Frank Rich writes about why the Democratic Party, the New York Times, and the political donor class got Zohran Mamdani’s rise in the NYC mayor race so wrong.
The opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera’s new season may be the last place you would expect to find yet another sign thatis on a glide path to City Hall. The audience is older, more affluent, and, one can safely speculate, less socialist than most audiences for the performing arts in New York.
It is the very definition of well-heeled uptown Manhattan’s political and cultural status quo. Yet it turns out that even at the Met — yes, the Met, where Franco Zeffirelli’s warhorse productions ofSuch, for me at least, was the takeaway from the scene that unfolded at the September 21 premiere of the new opera inspired by Michael Chabon’s Holocaust-haunted novelIn keeping with tradition, the company’s general manager, Peter Gelb, appeared in front of the curtain before it went up to deliver a few welcoming remarks — albeit this time spiked with an impassioned paean to artistic freedom that drew a standing ovation. Once he finished, an unexpected player popped out of the wings:, the most powerful Democrat in Washington and the most durable lion of Democratic politics in New York. Why was he there? Not for the opera. He breezed on- and offstage with the casual affect of someone dropping by before a round of pickleball. He had come to pander to the mishpocheh on the safe turf of the Upper West Side. In his brief remarks, he gave the same vow to protect artistic freedom Gelb just had, name-checkingfor good measure. But this time the audience did not cheer. “Do something about it!” shouted a heckler from a perch on high. Waves of boos followed, drowning out some light applause and implicitly giving Schumer the hook. Not a single word he said was in any way objectionable. The jeers were for the messenger, not the message. Why were people booing? First and foremost, I’d say, out of frustration that Schumer and his fellow New Yorker in Washington’s Democratic leadership, the House leader,, have failed to slow the damage that Donald Trump has inflicted on the Republic since Inauguration Day. That’s unfair, of course: The Democratic caucus in Washington is in the minority with few cards to play. Yet Schumer’s the guy in charge, so it comes with the territory that he is a sitting duck for the outrage. And heaven knows he has done his best to deserve it. He has often played his few cards badly — e.g., the previous congressional budget showdown in March — failing to pour even a modicum of sand into the well-oiled gears of Trump’s fierce second administration. And he is a tone-deaf spokesman for the opposition — culturally, demographically, rhetorically, and politically, whether speaking from the well of the Senate or the stage of an opera house. But there’s also a local component to the hostility that greeted him at the Met, I suspect. On this late-September night, it had been three months since Mamdani had won the mayoral primary in a rout. And what had Schumer, a hometown boy who rose to be the state’s senior senator, to say about it? Nothing. It was now six weeks before Election Day, barely a month before early voting, and a week after the state’s middle-of-the-road Democratic governor weighed in from upstate with an endorsement. Yet Schumer was still ducking the Mamdani question on Sunday-morning talk shows with a deer-in-the-headlights panic recalling a notable Brooklyn forebear, the bus driver Ralph Kramden, when he tried to hawk a kitchen gadget in a live television commercial in a classic episode of The fact that Schumer hadn’t endorsed anyone by this late date was as damning as if he had endorsed, say, Eric Adams. His Hamlet shtick on the question most roiling his hometown could be seen as a proxy for the fecklessness of Washington Democrats writ large. It was striking to see Schumer, who is nothing if not a finely tuned political animal, fail so completely to read the room. He’s in good company. Another institution of liberal Democratic New York, the New Yorkhas been trying to win back some of its most loyal readers ever since it ran a tortured “Opinion” piece titled “ Only last year, after all, the paper had declared it was no longer endorsing candidates in local races. In this June missive from the editorial board, it went back on that word. The editorial dismissed both Adams and Mamdani before arriving at this verdict on Andrew Cuomo: “We have serious objections to his ethics and conduct even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.” Even readers who suck atThe outcry at the editorial board’s disingenuous hedge on the mayor’s race was tantamount to the pockets of boos that greeted Schumer. “This is corporate gobbledygook and basically an endorsement of Cuomo” was readers’ most recommended comment of the thousand-plus posted online. They knew their intelligence was being insulted. There were parallel complaints about the’ reportage: It did not see Mamdani’s electoral rout coming, and it often covered him dismissively or unfairly. Check out the paper’s defensive deflection and double-talk in an attempt to explain itself — a July posting headlined “convicting Mamdani for having “checked a box that he was ‘Asian’ but also ‘Black or African American’ ” in a college application whose cookie-cutter