I hope this win signals (to both parties) that voters are receptive and will get engaged when a clear message is presented about cost of living and quality of life issues. Some of which are taken for granted in most other western countries.
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
Only speaking for myself (also not a political wonk): I do not expect Mamdani to be able to enact all of his policies. Not because of money but because of political opposition from the powerful.
I felt the same about Bernie and Medicare for all. We have the money to do it, but the powerful will not let it happen.
However: that doesn’t mean we should elect politicians that won’t even try to make these things happen. It’s important to have a North Star to shoot for, to move the Overton window of what’s worth discussing and to keep an eye on what political machinations block it from happening. I will never vote for a politician who pre-compromises with an imagined opposition, because that tells me they have a different North Star than I do in the first place.
Absolutely, elect enough Mamdani’s and the powerful will not be able to stop the changes. It’s the expectation that a single Mamdani or Sanders can fix much that has lead to extreme apathy from much of the electorate.
Obama was hated by San Franciscan progressives because he came in with all of these promises and then backtracked on almost all of them. He basically turned into a Bush-lite, and he even maintained every single one of Bush's policies as well as deadlines. For example, he talked a lot about abortion and then immediately said it wasn't a priority for him once he got into office. He never closed Guantanamo and in both elections said he didn't support gay marriage.
ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time. Income inequality skyrocketed under him as well. Anyone who wasn't rich enough to afford some sort of asset like stocks or real estate was left behind and is now suffering.
I'll give you one reason, among many, it wasn't a failure. It made it illegal to deny people health insurance coverage based on pre existing conditions. That was a big step forward in a broken system to restore some humanity to the system.
I heard this somewhere and its true of every politician:
you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
ACA is NOT a failure. It did address some really critical pain points but left others. There is no bill that can address every single pain point in a system that is as complex as the US healthcare.
“…the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time.”
That’s such a fraught statement, because the _opposite_ is claimed by supporters of the ACA after the repeal of the mandatory rule.
I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has only been legislatively weakened over time, rather than improved.
Whatever alternative, employers should not be where we look for our healthcare. Can’t understand why anyone would trust their employer or expect good outcomes in the post-lifelong employment age.
I hope Mamdani turns out to be as good as Obama was.
What was so impressive about Obama was his incredible leadership skills and ability to get elected president DESPITE his racial and ethnic background. That the things the far left saw which drove them to support him were not the ones that led him to be such a good leader for the country.
In 2008, I spent most of the year backpacking through Europe before starting college in the fall. So I truly don't remember much of Obama's first campaign or the tone of it at the time. But there is very little evidence in my mind that Mamdani has any of Obama's abilities. Hopefully either I'm missing something again, or he'll rise to the occasion despite the lack of evidence to suggest it.
> ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time.
This is absolute, unequivocal bullshit. I get that you aren't under 26, that you don't need subsidies, never were denied coverage for having had the audacity to get sick years before, and that you've never had to pay for expensive care, so you probably don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but suggesting it was a "failure" is absurd. The idea that actual coverage was less affordable after the ACA passed is such spectacular nonsense I don't even know where to start.
Sometimes it's ok to NOT have big, strident opinions on things you know you don't even slightly understand, and to ask questions or approach things with curiosity, instead.
I always called him a Bush-lite too, such a disappointment. Did everything I disliked about Bush and nothing about the things he said he'd do. If anything some of the things he did were worse, like executing a US Citizen with a drone without trial or crime to get a man that wasn't even there.
"He never closed Guantanamo" is missing a lot of context. See [0] for more context around Congress blocking his efforts[1].
(While searching for a decent article, I found [2] which has the hilarious-in-retrospect quote: "It just doesn't happen in, you know, traditional American justice that someone is essentially arrested and disappeared with no access to attorney" - oh the sweet innocence of 2017.)
[1] Which, to be fair, were hamstrung by his refusal to override the Republicans - a sensible approach (at the time) because a) the right wing would have gone mad (see: literally anything Obama did) and b) it opens the door for ruling by Presidential fiat which, sadly, was kicked wide open by Trump-1 and the entire wall removed by Trump-2 with the help of SCOTUS. On the whole, though, Obama wasn't as good as promised, definitely.
I kinda feel Obama is more of a Trojan horse. It was not he tried and failed to get what he campaigned for implemented, it was more like he did a U turn after he got elected. e.g. he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical"
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
I genuinely can't believe, still, that I have to spell this out for people.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
There was a government option in the original ACA. Dems couldn’t get the votes to overcome the filibuster in the senate to pass it. It had nothing to do Obama u turning. It was an amazing feat to get it passed in congress and get 60 votes in the senate.
The Affordable Care Act wasn't a complete solution - and I don't get the feeling universal health care was necessarily achievable - but it is the reason that I have health care and mental health services today. So I consider it to be a meaningful - if incremental - improvement. I imagine there are quite a few people aside from myself who are happy to have it.
> [Obama] called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
I feel Obama was trying to appease the Republicans as well, he appointed many of them who back stabbed him shortly after. Maybe he was trying to no be too radical just because he was black and knew how racist a part of America was and it turned out it was right, Trump mainly got elected because "Democrats" put a black person in the White House. In retrospect, yeah, maybe he should have been more radical.
Not too radical to be good and effective, too radical to break through current political constraints. You have to confront the reality of what can actually be achieved within the system you’re working in.
Proper Obamacare wasn't implemented because healthcare industry interests held up legislation until the midterms at which point the Republicans took over congress.
"I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices."
Zohran has the largest, youngest, mandate in
NYC in a very long time.
The key is thats it's NYC and the place has an energy all it's own, and Zohran has that, and understands that NYC is always broke falling down, rich, and building up.
Think about it, this guy just stood up, and Gotham said Hey!, you!, YES!
NYC is pumped and ready to out work, out think, and out party, the entrenched, but tired and old, establishment.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way(and cheer)
People should also remember Democrats won contested Governor ships as well. This wasn't just a Mamdani election/victory night, though the far left want to make it look that way.
I have some confrontational views about this, but in good faith I’d like to invite some discussion with it (not an American).
TLDR: You will see more Mamdanis in other cities. This is a treasure trove for MAGA. Expect at least 12 years of secure nationwide wins for whoever is championing that platform
> I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message
This is the gist of the PR campaign, voters fell for. It goes in line with him getting away with being “grassrootsy” when in fact he got tremendous funding from the typical NGOs (Open Society etc) and is a son of a Professor who was/is basically paid to tell American and African Top 5% why white people are bad.
