Off the Cuff: Why I voted Mamdani

Like Harrison Ford, I was raised by practicing Democrats, and despite the obligatory rebellion of my youth, as a man I’ve found myself particularly devout.

I consider myself, first and foremost, a liberal, progressive at heart, conservative in temperament.

In 2016 I shilled for Hill, having done my time as a high school anarcho-syndicalist. In 2020 I was “we need Warren in the Senate” for Biden (because his foreign policy wasn’t as bad and it’s not like Klobuchar had a shot). In ‘21 I backed Garcia for mayor, and in ’24 I was generally depressed.

Going into the NY Democratic mayoral primary, I was genuinely unsure who’d get my vote, unusual for me. Everyone I knew — educated, progressive, and millennial — wanted Mamdani. I share most of their values but was opposed for the usual reasons. For a socialist, Mamdani’s ideals are good, but his platform is just bad, ranging from gimmicks unlikely to leave the ground to measures that risk actively making things worse for New York. The other plausible candidates were bad, too, but by this point I had become pretty well accustomed to arguing that crap and uninspiring leadership is preferable to bad policy.

So, if I wasn’t the typical cross-pressured voter, I was at least a kind of voter Cuomo needed not to lose — progressive but reflexively establishmentarian and antagonistic to the DSA. I knew I didn’t want either Cuomo or Mamdani to be mayor, so I’d be ranking every other candidate first (in order of how much housing they promised to get built); what mattered was the last spot, who I feared least.

What determined my vote was that Cuomo had actively worked to make it as hard as possible to justify voting for him.

If you are a Democrat like me, you spend a lot of time explaining that while you agree with what a candidate wants to happen, you think his plans will make it less likely. The immediate response when you say you’re not for Mamdani is to ask what issue you have with more affordable housing and transportation — and of course, I want those things, and that is in fact why I didn’t want Mamdani.

The number one policy issue in this city — in this country, if you ask me — is housing. The answer to the affordability crisis, and all the political dysfunction downstream of it, is to act muscularly to build our way out of a severe lack of adequate housing. Mamdani has, to be fair, avoided the paranoid and degrowth-tinged misunderstandings of the issue endemic to the DSA, and I think has shown a desire to move his faction toward a more productive mindset on this issue.

At the same time, Mamdani has shown sensitivity to the political pressure against this approach by avoiding disclosing support for pro-housing measures on ballot until the last possible moment. And while I am in favor of affordability measures implemented hand-in-hand with supply increase, his rent freeze enthusiasm combined with this tepid rhetoric makes me really worried that he will work to make building our way out of this mess harder and therefore cause housing to become less affordable.

So, yes, I agree with Mamdani that we desperately need to make living here affordable. No, I do not think he will actually provide that. I am resigned, as usual, to the belief that doing nothing might be preferable to cockamamie schemes.

At Slow Boring , Ben Krauss laid out Cuomo’s credentials on housing:

Andrew Cuomo’s policies epitomize the stagnant governance of the past and are representative of the very politics the abundance movement seeks to leave behind.

As governor, Cuomo could have taken meaningful action to address the housing shortage — tackling exclusionary zoning in the city suburbs or lifting the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) cap to allow for more dense building. But while he did push the 421-a tax credit to incentivize housing development in the state, none of the housing policy analysts or NYC political experts I spoke with had any confidence that Cuomo would meaningfully address the city’s projected 500,000-unit housing shortage by the end of the decade.

His mayoral plan signals that he’s interested in boosting supply, but it isn’t particularly ambitious or detailed. He’s already calling for union labor construction mandates — exactly the kind of restriction that will limit new development since 80% of construction workers in the city aren’t unionized.

The New York Times notes that Cuomo supported the housing measures Mamdani backed at the last minute — but the Gothamist piece discussing Mamdani’s reticence above notes Cuomo’s similarly timed statements defending “the character of low-density neighborhoods.” And it seemed to me that Cuomo was worse than tepid — that he very plausibly would have wanted to make things worse. Josh Barro (arguing for Cuomo!) reminds us that his time in office was marked by wasteful vanity projects:

for example, directing the MTA to spend an extra $30 million to retile its road tunnels in colors that matched the state seal, and telling the Port Authority to build a LaGuardia AirTrain that would have run backwards, away from Manhattan and toward a lightly-served Long Island Railroad station near Citi Field.

The NYT editors’ non-endorsement (arguing for Cuomo’s policy credentials) similarly notes “significant mistakes, such as his mishandling of Covid at nursing homes and poor management of public transit.” Broadly, Cuomo’s transit record strikes me as one of Trumpian bluster, elbowing his way into situations he makes worse for the chance of taking credit.

Mamdani’s call for free bus service reflects his instincts on housing and is not going to fix anything. But he at least wants things to be fixed. If I had to sell a technical but worthwhile policy fix on transit or development to Mamdani or Cuomo, I’d choose the former in a heartbeat, because while he’s a socialist, he’s at least not mainly in this as a dick measuring exercise. Neither of these candidates assure me at all that they’d improve my life, but I know which one would tell me to drop dead if it suited him.