questionnaire didn’t accommodate the nuanced origins of the Uganda-born child of an Indian family that moved to New York when he was 7. It was a stretch to imply that Mamdani, as a high-school senior, was pulling a fast one: The application was to Columbia, where his family history is an open book and he wasn’t admitted . This time, the most popularreader comment was “This is insanely low, racist, and desperate … Truly insane that this was framed like this. Or reported at all! Who cares!” The paper has been conspicuously backpedaling since then with ever expanding, and ever more sympathetic, coverage, culminating in mid-October when, mere weeks before Election Day, theand Schumer have missed the point, appeal, and political prowess of Mamdani, so have many of my own specific demographic. I am a Jew, I am more than twice Mamdani’s age, I have mostly voted for Democrats, I have supported Israel since I first was able to “grow” trees for it while preparing for my bar mitzvah, and I will have a higher tax bill if he succeeds in his governing ambitions.No. 1: Mamdani has little experience. Absolutely correct. He has never run a large organization of any kind and has a slender political résumé. This puts him on a par with Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump . But unlike them, he is willing to settle for being mayor of a single city, not president of all 50 states. No. 2: His plans are impractical. Also true. Free buses? A crazy idea Mike Bloomberg also failed to make happen. Freezing stabilized rents? Yes, Bill de Blasio already did that, but even if it proves just a provocative opening gambit in addressing the crisis of affordable housing, Mamdani’s relentless focus moved it to the top of the election’s agenda. Five city-owned grocery stores as a pilot program to try to lower prices and expand shopping options in underserved neighborhoods? That the right-wing radio blowhard John Catsimatidis, who owns the Gristedes and D’Agostino chains, is one of Mamdani’s most vociferous adversaries is itself an argument for giving the experiment a shot. No. 3: He is a democratic socialist. The Democratic Party has fallen so low in public approval — 63 percent disapproval, the lowest in 35 years, according to ain July — why not rebrand it? “The Washington Commanders” has already been taken, but even “democratic socialists” may be an upgrade.after all, is not the scare word it once was. The Cold War ended the same year Mamdani was born, and socialism’s political meaning has blurred ever since. A recent Cato Institute–YouGov nationalfound that 62 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29, Democrats and Republicans alike, have a “favorable view” of it. Even Trump endorses socialism now. He claims, however deceitfully, to be the protector of Medicare and Medicaid, long demonized by his own party as “socialized medicine.” He has announced a plan for a mammoth state-owned online drug supermarket, brandedIntel, Nvidia, and U.S. Steel by demanding the U.S. get a cut of their corporate profits. The favored Trump epithet “commie” has likewise lost its old zing. No one in New York did more to normalize communism than Trump’s stooge Adams. He and his political sidekick Winnie Greco have long been as thick as thieves with the Chinese government, its lobbyists, and its moneybags. Though Trump derides Mamdani as a communist, New York’s sitting mayor was truly our Manchurian candidate, may he RIP.mocked the absurdity of his policy catechism, you would be hard-pressed to find a voter during the primary campaign who could name one, let alone three, policy planks favored by Cuomo or Adams. For all the rewriting of political norms in this era, one maxim is still inviolate: You can’t fight something with nothing. The’ editorial board’s veiled endorsement of Cuomo never specified which policies he was offering that promised to be “better for New York’s future” for the simple reason there weren’t any. He hasn’t lived in the city for decades and is so out of touch that in a postprimaryNo. 4: All the city’s rich people are going to move to Florida. Excuse me, but weren’t the same threats made when de Blasio was running? At least some of those who might move this time may be forced to dedicate some of their tax savings to a worthy cause: trying to re-eradicate the diseases that will threaten their nearest and dearest, not to mention their household staffs in Miami and Palm Beach, once Ron DeSantis’s anti-vaxx MAHA public-health regime startsBut of all the arguments wielded against Mamdani, the most vehement — and the true political epicenter of this election — has been the insinuation by Cuomo and Adams, the wealthiest donors that promoted them , and the Murdoch right that Mamdani is an antisemite and a Hamas sleeper cell, an “existential threat” to the city if not civilization as we know it. There is no evidence to support this fearmongering unless being a Muslim and an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza counts as such. Mamdani’s announcement that he will discourage Palestinian supporters from calling to “Globalize the intifada,” rather than condemn its use, is another red herring. He doesn’t use the phrase himself, and neither he nor anyone else can police the language of the American multitudes who sympathize with the Palestinians. Even 28 percent of Cuomo