With Mamdani, Republicans should be careful of what they wish for

 

New York City uses ranked-choice voting for its primary elections, but not for the general election. An earlier version of this story included incorrect information.

After a hilariously inept attempt to push New York Democrats to a more moderate place in the city’s mayoral election, Republicans are leaning in on the upsides of having Zohran Mamdani, a loud-and-proud socialist, in charge of America’s largest city.

Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race Sunday, a month after apparently failing to reach a deal with Trump World to leave the race in exchange for a sweet sinecure in the administration.

Had Adams left back in August, it wouldn’t have been enough to make a front-runner out of Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat now running as an independent after losing his party primary. But a high-profile departure by the incumbent might have provided some momentum for the former governor as the race was coming into focus.

For a guy who needed the president to intervene to save him from bribery charges, Adams sure seems bad at the whole payola thing. He leaves the race broke, without a cushy landing spot and without providing much help to Cuomo, who will have to scrap with Republican Curtis Sliwa for the sliver of voters who had been sticking with hizzoner. 

That’s not to say Cuomo won’t win, though. For all of Mamdani’s big leads in polls, he hasn’t cracked 50 percent once.

In an average of the five most recent high-quality surveys of New York voters, it’s Mamdani with 45 percent support, the other three with a combined 47 percent, and 8 percent undecided.

There would certainly be some poetic parallelism in Mamdani winning a primary that he looked sure to lose and then losing a general that he looked sure to win.

But ask yourself: Who is more likely to sit out the election? A Republican who feels obliged to vote for a candidate she or he has spent decades despising to stop Mamdani, or a Mamdani voter who is excited about the chance to disrupt the trajectory of a city that appears fundamentally broken?

Last week, the maker of a wearable artificial intelligence companion launched the largest-ever ad campaign on the New York subway. The signs blanketed tunnels and rail cars with stark text ads for a product that seems equally bleak in its design and purpose. The circle-shaped device is always listening in order to provide tailored interactions with the wearer, like the start of a Dave Eggers novel or a Spike Jonze movie from a decade ago. 

“I know people in New York hate AI, and things like AI companionship and wearables, probably more than anywhere else in the country,” CEO Avi Schiffmann told Ad Age. “So I bought more ads than anyone has ever done with a lot of white space so that they would socially comment on the topic.”

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