The handsome face, the bright smile, the carefully cultivated charisma, the influencer-savvy visuals—he feels like a solution, even if he may never deliver one. That affective aura is the message. Without it, there is no Mamdani.
Try a thought experiment:
> What if Mamdani had a heavy South Asian accent?
> What if the candidate were white, middle-aged, professorial and generic —full of gravitas, but lacking charm?
> What if he or she carried the same ideals but no brand?
He wouldn’t have stood a chance. In today’s electorate, hope isn’t transmitted via policy PDFs—it’s communicated through emotional resonance, optics, and the illusion of shared struggle.
That illusion matters because Mamdani’s voters aren’t just naive or forgetful. They’re exhausted. They’re living in an economic system that is all take and no give—where wages lag, housing is out of reach, and tech lords strip-mine every human interaction for profit. Into that void walks a candidate who looks like he cares, who feels like an answer.
Mamdani is Obama 2.0, adapted for the 2020s attention economy. And like Trump—another master of performative reassurance—he proves that what Americans vote for isn't leadership. It's emotional payoff.
Even DSA members and anti-capitalists must reckon with the irony: charisma is still the most valuable political currency in America.
The legacy Dems need to learn the same lesson from the Mamdani election as they needed to learn from the Trump election: listen to disgruntled voters whose paychecks don't cover their expenses, and tell them you'll help them.
As different as Mamdani and Trump appear to be on the surface, they followed the first rule of marketing: find out what the "customer" wants and give it to him.
People are hurting. They have all different ideas about what would fix that hurt. But what they do know is that all the Democratic leadership has offered is "we're not as bad as Trump," nationally and "Mamdani is a socialist scary person," in NY.
When people are hurting financially, you're not going to win them over by ignoring their worries and pain and talking about what you prefer to discuss, which is what the Dem leadership has been doing.
But look at Democrat Mikey Sherrill, who just won the governship in NJ by talking like the kind of Democrat we used to expect Democrats to be. The essence of her campaign was similar to Trump's and Mamdani's. She said, "I'm going to fix your problems." She spoke about rent and other expenses that are too high, and promised to heal the hurt. Trump said he'd fix the same problem with tariffs and deportations. Mamdani said he'd fix the same problem with free bus passes and government-run grocery stores.
Everything any of them promised beyond recognizing that people are losing ground financially and middle income is now both insecure and not going far enough was just to capture the fringes.
Pundits will call this "populism," ignoring the fact that the definition of that is "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups." Ordinary people. I.e. voters.
Maybe the left is able to hold more nuance than some of the right. I could almost never be a single issue voter. I want my 20 somethings to be able to afford rent in NYC without having to have 7 roommates. And I have a daughter harmed by the gender BS. I remain open to see what he can actually accomplish in a city and state with so much red tape and little room for tax hikes from families already struggling.
Small anecdote illustrating the immense privilege given to the "downtrodden" crossdressing men who claim to be women. A young man in his middle 20s just left NYC, where he grew up, to start over in Florida. Why? Because he'd been working at a shelter as a counselor. This shelter will house mentally ill homeless individuals in Brooklyn, with a men's side and a women's side. They receive counseling, group therapy, food and clothing while social workers try to get them permanent housing and jobs. Many men come in dressed as women, harass the staff, insist on sleeping in the women's quarters, showering in women's bathing areas, knowing the Mamdani crowd will fund lawsuits if they're looked at in the wrong way. Typical quotes: "If you don't stop that woman telling me I don't belong here, I'll beat you up." Then they shove the staffers into the wall, lean over the desk and scream harassment and sometimes threaten to kill them. The police are called and show up, but do nothing, their hands being tied by the ACLU &etc. One day someone will be murdered by men who ideate a female persona, like the one in Brooklyn who killed 2 women and chopped up their bodies, who is now housed on the women's side at Rikers. I moved out of Brooklyn 8 years ago and cross the street when I clock one of these dudes while doing errands. Too many of them are psychopaths. Good luck to anyone who chooses to stay in NYC. I'm glad my friend's son read the writing on the wall.
"Like, maybe don’t run terrible, tired, charmless old candidates like Cuomo?" Definitely. But also, I think Tuesday's elections represent, in part, a mandate against Trump-style Republicans. The liberals I know hate him. As in, hate him. Total TDS. I mean, I'm no fan. I think he's absolutely despicable. But that doesn't mean I'm just going to blindly vote for the Dems (which I have not, since 2020, because of the gender stuff). There's not only a lot for the Dems to learn from this; there's also a lot for Republicans to learn. I frequently chat with Republican (and former Republican) friends who also hate Trump. I think a lot of American voters would be happy if our candidates could just try to be vaguely normal humans. That's probably wildly idealistic on my part, but here we are.
