This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Democratic primary that just wrapped up in New York was a collision between two very different candidates on almost every level: ideologically, outsider versus insider and name recognition. But it was also a collision that I think matters, for much beyond New York City politics, of two very different theories of attention.
Andrew Cuomo ran a campaign that was based on a tried-and-true strategy of buying attention. He had this gigantic super PAC with tens of millions of dollars purchasing all the advertising money can buy, absolutely dominating airwaves with negative ads about Zohran Mamdani.
Archived clip: In his own words, Zohran Mamdani wants to defund the police.
Archived clip: Zohran Mamdani is a 33-year-old dangerously inexperienced legislator who has passed just three bills.
Archived clip: Zohran Mamdani, a risk New York can’t afford.
And then you had Mamdani, who was running a campaign on a very different theory of attention, a theory of viral attention, a campaign built on these vertical videos that, if you opened Instagram, if you opened TikTok, and you were in any way connected to his ideas or to New York City, this was all you saw.
Archived clip of Kareem Rahma: So what’s your take?
Zohran Mamdani: That I should be the mayor.
Archived clip of Mamdani: New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called halalflation.
Archived clip of Mamdani: Did you know that Andrew Cuomo gutted the pensions for hundreds and thousands of New Yorkers?
Archived clip of Mamdani: Mr. Cuomo, and furthermore, the name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.”
Attention works differently now. This is one of the core political theses of this entire podcast. It is laced through so many of these episodes.
You just watched these two incredibly different attentional strategies collide. Cuomo got flattened. He got flattened. It was not close.
There are things you cannot learn about how to win elections in other places from an off-year June Democratic primary in New York City using rank-choice voting.
But there are things you can learn about how attention works right now — and that’s in a large part the subject of this conversation.
I’m not a New Yorker, so I wanted somebody who is a New Yorker, has deep roots here and really understands political attention to join me. I asked my friend Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor, and the author of a phenomenal book on attention to politics, “The Sirens’ Call.”
EZRA KLEIN: Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show.
CHRIS HAYES: It’s great to be back.
Zohran Mamdani won the primary.
He sure did.
You just wrote a book about political attention. This was one of the most attentionally remarkable and innovative campaigns I’ve seen. I would like to hear the “Sirens’ Call” analysis of the Zohran Mamdani campaign.
The first thing I’d say about him is that he genuinely came out of nowhere. I live in New York City and spend between 16 to 20 hours a day reading and thinking about politics. I knew there was a Democratic Socialist assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani. I didn’t know he was running for mayor until he popped up on my Instagram and TikTok feed.
To level set, this is someone who had zero attention on him who went to monopolizing attention in the race. I think the way he did it was viral videos. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Democratic candidate be totally native to the medium of our time, which is short vertical videos in the algorithmic feed.
I want to play one of them here. This was one of the first times he came onto my radar — a video he did right after the 2024 election.
Archived clip of Mamdani: Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
Unidentified woman: Yes!
Mamdani: And who did you vote for?
Unidentified woman: Trump!
Unidentified man: Ah, the million-dollar question.
Unidentified man: Trump.
Mamdani: Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift toward Trump in last week’s election.
Unidentified man: Most of these people are working families, working one to two or three jobs. And rent is expensive, food is going up, utilities are going up.
Mamdani: And that’s your hope to see a little bit more of an affordable life?
Unidentified man: Absolutely.
Unidentified man: You know, Gaza. Who should I vote for? Either side, whoever I vote for, will send bombs to kill my brothers and sisters.
Mamdani: You know we have a mayor’s race coming up next year, and if we had a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality, are those things that you’d support?
Unidentified man: Absolutely. You’d have my vote all day.
Unidentified woman: We need child care that is affordable. Buses should be free. The hike in the Metrocards is, like, totally unaffordable.
Mamdani: So my name is Zohran Mamdani. I’m going to be running for mayor next year.
Unidentified man: Wow, wow.
Mamdani: And I’m going to be running on that platform.
Unidentified man: I’m going to vote for you. Your energy is —
Mamdani: Thank you, thank you. My energy is getting up to inflation.
What struck me about that video when I saw it was that so many politicians communicate by focusing on what they’re telling you. But what was fascinating about Mamdani’s campaign is that he turned the act of listening into a form of broadcasting.
That’s exactly what I found so striking about it.
When I first saw the video, I didn’t know he was running for mayor until the end, when he said: I’m running for mayor.
There are two things about it: One, he’s listening to people, and two, it’s this recognizable trope of this form of video. The guy on the street. The “Hawk Tuah Girl” is infamous because a guy was walking around Broadway in Nashville, sticking microphones in people’s faces.
He’s taking this established genre that has its own features and is familiar and doing this innovative thing. Instead of talking at people, he’s putting mics in their faces and asking questions. It’s incredibly effective.
He’s the first politician I’ve seen who feels truly native to social media. There are a lot of politicians — Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, for instance — who were dominant on Twitter and Facebook, mostly during the text-based, high-engagement, social-sharing era of media.
And the thing that’s come after it — TikTok, Instagram, you see it more now on X — is much more algorithmic, and it’s much easier to come out of nowhere using visual, vertical video that isn’t primarily text based.
Zohran wasn’t dominant through text posts on X — it was videos and visuals. The graphic design in that campaign was beautiful — the colors, the whole thing.
And he’s a handsome guy, too, I’ve got to say.
Great smile. Always in a suit — so a highly recognizable outfit. He was very visual. There was an incredibly consistent visual grammar.
There were certain filters on most of his videos, and then when he would do videos about more intense subjects like ICE, they would take those filters off or make a starker one. His mother is an amazing filmmaker. His sense of film and visual grammar is very, very strong.
I saw a very funny interview where someone was like: Do you consult with your mom before these? And he’s like: We’re doing them so fast, we just make them, we put them out. We’ve got to get them out. And my mom is like: Why don’t you show me final cuts? [Laughs.]
The last time I saw something like this was Howard Dean with Meetup in 2004 or Barack Obama with Facebook in 2008.
Or Trump on Twitter.
Trump on Twitter, yes.
Trump was truly native to what Twitter is.
Yes, you’re right. That’s a great point.
Donald Trump and Twitter in 2015 was the way that a lot of people came to know him as a politician.
One point I want to make — and that I think we can both agree on — is that in all of these discussions, some things are new and some things are timeless. The guy is very charismatic. He’s politically talented, and that would be true if he were running in the 1950s.
It would be true if he were doing whistle-stop tours because the guy can talk, and he’s a very talented communicator. I don’t want to overstate the degree to which the medium is determinative. You could make short-form videos that wouldn’t work as well. He’s got rizz. He just does.
What’s so wild about it, though, is that there’s a perfect pairing between that charisma, that way of communicating, with the form that he used — and then the fact that the algorithmic social media means a thing can blow up.
Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani were perfect foils for each other. You could not have scripted it better.
Cuomo had this gigantic super PAC behind him. There was this real sense, correctly, that following any normal rules of politics, how could Mamdani or anyone else climb uphill against the amount of attentional artillery that super PAC could and would buy? And we know that the ads were just absolutely dominating the airwaves 24/7, basically.
I cannot overstate to people outside the New York viewing area how insane the repetition of this same ad was.
I saw this ad one time — I mean, I saw it 17 times, in just this one experience — because I was at a bar, and they had a TV on.
