New York Stories

Back in the day, the ancestors of noted non-Anglo Americans Chuck Schumer and Andrew Cuomo and Tom Suozzi had to struggle and fight and become Americans. Their children became Americans and politicians and New York legends. But these types have totally forgotten about the reality of what that meant and are horrified that someone with both the name and the left politics of Zohran Mamdani could become mayor of New York. What they forget, when bathing in the gold of their donors, is that Mamdani’s story is an extremely New York one.

“Mamdani was in the 21st century and Cuomo was in the 19th century,” NYU urban policy professor Mitchell Moss told The Washington Post in one of the many New York mayoral election post-mortems. “That’s all there is to it.”

Well, yes and no. And it’s the “no” that requires some explanation, both of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory and Andrew Cuomo’s correspondingly stunning defeat.

Cuomo first. Moss is clearly right that Cuomo didn’t understand how to communicate with today’s voters, young voters particularly, even if the substance of his messages, not to mention the substance of Andrew Cuomo himself, are equally if not more to blame for his loss. That said, Cuomo’s campaign would have done a lot better if it had been a good 19th century campaign. New York’s Democratic machine from the 1870s through the 1940s—Tammany Hall, and its outer borough allies—carried Election Day after Election Day on the strength of a massive ground game, powered by ward heelers who, like Mamdani’s precinct walkers, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors (and also provided jobs and favors to more than a hundred thousand voters). Tammany’s strength was also rooted in “contributions” that city employees were compelled to make to its coffers, and various payoffs of all descriptions that the Hall itself made to smooth its way.

Cuomo’s operation had no real ground game to speak of. Even his paid canvassers were Mamdani voters. So by the metric of the 19th century, Cuomo fell flat.

Mamdani, by contrast, had a ground game that quantitatively evoked Tammany’s at the height of its powers, but better. While Tammany had to put its ward heelers on the payroll to get them to prompt voters to the polls, Mamdani had a volunteer army that was inspired enough to work for their candidate.

But there’s another way in which Mamdani’s victory is in the grand tradition of New York politics; for that matter, in the grand tradition of American big city politics generally. As a rule, those politics have long been politics of ethnic succession. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they pitted Irish immigrants against native-born Yankees, and any political history of Boston, New York, or any Northeastern city from the 1840s through the 1930s must focus on that conflict. The subsequent arrivals of Ashkenazi Jews, Italians, Southern Blacks, Caribbeans, and Mexicans and Central Americans to our major cities are central to their more recent political histories, too.

In that regard, the Mamdani coalition bears a striking resemblance to the coalition that brought New York’s greatest mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, to power in 1933. La Guardia was a Republican with distinctly progressive politics. (In the years preceding his three terms as mayor, he was a longtime congressman from East Harlem, and in the one year that the Republicans refused to run him on their party line, he was re-elected running on the line of the Socialist Party.)

But what about the landlord class?