voters sympathize with Palestinians, according to the postprimary. If Cuomo wants to emulate Trump and recklessly conflate any pro-Palestinian rhetoric with Hamas, he will reap still more self-inflicted political damage on Election Day. Someone should remind him he’s running for mayor of multicultural New York, not warden of Alligator Alcatraz. The fact is that Mamdani’s views on Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war have become majority opinion in New York, America, and most of the western world. This was the case long before most New Yorkers had heard of him, let alone cast a primary vote for him for mayor. Indeed, it was the inability of the Cuomo and Adams forces to acknowledge the rapidity of Israel’s erosion in public opinion that led them to underestimate him. They all seemed to assume he would be disqualified by New York voters from the get-go because he is a Muslim and an unstinting critic of the Israeli government. But over the two long years of war that followed the horrific atrocities of October 7, Netanyahu managed to transform America’s universal support of Israel into widespread antipathy. By the time the cease-fire arrived, Israel had lost a whole generation of young American supporters and many of their elders as well. Most Americans simply did not buy the Israeli government’s proposition that the righteous cause of eliminating Hamas justified slaughtering more than 67,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of them children. Rather than repulse the primary electorate and drive them to Cuomo and Adams, Mamdani’s indictment of Israel made voters, especially those under 45, take a hard look at him and listen to what he was saying about other issues, starting with affordability. It’s part of why he won a plurality of the city’s Jewish primary voters as well as winning the primary outright. As Patrick Gaspard, the former Obama aide advising his campaign, told me, Mamdani’s stand on Gaza had a similar political side effect to Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War in 2008. Obama’s Democratic presidential-primary rivals — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards — as well as liberal Senate lions like Schumer, John Kerry, and Dianne Feinstein, all had supported the Iraq War resolution. Obama had not. That separated him from the pack and gave Democratic voters “a permission structure,” as Gaspard puts it, to look at this little-known outsider with “a funny name” and sample what he had to say about other issues at stake on Election Day. Once they did, they ended up spurning the birther conspiracy theories tarring Obama much as they are the Islamophobic smears wielded against Mamdani. Perhaps if the New York powers that be had glanced at polling about Israel during the primary campaigns, they might have figured out that what they deemed Mamdani’s biggest political weakness was in fact his not-so-secret sauce. Perhaps Cuomo might have realized that his grandstanding offer to join Netanyahu’s legal team if he were tried on war crimes was more likely to drive voters away than win them over.that only 32 percent of Americans approved of Israel’s military action in Gaza . In mid-August, a YouGov–chimed in, finding that the share of Americans “who say their sympathies in the conflict lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians had reached a 25-year low.” Americans’ long-held “largely favorable view of Israel,” as, had “evaporated” since the war began, with 43 percent of all Americans believing that “Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.” The biggest drop is among Democrats — not just young Democrats but those over 50, “whose negative views of Israel have surged by 23 percentage points over the past three years.” Israel fares better among Republicans, but they too are starting to slip away. Half of those under 50 now see Israel negatively, 48 percent positively — “a stark change from 2022, when the margin was 35 percent to 63 percent,” perThat shift is even starker among young Evangelical Christians. The magazine cites as the last reliable polling a UNC survey in which “the share of evangelicals under the age of 30 who supported Israelis over Palestinians plummeted from 69 percent to 34 percent between 2018 and 2021. Researchers reckon the shift is enduring, according to the magazine, though there hasn’t been sufficient polling since. These findings have since been ratified by the bottom line of a late-Septemberin which more American voters sided with Palestinians over Israelis “for the first time since The Times began asking voters about their sympathies in 1998.”last month found they are in virtually complete agreement that Hamas is guilty of war crimes. But that unity did not prevent an overwhelming majority of American Jews from finding Israel guilty of the same. Unsurprisingly, the New York City electorate agrees. Those in the political class who assumed Mamdani’s stance on Israel was the kryptonite that would destroy him were deluding themselves. The first postprimary-Siena poll of registered New York City voters in early September found, by a lopsided margin , that the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel sympathized more with Palestinians. By a slightly more lopsided amount , voters agreed “that criticizing Israel is not inherently antisemitic.” In what