Zohran Mamdani, Part I

New York City, in theory and in practice.

Zohran Mamdani has now officially won the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City, a result confirmed two days ago, when the ranked choice tabulations were completed, giving Mamdani a 56-44 win over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Because of New York’s national media profile, the specific characteristics of Mamdani’s candidacy, and the ugly national context in which all this unfolding, the fall campaign in New York will be especially heavily covered and scrutinized. And it will, we can expect, reach a degree of venom and depth of ugliness we’re likely rarely to have seen in any major mayoral race in recent decades.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, including what Mamdani’s surprising success so far does and doesn’t portend for Democrats nationally and our politics more broadly, how much affordability as a central issue may come to dominate our politics and the changing nature of the politics of Israel/Palestine. But this post Part I, which will be long (sorry!), will focus on the images about New York most commonly perpetuated in popular culture and the collective imagination over the past several decades.

Bear with me as I lay this out, as I think it's relevant for understanding some of what has shaped and will continue to shape reactions to Mamdani's success so far and some of what we can expect during the general election campaign.

In the 1970s, a string of classic movies, including the French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon, portrayed the grittiness of a city that was, in many ways, in decline, the nadir of which was arguably New York's trip to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975. By the late 1970s, that sense of disorder had devolved into dystopianism. The Warriors, which came out in 1979 and Escape from New York (1981), were among a series of depictions of life in New York as that of running an unending gauntlet of murder and mayhem.

That was a long time ago, and New York is, in reality, a very different city today. And there are many other New Yorks of the popular imagination. Among the most prominent include a New York often celebrated for its glamour, extraordinary wealth, incomparable diversity and sheer kinetic energy, alongside the greedy machinations of its oligarchs, in and out of government.

But dark warnings of New York as a site of inchoate mayhem will dominate the anti-Mamdani onslaught over the next few months, particularly as Trump and other national Republicans weigh in more fully on the race. They will traffic in outright Islamophobia specifically and xenophobia more generally. And they will whip up all the most dire depictions of a New York that has been swirling in our popular imaginations for decades, while portraying Mamdani as a demonic agent for unleashing the bedlam that is always near at hand. A central purpose of the focus on overheated, exaggerated or outright false claims about the nature of life in New York will be to distract from or reframe the real sources of the daily struggles many New Yorkers' experience, which Mamdani has foregrounded in his so far stunningly successful long shot bid for the mayoralty.

To be clear, there are entirely valid debates to be had about Mamdani's actual vision and policy proposals, including legitimate questions about the wisdom and viability of his economic policy agenda, as there are about safety and well-being broadly.

But we’re already seeing a full outbreak of Mamdani Derangement Syndrome, including calls by Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles that Mamdani be denaturalized and deported because of rap lyrics he performed in 2017 that are alleged to prove he provided material aid and comfort to Hamas. That’s a position the president was asked about this week and to which, naturally, he agreed should be taken seriously. Aside from those sorts of scurrilous personal attacks, Mamdani’s candidacy will stir up the most dire warnings about that incipient hellscape noted above.

On that score, let's start with some low-hanging fruit, the unhinged comments by Republicans who will try to whip up the ugliest tropes against Mamdani this fall.

Last Wednesday, the day after Zohran Mamdani emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, Trump Gestapoista Stephen Miller took to Twitter to make a series of claims. Miller tweeted: “The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That’s how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.”

Miller also tweeted, “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”

Also, last Wednesday morning, Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Senator who, it must be said, stands out even in his caucus as a moron, appeared on the podcast of the rightwing conspiracy theorist Benny Johnson. Deeply alarmed by the meaning of Mamdani's victory, Johnson asserted that it was no longer a theory, but a "fact" that the plan to replace all native born Americans with criminal migrants in the electorate was being "executed" — the Great Replacement theory. When he asked Tuberville to respond, Tuberville said, in part:

"These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes."