His win also shows the effect migration has on elections. Immigration inherently is a deal where incumbent residents define the terms, and when the other party returns the favor by electing anti-incumbents into office some incumbents will have profound buyer’s remorse.
Fertile soil for the right.
Mamdani’s success also puts a spotlight on foundational problems of the democrats.
After all Mamdani is charismatic, yes, but more importantly he appealed on the issues. His policies will be abysmally failing to resolve the problems he criticized, yes - but that is unimportant to the voter. Important is that he believably criticized them.
How is it, that these well-established circles of the democrats, these well oiled machines, where in states like CA or NY (or most US cities) mayorships, senatorships, congressional seats, and governorships are basically handed out by the DNC, fail to win on those issues? It’s not like making life affordable is not a core branding of the party.
Well, it appears that the DNC gerrymandered itself to death. The dissolution of political contest from the public into internal primaries has stymied the platform’s vitality to a point where it can be easily hijacked by radicals.
Expect many more Mamdani-esque wins locally. Which will mean many wore wins for MAGA nationally.
>How is it, that these well-established circles of the democrats, these well oiled machines, where in states like CA or NY (or most US cities) mayorships, senatorships, congressional seats, and governorships are basically handed out by the DNC, fail to win on those issues?
You should know this better than the US, but our "democrats" are center right for the rest of the world. The goal is to sound progressive but then act in neoliberal ways to appeal to donors, after the attention isn't on them. I call these "Establshment Democrats", more concerned with keeping the status quo and being a PR machine to the people than actually making policy that benefit the people.
That's why Mamdami can cut through by saying the things that Establshment Dems hated. And early on in his campaign when he gained momentum you can see the resistance against him by the Establishment, up to Cuomo decided to run independent after the primaries. I can't speak for the common person, but those actions speak a lot louder than any words Mamdami said.
There is a rift in the US Left, but I think it's one Estblashiment Dems had coming for a while now. If absolutely nothing else, the rampant destruction of the country by the Trump admin has absolutely activated people in ways not seen since 9/11. And when people are active, words aren't enough anymore. They want action, to not see military roaming their streets and kidnapping US citizens. They want to see actual ways to fix the economy as these trade wars sap at their wealth.
The collorary here is that the MAGA movement is also causing a rift in the US Right. There's definitely Esablishment Republicans that do not like this situation either. And there's the fact that all this is propped on one obsese, Dementia-ridden, 79 year old man. If/when he passes, there's going to be a huge power vacuum, and none of the headrunners are ready to fill that.
If anything, the split on the Right will be worse than the split of the Left, when it eventually happens. At least the Left is having new blood to try and push that rift from the bottom up compared to the house of cards that is Trump and everyone who tried bundling under him.
Pretty sure both parties already know this. They both just don't want that to be a topic of conversation to control the window of what can / cannot be discussed in terms of what benefits the parties.
These people are not dumb. They are just very very interested in self-dealing.
Obamacare being what it was is 1,000,000% Obama’s failure - he’ll tell you this same thing over coffee too. Just outmost disaster through and through how it was implemented.
Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
You guys have it all wrong. There was only one candidate for the dem party, Here's the list:
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
It was pretty pathetic when, during one of the mayoral debates this year, most of the candidates including Cuomo said the first country they would visit as mayor would be Israel. Thankfully, younger generations aren’t falling for it anymore.
As a Brit who has been exposed to the blanket coverage of this on social media: Mamdani is going to be like Sadiq Khan. Popular with people in the city, while those outside run endless weird fantasy "news" scare stories because he's a Muslim.
I'm a Londoner who voted for Khan. There's a difference in that contrary to all the scapegoat stuff in the right wing press, Khan has had largely sensible middle of of the road policies. And where he has deviated from the average, on air pollution, it's been stuff I'm in favour of - I have desire to get sick/die from that.
Mamdani seems like a nice guy but some of his policies seem a bit bonkers - state owned retail outlets and the like.
> Free buses and free child care are not remotely common policies in the US. Ditto for govt-run grocery stores.
While not common, free buses do exist throughout the US and Europe.
Free childcare is uncommon. IDK where that actually exists.
Government run stores is actually very common. Many states run the liquor stores. A few cities have government run grocery stores.
Freezing the rent on rent controlled buildings isn't common but rent control itself it quite uncommon. It's probably the easiest for Mamdani to accomplish.
Free childcare is an extremely business-friendly proposal (increases the workforce, reduces the need for costly parental leave). I'd say I don't know why it's not more popular with right wing neoliberals, but I know why (they're more anti-government than pro-economy).
Rent control is increasing popular and common in liberal areas (which NYC is)
Plenty of red states have government run liquor stores. And army bases have government run grocery stores along with government run everything else. I don't see the problem here. Progressive version presumably would be free groceries for everyone.
Government runs a lot of businesses alongside private estates. Postal is the biggest example. Why is this super unusual? I don't know if it's middle of the road, but I don't think it's socialism.
Progressive ideas would be price controls on groceries to curb inflation, or seizing the means of production by making a major stake in a major food chain.
(side note: I think it's hilarious that Trump is doing this with Intel and potentially Tiktok and few have labeled it as such).
I disagree with this. I mean, it's as straightforward for me as you wrote it. But,
1. It hasn't worked like this when they elected Trump for the second time. Back then Kamala should have been the only valid candidate, according to this thinking.
2. Mamdani got 1,036,051 votes and Cuomo got 854,995. This is not exactly "all of NYC" as you imply.
> In September 2024, a series of investigations into Adams's administration emerged. Adams was indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges. He alleged that the charges were retaliation for opposing the Biden administration's handling of the migrant crisis. In February 2025, the Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration instructed federal prosecutors to drop charges against Adams. Judge Dale Ho dismissed the case against Adams on April 2, 2025
It’ll be interesting to see the headlines the onions writing by summer 2026.
For all I dislike him, Trump essentially squandered the political capital he had on things that are shiny, motivated by ego, and created clickbaity headlines that single out small subsets of the American populous. He could have done far far worse and less reversible things to America. We’re now at the start of the end of his presidency, with focus first turning to midterms and then his replacement.
I don’t expect Mamdani to do much better with his political capital.
> Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Look, Mamdani ran a good campaign, and if I was an NYC voter (I am not) I'd probably vote for him out of the options provided.
