NYC race reveals what’s awful about elite Dems | Will Bunch Newsletter

Barack Obama famously said he’s not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars. In that case, his successor Donald Trump has launched a doozy in Iran. A massive bombing attack egged on by Fox News blather inspired the 47th president to blast a sand trap in central Iran that may not have accomplished much. Tehran’s mullahs responded with a choreographed, low-energy missile launch. Instead of dumb wars, can’t we just get smart about peace?

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Don’t call it “an off-year election.” Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City is about much more than merely picking an odds-on favorite to become the next high-profile leader of America’s largest city. It’s become a no-holds-barred referendum on the future of the Democratic Party, right at the moment when voters need a fighting alternative to Donald Trump’s autocracy.

The contrast between the two clear front-runners in a talented multi-candidate field could not be more stark.

One is an energetic, telegenic 33-year-old whose family has lived the American Dream since fleeing Africa when he was a child, and who has put forth bold, progressive ideas from a rent freeze to free city buses to public supermarkets in food deserts that — boosted by a cool presence on social media — has electrified the recently alienated youth vote.

His chief rival is a 67-year-old boomer who’s besmirched his family’s iconic political name during an interminable career in which he was credibly accused of sexual harassment or misconduct with 11 women (he later apologized for “making anyone feel uncomfortable”) and whose resignation in disgrace as New York governor less than four years ago was greeted with universal acclaim and relief. (Although a report by New York’s attorney general found Cuomo sexually harassed multiple young women, Cuomo denied any wrongdoing and a handful of criminal charges against him were later dismissed.)

The contrast around who will lead 8 million New Yorkers for the next four years is so dramatic that alarmed elite leaders both in the city and the national Democratic Party have sprung into action. The likes of billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton and editorialists at the New York Times are making dramatic endorsements or pronouncements, spending millions of dollars, and even flying banners over the Hudson River in a desperate last-ditch bid to prevent a mayor they see as utterly unfit.

Yup, you guessed it. The most powerful Democrats, and some friends on Wall Street, will do anything to stop the free bus guy.

The gross, once-apologizing creep? New York City’s rich and famous, boomer division, are perfectly fine with him.

The irony here is beyond belief. Dems are reeling from their nominee Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss to Trump, and stung by apathy and defections from the youth vote that could have swung that election. Zohran Mamdani — who immigrated from Uganda at age 7, now a progressive state assemblyman with online savvy — looks like an answer to the desperate prayers of a political party lost in the wilderness. First polling and now surging early-voting turnout from under-35-year-olds suggests that urban youth like not just Mamdani’s style but also his ideas to tackle their problems like child care and sky-high rents.

But while the aging and increasingly decrepit Democratic leadership wants young voters, what they really want is for Gen Z to vote to keep them in power. And heaven forbid that young voters take seriously what affluent liberal parents taught them: that war crimes — even, or especially, in Gaza — are bad, or that up-and-coming folks deserve housing. So the elders have rallied behind the only candidate poised to stop Mamdani: the once-disgraced Andrew Cuomo.

Thanks to New York City’s embrace of ranked-choice voting, we probably won’t know by Tuesday night whether Mamdani or Cuomo has an inside track on November’s general election (which because of third-party lines could bring a Cuomo-Mamdani rematch, as well as current disgraced mayor Eric Adams). But even the first wave of results should provide insight into the future of the Democratic Party which is standing, Robert Johnson-like, at the crossroads, facing down its demons.

A win or strong showing for Mamdani can and should offer great hope to those who are eager to end the iron grip of a gerontocracy epitomized by Joe Biden’s (age 82) 2024 meltdown (which occurred one year ago Friday) and the likes of Reps. Nancy Pelosi (85) or Jim Clyburn (84), who last week endorsed Cuomo. It can prove that Democrats don’t need to throw millions more at consultants or find a “Joe Rogan of the left” to win back young voters, but merely run candidates willing to listen, and to challenge the status quo, even if billionaire donors pay more taxes.

