DANIEL GREENFIELD: Only 5% of New Yorkers Voted for Mamdani.
Who are those 5%? They aren’t New Yorkers because polls showed us Mamdani performing poorly with anyone over 50, with African-American, Latino and working class white voters. What’s left? White hipsters and Muslim immigrants.
Mamdani’s base isn’t New Yorkers, it’s a coalition of white hipsters and Muslim immigrants, most of them weren’t even in the city during 9/11, like Mamdani, have no roots in the city, and no connection to its history. The quintessential New Yorker, as envisioned by a thousand Hollywood movies, TV shows and Broadway musicals, still exists, but is harder to find than ever. The city of those movies and shows can be glimpsed as a palimpsest under layers of chain stores, illegal migrants, social justice projects and vegan eateries before it vanishes again in the rain.
What happened to New York is what happened to legendary cities across the country and around the world, from Philly to London, which is that the revival of the 90s was the final act in driving out its working class and middle class population. Rents soared until the only young people who could afford to live there were white hipsters and third world immigrants.
And their politics became based on coalitions between the hipsters and the new arrivals. In New York City, as in London, it produced a Jihadist coalition that paved the way for a Muslim mayor.
Even by 9/11, New York City already wasn’t ‘that city’. The Giuliani revolution that swept out bums and criminals was a victim of its own success. Much of the middle class had already left which was why so many of the victims of 9/11 were commuters. Those who didn’t were soon completely priced out. The working class, the Irish, Jewish and Italian men and women who appear as comic characters in countless shows, were soon priced out of everything except projects. Even as the world mourned for New York, the New Yorkers were disappearing.
Hence the same ranked choice voting primary that foisted Bill de Blasio upon the city in 2013.