However, this just is not true. Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road". Especially not on education and dealing with the homeless and public transit. And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
> And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
>Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road"
It seems like common sense to hear "cityfolk pay taxes, buses are paid for by taxpayers. Therefore, bus rides should be free for cityfolk". There's a lot more to it, but most voters are not going to read the 50 page proposal that Mamdami would need to submit to the govenor to get the wheels rolling.
I think that's enough for it to fall under "common sense". Policy you can explain in 3 sentences or less. Homeless people need help, not to be arrested. Invest in an organization who makes sure that these people get help so they don't stay on the streets.
(I can't find his education policy on a quick skim of the website and plan).
>his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road.
Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
The minimum wage not being indexed to inflation has been theft for decades. It would take a minimum wage of almost $60/hr to maintain purchasing power from 50-60 years ago.
Edit: If the system of “we make asset prices go up while labor prices are inflated away” gets to the point where a living wage is unobtainable (we are here), we can change the system. The name is irrelevant, it’s fundamentally “what are you optimizing for?”
This happens eventually (wage increases) due to global structural demographic working age population compression, the argument is really time horizon if we help people live better lives with dignity now vs years from now as labor supply declines.
The minimum wage should easily be 11-13 by any inflation metric you use for the last 40 years, and doubling that for a high cost of living place is reasonable.
Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones.
Price distortions are bad because the market might not react correctly to it. But if there are too many restrictions to build housing anyway, you might as well ease the pain for social harmony.
It's not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing? Presumably the kids can learn from the parents, get connected, etc.
Also, Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news. Lots of people predicting that Mamdani's criminal policies, economic policies, and lack of experienced staffers will lead the city to dark days.
> not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing?
Aristocracies are more stable but less efficient. That creates an incentive for corruption when growth inevitably stalls. Which leads to catastrophic instability.
I really don't get the doom and gloom on this, NYC now has a mayor that might inadvertently fuck over the city trying to do right by working class folks instead of a mayor who does it as a matter of course. Forget policy disagreements, just the fact that we have a successful politician any side of the isle that is not currently gargling the balls of rich people and actually has some principles is so refreshing.
You are demand better of your government than "the blatant corruption you've learned to live with."
I'm against any and all political dynasties. They fly in the face of what representative government should be about. We have many people qualified to become political leaders but they never get the chance due to how the system operates.
I'm not sure NYC knows what it is getting into with this guy, but yeah, the alternatives were lousy. Sliwa? The whole Guardian Angels thing was one hell of a marketing job, I'll say that. Does anyone really believe a bunch of former gang thugs with some martial arts training accomplished very much?
The Cuomo family is corrupt to the core. Terrible for NY State.
> It's not clear to me why a multigenerational dynasty specifically is a bad thing?
Because they're undemocratic.
Concentrating political capital within a family means raises barriers to entry. People with new -- possibly better -- ideas don't get a meaningful chance to see those ideas implemented.
These sorts of setups destroy the idea that politics and elections can be a meritocracy, but instead are determined by birthright. You end up with aristocracies populated by the extended family, friends, and business partners of the family in power.
You also get stagnation. You're less likely to see other points of view represented in the political process, and that affects outcomes.
Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
> Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
Mamdani will learn that you need to be friends with the people your voters hate to get things done.
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
>Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development
He's not actually pitching any new price controls. He's proposing a temporary rent freeze on rent stabilized (rent control is tiny in comparison and unaffected by this) apartments that are already subject to limits on rent increases.
How do I know this? I live in a a rent stabilized apartment. The rent for which, even though increases are "limited" (usually somewhere around 3-5%) has more than doubled since I moved in.
So no. Mamdani isn't suggesting making any changes to the law as it has existed for at least 50 years, rather he's suggesting stopping rent increases while fast-tracking new housing, which would likely stabilize the housing market.
As an aside, which most folks don't understand, is that the vacancy rate in NYC is ~1.5%. Healthy housing markets have vacancy rates of 4-6%. Like many places in the US (and elsewhere), NYC has a housing shortage. But in NYC, that shortage is much more severe than almost anywhere else in the US.
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
That article says the main benefit of rent control (besides popularity) is an increase in YIMBY sentiment, but it seems it still has the downsides detractors dislike about it.
It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.
Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.
All variants of rent control etc. have been tried in Europe and have miserably failed. Quite the opposite, rents have been rising even more, and new construction has been reduced due to new politically induced risks.
Examples: Berlin, Barcelona
But as Barcelona shows, there is a feedback loop benefiting leftist populist politicians:
Higher rents, lower housing supply -> people frustrated -> leftist populists get more votes -> more stupid regulation -> even higher rents, even lower housing supply -> people more frustrated -> ...
Berlin never really had rent control. It's been a few months before the law was abolished for constitutional technicalities. Everybody knew this was a possibility, so you can't make any conclusions about it. Bringing it up is pure propaganda. Nothing failed economically!
We have a federal law which in theory could slow down price progression, but it is rarely applied. It also doesn't govern newly build apartments, so criticism usually falls short there too...
Fascinating, yet rents have increased faster than inflation even as rent control has waned in NYC.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.
Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
That quote seems to ignore reality. If we look at San Francisco, where units built before 1980 are not subject to rent control, we find that building new housing has nothing to do with fears that rent control will be extended.
I agree that rents for uncontrolled apartments are high, but if we eliminated rent control for the rest, that wouldn't really fix anything. The formerly-rent-controlled apartments would cost just as much as the post-1979 housing stock.
The only thing that will fix our housing cost problem is a truly radical amount of new construction. Developers would love to build here, but the cost to build here is ridiculously high for policy reasons that have nothing to do with actually building.
If we could build enough housing to satisfy demand, then we might be ok eliminating rent control. Rent control is a response to housing scarcity, not the cause. You'd think economists would understand basic supply and demand.
About the only thing I do agree with is that rent control reduces the quality of available housing. Landlords are less incentivized to fix problems and maintain their buildings when they can't make market rate from their tenants.
Sadly many conservative leaning types simply think "nothing is wrong, this is capitalism. Just get a better job and make more money". While also railing against worker protections and wage increases that would be ensure better jobs.
In other words: they don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt them. The core mentality of NIMBYism.
> "a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing"
To address quality first, most economists would agree that landlords are incentivized to invest the bare minimum into their property that they can; this is not so much a function of income from rent. If a tenant feels generous and starts paying more for rent, the landlord will not invest more into their unit. So I find the inverse of that to be an assumption that doesn't completely add up.
Saying rent control will affect quantity is completely beside the point. Rent controls are meant to ease the financial burden on the people currently renting in NYC, not a hypothetical newcomer looking for an apartment. Housing is already a huge pain to find for lower-income new yorkers so the threat of a more scarcity doesn't really change the equation for a lot of people.
