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How bad could he be?
How bad could it get?
The answers are “very” and “very much worse than it is right now, which isn’t great to begin with.”
The question, of course, is whether New York City will actually elect Zohran Mamdani mayor next Tuesday. The electorate is certainly awake. More than 160,000 voted this past weekend in a huge early voting turnout.
Four years ago, a total of 1,149,172 people cast ballots, with Mayor Eric Adams tallying two-thirds of those votes. Curtis Sliwa, then, as now, the GOP nominee for mayor, collected 312,385. It seems unlikely that Sliwa will hit that mark again, as serious-minded Republicans at least are going to hold their noses and vote for former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and not because they like him. They don’t. But, because they are afraid of Zohran Mamdani.
Many, if not a majority, of Cuomo voters will be throwing in with him for the most practical of reasons: 300,000 people work for New York City and Comrade Mamdani will have no idea how to run a city of that size. It’s hard to believe he has the management skills to run a string of bodegas, much less the entirety of NYC.
Let that number sink in: 300,000. It’s as vast an organization with as many facets as any complex operation on the planet. New York City has its hands in literally every kind of undertaking from policing, to schools, to subways — from hospitals that welcome babies into the world to the cemeteries where they will lie in repose some day. It’s a staggeringly intricate set of tasks every day just to get the subways working. Imagine NYC with a string of rolling blackouts, the likes of which California suffered through in 2000-2001 and again in 2020. Do you think Mamdani is up to even one medium-sized crisis?
The average state legislator in the state of New York has a staff of, wait for it, 10 people. Mamdani has six years experience running 10 people. Can you imagine any business in the world selecting the head of a small, indeed obscure local outlet and putting him or her into the corner office of a vast national corporation? Of course not. Yet, New York City is dancing on the edge of that abyss.
So does the surge in early voting represent the reality of an alarm bell ringing and citizens responding? Whatever your ideology, no one wants to live through a disaster in governance. That’s what a vote for Mamdani is: A vote for chaos.
Much as you might dislike Andrew Cuomo, he knows how to staff a massive organization — almost 150,000 are employees of the state of New York — and how to recruit competent people most of the time. Actually doing the job of mayor of New York City is very hard. In my lifetime, only Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg pulled it off, although Ed Koch was entertaining as he failed to turn the city into a thriving, vibrant place that was the envy of the world.
New York City is no place for a rookie mayor. Pray that a surge of usually indifferent voters turn up by Tuesday, that they vote for Cuomo and resist the temptation to throw away their vote on Curtis Sliwa. The stakes are just too high.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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