How bad could he be?
How bad can it get?
The answers are “very” and “a lot worse than it is now, which isn’t great to begin with.”
The question, of course, is whether New York City will actually elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor next Tuesday. The electorate is certainly awake. More than 160,000 people voted last weekend in a huge early turnout.
NEW POLLS REVEAL MAMDANI IN LEAD OF RIVALS WEEKS FROM ELECTION DAY
Four years ago, a total of 1,149,172 people cast ballots, with Mayor Eric Adams receiving two-thirds of those votes. Curtis Sliwa, then, as now, the Republican candidate for mayor, collected 312,385. It seems unlikely that Sliwa will achieve that goal again, as serious Republicans will at least 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 support 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, let alone all of New York.
Let that number sink in: 300,000. It is as large an organization with as many facets as any complex operation on the planet. New York City literally controls every business, from police, to schools, to subways – from hospitals that welcome babies into the world to the cemeteries where they will one day lie at rest. It’s a mind-bogglingly complicated series of tasks every day to get the subway working. Imagine NYC with a series of rolling blackouts, as California suffered in 2000-2001 and again in 2020. Do you think Mamdani can handle even one medium-sized crisis?
The average state legislator in New York State has a staff of, wait for it, ten people. Mamdani has six years of experience running 10 people. Can you imagine that any company in the world would pick the head of a small, even obscure local branch and place him or her in the corner office of a large national corporation? Of course not. Yet New York City is dancing on the edge of that abyss.
So is the increase in early voting the reality of an alarm bell ringing and citizens responding? Whatever your ideology, no one wants to experience a governance disaster. That’s what a vote for Mamdani is: a vote for chaos.
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Even though you may hate Andrew Cuomo, he knows how to staff a huge organization—nearly 150,000 employees in New York State—and how to recruit mostly competent people. Actually, the job of mayor of New York City is very difficult. In my lifetime, only Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg succeeded, although Ed Koch was entertaining in his failure to turn the city into a thriving, vibrant place the envy of the world.
New York City is no place for a novice mayor. Pray that a wave of usually indifferent voters will show up on Tuesday, vote for Cuomo and resist the temptation to throw away their vote for Curtis Sliwa. The stakes are simply too high.
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