As if Cuomo was some economic genius. Look at all his campaign material - they were abject brain dead character smears and racism. If he was truly just trying to win by any means to supposedly save New Yorkers from economic disaster, he was a Machiavellian of the highest degree.
He used Orthodox Jewish communities with top down leaders as a core machine style voting bloc. The whole community turns out and did what the head guy says, just like the old Tammany Hall. I’m sure plenty of people “moved” from their upstate town back to Brooklyn. Usually the old style conservative Catholics vote for him too. (Oddly enough as his divorce and “living in sin” was scandalous)
The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.
It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.
I’m not sure your understand that almost none of his price control “wants” are likely to be enacted. City government is pretty moderate and Mamdani isn’t a dictator
1992 is a long time gone and economists aren’t always right. I don’t know how much worse the housing stock could get so maybe it’s time to try something different.
Also quoting Krugman, from today, who no longer writes for the NYT:
"Which party is out of touch, again?
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: If Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?
I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.
Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The G.O.P.
If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and yesterday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than G.O.P. apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.
And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists, and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism."
The literal alternative, which is actually happening right now and not some textbook hypothetical is supply not keeping up anyway and landlords charging however much they want pretty much unbridled, not to mention major companies snapping up real estate and leveraging it as investment collateral rather than treating them and managing them as, you know, housing.
We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.
Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
1. New york city has rent control on 1 million units already
2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible
3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply
Making it about "sides" is exactly why politics is as toxic as it is today.
Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?
Actually demand has being going down and rents have been trending down as a result. The main reason is less immigration and international students. I recall years ago every open house I would go to ended up selling above market value for cash from someone from overseas who "invests" their money on the back of locals trying to buy a house to live in for their family. The billionaires were not the ones to blame for this.
The underlying cause of impoverishment where inflation of housing, healthcare, and education is outpacing income is an expansionist monetary policy. ZIRP (Zero interest policy) along with QE (quantitative easing) pushed ever increasing amounts of printed money into the system. No one is touching the root cause. Not Mamdani, not Democrats and not Republicans.
"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money'
December 8, 201010:39 AM ET
By
Frank James
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.
On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:
BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...
Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "
Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.
But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.
It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.
> Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash.
GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising.
The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it as they made more money and saw people like Trump and Musk gain power.
The 2010's was the moment of SV emerging as a political donor cornerstone combined with Obama's peak, when up until that point, tech had been relatively hands off (80s through to 2010's). It was then that QE and low interest rates become part of VC strategy, and so SV got comfy with its image as supporting mainstream liberal candidates and policies. They all threw money behind the Dem machine (Obama, Hillary, Biden) until they realized they weren't actually getting any decision making power for their purchases, so the ones who felt some amount of urgency switched to Trump by showing up to speak at rallies or inaugurations.
Grow SF really only exists to go after city council members or school board members who get into twitter fights with a certain someone.
Pretty much a clean sweep for the dems today including a trashing on prop 50. In general I think only something on the fringes can draw away people attracted to the fringes.
well Prop 50 to redraw California's district lines passed by a nearly 30% margin and counting right now. That's an absolute spanking leading up to 26 midterms.
The story tonight isn't about Trump at all though, it's about millennial DSA types beating the establishment Democratic institution - in NYC, Detroit, Mississippi. In 24 everyone was astonished at the lack of response - "what is DNC going to do about losing to Trump, twice?". This is the beginning of what will be the eventual answer.
Also it doesn't need to be said, but the mobilization of 1M+ votes for Zohran's campaign today renders the fringes meaningless. He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.
You don't need to get them back, you just need to motivate the more normal voters and demoralize the weird ones.
There seem to be people who voted for Trump as an anti establishment candidate. Now, they're obviously completely unmoored from reality, but perhaps they'd like another anti establishment candidate?
Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.
Sure, Thiel is identifying some of the same problems, but the solutions he's proposing are basically the opposite of the ones Mamdani is. Unsurprisingly, he's proposing solutions that benefit billionaires rather than everyone else (e.g. just les us build whatever wherever we want, of course we'll build cheap housing that brings property houses down! Who could ever imagine we'll build luxury mansions that keep property prices high?).
From a non-american perspective it seems to me that in the US the problem of homelessness often gets mistaken for a problem with the homeless, maybe changing that narrative is a starting point?
I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful. It's apparent that many people are fed up with the status quo so they're pushing towards more experimental candidates.
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
Particularly in comparison to Cuomo who by all accounts doesn’t even seem to like the city he campaigned to run. A tiny bit of joy goes a very long way.
Strong agree. I think his policies are absurd but hope that more invested young people who aren’t career politicians can start trying a platform that isn’t party line and resonates with residents.
The biggest takeaway to me is how ridiculous it is that the US considers Mamdani somehow "experimental" or even radical.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care
2. Fast and Free Busses
3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
Because that's what the opposition, wrapped in the flag, tells voters to do.
"Free buses" is not really a thing even in the most left leaning European countries. Most experts recommend very cheap subsidized public transportation but not free.
Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration"
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
As they say... (often misattributed to John Steinbeck, but at best its really a rough paraphrase of something he wrote) "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
The truly wealthy have long convinced the average "middle class" American that they exist in roughly the same social class (even though this has always been an insane lie) but this illusion is quickly falling away due to current economic circumstances causing untenable concentration of wealth.
Ultimately its the absolute naked greed of the truly wealthy that is causing this realignment (that is likely to end badly for them as well) to happen. They are so dead set against making even the smallest move toward fair taxation that they are creating a situation in which the shrinking middle class have no choice but to see that they are quickly becoming an endangered species whose relative fortunes are moving rapidly down rather than slowly up.
> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.
I think it’s likely around 75% of his agenda will be blocked. NYC is a big ship to turn. However it will still be better than what Cuomo would have done
> I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful.
Since the 2008, the day after every election of a new president, the coalition that elected them had this sense of hope for a brighter tomorrow. One which disappeared within months.
Except maybe 2016, but the bubble I was in was so preoccupied by shock that maybe I missed it (also, I was deeply engrossed in the work I was doing that fall)
Why look at North Korea when NYC has had rent control forever? It makes landlords neglect maintenance. That’s about it. I don’t know that I totally agree with it, but it’s fine.
Or, you know, current day European social democracies.