may be the understatement of the decade, theconcluded that its poll’s findings “underscore just how much Mr. Adams and Mr. Cuomo may have misread the electorate by expending energy to attack Mr. Mamdani’s views on Israel.” To put a finer point on it, Cuomo also misread the political value of playing the Islamophobia card. Facing an instant backlash, he tried to deny having any knowledge of a stunt in which Fix the City, the deep-pocketed PAC backing him, had created a campaign mailer that thickened and darkened Mamdani’s beard to portray him as a jihadist. For years, Cuomo also denied that he’d had anything to do with the VOTE FOR CUOMO, NOT THE HOMO posters that popped up in Brooklyn and Queens when he was driving his father’s 1977 mayoral race against Ed Koch. He is nothing if not consistent. Say this for Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral candidate: Unlike either Cuomo or Adams, he has never tried to portray Mamdani as a terrorist or played footsie with Trump. And in the also-ran sweepstakes, it might have paid off: In the last Marist poll before Adams dropped out, Sliwa, at 17 percent, was far closer to Cuomo, at 24 percent, than Cuomo was to Mamdani, at 45 percent. Ostensible supporters of Israel like Cuomo and his backers have been living in denial by ignoring Israel’s current plight among American voters. To try to pin any of that crisis on a 33-year-old first-time mayoral candidate unknown to the vast majority of those being polled is sheer myopia. Should Mamdani be elected, his actions won’t move the needle on Israel no matter what he says or does. He has repeatedly vowed to bring passion and resources to the battle against antisemitism in his city — a cause in which a mayor may plausibly make some difference. The superrich Anyone But Mamdani Cuomo backers mostly refrain, meanwhile, from criticizing those American political figures who do have clout over Israel’s future and the welfare of American Jews — starting with the current president. If Trump’s efforts in fact produce a lasting peace, he may get and even deserve the, which he has been coveting nearly as long as his elusive prime-time Emmy. It was revealing, however, that he at long last strong-armed Netanyahu into a cease-fire and hostages-for-prisoners deal only after the targeted Israeli air strike on senior Hamas officials in Qatar. That timing was a stark reminder, if one were needed, that a potentially less than altruistic motive driving the process was Trump’s desire to make sure he, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff remain on the right side of the Gulf Arab potentates needed to enable future business deals like the crypto and real-estate get-rich-quick schemes Witkoff’s son has been pitching in Qatar throughout the peace negotiations. As is always the case with the transactional Trump, his support for Israel could well wane the moment there’s nothing in it for him monetarily or politically. There’s already pressure from his own base to do so. The next generation of MAGA leadership has moved on. Two of Trump’s most powerful allies, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, are critics of enduring U.S. support for Israel. The ever-shape-shifting J. D. Vance, who owes his vice-presidency to Carlson, may well divest from Israel once real power is in the offing post-Trump. He’ll go where the votes are: “Everybody under 30 is against Israel” is how his loyal media booster Megyn Kelly summed up the political equation on Carlson’s podcast. These anti-Israel right-wing forces will be joined by MAGA heroes trafficking in undisguised antisemitism like Kash Patel, who has appeared eight times on the podcast of the notorious Holocaust denier Stew Peters since 2021 and claimed during his confirmation hearings to be FBI director that he had no recollection of Peters. Not to mention the irrepressible Marjorie Taylor Greene, who theorized that Jewish space lasers financed by the Rothschilds caused the California wildfires in 2018 and who in July made a failed bid to cut $500 million in defense assistance to Israel. And rising young MAGA stars in the Trump administration like Kingsley Wilson, Pete Hegseth’s 20-something press secretary. Wilson tweeted in 2023 that Leo Frank, the Atlanta Jew who was wrongly convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in 1913 and then kidnapped and lynched by an antisemitic mob, was in fact guilty of that murder as well as of rape. It was the Frank trial that helped inspire B’nai B’rith to form the Anti-Defamation League in the first place. Who would have imagined that a century later the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense would try to rewrite the history of this landmark atrocity in American antisemitism to recast Frank as the villain? We can only imagine what will be in store for Josh Shapiro from this crowd in a presidential run. Both Carlson and Hegseth are devoted followers of the powerful Christian-nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson, whose movement has the long-term goal of barring non-Christians from public office, asreported last month. It was not happenstance that Trump’s repeated broadsides about political violence did not extend to expressing public sympathy for Shapiro and his family when the Pennsylvania governor’s residence was firebombed on the first night