Exact same. I was at a bar. “Wheel of Fortune” was on, and the ad played 21 times.
One of the things that struck me the whole way through on the Andrew Cuomo campaign was how old its understanding of communication was. At some point, I heard people talking about Cuomo as a juggernaut. But attentionally, in my world, Mamdani was the juggernaut. Cuomo didn’t exist.
He didn’t exist.
To take a step back, people really have to understand that for probably the last 40 years there’s been this formula — I think it’s true for both parties, but I know Democratic politics better. You raise a lot of money and then you spend it on TV buys. That’s what a campaign is. Raise a lot of money, spend it on TV buys.
That is how they choose candidates.
Can you raise the money so that you can do the TV buys?
The D.S.C.C. and the D.C.C.C. who recruit congressional candidates and senatorial candidates, one of the main things that they are testing is: Can you raise the money? And what are you doing with that money?
You are buying attention.
What you are doing is buying attention through 30-second ads that are going to run on the local news in the three weeks before the election.
That is 90 percent of the campaign. The last 10 percent is you have to go to events and shake hands. Maybe it’s closer to 80 percent — I’m sort of overstating.
But you saw Cuomo just run this play, which was to limit media availability and only pick your spots. Be confident that this enormous carpet-bombing is going to happen late down the stretch. It totally backfired and didn’t work.
It backfired. I really want to hold on this for a minute. Because you cannot buy attention now the way you once could.
Exactly.
You can only earn it.
Yes.
This goes back to the conversation we had right after the 2024 election. Donald Trump really did have a lot of money behind him in that election, but Kamala Harris had more.
She raised a ton of money and spent a ton of money. But she absolutely did not dominate attention.
You were watching between Cuomo and Mamdani an almost pitch-perfect version of the old attentional strategy colliding with a pitch-perfect version of the most modern and native attentional strategy.
I do think the underlying product here matters. Cuomo was just a bad product. He was a scandal-ridden, high negatives, widely-disliked former governor who had to resign in disgrace. And he was running against this fresh-faced figure. It was a real collision of these strategies that I do think people should watch.
If I am the D.S.C.C. or the D.C.C.C., I would start thinking not about who I think can raise money but who can raise attention themselves by being out there on all these platforms and actually creating things that are native to the places they’re running in. Which will be different if you’re an Ohio Senate candidate or a Wisconsin Senate candidate rather than if you’re a New York City mayor or candidate. Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri and Kansas have their own things that people care about and their own cultures.
How else are people getting information now? Above a certain age and among certain demographics, people still consume the news as the news, in whatever form that takes.
Voters who are in that outer concentric circle of political or news interest, who Democrats lost by 15 points in 2024 and who Democrats have struggled to win — you have to win if you’re going to win Ohio, right? If you want to reach those folks, how else are they going to hear about you?
If they’re not watching the evening news when you’re buying your ad points and they’re not watching network news and they’re not watching linear cable, how do they find out about you? They’re going to find out about you from their phones.
So how do you reach them? You have to really think this through: How will this person know that I’m running, what I look like and what I stand for? And if you don’t have a theory for that — other than we bought a bunch of points on TV — you’re cooked. You’re cooked. It’s not going to work.
We did this show a couple of months ago about attention. It was after the election and that particular show got very wide distribution among Democratic politicians. Some of them would come to talk to me later, and they were trying to do video.
I have just thought a lot since then about why their videos are so bad. Members of the Senate Democrats — and for that matter, the House Democrats — have a lot of money in their campaign committees. They have a lot of money for communications. They could hire very, very good people. And it’s actually not the case that you can’t make an argument about the “big, beautiful bill” or something go viral.
I know you can because I do it, and you know you can because you do it. And I just look at what all of their content looks like and I think: Does nobody there have a sense of what they like to watch?
Because definitely, they don’t like to watch this. But the absence of taste among people who are, in theory, skilled political communicators is weird to me.
[Laughs.] Well, you’ve been to Washington and have seen how people dress!
Here’s a structural answer to that question. Don’t hold me to it, but here’s a hypothesis: Democratic Party politics are really complicated politics of multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual coalitions. I think often the things that success in Democratic politics selects for is skill at managing these coalitional tensions, which is a really difficult thing to do.
Hakeem Jeffries is very good at that. Nancy Pelosi is the best at it. No one — and I think including Nancy Pelosi — would be like: I want to listen to a Nancy Pelosi podcast. Nancy Pelosi is not a great public communicator. She is a legendary, all-time great manager of coalitional tension.
I think the coalitional politics of Democratic politics often select for people who are very skilled at managing these very different, difficult coalitional issues. That is a different skill than public communication to the normies.
Let me push on this a little bit. I think you’re right about a Hakeem Jefferies here, a Chuck Schumer.
And they’re not bad communicators. That’s just not the thing that put them in the position they’re in.
But you think about a Cory Booker. You think about a Chris Murphy.
You’re right. Why can’t they do it? I mean Chris Murphy walks across Connecticut every year.
Yes, he does that. Cory Booker did the 25-hour filibuster. Or not quite a filibuster but a long speech.
There is a dimension where I know they want to communicate. I know they want what they’re saying to break through. They are willing to say things. I mean, Chris Murphy has been very out there in the level of alarm he is raising. They’re good podcast guests. If you were to rank Senate Democrats on how good they are on a podcast, Murphy and Booker would be high up there.
But the amount of agita I’ve heard Democrats express about the lack of a liberal Joe Rogan, whatever it might be, as opposed to understanding attention not as something other people gift to you but as something you earn yourself. Or you look for it as a skill in other people, or you have some kind of filmmaker coach you. The gap is so much wider than it seems like it needs to be at this point. And watching all these people just get flattened by someone like Mamdani, it really speaks to it.
Yes. I mean, part of the question here, though, is about being native to new forms. I have made a few TikTok videos, and they’re not that good. I think I’m a pretty skilled public communicator. It’s what I do for a living. It’s what I’ve done for a long time.
But there are these weird differences between different mediums, formats, visual grammars in different times. And here’s a key thing: I think you have to be a consumer to be a producer, and I think this is a huge gap. I really think this is a real problem. I think now if I started to get serious about making TikTok videos where I talk to a camera, having watched a lot more, I would be better now.
And if I practiced, I’d get better.
But the textural sense Mamdani has for the format — you can’t just read some packet or jump in from nowhere.
But that seems like a thing where you should be looking for certain kinds of talent.
Yes. That I agree with.
There’s a reality that a lot of people who run for office are news anchors. I mean, Mike Pence had been a talk-radio host. Kari Lake had been a news anchor. A lot of these people have experience in front of a camera. And I just think, if both parties were smart, they would be looking for people who have attentional skills.
Yes.
Mamdani was trying to make the election about affordability, about material concerns. But Cuomo won the precincts where the median income was under $50,000.
What did you make of the strange structure of the coalitions?
I don’t really have a good theory on it yet. The one piece of election analysis that has stuck out the most to me is this triangle that breaks down precincts by their degree of racial integration.
Have you seen this triangle? It’s so fascinating. It breaks down precincts by how white they are, how Black they are or how “other” they are. This is by census — these are not the racial categories that I would use to describe people. Basically, what it finds is that the precincts that are all Black and all white were Cuomo precincts.
And the more mixed a neighborhood was in its racial makeup, the better Mamdani did. Which I find to be a fascinating result. Now that might just be a proxy for the income stuff you’re talking about.