You can’t help but laugh at the amount of hysteria about Mamdani. No cost childcare? Free buses? Using existing rent control regulations to keep rent affordable? Oh no
Nice to see someone young, charismatic, and highly energized breathing life into the decrepit democratic party. Hopefully he can accomplish a ton and repudiate the DNC.
The reality, which kinda sucks and is boring, is that generally people with money understand how money works, and why things like rent control, government grocery stores, and free [expensive service], are financially brutal policies.
This is stuff economists know. Why would rich people know that? How many rich people pay rent or rely on social security? Making profits is not a skill transferrable to the broader economy.
Also, what worked in the past, in different places or different demographics does not mean it will work again today.
Brutal to who? Wage theft is also brutal, but it's pretty obvious why the folk who "understand how money works" condone it. It's a tad credulous to think the billionaires donated against Mamdani out of a sense of noblesse oblige
Appeal to authority and sweeping generalisation in a cynical dismissal package.
You’re not talking to bilionaires on this site, only a portion of bilionaires know about making money, which has no relation whatsoever to having a good grasp about political philosophy, large-scale economic principles and statesmanship.
It's just they have been in charge for so long, and gotten their ideology implemented for decades, the damage they caused is now so large and felt by so many people deep inside the neocolonial core that we finally see the first cracks in this system.
If these people were aware of the current moment instead of just confused and trapped in their own ideological bubble, they would probably all be wearing MAGA hats, since the authoritarian right is the only way they can realistically hold on to their rotten system in the long run. Curious why that's not a lesson they learned from history, too uncomfortable to think about that part I suppose.
But some are selfish assholes; and if you find yourself agreeing with the selfish asshole rich people when it comes to economics, it might be worth double-checking their claims that a policy is supposedly better for everyone. Much hooplah is made of rising tides lifting all boats, but flooding the valley tends to just drown everyone not in a boat.
Why is that? I think many of us who are educated in history understand the risks of collectivism. It has never worked out anywhere. I see it as basically a marketing cover for oligarchy. The Western world should aspire to better than China. I'm not even a conservative, just read a lot. Humanity has had some pretty hellish experiences with communism and yet we keep "going there."
Exciting times in New York City, I wish them the best, it probably will become a uphill battle now to do anything without media on every single thing out the wazooo
Readit News
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down
I felt the same about Bernie and Medicare for all. We have the money to do it, but the powerful will not let it happen.
However: that doesn’t mean we should elect politicians that won’t even try to make these things happen. It’s important to have a North Star to shoot for, to move the Overton window of what’s worth discussing and to keep an eye on what political machinations block it from happening. I will never vote for a politician who pre-compromises with an imagined opposition, because that tells me they have a different North Star than I do in the first place.
Mamdani is one of the powerful now.
ACA is a failure and the only thing it did was make it mandatory and unaffordable at the same time. Income inequality skyrocketed under him as well. Anyone who wasn't rich enough to afford some sort of asset like stocks or real estate was left behind and is now suffering.
you campaign in poetry and govern in prose.
ACA is NOT a failure. It did address some really critical pain points but left others. There is no bill that can address every single pain point in a system that is as complex as the US healthcare.
Because San Francisco progressivism doesn’t win on a national stage.
That’s such a fraught statement, because the _opposite_ is claimed by supporters of the ACA after the repeal of the mandatory rule.
I’m old enough to remember the failed attempts for healthcare reforms under President Bill Clinton. The ACA felt like a miracle. It wasn’t what everyone wanted, but it was a start with principles. It has only been legislatively weakened over time, rather than improved.
Whatever alternative, employers should not be where we look for our healthcare. Can’t understand why anyone would trust their employer or expect good outcomes in the post-lifelong employment age.
Isn't it because Republicans spent a busy decade destroying it?
Compared to what? Is it really better to just be uninsured and go bankrupt over an ambulance ride?
This point alone makes your entire post suspect, even though parts of it are indeed true (it's a real shame guantanomo was not closed down).
What was so impressive about Obama was his incredible leadership skills and ability to get elected president DESPITE his racial and ethnic background. That the things the far left saw which drove them to support him were not the ones that led him to be such a good leader for the country.
In 2008, I spent most of the year backpacking through Europe before starting college in the fall. So I truly don't remember much of Obama's first campaign or the tone of it at the time. But there is very little evidence in my mind that Mamdani has any of Obama's abilities. Hopefully either I'm missing something again, or he'll rise to the occasion despite the lack of evidence to suggest it.
This is absolute, unequivocal bullshit. I get that you aren't under 26, that you don't need subsidies, never were denied coverage for having had the audacity to get sick years before, and that you've never had to pay for expensive care, so you probably don't know what you're talking about in the first place, but suggesting it was a "failure" is absurd. The idea that actual coverage was less affordable after the ACA passed is such spectacular nonsense I don't even know where to start.
Sometimes it's ok to NOT have big, strident opinions on things you know you don't even slightly understand, and to ask questions or approach things with curiosity, instead.
(While searching for a decent article, I found [2] which has the hilarious-in-retrospect quote: "It just doesn't happen in, you know, traditional American justice that someone is essentially arrested and disappeared with no access to attorney" - oh the sweet innocence of 2017.)
[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/obama-congress-guanta...
[1] Which, to be fair, were hamstrung by his refusal to override the Republicans - a sensible approach (at the time) because a) the right wing would have gone mad (see: literally anything Obama did) and b) it opens the door for ruling by Presidential fiat which, sadly, was kicked wide open by Trump-1 and the entire wall removed by Trump-2 with the help of SCOTUS. On the whole, though, Obama wasn't as good as promised, definitely.
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantan...
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Stop calling concepts like ACA a failure and look in the mirror.
Then ignore it all and go enjoy some TV, video games, grubhub any obligation to yourself away; you earned it.
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
Obama did not do a U-turn. It is the worst naivete to think that what happened was "he had big ideas and he changed his mind." He had to bring up big ideas to get elected, and then he got elected the first Black president and some of you seem entirely too dense to actually grasp what that means. President. Not King.
Subject to all of those checks and balances you hear about and then some.
You people act as if he could wave a wand and just sweep away everyone and everything who was against his big ideas, when the opposite was at play.
Please, grow a better sense of politics.
He "called for" a bill that would pass (barely, as it required a filibuster-proof majority that will never happen again in our lives), and it did. It's absolutely infuriating to me the extent to which the American electorate fails to understand basic civics. Presidents take all sorts of legislative positions, but they don't run congress and never have.
