Mamdani gained traction where organizing infrastructure exists and where his message reached people. Bed-Stuy and Park Slope didn’t go for him despite rent issues, they went for him because the left has a real presence there. The rent freeze wasn’t aimed at wealthy co-ops. It was part of a broader message about dignity for working people. Same with transit: it wasn’t just about bus routes in Greenwood, it was a citywide call for free and reliable service.
Your rent freeze point flips basic politics on its head. The people paying the highest rents aren’t usually the ones demanding rent freezes, they’re the ones least likely to be impacted. The rent freeze resonated most where renters are vulnerable, where tenant organizing is strong, and where people are struggling with rent hikes, not in the wealthiest ZIP codes.
You even said you were surprised that East Flatbush went for Cuomo, when anyone with a basic grasp of the race knew that Cuomo’s base of support came largely from Black voters. That’s not some niche local insight; it was one of the most widely reported dynamics of the primary. Acting like this disproves Mamdani’s message just shows how disconnected your frame is from actual organizing and political reality.
As for your “eyeball analysis." you don’t even live in NYC anymore. Meanwhile, plenty of actual New Yorkers, including journalists and organizers, have made the same points I’m making. That two board posters disagree with me doesn’t invalidate the broader takeaway. You keep leaning on lived experience, but apparently only yours counts.
If all this leads you to call me MAGA and say I’m embarrassing myself, maybe it’s because the argument isn’t going your way, and you know it.
1. I didn't call you MAGA. I said you were using MAGA logic -- that is, you try to twist every counter-argument as actually an argument in your favor. From what I observe, you've twisted every objection to your analysis into somehow support for your analysis. It's farcical. I didn't get where I did by making arguments that help the other side for lack of comprehension. Neither did the other posters whose objections you've attempted to subsume within your theory. You say that Marcuse is dead, but you're doing a great impression of the One Dimensional Man.
2. For instance: I understand rent freezes. I'm not flipping basic politics on its head. Rather, my point -- which you seem to have missed -- is that support for Mamdani doesn't actually seem to track the vulnerability of renters. Now, we have only neighborhood level data, and I'm not sure where those neighborhoods are defined. Maybe when someone looks in more detail, they will find that within each neighborhood, there was a correlation between rent vulnerability and thus Mamdami's message was heard, received and embraced. But the data we have now does not show that. Your hypothesis is unsupported.
I mean, what about me suggests that I can't understand the politics of rent? Do you really think that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground. Is it our conversations about the Frankfurt School of post-Marxist social theory? My careful explanations of legal doctrines and analyses of Supreme Court opinions? Maybe it's my financial literacy. And for that matter, what about the other posters from NYC suggests that they are stupid and unthinking? You've been trying to contend that all of our objections are actually support, which is to say that you're accusing us of idiocy.
Pro tip: when you're in a room with smart people, and you're asserting X while everyone else is saying Y, and then you come back and say, "actually Y proves X" -- do you think the most likely explanation is that the rest of the people don't get it, or that you're not getting something?
3. I'm not leaning on lived experience nor am I making only my experience count. You might have noticed that I've expressed no opinion of my own on Mamdani's victory. I don't know. I would want to wait for more data. I'd like more testimonials from people on the ground. I'm only pushing back at your lecturing tone, because it strikes me as unseemly when directed at people who know way more about it than you. You said you visited New York once. La di fucking da.
My examples aren't meant to be unassailable, but rather to show how knowledge of the city can lend insights that maybe an outsider wouldn't grasp. For instance, Cuomo's base of support was among black people? Well, funny that -- again, that doesn't neatly match up with the election results. He appears to have killed it in East Brooklyn overall. He did poorly in Bed-Stuy, also full of black residents (though not as much as before). Maybe Cuomo won the black parts of Bed-Stuy and Mamdani with the white hipsters spilling over from neighboring areas. I don't know. Neither do you.
Note that according to the Times, Cuomo outperformed Mamdani in lower income neighborhoods, 49-38. Maybe that's just a reflection of the socioeconomic status of black people in New York -- Eastern Brooklyn being generally low income. But maybe not. It certainly doesn't advance your argument about material interests. Mamdami did better with upscale progressives than low income people -- in other words, what you'd expect in today's politics.
4. To my eye, the pattern was: Mamdani cleaned up with Asian voters, unsurprisingly. Cuomo won almost every vote in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods (seriously -- the margins were 90% or higher). Mamdani won the progressive enclaves and the hipster areas. Lower income and black neighborhoods went for Cuomo. Nothing about these cross tabs supports your grand theory of the race. You say it wasn't about bus routes only in Greenwood -- well, duh. Did you think that I was saying he proposed a bus route system at the neighborhood level? I said that mileage may vary on how important bus routes are to you. When I lived in Park Slope, I never took the bus. I never had to; subway was great there. Had I lived 30 blocks to the south, that wouldn't necessarily be true.
This pattern is not proving your point. It's not disproving your point, either. It shows a complicated picture, some of which is unique to New York.
As for journalists and other observers, sure they can have their opinions. I'm not dismissing them. I'm just suggesting that you not be dismissive of other posters when you are making empirical claims that you can't back up. I wouldn't have thought this to be controversial.
5. Neighborhoods do change pretty quickly in NYC and I haven't been there for a while. For instance, in reading for this post, I learned that Canarsie -- once an outpost of the white working class -- had gradually become a West Indian neighborhood. Not that I ever spent much time in Canarsie, but I'd been there a few times. Bensonhurt, by contrast, remains a white working class outpost (probably a lot of Italians still) but white people are actually slightly outnumbered there by Asians. So yeah, I was a bit surprised about East Flatbush because a) I would have thought there was more progressive sentiment and b) the problems Mamdani was addressing are especially acute there. Turns out I wasn't right.