Yes. It might cross-correlate.
My mom and I were talking about this because we were in the Bronx. The Bronx ended up being a Cuomo borough. Which is sort of ironic, because Mamdani’s opening bid was something like: I’m here in the Bronx, on Fordham Road, in this place that swung. I’m talking to people, and I’m going to address your concerns.
Then he ran up the numbers in the Democratic Socialists of America precincts. But he also couldn’t have won unless he made it outside those parameters.
I think name recognition is part of it. I think familiarity matters to voters. The devil you know — or just familiarity — often matters to voters on the periphery of an electorate in a Democratic primary.
But I don’t have a good theory of why that was the case here. There are other patchworks I could theorize better than those.
What do you think?
I don’t know, either. I think you could come up with a couple of arguments.
One is that maybe that’s cross-correlating something that’s just informational. Those voters were less attached to the discourse. They weren’t telling the algorithm they wanted to see a bunch of Zohran Mamdani videos.
They sort of know who Andrew Cuomo is, and they’re more mobilized by interest groups that used to be more powerful and that largely signed up with Cuomo: the unions, churches.
Cuomo did a lot of his campaigning among Black churches. You might be seeing something that has to do with almost machine and mobilization politics, which Cuomo was leaning heavily on.
There’s also a crime and disorder question here. Let’s say you’re a voter making, like, $35,000 a year, you’re living in N.Y.C.H.A. housing. You are more likely to be exposed to crime and disorder than a voter in Williamsburg making around $137,000.
Yes.
Adams won running against crime and disorder, running up the totals among working class voters. So we know that kind of politics is powerful.
I have this sort of view that Mamdani could only have won at a time when crime had actually gone down quite a lot, as it has. If this really was a big crime and disorder election, I think that would have been a big problem for him, as he wasn’t well trusted on those issues.
This is a consistent thing we see in the data with left-wing candidates. I think you could just say this is something we’ve seen happening a lot.
Donald Trump also won voters under $50,000. There are different things happening as you move up the income scale — people are voting more expressively.
Even though Mamdani tried desperately hard to run the most materialist campaign possible.
Politics is very expressive. It’s not like a bad thing about it — it’s just a reality.
I voted against my material interest in this mayoral election.
As did I. So I think you can cut politicians into these two categories. There are the politicians for whom you can identify a policy that stands for them immediately. “Build the wall”— that’s a policy, but it’s a metonym for Donald Trump. “Medicare for all” for Bernie Sanders. The Green New Deal for A.O.C.
Mamdani — he had four or five, right? It was: “Freeze the rent.” It was free buses. It was free day care. It was publicly owned grocery stores. All of these are actual policies, and they’re worth talking about, but they’re mimetic.
Hillary Clinton running against Bernie Sanders had 70 policies — but none that actually defined her.
I cannot give you the policy that stands for Kamala Harris. The same is true for Brad Lander and a bunch of the other people in this campaign.
Which is not to say they didn’t have them. They had them.
Brad Lander had a depth of policy on his campaign website in this mayoral race that I only associate with presidential campaigns. It was so detailed, and a lot of them are great.
Brad Lander was my choice in the campaign. But I said, when I wrote this piece about him: There are politicians who communicate about policy, and there are politicians who use policy to communicate.
And you can lament that what modern media is doing is flattening down policy to this sort of bumper-sticker level of mimetic communication. And I kind of do lament it — but it’s also true.
Abundance has been a big deal — but it’s the word, and there’s all this stuff behind it. And that’s a much more complicated set of conversations.
But it cuts through.
But if you don’t have the mimetic tip of the spear —
There’s a question here that I think is interesting in terms of replicability, which is: How much of that ability is structurally producible, and how much is just like telling someone to dunk a basketball?
Certain people have talents for things. I do think there is a question here about how much it comes down to talent. People have instincts and knacks for this. But you’re absolutely correct about this.
I think to go back to that video, there’s this kind of one plus one equals two thing happening there. He goes up to Fordham Road in the Bronx area. It’s an area I know well, right by where my mom grew up. I was just having lunch around there for Father’s Day.
Mamdani asked people, and they’re like: Groceries cost too much. And then at the end, it’s like: We’re going to try public grocery stores. Now to be clear, the grocery business runs at margins of 1 to 3 percent. It’s not private profit that’s making the price of groceries more.
I’m not convinced that the solution is going to solve the problem — particularly in this case, which I think is probably the most dubious. But it’s also worth trying, and it’s an attempt to address people’s concerns.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about publicly owned grocery stores. I basically understand this modest pilot of five stores that he’s proposed —
Yes, one in each borough.
As getting caught trying on something —
Right.
I do think this gets to something very real. Are the only policies that can become mimetic in this way these sort of huge, sweeping ones? Policies that often have conflict at their heart? They make people not like them at the same time they make people like them. “Build the wall,” “Medicare for all,” an ongoing rent freeze.
Can policy be mimetic? Can it be communicative —
And be good?
I don’t just mean be good. I think it would be great if you can pay for free day care to have free day care. Terrific. I don’t want to just create a good-bad division here, as if all good policy is complicated. That’s not my belief. But mimetic products have to be simple.
Yes.
Memes are simple. The thing behind the meme might be complicated and good or bad. For something to gain energy, I think it has to be easily memorable.
I think it has to be big. It has to activate something people care about, and it probably has to be controversial. People forget this now, but every 2020 Democratic primary was about Medicare. It was just a lot of debate about “Medicare for all.”
Anybody who understood the kind of Congress any Democrat would be facing knew we were not going to get Medicare for all. Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager, was on my show earlier this year, or maybe late last year.
Basically saying we would have gotten as close as we could get.
We would have expanded the age range of Medicare, and everybody knew it. The reason that it could dominate so much was it unleashed controversial energy.
There was a debate: Would you abolish all private health insurance? Were you willing to raise taxes on middle-class Americans to fund this?
It was attentionally salient because conflict is attentionally salient.
A lot of policy is built for compromise.
I think we have a good, tangible example in recent history in exactly this context, from the mayor that Zohran Mamdani says was the best mayor of his life — which got The New York Times very mad at him for saying so: Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K.
As a non-New Yorker, Bill de Blasio seemed like a perfectly good mayor to me. My kid is in 3-K.
Let’s talk about universal pre-K for a second. “Universal pre-K” did have that mimetic energy. It’s simple and straightforward. Every kid in the city has to go to kindergarten, and we’re going to make a pre-, a new grade below it.
And this is informed by real empirical work that has been done — and we’re going to have a tax structure that funds it and makes it happen. It was controversial at the time. There were lots of people who said this was a bad idea, and you’re going to put local day cares out of business.
There was conflicting energy around it, and then they delivered it. I sent my first kid — it was Year 2, maybe, that it had been up and running. And I walked into this school that had been leased by the Department of Education that had formally been a Catholic school. This is one of the biggest pre-Ks in the whole city — something like 20 classes.
I remember thinking this is the most extraordinary accomplishment I have ever seen. I couldn’t believe you guys stood this thing up, that my kid was going there for free every day.
So that’s an example. It was a mimetic policy, it cut through, and it identified Bill de Blasio. They got into power, they actually did it, and it worked. That is an example of all of those things happening.
Yet it didn’t stop everybody from turning on Bill de Blasio.