And so the cycle continues. Presidential candidate says "I thinks Foo is good", electorate takes that as a promise to deliver Foo. Foo fails to appear, electorate gets mad and votes for the other guy promising to deliver Bar.
Never mind that MetaFoo actually passed, Bar is impossible, and the Barite party wants to enact hungarian notation via martial law. Electorate is still pissed off about Foo, somehow.
...I mean c'mon now. Congress passed what they could and it cost the Dems greatly. Why are we pretending Obama could have gotten more?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_Americans_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
(Fuck you Bill Kristol.)
There's a long, sad, littered history of attempts at universal care in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
Zohran has the largest, youngest, mandate in NYC in a very long time. The key is thats it's NYC and the place has an energy all it's own, and Zohran has that, and understands that NYC is always broke falling down, rich, and building up. Think about it, this guy just stood up, and Gotham said Hey!, you!, YES! NYC is pumped and ready to out work, out think, and out party, the entrenched, but tired and old, establishment. Lead, follow, or get out of the way(and cheer)
Make of that what you will.
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TLDR: You will see more Mamdanis in other cities. This is a treasure trove for MAGA. Expect at least 12 years of secure nationwide wins for whoever is championing that platform
> I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message
This is the gist of the PR campaign, voters fell for. It goes in line with him getting away with being “grassrootsy” when in fact he got tremendous funding from the typical NGOs (Open Society etc) and is a son of a Professor who was/is basically paid to tell American and African Top 5% why white people are bad.
His win also shows the effect migration has on elections. Immigration inherently is a deal where incumbent residents define the terms, and when the other party returns the favor by electing anti-incumbents into office some incumbents will have profound buyer’s remorse.
Fertile soil for the right.
Mamdani’s success also puts a spotlight on foundational problems of the democrats.
After all Mamdani is charismatic, yes, but more importantly he appealed on the issues. His policies will be abysmally failing to resolve the problems he criticized, yes - but that is unimportant to the voter. Important is that he believably criticized them.
How is it, that these well-established circles of the democrats, these well oiled machines, where in states like CA or NY (or most US cities) mayorships, senatorships, congressional seats, and governorships are basically handed out by the DNC, fail to win on those issues? It’s not like making life affordable is not a core branding of the party.
Well, it appears that the DNC gerrymandered itself to death. The dissolution of political contest from the public into internal primaries has stymied the platform’s vitality to a point where it can be easily hijacked by radicals.
Expect many more Mamdani-esque wins locally. Which will mean many wore wins for MAGA nationally.
You should know this better than the US, but our "democrats" are center right for the rest of the world. The goal is to sound progressive but then act in neoliberal ways to appeal to donors, after the attention isn't on them. I call these "Establshment Democrats", more concerned with keeping the status quo and being a PR machine to the people than actually making policy that benefit the people.
That's why Mamdami can cut through by saying the things that Establshment Dems hated. And early on in his campaign when he gained momentum you can see the resistance against him by the Establishment, up to Cuomo decided to run independent after the primaries. I can't speak for the common person, but those actions speak a lot louder than any words Mamdami said.
There is a rift in the US Left, but I think it's one Estblashiment Dems had coming for a while now. If absolutely nothing else, the rampant destruction of the country by the Trump admin has absolutely activated people in ways not seen since 9/11. And when people are active, words aren't enough anymore. They want action, to not see military roaming their streets and kidnapping US citizens. They want to see actual ways to fix the economy as these trade wars sap at their wealth.
The collorary here is that the MAGA movement is also causing a rift in the US Right. There's definitely Esablishment Republicans that do not like this situation either. And there's the fact that all this is propped on one obsese, Dementia-ridden, 79 year old man. If/when he passes, there's going to be a huge power vacuum, and none of the headrunners are ready to fill that.
If anything, the split on the Right will be worse than the split of the Left, when it eventually happens. At least the Left is having new blood to try and push that rift from the bottom up compared to the house of cards that is Trump and everyone who tried bundling under him.
These people are not dumb. They are just very very interested in self-dealing.
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Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
> No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young
Stupid stuff he credibly disavowed.
I’m still blown away that after De Blasio he was the only one, when asked a foreign policy question, who said he’d put city priorities first.
This is exactly the point where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed, but common ground in so many contexts is absent.
I hope that we can put ourselves back together. We've seen the consequences this year of its lack.
It's disgusting they're allowed to vilify him so much without any accountability.
Mamdani seems like a nice guy but some of his policies seem a bit bonkers - state owned retail outlets and the like.
Free buses and free child care are not remotely common policies in the US. Ditto for govt-run grocery stores. And freezing rent for controlled units.
While not common, free buses do exist throughout the US and Europe.
Free childcare is uncommon. IDK where that actually exists.
Government run stores is actually very common. Many states run the liquor stores. A few cities have government run grocery stores.
Freezing the rent on rent controlled buildings isn't common but rent control itself it quite uncommon. It's probably the easiest for Mamdani to accomplish.
Rent control is increasing popular and common in liberal areas (which NYC is)
Eric Adams born 1960
Andrew Cuomo born 1957
Curtis Sliwa born 1954
Mamdani born 1991
On policing, on New York's relationship to Israel, on public transit, the so-called 'mainstream' is actually 'the average view of people over 60'.
[0]: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/explorer/cities/NYC?c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_grocery_store
Progressive ideas would be price controls on groceries to curb inflation, or seizing the means of production by making a major stake in a major food chain.
(side note: I think it's hilarious that Trump is doing this with Intel and potentially Tiktok and few have labeled it as such).
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Like, they mightn't have won, but surely a boring establishment candidate would at least have beat Cuomo.
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That's not true at all. He is not even "middle of the road" in the Democratic party.
1. It hasn't worked like this when they elected Trump for the second time. Back then Kamala should have been the only valid candidate, according to this thinking.
2. Mamdani got 1,036,051 votes and Cuomo got 854,995. This is not exactly "all of NYC" as you imply.
> In September 2024, a series of investigations into Adams's administration emerged. Adams was indicted on federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges. He alleged that the charges were retaliation for opposing the Biden administration's handling of the migrant crisis. In February 2025, the Department of Justice in the Donald Trump administration instructed federal prosecutors to drop charges against Adams. Judge Dale Ho dismissed the case against Adams on April 2, 2025
I'd also call out October 17, 2025 : Zohran Mamdani Refuses To Share Plan For Making Rich Richer https://theonion.com/zohran-mamdani-refuses-to-share-plan-fo...