Meanwhile, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, who was supposed to be one of the “adults in the room” of the new Trump administration, predicted that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”

These are, needless to say, the tippy top of a mountain of garbage already piling up Let's try to sift through some of it using.

In 2024, no state swung more toward Donald Trump than did New York. He still lost it, but he cut his 23-point deficit in 2020 nearly in half in 2024. And much of that improvement came from the lion's den of liberalism itself, New York City. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 54 percentage points in the Big Apple, 76-22. In 2024, Harris defeated Trump by 68-30. Still a huge margin, but Trump did a full 16 percentage points better in 2024, out of close to three million votes cast. So, somehow, despite Miller’s insistence that unchecked immigration was allowing in a flood of new voters who would directly and decisively turn the electorate in Democrats' favor in places like New York City, Harris won over 400,000 fewer votes in the ultimate den of iniquity than Biden did.

Further, Spanish speaking migrants, overwhelmingly from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, still comprise by far the largest group of immigrants to the United States. And their naturalized counterparts have swung heavily toward Trump over the past decade. Indeed, Trump almost broke even among Hispanic voters nationally in 2024, after losing by over twenty points among that group in 2020 and an even bigger margin to Clinton in 2016.

How does any of this square with a version of the demented Great Replacement Theory, now de rigueur in rightwing circles, a core tenet of which is that "illegals" from Latin America are part of an "invasion" of the United States, meant to upend our way of life and culture and to usher in permanent Democratic majorities by replacing “real” Americans with foreign hordes? And which the likes of Johnson, Tuberville and Tucker Carlson, among many others insist is the heart of the Democratic agenda? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. If Trump and some of his closest allies weren’t trafficking in Great Replacement and adjacent theories, that would be one thing. But he is and they are, which is motivating some of the most cruel and vicious aspects of Trump’s agenda, of which Miller is a central architect. As an added “bonus,” Great Replacement theories inhabit a swamp infested by antisemitism.

To recap so far, the most common line of attack against Mamdani this fall from Trump and his allies, lines of attack that will dominate our airwaves between now and November, will be based on these premises: that New York is in danger of electing a mayor who himself is both a direct embodiment of and an ideological progenitor of the dark forces of disorder and chaos that will bring New York to its knees and threaten good, hardworking, "real" Americans everywhere.

Here let me share a bit of my own upbringing as a New Yorker.

If there's any time in the past century that New York City was anything close to the fevered imaginings of its bitterest critics, the 1970s (and arguably the 1980s) were it. I was born in 1965. The French Connection, which I happened to rewatch just a few days ago, painted a picture of New York at its filthiest and most degraded and chaotic. That was the city of my childhood. When I was ten, my sister and I were held hostage in our apartment while a burglar ransacked the place (fortunately, he had no interest in hurting us). I was held up at gunpoint in Central Park with two friends when I was 15. I was mugged three other times during that time period. My experience was pretty typical. Dog shit was *everywhere,* especially before New York City passed its so-called pooper scooper law in 1978. So were rats. For those living in New York today who think there's a rat problem now, you simply have no idea. In the New York of my youth, significant swathes of the city were pockmarked by stretches of bombed out buildings and some areas were so dangerous, they were no go zones.

I'm not trying to tell people who live in New York now that their concerns about safety and livability are invalid. The city definitely got grittier during covid. It experienced a significant jump in crime, which I will address below. There are more visible signs of unkemptness than there were a few years ago. The huge influx of migrants two years ago, and the city’s challenges in absorbing those, with little help from the Biden administration, fed an atmosphere of deterioration. I am also well aware that concerns about order and safety are often most acute among the city’s less well-off residents, who are more likely to be victimized by crime. But I do have a perspective to offer. From the vantage point of personal security and cleanliness, the city is like Disneyland compared to that of my youth. And that’s relevant to any effort to police the line between valid concerns on the one hand and outright demagoguery on the other.