Because then it’s like: What have you done for me lately?
Here’s the thing about that promise: I will say if you don’t have a kid that age, it’s irrelevant.
It’s highly salient to me.
For me, it was awesome.
I see a lot of people on Twitter celebrating Mamdani’s win. And I think Mamdani’s win is exciting. But I’ve said this before: The downside for him is not that he loses a primary. The bad outcome is that he wins and fails at governing.
He cannot get the tax increases he needs from Albany, and he does not control the tax increases he needs for this agenda. Kathy Hochul has already said no.
Very clearly.
She has a no raising taxes pledge, and she’s not going to break it. So he’s not going to have the money. He wants an extended rent freeze.
I know people who do nonprofit housing. And there are people who are ideologically aligned with Mamdani, and they don’t think this is a good idea.
Yes, I know exactly. I know people in nonprofit housing who feel the same way.
If you do it for one year: OK, fine. But over an extended period of time, you will reduce the incentive to build that housing and to care for that housing. Mamdani will say: You have these other programs you can apply to for relief if you need it. All that stuff is complicated.
You make a market less profitable to be in and fewer people will be in it. A lot of the things such as free day care — he probably just can’t pay for. If you set up these expectations and then you don’t meet them —
That’s a good question.
Is it OK because your supporters know you tried? Or is it a kind of structural thing where you have set yourself up for failure?
I think it’s the most important question in some ways. One thing I would say is, I like experimentation and new ideas.
When he was asked about the public groceries — I think it’s in “The Bulwark Podcast” — he says: We’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work, c’est la vie.
I love that answer. Politicians never give that answer. The person who really most embodied that spirit is F.D.R.
If you go back and read about the first hundred days, they’re just trying a lot. We now think about F.D.R. as this colossus who remade the relationship between the citizen and the federal government. A lot of that stuff did not work — like, fully failed. A lot of the interventions failed.
They did a lot of clunky stuff. It was a totally different time. He had these enormous mandates, and it was a crisis.
I like the idea of experimentation and these ideas coming from outside of the consensus around sensible policy. The test for it is: Can you deliver?
One thing that struck me a lot about Mamdani was his ability to listen — like, to sense the zeitgeist but also to listen to voters. The relentless focus on affordability — that was an act of listening — and then being able to respond to it. It’s been one of my views for a while. It actually is the introduction of my book: that we have moved into an era of politics that is going to be all about affordability.
Housing inflation, cost of child care inflation, cost of health care inflation — which was actually moderated in some ways, but it’s still quite bad — educational pricing for four-year colleges, that kind of thing. That didn’t just happen in 2022 and 2023 — it had been building for decades. And now, things rise, and they’re an issue, and then they’re actually intolerable.
Future politicians are going to have to develop a set of ideas and a way of talking about bringing costs down, not just bringing subsidies up. And whether Mamdani’s particular policies will work to do that, he really struck me as a politician native to this era of concerns.
I mean, think about the rent freeze. He wasn’t saying we’re going to give rent rebates through a tax filing where you file a tax and we’ll give you $150 back. It was like: No, we’re just going to cap the price.
Yes. My concern with Mamdani is that I think he gets that you need housing supply. But his plans are all public housing, which is fine, but that’s much harder.
Then when he talks about market-rate housing, he basically says: I really believe in market-rate housing as long as it accords to our sustainability, union and affordability needs.
When you need a lot of housing, adding a lot of conditions to that housing is going to raise the price. So I really think there’s a question about whether or not he can deliver affordability if he’s not able to increase supply.
I would feel better about a rent freeze that was paired with an incredible explosion of building. If what was happening was like we were freezing rents and there were cranes everywhere, then OK, fine. Because maybe in three years we have a lot of housing coming online. But at this level of supply creation, if you freeze rent for an extended period of time, you might begin to constrict supply down the road and create a bigger problem for the future.
The thing is, there are some levers we could pull on this. Housing is a particularly tough one because it takes time to build houses, and we make it hard to build houses.
I’m very skeptical that Mamdani can make free day care happen. I don’t think he’s got the money to do it. There’s more infrastructure that we need than was needed even for a 3-K.
But you could conceptually do free day care. You could definitely do it nationally. There are ways to approach some of these things, but I think this is what politics economically is going to be about for an extended period.
I think one wrinkle to the housing question — which I think is a really important thing to always keep coming back to and you discuss in your book — is that one person’s price is another person’s income.
There’s a real genuine material conflict in New York City between renters and homeowners. It’s not false consciousness, it’s not a distraction, it’s not culture war [expletive]. If you own a home and most of your wealth is in your home, you want to see that wealth go up. If you are trying to enter the housing market or a renter, rising house prices are bad for you. This is a real problem.
And you will not be excited about Mamdani or anyone coming in saying: We’re going to build a ton of public housing next to you. That’s the other thing that’s very difficult about public housing and affordable housing. All of these homeowners who want their high home prices do not want that down the block from them. It’s a huge problem in California.
And that material fight, which the homeowners have been winning in California, has been beating the brains out of the people trying to buy homes and renters for decades now to a degree that’s truly catastrophic, I think it’s fair to say.
I do worry that the structural nature of public opinion now is negative in a way that makes even good governance not resonate with people. Or the structural limitations on governing — one of the two. That it’s just very hard because of how many things contribute to a working-class person who lives on Fordham Road feeling the squeeze in every direction.
Can Zohran Mamdani unilaterally make it so they don’t feel that way? It’s hard to say. Can they feel: I’ve got a mayor who’s trying to make my life better? Yes.
Translating this kind of communication from campaign to governance — not that many people have had to do it. But Obama had to, and I think I would say he failed to do that.
I think the sense is that he was an amazing campaigner. And then given the reality of incremental victory, he was never sort of able to narrativize that.
I think that’s true.
In a way that could ease the disappointment a lot of people felt. I think that’s in some ways why the liberalism he represented after him, for at least some time, had a hard time because he had raised hope so high for a lot of people.
I mean, things did change. I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. The Affordable Care Act was a huge and ongoing achievement.
But how do you narrativize the difference between people’s hopes for your campaign and what they got?
Donald Trump is interesting because he comes after Obama. He also makes huge, sweeping, wild promises.
They never built the wall.
They don’t build the wall. But Donald Trump has his way of communicating throughout his entire presidency.
And I mean, he loses re-election, so it doesn’t work exactly. It’s like somehow he’s a president, but he’s not responsible for what happens.
No. He’s at war with his own government.
The “deep state.” There was a narrative that Donald Trump maintained as president that allowed him to explain away the difference between what he attempted and what he achieved.
And now Trump is president again, and he has much more control over the government. So it’s not as much of a “deep state” narrative this time.
Although he has spent the last 24 hours railing against the intelligence apparatus.
Yes, exactly.
It’s very classic.
Yes, because they say that the Iranian strikes only set it back by a couple months, and he’s saying it’s false.
So there’s that, right? You try to make the government itself your enemy. The question is: Can you use this kind of communication mastery, this capability over attention, to generate force for the things you want to pass? Can you use it as a form of power? But then can you use it if you’re not able to get it done?
Can you narrativize the grimy reality of governing in a way that maintains people’s faith in you — even when you’re not able to deliver what you promised?
There’s a few things I’d say about that. One, I think the mayor is different from the president in a lot of ways. Partly because it’s much more retail, and you can get a long way by showing up a lot.
