Over dinner with a politically sophisticated college friend, I explained that I was planning to vote for Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor. In full Gen X snark mode, she asked, “Because vibes?”
She was alluding to the fact that some of Mr. Mamdani’s most meme-able campaign slogans are impossible as actual policy. A few are not even good ideas to begin with.
Take “Freeze the rent,” his rallying cry, understood to refer to the city’s million or so rent-stabilized apartments. Freezing the rent has been tried; it helps in the short term, but it exacerbates many long-term problems. Low-income renters would be better served by a laser focus on increasing housing supply. I’m voting for him anyway.
Or take free buses. Mr. Mamdani has said little about how he’d deliver on this promise, since New York’s mayor does not control the city’s mass transit system and the institutions that do are most likely to hate the idea. I’m voting for him anyway.
I’m doing it 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!).
That is the same spirit that motivated a great many people to vote for Donald Trump. You can see the irony: There may be no two politicians further apart on the ideological spectrum. Or two who are less personally aligned: Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to destroy the “Communist” Mr. Mamdani — and beyond him, New York — if Mr. Mamdani is elected. But the appeal they make to voters, and the way voters respond, is uncannily similar.
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The post Voting for Mamdani Taught Me Why Trump Won appeared first on New York Times.
