NICK GILLESPIE GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Mamdani’s Socialist Mayorship Will Make New York a Worse Place To Live and Do Business.

If you live outside New York, your biggest worry should be what effect a landslide win might have on the Democratic Party nationally. If Mamdani crushes Cuomo and Sliwa as seems likely, expect a big push from allies like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) to revive the worst excesses of the populist identity politics that helped cost Democrats the White House in 2024 and caused much of the discord, overspending, and stupidity of the past decade. (If the centrist Democrats running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia win as currently expected, expect a ton of articles about the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.)

As Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller recently explained, Mamdani’s appeal goes beyond playing Santa Claus to large blocs of voters. He personifies the symbolic grievances of college-educated and relatively well-off Millennial and Gen Z voters who don’t really understand how capitalism works and what creative destruction entails. They take wealth production for granted, focusing instead on what they perceive as its morally just distribution, while overlooking the challenge of maintaining, much less expanding, economic and social opportunities for all.

For New York City, what Mamdani’s mayoralty will absolutely do is hurry along the slowly decaying orbit of the country’s largest city that commenced with the election of groundhog manhandler Bill de Blasio to two terms in Gracie Mansion and continued with the mediocre-at-best performance of Turkish Airlines enthusiast and cheese-detractor Eric Adams. We’re already a dozen-plus years into having the city run by bums or buffoons and, if you read histories like Richard E. Farley’s Drop Dead, you know this is how things go in New York City. There are long cycles of mediocre-to-terrible mayors (think of the years of Richard Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame, a period lasting from 1954 to 1977) that are interrupted by periods of better-than-average governance (think Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg, a span lasting from 1978 to 2013, exclusive of David Dinkins’ single term in the early ’90s).

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