Eric Adams actually does this pretty well.
There’s a club opening — he’s going to be there.
This is Chuck Schumer’s legendary talent — not as mayor or senator but before that, as congressman.
There’s a little bit of a trap that’s difficult to avoid, which is: It will be more difficult to govern than it is to campaign. Always. Andrew Cuomo’s father quite famously said: We campaign in poetry, and we govern in prose.
Part of the way you escape that trap is talented political communication. I really do think you have to do a good job. You can’t be a total failure as a mayor. The city has to feel like there are tangible improvements in people’s lives.
But that alone won’t be enough. You basically need both.
I thought of the Mamdani video that closed out the campaign — where he walks the length of Manhattan, talks to people, eating a slice of pizza and drinking water. I think you have to keep doing that to be an effective mayor.
And I think that does actually allow you to narrativize. Because you’re out there in the streets, talking to people and hearing what they’re saying. You’re able to communicate what you’re trying to do.
Getting caught trying is the key part of that.
I think this gets to something you’re seeing with Donald Trump right now. Which is that he actually has an instinct for how to turn policy that isn’t affecting that many people into something that is intentionally salient. Which is to make it a performance.
Yes. He performs everything. Including war.
Including war, the deportations, sending people to foreign prisons and having Kristi Noem pose with them in her flak jacket.
There’s something about him — he feels to me like a genuine and intentional innovator. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he’s trying to turn policy into a public performance. I mean, there is a reason —
Dr. Phil is embedded with the ICE teams.
Dr. Phil is embedded with the ICE teams. His cabinet is full of people from reality TV — from Sean Duffy all the way to the secretary of defense, who’s a weekend cable news host.
There’s a way in which I think Trump has been trying to square this. Most people will not feel the effect of most of his policies. But what if he can turn those policies into programming?
Yes, but here’s the irony: He’s at 10 points underwater, and all this stuff is pulling at exactly what you would predict from thermostatic public opinion.
David Shor had a thing the other day: One of the most consistent and counterintuitive findings is that when a president talks about something, its negatives go up.
The sort of negative bully pulpit. And now, the question to me — and this feels very unresolved because of how sui generis Trump is and how his trajectory has been: Does it net out as a positive?
The question of attentional domination — he does it better than anyone. He is a genuine innovator and a weird genius for attention at a pathological and feral level that is not replicable.
The constant show and constant conflict — his negatives are high. He lost re-election. He stuck around. He won. He almost immediately started to tank in the polls. He’s a very polarizing figure.
It works at some level, and there’s some power to it. But how much does it work? That still remains unclear to me.
I think that’s right, but what it works to do is set narrative, and that is its own dimension of power. It is a kind of power that he exerts in a way few presidents do over culture.
I’d say this is true for Mamdani. Mamdani is a discourse object, and Trump is a discourse object. It’s not like Zohran Mamdani is the only person to have recently won a Democratic primary anywhere in the country.
In Jersey, Mikie Sherrill just won the primary for governor.
Sherrill, I think, is an incredibly impressive politician. A former Navy helicopter pilot, and I find her charismatic.
Yes, she’s very good.
More on the moderate side of things. Does every Democrat need to reckon with the victory of Sherrill in the way that right now there’s a discourse of how every Democrat and politician and human being need to reckon with what we just saw in this June Democratic primary in New York City?
The former governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, who served two terms in a state — that Trump has won every time that he’s been on the ballot there — and left with I think 55 percent or 56 percent approval rating, no one is like: We need to find the next Roy Cooper.
He was an insanely effective politician in a very difficult terrain and has none of these like attentionally salient qualities — we talked about this last time — which is high risk, high reward and high volatility. There are trade-offs here.
The question you were asking a minute ago feels like it bites to me — which is, Does this kind of attentional dominance net out as a positive?
Right.
It can clearly win primaries. It clearly can help you exert a cultural and narrative force.
An ideological force.
An ideological force — above and beyond what you would be able to do. A.O.C. is not the only Democrat who has knocked off another Democrat in a primary. She’s not the only Democrat to win a House seat.
She’s incredibly salient as a national politician because of her ability to drive attention. And on the other hand, I recently was talking to a bunch of various people in the sort of new Democrats caucus, which is the more moderate House Democrats caucus.
And one thing that struck me, just talking to them, is that a couple of them are very talented communicators. But actually what most of them communicate in their bearing, in the way they are, is not flashy aggressive ideological projects. It’s kind of like this person might coach your Little League team.
Yes, he’s a good dude.
These things work and don’t work in different places. And I don’t think we have a good way of answering the question: When is it valuable to drive this kind of attention, and when is it not?
One place where it matters is presidential politics.
In presidential politics there’s just no question that it matters at that level. And you need someone who is an insanely skilled communicator with an incredible appetite and instinct for attention. The kind of person who wants to go do three-hour podcast interviews.
I think if you have a person who’s not that, you’re really in trouble. The other thing that I think is worth considering is the valence of incumbent versus challenger. I actually think this is interesting to think about. I think this kind of attentional dominance works better as a challenger than an incumbent. For exactly the reason we’re talking about.
So we’re seeing, right now, Donald Trump re-create some of the thermostatic public opinion on immigration that he had the first term. Which was part of what drove Democrats to adopt a line on immigration that was to the left of what their previous line had been. Partly along the lines of how public opinion had changed in recoiling in horror at what Donald Trump was doing on immigration.
My point being here is that there are more upsides to downsides for the challenger for this high-volatility, high-risk, high-reward attentional trade than there are for the incumbent.
This is very valuable in primaries. Everything we were saying a minute ago about policy that becomes mimetic is policy that unlocks a lot of attention.
Usually it happens through controversy — where some people really like it and others really hate it. And what you’re hoping for, when you unleash that kind of attentional energy, is that there are more people who really like the thing than hate it. The trade-off that you often see some of these candidates make is they are unleashing energy in the primary that might hurt them in the general.
Yes.
It is an often-made observation about Donald Trump that he seems to underperform in the general. He’s incredibly dominant at the primary level. But Trump, and then candidates like him, who are less talented than him, MAGA candidates, tend to underperform in the general.
I think a lot of people believe, and I’m one of them, that if Republicans had run Marco Rubio in 2016, they would have won by more. I actually think that’s true in 2024. If they had run Nikki Haley, if they ran probably even Ron DeSantis, they would have won by more — the conditions were there for that. Trump creates a lot of negative attention on him in general elections.
New York is weird in a lot of ways, but one is that the expectation is that if you have won the Democratic primary, you have won, right? The fact that this is not a complete expectation with Mamdani speaks to the way that there’s at least a belief that he will generate a countermobilization against him at a higher rate than a Brad Lander would, than some of these other candidates. But it will probably be OK for him in New York City because, again, it’s so dominated by Democrats.
But there’s this question of: How do you stand out in a primary campaign in a nonrepresentative electorate that agrees with you much more than the general electorate will? But then, if you’ve done that, then what do you do with these positions you’ve taken? Particularly if you’re dealing with a general electorate that is not all the way to your side. One example of this, in Ohio, when JD Vance ran for senate, Mike DeWine — who’s an intentionally not very skilled, kind of more older-school Republican — he was governor, and he won his re-election campaign that year by like 20-ish points.
Vance underperformed in the Senate race. I mean, he won, but it was by 6, 7, 8 points. It was not an amazing performance, in part because he had taken very, very MAGA positions.
