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Notes -
Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:
The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).
The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).
The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).
The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).
The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).
Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.
Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.
The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!
I am pretty happy about Mamdani. I have a somewhat radical opinion about democracy that is rarely held in the intelligentsia circles - that if voters want something, let them have it. The other thing that said circles never learn is - don't talk down to the voters. They have no choice but to vote Cuomo - guess what they did have a choice. And it was not voting for Cuomo.
The squeals of the anti Mamdani factions are a balm on the soul. And the ADL worst nightmare seems to be coming true - antisemitic as a label is sliding into indifference. Which is kinda amusing when right now for the first time in probably 60 years in the West there is proper 14 karat antisemitism showing its head.
I do hope that he will be able to hurt NY City enough to push things toward R in 2026 and 2028, but I doubt it - the mayor just doesn't have that many powers to ruin something that fast.
I agree that Mamdani is likely to make NYC worse, and I share your skepticism that “the worse, the better” (for R prospects) will apply here, not only because one single mayor—especially one with zero experience managing large organizations—can’t change much in a short time, but also because, paraphrasing Adam Smith, “There is much ruin in New York City”. The city has too much going for it for its biggest tax pay
pigers (major financial institutions) to seriously consider the idea of picking up stakes and relocating to, say, Miami, at least in the short term. In the long term, I can definitely see a slow decline as businesses get strangled out of existence by onerous D policies. But that will happen much too slowly for the voting public to even notice, let alone pin the blame on a specific mayor or party.It will be interesting to see whether those New York City Jews who swore they would leave for Florida if Mamdani got elected will make good on their promised exodus [heh]. My money is on “no”, in the main: their loyalty is to leftism first and foremost and to Judaism a distant second, so the prospect of living in a state where anyone could be carrying a handgun and where abortion is illegal after 6 weeks is anathema, no matter how philosemitic the state government.
And lastly, if I were a NYC resident, I would vote for literally anyone but Cuomo: his bungling of the pandemic (first with the nursing home massacres, then by riding roughshod over civil liberties to cover it up) is absolutely unforgivable.
They have already been expanding presence in Miami. They may not jump (because Mandami may cut a deal) but they have been preparing to.
They've been moving to Florida for decades anyway; evidently once you're old enough you don't care about either abortion or handguns. You'll hear more classic NYC accents in Fort Lauderdale than New York City.
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I'd love to see God top his Red Sea trick with one all down the US East Coast from Manhattan to Miami. It's over 5x the distance, but it's been a couple thousand years, at least, since He pulled that off for Moses, which is a lot of time for Him to improve (or is that also one of those things that a perfect, omnipotent being can't do?).
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Yeah, I think that's the most likely outcome. Come into office on a slate of promises. Some get watered down, because he has to compromise to get them passed. Some get junked, because they were only campaign promises, ha ha did you really think you were going to get a pony for your birthday? And some will go nowhere, because he's butting right up against institutional inertia, 'this is the way we've always done it', entrenched power blocs, and "you gotta find the money to grease the palms somewhere, Zohran, or else nothin' doin'".
Like free bus services. First, that will have to jump through sixteen hoops, on fire, then swandive into a coffee cup just in order to get past everyone who wants it to die or they want too big a slice of the pie for it to work. Second, it will be tried. Thirdly, after ten minutes it will crash and burn and be quietly sidelined.
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I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I'm vaguely aware that Mamdani is a sort of DSA-type, so I think it's fairly safe to bet policy-wise he's a bit out there, but also won't accomplish much. But it's hard not to root for him a little given the kind of frothing, incoherent rage he was generating.
I only saw bits of some ads online, and "unhinged" was a thought that came to my mind as well, reminiscent of the type of things thrown at Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which ostensibly helped him get elected in 2/3 of those cases. The past decade or so, I'd been worried that President AOC was going to be the Dems' President Trump, but it looks like Mamdani being that might be more likely. The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
Mamdani has a position of real executive power unlike AOC who is just 1 of 435 legislators. Given he's a socialist, it's hard to believe he won't fuck it up. Even if he weren't ineligible I can't see him being a serious contender for President based on what I expect his record to be.
As much as I'm being tongue-in-cheek by taking how hot Mamdani's been the last 3 months and extending it out forward (then he'd be God Emperor of the Democratic People's Republic of Earth within the decade - but no one remains that hot in politics for that long, not even exceptions to exceptions to exceptions like Trump), I think this analysis is flawed.
Almost certainly he will fuck it up - by default because he's a politician, and even moreso because he's a socialist - but a politician's record doesn't matter for his electoral prospects; it's the perception of his record by the voters that matters. And I've been burned too many times underestimating just how far the distance between perception and reality can be, especially in politics, to bet that Mamdani's (predicted) poor record once he becomes NYC mayor will meaningfully affect his chances in future elections for bigger seats, relative to his apparent charisma to half the voters, along with his superior genetics and religion to much of that same half.
My prediction as of a couple weeks ago has been that once Mamdani wins and rules over NYC, to whatever extent he achieves his political promises, they won't effectively address the real thing that the policies are supposed to address, and this failure will entirely be blamed on Republicans and not-sufficiently-socialist-Democrats for not doing what their moral superiors have told them they ought to do, rather than Mamdani and his allies for simply having a poor understanding of how politics and economics work. Whether or not this assignment of blame is "fair" or "correct" for whatever those terms mean in this context, most high status journalism outlets will reinforce the notion that it is "correct" to enough of an extent that it will be the mainstream, default, "educated" opinion that Mamdani didn't fail, he was failed by an Islamophobic, racist, and probably transphobic populace/political machine that stood in his way even after he had used his sheer force of charisma and standing for Basic Human Decency to convince enough voters to elect him.
One major wrinkle (among many, I'm sure) in this prediction is that these high status journalists' credibility has been falling among the electorate and seems likely to continue, and so I could be overcorrecting from underestimating the future distance between perception and reality to overestimating it.
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I’m old enough to remember when people thought the Republicans might do this so that their own guy (Schwarzenegger) could run for president.
President Schwarzenegger would have been so so cool.
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People need to reflect upon the fact that a mayor race of a US city is having an ethnic group's view of its homeland as the main issue. Imagine if a significant US city was having its election being about the Sudanese communities view of the mayor's Sudan policy. The absolute level of capture and control by a lobby of a small country is reason enough to vote for anyone opposed to it.
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