Mamdani’s surge reminds me of what a former New York Newsday colleague, the legendary columnist Murray Kempton, famously wrote in 1965 when a young and dynamic John Lindsay challenged that generation’s Democratic machine: “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.”

But six decades later, the tired elites are refusing to let go. A pro-Cuomo political action committee called Fix the City has accounted for roughly half of all outside spending, with at least $16 million and probably more. Those dollars come from the likes of hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who recently drove out Harvard’s first Black woman president, former mayor and Democratic presidential candidate and fellow billionaire Bloomberg ($8.3 million donated), and even DoorDash, in a slap to its young customers.

Following the money behind Cuomo have been a lot of big-name Democrats like Clinton (who, a few of you may remember, had his own issues with women) and Clyburn. Even more surprising was the intervention of the Times, which caused a stir a couple of years ago by stating it was done endorsing local candidates, only to race back in panic over the prospect of a democratic socialist as mayor with a bizarre editorial that, while not technically an endorsement, begged New Yorkers to rank anybody but Mamdani — even, and maybe especially, Cuomo, whom the paper had once called on to resign as governor.

“His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. [Bill] de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty,” wrote the Times’ Editorial Board of Mamdani, in a piece reportedly drafted by elitist centrist-in-chief David Leonhardt. “As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”

Really? Ethics and conduct aside, there’s plenty of other good reasons to be dubious about a Cuomo mayoralty, including ongoing investigations into his state government’s alleged mishandling of 2020’s COVID crisis that resulted in more than 10,000 nursing-home deaths, or living most of his adult life not in New York City, or the inertia of his old and ineffective ideas about dealing with homelessness or the city’s troubled history of brutal policing. So what’s really going on here?

Some of the opposition is undoubtedly rooted in New York’s distinctive brand of Islamophobia that has lingered and often surfaced since the 2001 terror attacks. Mamdani is bidding to become New York’s first Muslim mayor and has labelled Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “genocide,” while facing attacks for pro-Palestinian statements he made in college. He’s also faced death threats and racist verbal attacks. That banner flying over the Hudson on Sunday read “SAVE NEW YORK FROM GLOBAL INTIFADA REJECT MAMDANI.”

The absurd and offensive notion that Mamdani is antisemitic was demolished in a powerful essay by New York’s current-best independent pro-democracy journalist, Marisa Kabas, who is Jewish and who wrote that “it boils down to the same problem that has pervaded nearly every conversation since October 7th: conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism.” Such attitudes still permeate the elite ranks of the Democratic Party despite a persuasive case that failure to address the Gaza carnage hurt them in the 2024 election, badly.

What’s more, the antisemitism charges feel like a crutch for the real fears of elites who cling to a brand of capitalism that is failing many urban residents, but especially Gen Z. One of Mamdani’s bolder proposals would create a so-called “public option” of city-backed groceries that would both eliminate food deserts in poorer neighborhoods and foster lower prices. The owner of one of New York’s bigger grocery chains, wealthy political donor John Catsimatidis, is threatening to close his supermarkets if Mamdani wins. It’s what the oligarchy always does when confronted with anything that might boost the bottom half.

These are the real stakes Tuesday. It’s not so much Primary Day as a potential Groundhog Day for an embattled and increasingly enfeebled Democratic Party, because if New Yorkers wake up and see Cuomo’s dark shadow, expect four more years, or whatever, of a political winter that will not only chill democracy. It will make young voters even more angry and cynical, which didn’t seem possible after the blizzard of 2024.

Question: How does Trump financially benefit from deporting people to third-party countries? He must, right? — @bonnie6024.bsky.social‬ via Bluesky

Answer: Bonnie, I don’t think Trump is personally profiting from sending migrants to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT gulag, Djibouti, or anywhere else now that our compromised right-wing Supreme Court this week — in an appalling decision — gave the regime a green light to continue these so-called third-party deportations. He might find a cash angle eventually. But for now, the goal is simply to get 1 million human beings out of the United States in 2025 by any means necessary. That means finding anybody willing to take them, and brutally repressive regimes like El Salvador and South Sudan seem most willing to cut deals. But more importantly, getting to 1 million means abandoning the past focus on deporting criminals, and instead rounding up hard-working dads or high-school soccer stars with spotless records, plucking them from their communities. Whatever else happens under Trump, including the mess in the Middle East, history will never forget the cruelty of mass deportation.