Now has it worked out for JD Vance? Yes. But not in the sense that JD Vance overperforms with general election audiences. It’s like this is where it’s an uncertain trade a lot of the time.
It’s a really uncertain trade. And I think to add one wrinkle here that I think is interesting and slightly weedsy but worthwhile, is that, you know, New York City has ranked-choice voting. The rank-choice voting allows voters to rank five different candidates, and that created some interesting incentives that are a little different in this race, that I actually think worked against part of what you’re saying, which is that being the biggest bomb thrower is the most distinguishing. But the way ranked-choice voting works is you don’t want to alienate other people’s supporters, because you want them to rank you second or third or fourth.
And one of the things I thought was very interesting about how Mamdani navigated this, and I think huge props here go to Brad Lander, who came in third in the first round of voting, was that there were all these cross-endorsements and this sort of coalition building. It wasn’t just bomb throwing.
There’s a kind of politics you see, particularly in Republican primaries, where it’s like: The rest of these people are sellouts, and I’m the truest MAGA.
There kind of wasn’t that. Mamdani wasn’t running against the Democratic establishment. There wasn’t the kind of thing you can see among the sort of left flank of the Democratic Party: These corporate sellouts, they suck.
There was not very much of that. There was directed at Cuomo, but Mamdani cross-endorsed other candidates, as well. I think the reason that’s salient for the general is that, yes, it’s in a primary, but it’s also coalition building. And I think that coalition building actually ends up being extremely important in a general.
By the way, New York City had five straight terms of a Republican mayor, let’s not forget. So the expectation that the Democrat wins is like a fairly recent vintage, like Giuliani won twice. Bloomberg was three terms. That was 20 years in a row for Republican mayor.
I think some of his people will not like hearing me say this. I read Mamdani as a left pluralist, not a left populist.
People I think have very, very, shifty definitions of populism, but in its classic definition, what actually makes somebody a populist politician is not that they believe in redistribution or believe that the working man is getting screwed a bit. It’s that they believe that the system is built around a true people and then sort of like small, conspiratorial enemies of the people who are keeping everybody else down. And if you could just break through them and have your villains and destroy your villains, you can sort of hit the more utopic politics you’re looking for.
I have seen many right populists and left populists. I thought Mamdani’s affect was a bit of a TikTok affect. People forget TikTok — it doesn’t really work this way anymore — but for a very long time they were really pushing it to be a positive platform. They positioned it algorithmically, against what was happening on Twitter and Facebook and other things at that time.
Mamdani always seemed much more motivated by his sympathies than his resentments. And Cuomo felt to me much more motivated by his resentments than his sympathies.
And this also then played into the R.C.V. dynamic you’re discussing. I think it would have been natural to assume that these other more establishment, long-serving New York politicians would be likelier to cross-endorse and work with the front-runner, former governor. Who could both, in theory, give them more because he was likelier to be elected for most of the campaign but also somebody they would have known better. He’s been in New York politics forever. And to me this was both politically meaningful and substantively meaningful because it undercut the central argument of Cuomo’s candidacy.
Jessica Ramos endorsed him. But they largely really, really disliked him. Brad Lander really clearly dislikes Cuomo, and so do a lot of them. They did not want Cuomo ranked.
So it created this interesting space. The dynamics were not what you would have thought in a left-insurgent versus Democratic establishment race.
And there’s this validation role that ends up happening from that. Which is if you’re hearing that the guy is this terrifying, scary figure who’s an extremist, but then the other candidates in the field are cross-endorsing him and appearing with him, it makes it much harder for that to land.
And again, to Mamdani’s credit, I agree with you: I think it’s well said that he’s sort of animated by his sympathies as opposed to his resentments.
His affect is welcoming and pluralistic and also not like “They’re out to get me.” He just does not portray that at all — which I think can be a real problem for a certain kind of left populist politics.
It’s a rigged system. It’s all rigged. The fix is in. Cuomo got $25 million dropped on his head by super PAC money.
Bloomberg wrote a $5 million check. There was a little bit of a rigged game against Mamdani. But if you look at that walking the length of Manhattan video, the affect there is welcoming and inclusive at all times.
I don’t want to over-Marshall McLuhan everything and say: The medium is always the message, and everybody is shaped by their mediums. Because obviously there are a lot of people on TikTok or in vertical video who are not like Zohran Mamdani or don’t even follow what I’m talking about.
But with the rise of populist right, and to a lesser extent, populist left politics all across the world all at the same time in this punctuated period, starting in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I believe the single strongest force there was not just immigration, and it wasn’t economics, as you can really see in the data. I think it was the rise of the central communication platforms of politics being high-conflict, high-engagement, compressed-text platforms.
I think, in a way that we do not have incredibly good language for, those platforms are somewhat illiberal in their design. And by that I mean that they are structured in a way that makes the fundamental temperament of liberalism hard to do.
They’re not well suited for deliberation or tolerance. They’re not well suited for on the one hand, on the other hand — the things that make deliberative liberal democracy function, those habits of mind.
Barack Obama is not good at Twitter. He’s just not. His Twitter is bad. These platforms, they’re about groups. They’re about engagement within and then against other groups. They’re about drawing these lines very, very carefully. They create, by nature, a more populist form of politics. Or at least they create a communicative structure of politics where it is easier for outsider populist politicians to thrive.
The thing coming after it — when you look at TikTok, when you look at Instagram reels: It’s not that no content is high-conflict political content, but most of it much more day-in-the-life stuff. It’s very highly visual.
And you just kind of saw that a little bit in this campaign. I think there was something in the grammar of Mamdani that was so inflected by that era. He’s really like our first Vine politician. His grammar was not Twitter’s grammar. His grammar was TikTok’s grammar.
Yes. Fun, kind of goofy. I think that’s a really interesting point. I’m thinking this through. I think I agree that social media has constituted over the last tech decade is structurally illiberal.
I think I agree that relentlessly algorithmically competitive attention markets are going to drive toward the parts of us, as ourselves, that are the furthest from deliberation. I have a whole chapter in my book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates and how different that is, not that that should be the model of everything. I’m sort of thinking through this idea of the visual grammar and affect of the vertical video as being less conflict, populist, in its nature. I think it’s a really interesting idea.
I mean, one thought I had — and you just said that Barack Obama is bad at Twitter — is that I watched the whole Mamdani speech. I thought it was fine. He’s not great at giving a speech. Barack Obama was great at giving a speech.
There are great one-minute clips in his speeches, though.
Yes. His vertical video performance is a 10 out of 10. His speech performance was not a 10 of 10 to me. And I think that speaks to something about the nature of that.
Here’s the one counterpoint I would say. It seems to me like there are ways in which those algorithms over time — and partly this has to do with the weird black box of the algorithm — is that they do start to get more and more conflict embracing, like with the clapback video, the posting of the comment of someone said something, and the stitching.
Stitching became this thing that really generates conflict. Here’s this dumb, clueless person saying this thing, and I come in, and I stitch and talk about how stupid they are.
So I do think there is still that incentive. But I think you’re right that overall the vibes directionally in vertical video right now are more positive than the vibes of, say, the cesspool that is X.