If you are a moderate Democrat, you are used to arguing that, for all the establishment candidate’s faults, they come with an experience in government which enables them to get things done or at least keep the lights on. You’re not going to get a transformative vision — you’ll likely get managed decline — but at least they’re not going to actively break things. But you couldn’t make that argument for Cuomo. As Ezra Klein pointed out, Cuomo’s experience is one of the strongest points against him, because everyone he’s worked with hates his guts:

Cuomo’s claim to be the best suited to manage New York City’s government is undermined by how many people in or around that government loathe him. Andy Byford, a former head of the M.T.A. whom Trump recently picked to lead the redevelopment of Penn Station, said Cuomo made his job “intolerable.” Gov. Kathy Hochul called Cuomo’s conduct as governor “repulsive and unlawful.” Bill de Blasio… called him “a bully” who is “obsessed with revenge.”

So, on a purely mechanical, office-management, day-to-day functioning level, a Cuomo administration would likely have been the worse option for New York. People like me are often worried that appealing slogans promising great change cover up a lack of attention to the actual job of government, but I am genuinely more optimistic that New York will run smoothly because Mamdani won.

There has been plenty of brouhaha during this election cycle over the candidate’s feelings on Israel. As far as I can tell, this matters mostly in terms of signaling the ability of candidates to work with the diverse population of the city — it’s not as if the New York mayor is going to shape a ceasefire in Gaza. And, look, it would not take a lot to convince me that the DSA candidate had issues with Jews or difficulty in straddling ideological or religious divides.

Mamdani seems pretty aware of this attitude, and has run a campaign laser focused on outreach and pluralism. You might not like everything he has said, but you cannot say he has stayed closed off to conversation. He very actively wants us to believe he will be a mayor for all New Yorkers — whether or not that is actually true.

On the other hand, Cuomo — who was forced out of Albany in disgrace over multiple accusations of sexual harassment — seems actually contemptuous of the idea that he should have to sell anyone on anything. Returning to Ezra Klein —

I was open, at the beginning of the campaign, to the possibility of Cuomo’s redemption. What is shocking is how little he has done to seek it. What he learned from the bullying and sexual harassment allegations that led to his downfall appears to have been … nothing. How has he grown? What has he learned about how to treat those who work with or for him?

I was totally unwilling not to vote for one of these two candidates. That would be more comfortable, but dishonest. At the end of the day, I knew that one would be the candidate, that I had a modicum of control over which one it would be, and that real consequences would issue from either outcome. Voting for the lesser of two evils is not something I view as disreputable — I find it irresponsible not to do so.

And if you are a Democrat who urges strategic voting, you are very used to arguing that casting a vote to avert disaster is worth the discomfort of holding your nose, that to see it as morally impure to associate oneself with a lackluster candidate is childish. After all, the Republicans elected Trump because they were so pissy about Bushes and Romneys, and what has that gotten them?

How bad does the strategic choice have to be before it is actively insulting to be asked to make this case? Am I obligated to do so when the candidate I am defending seems to harbor active disdain for me?

I kinda think I am. Michael Hirschorn the other day wrote that “Voting for Mamdani Taught Me Why Trump Won,” and while I agree with him in places, overall his take seems wrong.

I’m voting for him anyway… because he’s freaking out the business-as-usual power elites and driving establishment members of his own Democratic Party bananas. Because things have gone dangerously wrong in this country, and like a lot of other New Yorkers, I’m ready to tear the whole playhouse down (metaphorically speaking).

I just think this is always wrong. You don’t get to tear things down and call it simply metaphorical. You are always responsible for your choices and you don’t get to blame the outcome of a temper tantrum on the people who upset you. What was interesting about this election is that Mamdani was the one making that case for strategic voting. If I’m obligated to back the lesser of two evils, isn’t it worth the discomfort of associating myself with half-baked non-solutions to avoid perpetrating active harm?

There is going to be a ton of very stupid discourse moving forward as to what it means that Mamdani won this election, to what degree it shows whether Americans or just New Yorkers are ready for socialism, if there are geopolitical implications for global leftism, what demographics think what about which others, etc. I can’t tell you why Mamdani won, though I have strong hunches. I can only say why I voted for him.

When Kevin McCarthy was drowning as leader of House Republicans, Matthew Yglesias wrote:

I just reject the Republican establishmentarian spin that the real issue here is Democrats’ refusal to bail McCarthy out. My advice to Democrats was to not drive a hard bargain here — be a cheap date, want to get to yes. But if McCarthy wants Democrats to do something for him, he has to do something in return.

That’s fundamentally the way I ended up looking at this election. I am a pessimist by nature and an easy get for tepid, even bad candidates who at least seem not to harbor active disaster. It says a lot that, in this specific race, that candidate was the DSA pick.

Things have gotten heated in the last days of the campaign, so it’s hard to remember, but for most of the primary I honestly couldn’t tell you what Cuomo was doing day to day. For someone with such awful odds of winning the nomination, the guy seemed actually averse to campaigning for it. So instead, all you heard, day in and day out, was the push for Don’t Vote Cuomo. Like a lot of other New Yorkers, I thought they made some good points, and I wasn’t exactly hearing convincing pushback.

I can’t say that, like Klein, I was open to the possibility of Cuomo’s redemption — but I was open to voting for him anyway. The problem is that, at the end of the day, if you want my vote, you have to ask for it. He didn’t.