of Passover. The curious silence of Anybody But Mamdani donors of the Bill Ackman breed, especially Jewish donors, about the truly pressing threats to Israel and American Jewry by those at the pinnacle of American power has a Vichy taint to it. Rather than confront the decline of American support for Israel, they’d rather throw money at a mayoral race they have probably already lost. Even a poll commissioned by one of their institutional organs, the Real Estate Board of New York, found Cuomo had a negative approval rating of 50 percent. And it’s likely to get worse. Trump’s implicit support for Cuomo will be as toxic for him as it was for Adams, whose fatal poll collapse, triggered by Trump’s gift of a GET-OUT-OF-JAIL-FREE card, was compounded by the leaking of a failed Trump-Witkoff gambit to yank him from the race with the bribe of a Saudi ambassadorship. What we don’t know and cannot know is whether Mamdani has what it takes to protect his city when Trump declares war on it either financially or literally with shock troops under the banner of ICE. What we can bet on is that the ethically challenged Cuomo, should he by some miracle pull off an upset, will surrender to Trump without a fight in some back room to save himself, much as Adams did. I confess that Mamdani, whom I ranked second to Brad Lander in my own primary vote, gives me rare hope at a time when I, like so many others, have soured on the Democratic old guard. After the primary, I was curious to meet him and did at the Brooklyn home of a mutual friend. What I saw is what he projects in his campaign. A smart, focused guy who listens to others and welcomes tough questions; who is transparent and consistent on the core political convictions that guide him; who is not an ideologue or a glib Pez dispenser of consultantspeak; and, no less important, who knows what he doesn’t know. Why should we believe he can fill in the expertise he needs to manage the city? His answer, in private as in public, is that he plans to surround himself with those who have the experience he lacks, who will inevitably be older than he is in many cases. His off-camera conversations with Kathy Hochul, Jamie Dimon, and Kathryn Wylde, the powerful billionaire whisperer who leads the nonprofit Partnership for New York, have been substantive, not ceremonial, whatever their disagreements. His outreach kept expanding, including, perhaps most notably, to Bloomberg, who was willing to engage with him even though the former mayor had been the biggest contributor to the Fix the City PAC that tried to slay the insurgent’s campaign over the summer. But Mamdani’s secret power, I’d argue, is that he can never be president. As the U.S. Constitution states in Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, “No person except a natural born Citizen” is eligible for that high office. Mamdani is not angling to go to Washington or be anointed the “savior” of the Democratic Party, does not want to broker the Middle East, and does not want to flee to Florida. An immigrant who fell in love with his family’s adopted city and country, he is a politician who actually wants to do the job he is running for. That is a truly radical idea.. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 20, 2025, issue ofto support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 20, 2025, issue ofA panel of federal appeals court judges stopped a National Guard deployment in Chicago with a warning against the ultimate Trump power grab.The president briefly forgot to pretend that the arch is meant to mark America’s 250th birthday and beautify D.C.’s traffic circles.As shown in his defense of nasty text messages from Young Republicans, the vice-president can’t let anyone outflank him on the right.A swastika American flag was found in a GOP congressman’s D.C. office soon after the Young Republicans’ “I love Hitler” Telegram leak.A proposed overhaul of the refugee system would welcome people who share Trump’s politics and race while banning virtually everyone else.Like the original paranoid advocate for an imperial presidency, Trump wants to use tax records to punish enemies. Unlike Nixon, Trump isn’t hiding it.Everything to know about the Fox News host, aspiring senator, and activewear entrepreneur, who offered to sing at the MAGA Super Bowl halftime show.Johnson is refusing to swear in the newly elected representative as Democrats step up their protests and Arizona’s attorney general vows legal action.The globe-trotting president and his immigrant-chasing and government-bashing White House should pay some attention to the issue that got him elected.Is the NFL canceling Bad Bunny? Will ICE really be at the game? Here’s what we know about the halftime-show headliner and the MAGA backlash.She painted her less exclusive, less profitable partnership with the streamer as a win, drawing a comparison with the Obamas.On Trump’s favorite network, Mamdani told the president he’s “ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living.”Justices seem ready to weaken the Voting Rights Act. The ruling could erase minority districts, locking in GOP House control in 2026 and beyond.National-party conflicts over age, experience, and ideology are playing out in the Maine Senate primary between Janet Mills and Graham Platner.New York
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