Well, the other thing here is it’s more capacious. I mean, this is a little less true now, but it still is basically true: The fundamental reality of the Twitter text box is that it’s a compression mechanism. The move toward languid podcasting, where we’re just sitting here vibing for two hours or longer. I knew this was out there, but I went out and did some of these podcasts, like Lex Fridman, you really did three to four hours.
But even in this, you can put up six-minute videos. I mean, I have videos that go out on TikTok that are six or 12 minutes long. Actually a lot can be in there. It is compressed compared to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it is a lot less compressed than the original Instagram box or the Twitter box or Facebook post allowed. And then Mamdani was doing a ton of podcasting.
And then getting clipped from that.
But it does come in the context of these sort of much longer conversations that create a different vibe between people. I’ve had many people on this show because they’re such harsh critics of me, and I find that they find it very hard to maintain the criticism when you’re in an extended social dynamic.
That’s devious of you.
Well, it’s not. It’s actually sometimes a problem. Sometimes I have to like cue them: Remember, you hate — we’re here to talk about this.
But you really see when you do that how much mediums shape us all. It’s much harder to be a jerk to somebody’s face. And so it’s not like all vertical video is going to be sunny, but it is going to be different in ways that I’m not even sure we’re quite ready to understand in politics.
Yes, I totally go with that. And you know, I’m just sort of spitballing here, so I can hear in my head the academics who study this being like: You’re totally wrong. But let me just throw this out. We’ve got the kind of semi-apocryphal story of the 1960 debate with Nixon and Kennedy and how people who listened thought Nixon won and people who watched thought Kennedy won.
If you go watch that debate, Nixon just does not look that bad to me. I’ve done this a few times, and Nixon looks totally fine.
The reason I say “apocryphal” — I’m not even sure it’s true — it has become this kind of mythos about how this works. And it’s capturing the central, sort of McLuhan, insight about how much the medium structures this.
There was a sort of preliterate politics in America when you have a very small percentage of voters who can actually read. Then you have the beginnings of radio politics, and people know about the fireside chat. Television is totally transformative to American politics.
The first wave of internet politics that lasts for a very long time is written politics. It’s the politics of text. All the stuff that’s happening with blogs, when we came up, and Facebook posts and all this stuff.
We are now going through this transformation where everything will be video. I mean, at least for the foreseeable future. Who knows? These trends change on a dime.
I think it’s interesting to consider what that does. The media strategy, too.
If I’m recruiting candidates, the ones that can get attention are going to be scarier propositions. Part of getting attention often involves conflict, provocation — views that aren’t boring that jump out at you. It also means doing interviews and talking to a lot of people, where you might say something that people don’t like or offend certain groups.
The institutional orientation of the Democratic Party — I think there’s a great example of it with Mamdani down the stretch. If we talk about his media strategy, he went everywhere and said yes to everything. He even gave an interview to a Pakistani news channel in Urdu. Have you seen this?
No.
At some level, I was thinking, why are you doing this down the stretch? This is the last week. But maybe that gets back to Urdu-speaking New Yorkers who share the clip. Then he also goes on mainstream, alternative “SubwayTakes” and then even does “The Bulwark.”
Now “The Bulwark” is a centrist, center-right anti-Trump network.
Center left at this point.
OK, fine — it’s center left at this point.
Tim Miller is great.
It’s in the big Democratic —
It’s in the anti-Trump tent.
It’s strongly in the anti-Trump tent, but it was founded by people who used to be Republicans — and whose views on issues like Israel tend more toward the right of the Democratic coalition.
They ask him about this phrase “Globalize the intifada.”
Archived clip of Tim Miller: Which is a very popular phrase at protests on the left. And maybe some people say that phrase with good intent, but there are certainly some people who are saying that phrase with violent intent. So I wonder what you think about that?
He gives an answer that starts off with a long response about Jewish safety. About the Jewish people that he’s talked to in New York City.
Archived clip of Mamdani: And then just a few weeks ago I had a conversation with a Jewish man in Williamsburg who told me that the same door he would keep unlocked for decades is one that he now locks out of a fear of what could happen in his own neighborhood.
Then he says: “intifada” is Arabic for “struggle.” The word is used in the Holocaust Museum website to mean “struggle.”
Archived clip of Mamdani: The very word is has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising into Arabic because it’s a word that means “struggle.” And as a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that’s where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe. And the question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven’t ventured into.
And the headline that comes out from it — and to be clear I don’t think it was a great answer — is: refuses to condemn globalizing the intifada.
And so I thought to myself, now we’re seeing the cost. We’ve seen the benefit.
He’s been everywhere. But going everywhere means you might have a news cycle where you say something like that.
And I think it’s pretty striking that he won. Because I do think the old way of thinking is: Say no to 10 things if it means that you never have the news cycle about globalizing intifada.
And his embracing the strategy he did meant that he had a news cycle in a city with a million Jewish voters, where people’s views on this can be very strong, that was all about his refusing to condemn globalizing the intifada. A kind of nightmare scenario if you’re a political staffer on that campaign, a genuine nightmare scenario that didn’t have the effect that I think a lot of people would have —
Maybe implies the politics of that are not what people think they are.
I will only speak for myself on this. My priors on Andrew Cuomo — I wasn’t a huge fan of his governorship even from afar, even back when he was being talked about as a presidential candidate. And everything that eventually led to his resignation struck me as really upsetting.
I’m open to people’s redemption. I think you need to be open to redemption.
Two things about that campaign. One was the number of people — even some who endorsed Cuomo — who talked to me about his cruelty or his tendency for revenge.
That’s an amazing sentence to utter.
I had somebody tell me he was a sociopath and then endorse him a couple of days later. That was one line that I just couldn’t get over.
But the other thing that actually closed it, the reason I would not rank him, was the way he used Israel in the campaign.
I’m a Jewish person. I have very deep feelings about what is happening in Israel and Gaza. I found it so cynical and so repulsive. It was just such a vicious way to weaponize Mamdani’s ethnicity. But also what’s happening in Gaza is a horror — people should be horrified.
The whole thing just struck me as gross — I know a lot of people who read it that way, too — the thing in the debates where they got into a fight about visiting Israel.
What’s the first country you’re going to visit?
Archived clip of Mamdani: I would stay in New York City. My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that.
Moderator: Mr. Mamdani — can I just jump in? — would you visit Israel as mayor?
Mamdani: I’ve said in a U.J.A. questionnaire that I believe you need not travel to Israel to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers and that is what I’ll be doing as the mayor. I’ll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers, and I’ll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs whether that’s in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform — because ultimately we need to focus on delivering on their concerns.
Moderator: Yes or no — do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel?
Mamdani: I believe Israel has the right to exist.
Moderator: As a Jewish state?
Mamdani: As a state with equal rights.
[cross talk]
Cuomo: And his answer was no. He won’t visit Israel.
It was such an obvious political game.
It was deathlessly cynical.
I have to say, it was also comical on a certain level. My formative years were spent at Shabbat dinners at my friends’ houses and going to bar mitzvahs — being in this milieu of Jewish New York. And it’s incredibly precious to me. I feel profound gratitude and affection for that.
My wife is half-Jewish. This is very close to me. I’m not Jewish, but it’s a culture that I love deeply and feel bound to.
I found it deathlessly cynical. The other thing that complicated this — and this is an interesting angle — is that Andrew Cuomo, like me, is a paisan from New York. The guy is not Jewish.
Brad Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani, is Jewish and very devoted to questions around Israel.
He’s also the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City.