I've mentioned this before, but to take one data point, crime in New York City began to surge in the late 1960s and continued to rise until the early 1990s. In 1990, there were over two thousand murders in the Big Apple. That figure began to decline, and then collapsed after the start of the new century. Though there was a relative surge in the early Covid period, the murder rate remained a fraction of what it had been in earlier decades. And as the early Covid crime wave mostly recedes, in 2024, there were fewer than 400 murders. 2025 figures so far are coming in still lower. The differences in the city of my youth and now are vast — these are different universes. Other felonies did increase significantly during the initial emergence of covid and most categories are still elevated compared to the 2015-2019 period. But compared to two and three decades ago, they are generally vastly lower.

For further context and relevant to the claims of the likes of Miller and Tuberville, the Census tells us that, in 1900, about 36% of New Yorkers were foreign born. That percentage declined steadily during the middle of the 20th century. It reached its post-1900 low point, 18% at the time of the 1970 census, the time of The French Connection. The proportion of foreign-born residents in New York City began to rise again, to 28% in 1990, and back to 36% in 2000 where, according to city government statistics, it currently roughly sits.

There are some very inconvenient facts in these data for the Stephen Millers of the world. New York City's most significant, sustained spike in crime began in the 1960s, when the city's foreign born population was at its lowest point in the 20th century. And the city reclaimed its post-1900 foreign-born heights at the turn of the new century, as crime in New York was falling to levels not seen in decades. This is especially significant because some of the most ignorant claims about immigration center on where it's coming from. The fact is that the immigrant populations of the early 20th century, including Italians, Jews and southern Europeans were demonized using many of the same racist tropes reserved for immigrants from other parts of the world today. Regardless, the composition of immigration in New York in the 21st is very different than it was a 100 years ago, comprising as it does so many immigrants from the Global South, people allegedly ill-suited to the American way of life, and deemed apt to bring with them danger and disease. And yet, New York City today is far safer, cleaner and more of an economic dynamo than it was in the city of my youth, the city of crime, decay and bankruptcy, when the foreign-born population was at a 100+ year low.

I've highlighted the rhetoric of national Republicans because that’s what’s already setting the tone, at the national level, for what is to come, all of which will only intensify when Trump, who can be expected to go after Mamdani repeatedly and in the vilest terms, weighs in more regularly. The campaign in New York itself will play out somewhat differently, though Mamdani’s chief challenger, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, running as an independent, can be expected, at a minimum, to flirt with some of these themes.

In the next post, I’ll focus on a set of issues that, in many ways, have a much more profound bearing on many New Yorkers’ well being than do crime and disorder. Mamdani’s campaign has focused relentlessly on affordability. And whether some of his proposed solutions are the right ones, a key source of the affordability crisis is a decades-long approach to public policy nationally that has increased inequality in the United States enormously, creating a staggering chasm between haves and have nots. New York mayors can only do so much about that larger policy and economic environment. But as I’ll discuss in more detail next time, New York is one of the most unequal cities in the world, an endless playground for those of astonishing wealth, sitting alongside what is an increasing grind for too many New Yorkers. Any politician who doesn’t, at the very least, acknowledge that reality in their analysis of what ails ordinary New Yorkers is, by omission or commission, engaging in what should be understood as an astonishing act of dishonesty. Demagoguing migrants and mayhem is one tried and true method for changing the conversation. Accusing Mamdani of being a “Communist” or “anarcho-socialist” or whatever, intent on destroying the city economically is another (I guess just calling him a plain old democratic socialist, as he describes himself, doesn’t have the same oomph). In the face of that, will Mamdani be able to keep the attention of the general electorate focused on affordability and the imperative of a fairer New York, the economic realities of New York and how to address those, as he did the Democratic primary electorate? Or will his opponents be able to make the politics of actual or looming chaos the central axis of contestation?

Next time, with a lot of help from the great Adam Tooze, we’ll get into some of those economic realities.

As always, constructive comments welcome.