The News
New York’s Democratic mayoral primary today has the city’s capital class spooked, as a 33-year-old socialist has caught former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the polls.
Zohran Mamdani’s promises to raise corporate taxes and income taxes on millionaires and freeze rents raises the specter of a leftward shift for America’s biggest city, whose already strapped finances have Wall Street worried. Mamdani’s 14-mile walk this week of Manhattan, in scorching heat, evoked the neighborhood canvasses of John Lindsay, the liberal crusader whose budget priorities contributed to the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis.
The faraway conflict in Israel is another flashpoint: Mamdani in a podcast interview declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” while Cuomo’s pro-Israel stance has won him support from financiers like Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, who donated $250,000 to a Cuomo political action committee.
The View From Wealthy New Yorkers
Some wealthy New Yorkers are (off the record, of course) saying they’ll leave if Mamdani wins. Big checks have come from the city’s corporate elders, including lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell, which has represented President Donald Trump, and Paul Weiss, historically a Democratic powerhouse. Financier Glenn Dubin, Two Sigma’s Scott Hoffman, former HBO chief Richard Plepler, RXR’s Scott Rechler, and real estate investor William Zeckendorf are among those who have maxed out contributions to Cuomo.
Mamdani slightly lags Cuomo in the first round of ranked-choice voting, but polls show him eking out a victory once all votes are reallocated in later rounds. (CNN has a good explainer for non-New Yorkers on how ranked choice voting works.)
Room for Disagreement
Mamdani might not be the progressive savior his supporters hope or the boogeyman Wall Street fears. Waleed Shahid, a progressive New York strategist, drew a comparison to Fiorello La Guardia, who ran against the political machine bosses and was endorsed by the city’s socialists but ushered in a wave of prosperity and helped build modern New York: “First they call you radical,” he writes today in The Ink. “Then they name an airport after you.”
Notable
- Daniel Loeb and Ron DeSantis think expats will flock Palm Beach and Greenwich if Mamdani wins.
- The Journal put it bluntly: New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist Might Become Mayor