For all I dislike him, Trump essentially squandered the political capital he had on things that are shiny, motivated by ego, and created clickbaity headlines that single out small subsets of the American populous. He could have done far far worse and less reversible things to America. We’re now at the start of the end of his presidency, with focus first turning to midterms and then his replacement.
I don’t expect Mamdani to do much better with his political capital.
Look, Mamdani ran a good campaign, and if I was an NYC voter (I am not) I'd probably vote for him out of the options provided.
However, this just is not true. Many of his policies are neither "common sense" nor "middle of the road". Especially not on education and dealing with the homeless and public transit. And lots of his dumb comments were from like 2 years ago, not 12 - he was not "young" when he said them.
If you're talking about the "globalize the intifada" comment, he actually never even said that, but a whole lot of people (you among them, it seems like?) have been brainwashed into thinking he did through political maneuvering.
The root of that whole drummed up controversy was him refusing to blanket condemn the phrase when media people (never attributing it as something he himself had said) kept asking him to.
And he was always very clear what his reasons for that were, which were extremely reasonable to anyone who isn't a kneejerk ultra zionist.
It seems like common sense to hear "cityfolk pay taxes, buses are paid for by taxpayers. Therefore, bus rides should be free for cityfolk". There's a lot more to it, but most voters are not going to read the 50 page proposal that Mamdami would need to submit to the govenor to get the wheels rolling.
I think that's enough for it to fall under "common sense". Policy you can explain in 3 sentences or less. Homeless people need help, not to be arrested. Invest in an organization who makes sure that these people get help so they don't stay on the streets.
(I can't find his education policy on a quick skim of the website and plan).
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Also not sure what value your comment has. Interpret things charitably. Your "gotcha" is not at all that.
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Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-value-of-the-federal-minimum-wa...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/minimum-wage-york-2024-live-1...
https://livingwage.mit.edu/
Edit: If the system of “we make asset prices go up while labor prices are inflated away” gets to the point where a living wage is unobtainable (we are here), we can change the system. The name is irrelevant, it’s fundamentally “what are you optimizing for?”
This happens eventually (wage increases) due to global structural demographic working age population compression, the argument is really time horizon if we help people live better lives with dignity now vs years from now as labor supply declines.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones.
It’s a smaller delta than you think.
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Ask Seattle how well that turned out
Also, Mamdani's policies are incredibly controversial, that's why it's such big news. Lots of people predicting that Mamdani's criminal policies, economic policies, and lack of experienced staffers will lead the city to dark days.
Aristocracies are more stable but less efficient. That creates an incentive for corruption when growth inevitably stalls. Which leads to catastrophic instability.
Which policies are "incredibly controversial?" And be specific.
Here'a a direct link to his platform for your reference"
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
No rush. I'll wait.
You are demand better of your government than "the blatant corruption you've learned to live with."
I'm not sure NYC knows what it is getting into with this guy, but yeah, the alternatives were lousy. Sliwa? The whole Guardian Angels thing was one hell of a marketing job, I'll say that. Does anyone really believe a bunch of former gang thugs with some martial arts training accomplished very much?
The Cuomo family is corrupt to the core. Terrible for NY State.
Good luck, NYC. You're gonna need it!
You also think New York can't find someone that's at least as competent as someone in a multigenerational dynasty?
Because they're undemocratic.
Concentrating political capital within a family means raises barriers to entry. People with new -- possibly better -- ideas don't get a meaningful chance to see those ideas implemented.
These sorts of setups destroy the idea that politics and elections can be a meritocracy, but instead are determined by birthright. You end up with aristocracies populated by the extended family, friends, and business partners of the family in power.
You also get stagnation. You're less likely to see other points of view represented in the political process, and that affects outcomes.
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
Developers are the single most important players in lowering housing costs, but they are part of the "landlord" contingent in voters minds.
If he doesn't learn that, the city is going to be in bad shape. Impossible to get an apartment unless you want to get an illegal sublet at regular old $4500/mo prices.
He's not actually pitching any new price controls. He's proposing a temporary rent freeze on rent stabilized (rent control is tiny in comparison and unaffected by this) apartments that are already subject to limits on rent increases.
How do I know this? I live in a a rent stabilized apartment. The rent for which, even though increases are "limited" (usually somewhere around 3-5%) has more than doubled since I moved in.
So no. Mamdani isn't suggesting making any changes to the law as it has existed for at least 50 years, rather he's suggesting stopping rent increases while fast-tracking new housing, which would likely stabilize the housing market.
As an aside, which most folks don't understand, is that the vacancy rate in NYC is ~1.5%. Healthy housing markets have vacancy rates of 4-6%. Like many places in the US (and elsewhere), NYC has a housing shortage. But in NYC, that shortage is much more severe than almost anywhere else in the US.
https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
It doesn't do much to convince me it isn't a populist campaign promise.
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.
An alternative is Austin:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.
Here is a Khan Academy video: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...
All variants of rent control etc. have been tried in Europe and have miserably failed. Quite the opposite, rents have been rising even more, and new construction has been reduced due to new politically induced risks.
Examples: Berlin, Barcelona
But as Barcelona shows, there is a feedback loop benefiting leftist populist politicians:
Higher rents, lower housing supply -> people frustrated -> leftist populists get more votes -> more stupid regulation -> even higher rents, even lower housing supply -> people more frustrated -> ...
This can go on for at least two electoral cycles.
We have a federal law which in theory could slow down price progression, but it is rarely applied. It also doesn't govern newly build apartments, so criticism usually falls short there too...
But they always think this time it'll be different I guess.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing
- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working
- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing
- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant
Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.
Spoiler alert, the economy books and the economists are right
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
The near-term effect will be a spike in market rates. If Mamdani delivers on new supply, rents should broadly flatten in real terms.
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I agree that rents for uncontrolled apartments are high, but if we eliminated rent control for the rest, that wouldn't really fix anything. The formerly-rent-controlled apartments would cost just as much as the post-1979 housing stock.
The only thing that will fix our housing cost problem is a truly radical amount of new construction. Developers would love to build here, but the cost to build here is ridiculously high for policy reasons that have nothing to do with actually building.
If we could build enough housing to satisfy demand, then we might be ok eliminating rent control. Rent control is a response to housing scarcity, not the cause. You'd think economists would understand basic supply and demand.
About the only thing I do agree with is that rent control reduces the quality of available housing. Landlords are less incentivized to fix problems and maintain their buildings when they can't make market rate from their tenants.
In other words: they don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt them. The core mentality of NIMBYism.