Last week’s question about the Israel-Iran conflict, which was dropped five days ahead of Trump’s bombs, produced a very light response, which suggests what a fraught topic the Middle East has become these days. The handful who did respond were opposed to the U.S. intervention and also weary of American hypocrisy in the region. “The biggest problem here is that we have no idea what we’re doing,” wrote Robert G. Wick. “From the time that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said that for peace in the region, ‘What we need to do is to get the Jews and the Arabs to begin treating one another in a Christian manner,’ we have constantly misinterpreted the region.” Added David Wiedner: “What we need is a coherent, long-term foreign policy for the region that is focused on stability and peace, not one based on fear of how Israel might influence our politics or how Saudi Arabia might threaten our wallets.”

📮 This week’s question: Let’s mix it up a little. The big (mostly) non-Trump story of 2025 is the dramatic rise in the use and influence of artificial intelligence, or AI. Based on what we’ve seen so far, and can predict, is AI good or bad for the future of humankind? Please email me your answer and put “AI good or bad?” in the subject line.

The other night — diehard soccer fanatic that I am, even with my Phillies in a pennant race — I flipped on the TV to watch the U.S. men’s national team in a Gold Cup match against Saudi Arabia. The match was in Austin, a city with a mix of old-school Latinos and young tech workers who routinely pack Q2 Stadium for Major League Soccer. But I was shocked by the sea of empty seats, in a venue that only holds 20,500.

To be sure, the USMNT has played poorly of late. But I couldn’t help but wonder how much low attendance for both the Gold Cup and the Club World Cup in 2025’s “summer of soccer” is also the result of threats by Border Patrol and other federal agents involved in Donald Trump’s mass deportation crusade to show up at venues, included a deleted post before a big match in Miami. It drove home a grim reality. In Trump’s first term, he landed the world’s two premier sporting events, with next year’s World Cup finals (mostly here, but also in Canada and Mexico), and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. In Trump’s second term, he seems determined to ruin them.

The widespread reports of unassuming tourists getting hassled, detained or deported from airports, and a travel ban or restrictions that could be expanded to dozens of nations has already shattered any confidence that either event will be a slam-dunk success. That fear was driven home earlier this month when the women’s national basketball team from Senegal was forced to cancel a U.S. training trip because several players were denied visas. Senegal isn’t even one of the 12 countries covered by the current travel ban. “Tensions are a good thing,” Trump recently told a task force from the world soccer body, FIFA. “It’ll make it more exciting.”

No, it won’t. The 47th president is doing his best to ruin sports in America, much as he ruins everything he touches. Doing his best...but not fully succeeding, not yet. It was a victory both for the national pastime of baseball, and morality writ large, when the Los Angeles Dodgers last week denied masked federal border agents access to Dodger Stadium ahead of a game, and when protesters and a strong presence of Los Angeles police kept the feds at bay. We need that kind of gumption. It’s been the worst of times but also the best of times for sports in America, punctuated by an electrifying 7-game NBA finals between two upstarts, the Indiana Pacers and the victorious Oklahoma City Thunder. It was a joyous reminder of what a global polyglot of great athletes can achieve on American soil, as long as the games go on.

For some weird reason, most of my posts from June 24 are ancient rebukes of the likes of Mitt Romney or John McCain, back in the good ol’ days when the biggest threat to the Republic seemed like another Republican tax cut. For example, on this date 17 years ago I was on the warpath about the GOP’s refusal, as epitomized by its 2008 presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, to adequately fund Amtrak. I wrote: “If you envision a future with commuters out of their SUVs and off the Schuylkill Expressway and onto rail cars, you’re probably not picturing the McCain administration.” Read the rest: “Why does John McCain hate trains?‘.”

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