As his rivals in the New York City mayoral election slouch into the final two months of the race, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani of Queens easily maintains his double-digit lead in polls, and national and state leaders continue to fret over how a socialist with no executive experience is set to take charge of America’s largest city.
It’s not that New York voters have suddenly become socialists in the past four years, any more than national voters suddenly became MAGA militants last fall in electing Donald Trump as president again.
In both cases, more traditional Democrats failed to realize that it’s not enough to point out a transgressive candidate’s shortcomings. You have to offer voters something better. And few Democrats seem to be able to do that.
Despite Mr. Mamdani’s charisma and campaign prowess, he, like Mr. Trump, should be a mainstream Democrat’s dream opponent. His economic policies, like Mr. Trump’s, are transparently impractical.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.
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