To address quality first, most economists would agree that landlords are incentivized to invest the bare minimum into their property that they can; this is not so much a function of income from rent. If a tenant feels generous and starts paying more for rent, the landlord will not invest more into their unit. So I find the inverse of that to be an assumption that doesn't completely add up.
Saying rent control will affect quantity is completely beside the point. Rent controls are meant to ease the financial burden on the people currently renting in NYC, not a hypothetical newcomer looking for an apartment. Housing is already a huge pain to find for lower-income new yorkers so the threat of a more scarcity doesn't really change the equation for a lot of people.
The issue is that the machine stuff only works when nobody is amped up. And his broader audience is both dying off and angry at the Trump nonsense. The population is shifting, and south asian, Middle Eastern and other, less traditionally powerful blocs are voting now and Zohran activated them. That’s why the dog whistles were so important - he needed to get more republicans and Archie bunker types to turn out.
It’s kind of sad, Cuomo with the right people restraining him is a force. But his enemy is himself.
Isn't that odd?
Weirdly you get the same effect without rent control.
"Which party is out of touch, again?
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, in the face of hysterical opposition from the big money, has grabbed many of the headlines, which I understand — it’s an amazing story. And I wonder what the right-wing tech bros are thinking: If Wall Street couldn’t buy New York, can they really buy America?
I’m seeing some commentators argue that Mamdani will be a problem for Democrats, allowing Republicans to paint them as extremists who are out of touch with America. But Republicans would do that anyway. For what it’s worth, Mamdani may be on the left, but all indications are that he’s a pragmatist who will get along fine with the rest of his party.
Meanwhile, you know which party is out of touch and riddled with extremists? The G.O.P.
If you look at recent Republican campaigns and positioning, it’s striking how much energy they’re putting into issues that just don’t matter much to ordinary Americans. Republicans may be obsessed with trans athletes, but most people aren’t. Polls and yesterday’s elections suggest that rants about the menace of illegal aliens have a lot less traction with the public than G.O.P. apparatchiks imagine — and that Americans don’t like the spectacle of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street.
And if we’re talking about extremists within the party, well, Democrats have people like Mamdani, a mild-mannered guy who says he’s a socialist but really isn’t. The Republican Party, by contrast, has been largely taken over by outright fascists, and is facing a major outbreak of old-fashioned antisemitism."
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/which-party-is-in-trouble...
20 bucks says Trump.
We need a change. We don't need to do rent freezes in a vacuum. Coupled with the right policy supports they can definitely work, and Mamdani's proposed freezes are limited in scope. He is freezing rents only for select controlled units, last I checked.
Before you go spreading the bs propaganda, consider what your fellow citizens actually need to survive and whether or not you want to be viewed as being on the side of a few billionaires or on the side of the vast population that is increasingly becoming impoverished.
2. New york city has laws making it so you can only increase rent by a small fraction of the investment for renovation taking a large amount of units off the market as its economically infeasible
3. Nyc has a very strict zoning and regulation system that is reducing housing supply
Is it inconceivable that one could look at the candidates and, without being a billionaire, decide that Mamdani is not a candidate they want to bet their chips on?
45% of apartments in NYC
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/12/08/13190...
"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money' December 8, 201010:39 AM ET By
Frank James
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.
Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.
On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:
BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...
Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:
Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."
"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.
"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "
But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left.
It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL improvements as a mission, is now so deeply forked from the base that sprung today's results. Politicians like Zohran won't be bought off by Palantir money. So, what's Peter Thiel and Gary to do? Where is Marc Benioff going to park his money? Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, Michael Moritz, Reed Hastings, Eric Schmidt, Laurene Jobs, Ben Horowitz - all of these people aren't doing the normal pay for play donations, they are interested in shaping the party in their image. Well, Zohran doesn't look like you.
GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising.
The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it as they made more money and saw people like Trump and Musk gain power.
Grow SF really only exists to go after city council members or school board members who get into twitter fights with a certain someone.
The story tonight isn't about Trump at all though, it's about millennial DSA types beating the establishment Democratic institution - in NYC, Detroit, Mississippi. In 24 everyone was astonished at the lack of response - "what is DNC going to do about losing to Trump, twice?". This is the beginning of what will be the eventual answer.
Also it doesn't need to be said, but the mobilization of 1M+ votes for Zohran's campaign today renders the fringes meaningless. He's now automatically in the conversation for the Presidential primary for 2028.
There seem to be people who voted for Trump as an anti establishment candidate. Now, they're obviously completely unmoored from reality, but perhaps they'd like another anti establishment candidate?
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https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns...
Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?
Thiel: Uh ——
Douthat: You’re hesitating.
Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——
Douthat: This is a long hesitation!
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
Combining it with streamlining city approval process and building more actual city development will actually stabilize the rent across the market.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care 2. Fast and Free Busses 3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
Because that's what the opposition, wrapped in the flag, tells voters to do.
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
As they say... (often misattributed to John Steinbeck, but at best its really a rough paraphrase of something he wrote) "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
The truly wealthy have long convinced the average "middle class" American that they exist in roughly the same social class (even though this has always been an insane lie) but this illusion is quickly falling away due to current economic circumstances causing untenable concentration of wealth.
Ultimately its the absolute naked greed of the truly wealthy that is causing this realignment (that is likely to end badly for them as well) to happen. They are so dead set against making even the smallest move toward fair taxation that they are creating a situation in which the shrinking middle class have no choice but to see that they are quickly becoming an endangered species whose relative fortunes are moving rapidly down rather than slowly up.
Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.
Since the 2008, the day after every election of a new president, the coalition that elected them had this sense of hope for a brighter tomorrow. One which disappeared within months.
Except maybe 2016, but the bubble I was in was so preoccupied by shock that maybe I missed it (also, I was deeply engrossed in the work I was doing that fall)
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You can’t help but laugh at the amount of hysteria about Mamdani. No cost childcare? Free buses? Using existing rent control regulations to keep rent affordable? Oh no
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Also, what worked in the past, in different places or different demographics does not mean it will work again today.
In their favor
You’re not talking to bilionaires on this site, only a portion of bilionaires know about making money, which has no relation whatsoever to having a good grasp about political philosophy, large-scale economic principles and statesmanship.
If these people were aware of the current moment instead of just confused and trapped in their own ideological bubble, they would probably all be wearing MAGA hats, since the authoritarian right is the only way they can realistically hold on to their rotten system in the long run. Curious why that's not a lesson they learned from history, too uncomfortable to think about that part I suppose.