Is New York City Ready for a Democratic Socialist Mayor?

WSJ Opinion: Free Expression

Gerard Baker, Editor at Large, The Wall Street Journal

Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A shockwave rippled through New York politics this week as little-known 33-year old assemblyman Zohran Mamdani toppled Andrew Cuomo, whose political lineage could not compete with his scandal-ridden tenure as governor, to win the Democratic primary nomination for the city’s mayoral election. Mamdani mobilized a coalition of young voters, ethnic minorities and others behind a hard-left platform that called for even higher taxes than New Yorkers already pay and expanded government programs. He has voiced strong support for Palestinian causes and has called to “globalize the intifada” whatever that means. Meanwhile, current mayor Eric Adams plans to run as an independent as a way to head off the new young radical’s path to Gracie Mansion. What does Mamdani’s stunning success say about Democrats - in New York and in the country as a whole. On this episode of Free Expression, Gerry Baker and political analyst Heather Mac Donald look at some of Mamdani’s more radical views, break down just who voted for each candidate, and what the latest far left Democratic plans for a major city may do to New York’s economy and financial sector. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Opinion Pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.
0:09.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Free Expression from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages.
0:13.2	I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal. If you're not already subscribing,
0:17.9	please do subscribe to Free Expression at Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you do
0:22.5	your podcast listening and leave me a nice review if you would. It always helps to build our audience.
0:29.3	Well, this week, taking a break from the extraordinary pace of international affairs, and we're
0:34.4	going to bring it really, really back down to earth, at least as far as
0:37.5	I'm concerned. I'm sitting here in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after we've
0:43.9	had something of a political earthquake in the Big Apple. New York City had its primary day yesterday,
0:49.3	and Democratic voters, as you will surely know by now, it seems to have chosen. It's complicated.
0:53.7	I'll explain why in a minute.
0:54.9	It seems to have chosen someone who until a few months ago was largely unheard of, Zoran Mamdani,
1:01.4	as their candidate for mayor in November's general election. He looks likely to be the Democratic candidate.
1:07.2	As I say, New York City has this now rather complicated, ranked voting system
1:12.3	in which no candidate gets 50% of the vote, of the first choice votes. Other candidates' votes
1:17.6	are redistributed, and we will know the result. Apparently, that takes about a week to happen.
1:23.0	It seems extraordinary to me in a country and a city where I can order pretty well anything.
1:27.3	I want,
1:27.6	anything in the world. And it arrives in my apartment building in 24 hours. It apparently takes
1:31.9	them up to a week to calculate the election results. But that's where we are. Mamdani won about
1:35.5	43% of the vote of the first choice votes to Andrew Cuomo, who was his opponent, of course,
1:40.8	his principal opponent, widely expected to be the favorite, the former governor,
	...

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