A lot of what happened in this campaign happened on both a literal level and a metaphorical one.
One thing I thought about that moment — when Mamdani didn’t condemn globalizing the intifada — was that it had this quality of: This is what he believes. He’s not going to sell out a politics or a community he either belongs to or feels deep sympathy for why they feel the way they do.
And with Cuomo, I’m not saying he does not have beliefs about Israel. But it felt like the oppo researchers had come to him with a packet, and he was now going to use what was in the packet.
We can talk about the popularity of different ideas, but some things are also just communicating what kind of person you are. I’ve been interested in the way Israel and Gaza have become highly symbolic — kind of attentional in both directions. There’s the “Gaza is genocide” direction and also the people who have made themselves aggressively into anti-left moderates. You see this a bit with Cuomo, but you see it with Ritchie Torres.
You see it with John Fetterman. It’s like the strongest and most consistent fight they pick is on Israel.
Weirdly, it’s become the ideological delineator.
Israel has become a culture war.
If you want to send a strong signal — I’m just struck by how many signals were sent — for people who do not have a lot of power over American policy toward Israel — on this issue.
I think there’s an added dimension to that, which is the enormous estrangement between the establishment of the party and its base.
I saw the polling on the Iran strikes — 85 percent of Democrats opposed them and only 13 percent approved. But if you looked at Democratic legislators’ responses, you’d never guess those were the numbers.
Donald Trump really exploited a huge gap between the elites in the party and the establishment on immigration and trade, and the base of the party — to tremendous effect.
There’s something like that in the Democratic Party right now on the issue of Israel. There is poll after poll. I think this has to do with a bunch of complicated factors.
Although the driving factor has been the war in Gaza, since October 2023, I think you really saw it play out in this race. New York City is the most Jewish city in the country and one of the most Jewish cities in the world outside of Tel Aviv.
It has the second highest number of Jewish citizens. That number fails to represent how Jewish the city is in terms of its cultural milieu — like the fabric of New York. I think it’s shocking to a lot of people, and even to me, I have to say, that someone with Mamdani’s politics on this conflict just won a Democratic primary.
Without shifting from that, he used to support “Defund the police.” Now I think he both says he doesn’t — and actually doesn’t. He does not want to actually defund the police as mayor.
He is an anti-Zionist, I think, and is now still.
He said Israel should not be a Jewish state.
I feel a little weird about this conversation, because I really — it’s thorny for a million reasons. I respect the views of people who are the closest to it, and I am not the closest to it.
I’m always kind of trying to check that in me. It’s weird for me to say it’s bad for the Jews because I’m not Jewish.
I think the way this is developing within the Democratic Party is kind of dangerous. The idea that this becomes a signifier of the rich elites who control everything behind closed doors — which is both an antisemitic trope and something that touches on how money flows in Democratic politics — is a really combustible mix.
I think that’s right. I’d say two other things about it being a signifier. One is that it’s a signifier in two directions: It’s a signifier in one direction of being willing to stick to your beliefs that I think a lot of people in the base feel.
That even Democrats who actually agree with them will not speak on Gaza and how horrifying that has been. They will not quite say it or will sugarcoat it or not vote with it.
I believe the belief is authentic to Mamdani, showing that you will stand up to that kind of pressure.
In the other direction, it’s showing that you will not be cowed. If you’re Ritchie Torres or Fetterman, it’s showing you’ll not be cowed by a different thing.
Yes, exactly the woke mob.
Right, the woke mob. It’s become a kind of declaration of independence.
It’s a signifier.
I will just say on the point you just made about how saying something true can veer close to saying something antisemitic: One thing I have just appreciated about Mamdani and the Mamdani-Lander alliance as a Jewish person, it’s very important that it is possible and understood to be possible that you can be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic.
I’m not anti-Zionist in that way. I’m a kind of two-state solution person who doesn’t really believe that’s possible. I’m not sure what I think is plausible at this point. But putting my own politics aside, I very fundamentally believe Mamdani is anti-Zionist and not antisemitic.
In my view, he did a very good job making that clear in his responses. Lander acted as a very important cross-validator for him.
But in a world where Israel is going to be as brutal as it has been in Gaza — and is going to play much more of a role of a regional hegemon militarily, which is what it has stepped into — people are going to have very strong opinions — including strong negative opinions — on what it means for there to be roughly 7 million Palestinians who do not have equal rights and who are under Israeli control.
It’s very important. You just have to be able to be against what the Israeli state has become and not antisemitic.
I think it’s an incredibly dangerous game that pro-Zionist people have played trying to conflate those things. Because if you tell people enough times that opposing Israel is to be antisemitic, at some point they’re going to say: Then I guess I’m antisemitic.
That’s the fear. I think the taboo around antisemitism — which is born of the worst atrocities in human history — is a wildly important taboo. And it’s breaking down everywhere we look. And let’s be clear: That taboo is disintegrating. It’s disintegrating for a lot of people, and it’s terrifying.
I’ll say again — and this is my offering advice that no one asked for from the position of a Catholic boy from the Bronx who now lives in Brooklyn: I think there are tangible and concrete things that Mamdani can do. He should be going to Borough Park or Ocean Parkway. He should be talking to people there and tell them we’re not going to agree on Israel.
Let’s just say that at the beginning: I want you to feel safe and heard. I want your communities to thrive, and I want the city to work for you. Let’s talk about how we make that happen. I think they’re tangible, and there’s huge security concerns.
Have you heard him on Colbert? I think he did a very beautiful job walking that line.
Yes, I agree.
Archived clip of Mamdani: You know, I remember the words of Mayor Koch who said: “If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me. 12 out of 12 see a psychiatrist.” I had an older Jewish woman come up to me in a synagogue many months ago after a Democratic Club forum, and she whispered in my ear: “I disagree with you on one issue — I’m pretty sure you know which one it is — and I agree with you on the others, and I’m going to be ranking you on my ballot.”
And I say this because I know there are many New Yorkers with whom I have a disagreement about the Israeli government’s policies and also there are many who understand that that’s a disagreement still rooted in shared humanity because the conclusions I’ve come to, they are the conclusions of Israeli historians like Amos Goldberg, they are echoing the words of an Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who said just recently: What we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation. It is cruel. It is indiscriminate. It is limitless. It is criminal killing of civilians. These are the conclusions I’ve come to.
I think that is a good place to end. As always, our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
This is an oldie but a goody: “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco, which is the most recent novel I’ve read. It was one of these things that I had started, put down for months and then took back up. And you know how you do that with novels where you’re like: I sort of remember where we are? But the book is incredible.
The second one is an incredible book that is not out yet that I am able to read an advanced reader copy of. It’s by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. It’s called “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”
Just got recommended in the last episode, too.
It’s really something else. It’s beautifully written. It’s two people who have genuinely, incredibly distinct perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who have been in the room a bunch of times. That is a great book.
And the last book is a history of the Cultural Revolution called “Mao’s Last Revolution” by Michael Schoenhals and Roderick MacFarquhar. I don’t know why I suddenly was seized with an interest in reading about the Cultural Revolution, except that I was looking to escape to a political environment that was more dire and toxic than our own.
That book is amazing. Although, I mean, my God, it’s sort of suffocating in some ways to be inside that universe. And then there are a few whiffs of familiarity that are unnerving.
Chris Hayes, always such a pleasure.
Loved it.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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