And then there’s this: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1150978060539267&set=a.158909999746083&type=3
Link to original:
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-yorks-elderly-jews-torn-between-man-who-would-kill-them-for-being-jewish-and-man-who-would-kill-them-for-being-elderly
Avoiding the gender issue worked this election but not for Harris. What changed? As Jeff Maurer pointed out Spanberger's opponent may have gone too often to the gender wars when people had the economy and ICE cruelty on their minds. A revulsion to MAGA cruelty also undergirds the discomfort most folks have with GOP regressive attacks on transgender folks.
I think you’re spot on with people’s “revulsion to MAGA cruelty.” That’s why it’s important for dems to develop a strong message of support for gender nonconforming people, even as they hold the line on material reality.
The lessons are clear. (1) People will vote for the person who promises them the most ideal future, regardless of how unrealistic that promise might be, especially if they are not informed of what is and is not possible. (2) The majority of people also have NO IDEA that the whole "gender" thing is a criminal scandal that is harming thousands upon thousands of innocent, vulnerable young people and their helpless families.
To me, this means any future candidate and any future campaign must, to be successful, make it very clear what can and cannot be achieved, and then must promise to achieve exactly what can be achieved, to the fullest extent possible. A somewhat realistic, but still hopeful plan for the future must be presented, and there must be a clear critique of the obvious problems with any unrealistic plan put forward by another Mamdami-like candidate (e.g. freezing rent on Rent Stabilized apartments, if possible, will not solve our housing problem and will cause its own problems, including warping of the market, putting a percentage of landlords in crisis, and, of course, this won't help anyone who is not lucky enough to be in Rent Stabilized housing, and a percentage of those in Rent Stabilized housing, such as Mamdami, don't really need it).
This also means we must - and I am a broken record here - change hearts and minds on the "gender" issue. We must educate the public, informing it that it has been lied to, and that so-called "gender-affirming care" is not kind or life-saving. Instead, GAC is a harmful, homophobic, misogynistic set of pseudo-religious beliefs (unprovable and unfalsifiable), targeted at the most vulnerable of us (autistic, mentally unwell, socially awkward, abused, etc.). In fact, nobody is born with the need to be chemically and surgically altered and the need to be lied to about their sex in order to have any semblance of happiness or avoid suicide.
My current working theory is that Mamdani won because people feel battered, they need hope, and Mamdani inspired hope. It was striking to me to see a stat where 73% of voters thought Cuomo had the greatest governing skill, with Mamdani at a much lower percent—yet that didn’t seem to matter. Cuomo was a terrible candidate. Among his many other flaws, he was incapable, throughout this campaign, of inspiring hope. Indeed his meanest self, and that’s saying something, was on full display.
Where I live, we saw this surge of hopefulness all around us: A slight mention of concern about Mamdani, and even our older normie Dem friends’ faces visibly fell (even one who voted for Giuliani instead of Dinkins back in the day). Our neighbor Y was practically levitating with hope, and she’s more often a bit of a cynic.
And our social activist neighbor and truly an all-around good person was totally in her element, in her Zohran T-shirt, just back from a round of GOTV. She was in our lobby talking with a solid, generally very clear-eyed and well-informed, Democratic member of the building staff, who is excited, too (and he has no interest in, eg, males in women’s sports, which he long ago described, at its first mention, as a “losing position”).
I am still thinking about what this means for those of us who are aware and deeply concerned about the Democratic sex-denialist stances and all the harm they are causing on so many fronts. I’ll offer this preliminary thought for those of us who live in NYC, where Democrats are practically the whole ballgame: we need to find ways to become much more effective at and significantly scale up outreach to Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. The aim would be to build much, much more support at the grassroots level, and then aim that at our D electeds, who do know, generally, how to count votes. I only wish I knew how to make this happen.
PS: on another matter—I am in CA on an overdue visit with my 97-year-old Mom (she is an old-style small government conservative). Of course my planned mode of transportation back to NYC is by air. Good times . . .
Safe travels, Susan!!! We need you.
How often does a New York election predict voting in any other part of the country? In other urban areas? In areas with a different racial/ethnic breakdown? Without answers to those and similar questions it is hard to extract any lessons.
