The Myth of Mamdani's Mandate
Only 5% of New York voted for Zohran Mamdani
After Zohran Mamdani secured the Democrat nomination for mayor, millions of people around the country are wondering how the city that lived through 9/11 could have done this?
The answer is it didn’t.
Less than 30% of Democrats voted in the mayoral primary. Of those, supposedly, 43.5% voted for Mamdani. So some 12.9% of New York Democrats voted for Mamdani.
56% of registered voters in the city are Democrats so some 7.2% of city residents voted for him.
New York City has a population of 8.2 million. Of those 432,305 or 5% voted for Mamdani.
This isn’t a mandate. It’s a city that tuned out the election because it saw no one worth voting for and ceded the playing field to radicals and extremists.
The media is doing its best to hype those numbers as a stunning mandate when what they really represent are high levels of turnout by Mamadani’s base and low turnout by everyone else.
Who are those 5%? They aren’t New Yorkers because polls showed us Mamdani performing poorly with anyone over 50, with African-American, Latino and working class white voters. What’s left? White hipsters and Muslim immigrants.
Most New Yorkers didn’t vote. They stayed home and allowed the 5% of white hipsters and Islamists to have their way. Given a choice between two terrible candidates, in a city that has long since proven to be utterly corrupt, they opted out. They may have failed to protect the city, but the political establishment failed them badly by putting up Cuomo and seems likely to fail all over again as it now has to revert to holding up Mayor Eric Adams as the last best hope for New York City.
In the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race between corrupt politicians Edwin Edwards and Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, bumper stickers read, “Vote for the crook, it’s important.” Voting for the crook may be important once more in New York City, but it’s not an ideal choice you want to give voters. Not unless you want below 30% turnout with the numbers favoring those who are most enthusiastic about their Neo-Neo-Nazi candidate and his plans to destroy the city.
New Yorkers needed a real choice and instead they got a choice between eating a dead rat and committing suicide. Only 5% chose to commit suicide, but most didn’t want to eat a dead rat either. And the dead rat strategy is going to be a longshot in any political campaign.
The best way to beat an evil candidate is with a better choice, not with a lesser evil.
Maybe America and Europe’s big cities are beyond saving, but the low turnout shows that the city that survived 9/11 hasn’t turned evil, its people have either left or given up on politics.
New York City can be saved. But it will take a leader with a real message to do it.
We need someone of the courage and caliber of Giuliani to save NYC
So New Yorkers did vote... By not voting. But electoral apathy forces the exasperated majority to suffer from the politics of activist minority. Terrible outcome, but how can the system ensure a practical solution without becoming a super expensive burden in and of itself? Should voting in all elections be mandatory, perhaps with the choice of "none of the above"?