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Per Politico, Zohran Mamdani set to topple Andrew Cuomo in NYC mayoral race, at least the Democratic primary. Live results here if that changes. The general election is in November -- Cuomo left the door open as he conceded tonight already to run as an independent; current mayor Eric Adams already is intending to run as an independent. This is nothing short of a massive political earthquake. Here's what I see as the most important questions raised:
Did ranked choice (and associated strategy) make a major difference?
We don't know yet quite how much. In percents, Mamdani leads 43.5 - 36.4 with 91% reporting as of writing, this means on Tuesday ranked-choice results will be released as he didn't clear 50% alone, since Brad Lander who cross-endorsed Mamdani has 11.4, Adrienne Adams who did not for anyone has 4.1. But it seems a foregone conclusion he will win. I'm not certain how detailed a ranked-choice result we get. Do we get full ranked choice results/anonymized data, or do we only see the final result, or do we get stage by stage? The voter-facing guide is here which I might have to peruse. I think the RCV flavor here is IRV (fewest first-place votes eliminated progressively between virtual "rounds" until one has a majority)
In terms of counterfactuals, I believe the previous Democratic primary system was 40%+ wins, under 40% led to a runoff between top two, so Mamdani would have won that anyways. But the general election is, near as I can tell, not ranked choice, it is instead simply plurality, no runoff. This creates some interesting dynamics. Of course, it's also possible the pre-voting dynamics and candidate strategies of this race were affected.
My thoughts? It seems Cuomo was ganged up on, and I think ranked choice accelerated this. It will be very interesting to see how this did or did not pay off for Lander specifically -- was he close-ish to a situation where people hate Cuomo most, but are still uncomfortable enough with Mamdani to hand Lander a surprise victory from behind? Statistically this seems unlikely in this particular case, but it could still happen, and how close he comes could offer some interesting insights about how popular a strategy like this might be in the future.
Will Democratic support and the primary victory make a difference in the general election?
The literal million-dollar question. Cuomo might very well run again as an independent -- otherwise his career is kind of extra-finished, no? I suppose he could always try and run for Congress later, but this is a black eye no matter how you spin it. Eric Adams, the former Democratic candidate, has also had his share of scandals, so potentially there is some similarity with Cuomo on that level. But he does have an incumbency advantage, and has expected some kind of fight for a while. Republicans might back him more, however, depending on how much they dislike Mamdani. It's hard to say. Also, Mamdani would have the Democratic party machinery and resources behind him. How much will they pitch in? That's an open question for sure. It will certainly help to some extent, for legitimacy if nothing else.
Will these results generalize nationally? And if so, what part of the results?
First of all, you must see this as an absolute W for grassroots. Cuomo is a political super-insider, despite being a major bully who is widely disliked. Yet many former enemies have backed him anyways, especially more "moderate" ones. Interesting article link. Bloomberg for example backed him. He formed a super PAC "Fix the City" and it spent a ton of time on negative attacks against Mamdani, especially on his pro-Palestinian comments framing them as anti-Israel. There's that angle of course. I'd rather not get into it personally, but I'm sure there will be some observations about if the Israel-Palestinian issue was big or not, whether it was fair, etc.
Then there's the socialism angle. Do Democrats want more extreme left candidates? Are socialists ready for the big time? Was this Cuomo's unique weaknesses? Was is just crazy turnout among young people? Did AOC and friends help a lot? All things we will be thinking about for a number of months to come. Personally, I see this as Mamdani doing much, much better among kitchen-table issues for the median voter. All about affordability. Of course, the merit of his attempt is a separate question. He's pro rent control (economically sketchy but not unheard of), wants to create public supermarkets (horrible idea all around, supermarket margins are very small), taxing the rich (will they flee or not?), and is obviously young and not super experienced.
Then who makes money from the food industry. And this is a very serious question. Farmers are on thin margins, Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
I actually approve this as an experiment. Create couple of stores. Cut direct deals with some farmers in the Midwest, olive oil produces in California, the big corn and wheat mills. Organize distribution and see if you can deliver fresh produce and other staples, pay wages and sell at near cost. And if the whole operation is financially sane - scale it.
Also when will the Dem party figure out that their tactics for stopping Trump like figures don't work as good as they think? People are tired of economic stagnation and hate the establishment.
Processing and manufacturing adds a great deal of value, the actual industrial part of the food industry is huge.
You also got commodity traders and other middlemen, the people who profit from price volatility, storage, transportation, etc; whom you need to stabilize prices.
Then there's input suppliers, the people that sell farmers seeds and equipment.
And I'm not going to name all the other middlemen like the various distributors, who in turn have their own suppliers and logistical needs.
Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.
There are ways a public option could actually cut prices, but they all involve unacceptable tradeoffs like compromizing food safety standards, not having reliable output or operating at a loss. Not having to pay taxes (which is advanced here as the main method of savings) is far from enough.
You can actually operate at a loss if you want, the commissaries operated by DeCA seem like an obvious example. But you have to accept one of the tradeoffs. There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at.
Good rule of thumb is that whenever you look in any complex system in the USA of lately usually you have shitload of rent seeking and not capitalism. I am not sure that the food chain is an exception from this - I already know that farmers have great problem with rent seeking behavior from John Dreeres and Monsantnos of the world.
Ok, but supermarkets are not dodging rent seeking from farm suppliers- thats the wrong step in the chain. My guess is there’s a bunch of rent seeking in the processing/middleman stage too. And further I’d assume the bulk of the rent seeking in the supermarket side is mostly contractors that the supermarket cant easily replace.
I was talking about the whole food chain. And that small and medium farmers are squeezed on both input and output is well known. And this is why I think that those kinds of experiments are worthy. The government has enough heft to shake things a bit.
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Why should these be opposed to each other?
Not a market theorist but rent seeking is extracting value and not generating. I have never seen consumers being better off when there is lack of interoperability, DRM, vertical integration, walled gardens, monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, drm on printer ink and other anticompetitive practices.
So it is not the best use of the capital in the society.
No, I just meant why define capitalism in a way that only includes the good things it enables and not the bad.
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