Mamdani’s win isn’t just about policy—it’s about persona. In today’s politics, the messenger is the message. Americans’ political memories are notoriously short and selective, but more than that, they’re emotionally depleted. Voters aren’t evaluating platforms; they’re grasping for relief.
And Mamdani offered it—not through a tested plan, but through the packaging of hope. The handsome face, the bright smile, the carefully cultivated charisma, the influencer-savvy visuals—he feels like a solution, even if he may never deliver one. That affective aura is the message. Without it, there is no Mamdani.
Try a thought experiment:
> What if Mamdani had a heavy South Asian accent?
> What if the candidate were white, middle-aged, professorial and generic —full of gravitas, but lacking charm?
> What if he or she carried the same ideals but no brand?
He wouldn’t have stood a chance. In today’s electorate, hope isn’t transmitted via policy PDFs—it’s communicated through emotional resonance, optics, and the illusion of shared struggle.
That illusion matters because Mamdani’s voters aren’t just naive or forgetful. They’re exhausted. They’re living in an economic system that is all take and no give—where wages lag, housing is out of reach, and tech lords strip-mine every human interaction for profit. Into that void walks a candidate who looks like he cares, who feels like an answer.
Mamdani is Obama 2.0, adapted for the 2020s attention economy. And like Trump—another master of performative reassurance—he proves that what Americans vote for isn't leadership. It's emotional payoff.
Even DSA members and anti-capitalists must reckon with the irony: charisma is still the most valuable political currency in America.
The legacy Dems need to learn the same lesson from the Mamdani election as they needed to learn from the Trump election: listen to disgruntled voters whose paychecks don't cover their expenses, and tell them you'll help them.
As different as Mamdani and Trump appear to be on the surface, they followed the first rule of marketing: find out what the "customer" wants and give it to him.
People are hurting. They have all different ideas about what would fix that hurt. But what they do know is that all the Democratic leadership has offered is "we're not as bad as Trump," nationally and "Mamdani is a socialist scary person," in NY.
When people are hurting financially, you're not going to win them over by ignoring their worries and pain and talking about what you prefer to discuss, which is what the Dem leadership has been doing.
But look at Democrat Mikey Sherrill, who just won the governship in NJ by talking like the kind of Democrat we used to expect Democrats to be. The essence of her campaign was similar to Trump's and Mamdani's. She said, "I'm going to fix your problems." She spoke about rent and other expenses that are too high, and promised to heal the hurt. Trump said he'd fix the same problem with tariffs and deportations. Mamdani said he'd fix the same problem with free bus passes and government-run grocery stores.
Everything any of them promised beyond recognizing that people are losing ground financially and middle income is now both insecure and not going far enough was just to capture the fringes.
Pundits will call this "populism," ignoring the fact that the definition of that is "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups." Ordinary people. I.e. voters.
Maybe the left is able to hold more nuance than some of the right. I could almost never be a single issue voter. I want my 20 somethings to be able to afford rent in NYC without having to have 7 roommates. And I have a daughter harmed by the gender BS. I remain open to see what he can actually accomplish in a city and state with so much red tape and little room for tax hikes from families already struggling.
Small anecdote illustrating the immense privilege given to the "downtrodden" crossdressing men who claim to be women. A young man in his middle 20s just left NYC, where he grew up, to start over in Florida. Why? Because he'd been working at a shelter as a counselor. This shelter will house mentally ill homeless individuals in Brooklyn, with a men's side and a women's side. They receive counseling, group therapy, food and clothing while social workers try to get them permanent housing and jobs. Many men come in dressed as women, harass the staff, insist on sleeping in the women's quarters, showering in women's bathing areas, knowing the Mamdani crowd will fund lawsuits if they're looked at in the wrong way. Typical quotes: "If you don't stop that woman telling me I don't belong here, I'll beat you up." Then they shove the staffers into the wall, lean over the desk and scream harassment and sometimes threaten to kill them. The police are called and show up, but do nothing, their hands being tied by the ACLU &etc. One day someone will be murdered by men who ideate a female persona, like the one in Brooklyn who killed 2 women and chopped up their bodies, who is now housed on the women's side at Rikers. I moved out of Brooklyn 8 years ago and cross the street when I clock one of these dudes while doing errands. Too many of them are psychopaths. Good luck to anyone who chooses to stay in NYC. I'm glad my friend's son read the writing on the wall.
Slightly off-topic, but I thought this was a good piece on Mamdani:
https://www.thefp.com/p/what-the-right-gets-wrong-about-zohran