I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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What a month.
It’s been a whirlwind of news this month, with Israel attacking Iran, the U.S. joining the strikes, the Supreme Court ruling on important cases, and a budget bill working its way through Congress. In fact, we had planned to cover that bill this morning when the surprising early results of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary broke, which caused us to pivot late last night.
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Quick hits.
- A ceasefire agreement between Israel and Iran remains intact despite both sides claiming the other violated the terms. (The ceasefire) Separately, an initial assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency reportedly found that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities did not fully destroy the sites or Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. The White House denied the report. (The findings)
- NATO member countries reached an agreement to boost defense spending to 5% of their GDP, a plan spearheaded by President Donald Trump. (The agreement)
- A suspect accused of aiding the bombing at a California fertility clinic in May was found dead in a federal detention center in Los Angeles. No cause of death has been given. (The death)
- A federal judge ruled that artificial intelligence company Anthropic can legally train its AI models on published books without authors’ permission under fair use doctrine, the first such ruling in support of this practice. (The ruling)
- Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R) said he plans to start voting on the “one big, beautiful bill” on Friday, with votes continuing into the weekend. (The plan)
Today’s topic.
The New York City mayoral primary. On Tuesday, results from New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary showed state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in a commanding lead over the field, setting the stage for him to become the party’s nominee in the general election on November 4. As of 11:45am ET on Wednesday morning, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, leads former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo 43.5%–36.4% with 93% of votes in; Cuomo conceded the race on Tuesday night.
Back up: New York City uses ranked-choice voting in primary and special elections for city offices. Voters rank up to five candidates on their ballots, starting with their top choice. If one candidate is the first choice of more than 50% of voters, they win the election outright, but if not, the ranked-choice process starts. No candidate is expected to reach 50% in the first round of the mayoral primary, so the ranked-choice tabulations will begin on July 1 to allow for the arrival of mail-in ballots.
You can read more about ranked-choice voting here.
Eleven candidates were on the Democratic primary ballot, not including current New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D), who chose to run as an independent in the general election. Adams cited a (since dismissed) federal corruption case against him as his reason for skipping the primary.
Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved to the United States when he was seven. He has served in the state assembly since 2021 and previously worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor. Mamdani ran on a progressive platform, supporting a rent freeze for all rent-stabilized tenants, free city bus fares, city-owned grocery stores, and a Department of Community Safety to address mental health programs and crisis response. He also proposed raising taxes on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers to pay for these initiatives.
While he is not yet officially the Democratic nominee, Mamdani declared victory on Tuesday night, telling supporters, “Tonight, we made history. In the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’ My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.”
The first-round results surprised many political analysts, as Cuomo led the field in most polls for the majority of the race, bolstered by strong financial backing and institutional support. However, Mamdani rapidly made up ground over the last few months, highlighting accusations that Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women employed by the state and criticizing his management of the Covid-19 pandemic as governor. While Cuomo conceded the Democratic nomination, he can still choose to run in the general election as an independent candidate. On Tuesday, the former governor said he would analyze the primary results and confer with his advisers before making a decision.
Today, we’ll cover the primary results, with views from the left and right. Then, my take.
What the left is saying.
- Many on the left say Mamdani’s victory should be a lesson for the entire Democratic Party.
- Some praise Mamdani for running an explicitly progressive campaign and embracing voters of all backgrounds.
- Others say the outcome will have ripple effects across national politics.
In The New York Times, Rebecca Kirszner Katz wrote “Democratic leaders tried to crush Zohran Mamdani. They should have been taking notes.”
“The party establishment’s impulse to stifle and ignore some of its most exciting emerging voices isn’t limited to progressives. Take Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania or Pat Ryan in New York. While decidedly more moderate than Mr. Mamdani, both congressmen campaigned last fall on bringing down costs for people in their swing districts and taking on huge corporations and billionaires, a strategy Mr. Ryan described as ‘patriotic populism.’ Even though it won them both races, Washington Democrats have been hesitant to embrace that strategy,” Katz said. “If Democratic leaders don’t start asking themselves how these candidates won, and what they can learn from their success, we’ll be doomed to fail in the future.”
“Mr. Mamdani also got creative about how to communicate his message. He broke through on social media with viral videos that reached beyond the professionally online crowd. Mr. Cuomo and some of his other rivals derided him as a ‘social media messenger,’ as if that were an insult. They mocked his videos at the debates,” Katz wrote. “While Mr. Cuomo and his allies wrote off Mr. Mamdani’s social media success, they missed how it was manifesting in palpable enthusiasm across the city. We saw that at the ballot box on Tuesday, but even before they started counting votes, you could feel it.”
In The Guardian, Bhaskar Sunkara said “Zohran Mamdani offered New Yorkers a political revolution – and won.”
Mamdani “ran a relentlessly disciplined campaign built around cost-of-living issues, zeroing in on essentials such as housing, transport, childcare and groceries. Repeated attempts to define Mamdani as merely a ‘Muslim socialist’ with radical ideas, to force divisive identity politics to the fore, or to make the election a referendum on Israel, failed,” Sunkara wrote. “But it wasn’t simply messaging discipline that made Mamdani successful. Mamdani has a political talent rooted in genuine charisma. His fluency with language, clarity of purpose, and authenticity allowed him to speak convincingly to voters from many different backgrounds.”
“Voters, for their part, proved that they were ready for change. They refused to succumb to cynical fearmongering about a supposed tide of crime and antisemitism that would come from a Mamdani victory. Instead, they took a clear-eyed look at their lives, assessed the failings of the Democratic party, and chose something fresh, new, and fundamentally different over a failed political establishment,” Sunkara said. “Still, Tuesday’s results carry deeper questions about the future. Mamdani’s victory in this primary, significant as it is, must now be tested against Eric Adams and likely Cuomo again in the November election. Beyond that lies a far more challenging test: governing.”
In New York Magazine, Ross Barkan argued “Zohran Mamdani just remade American politics.”
“This is a realignment election in the city and perhaps one of the most significant victories by an unabashedly left-wing candidate in the history of the U.S. No one like Mamdani has ever won an election where as many as a million people voted. This is akin to a socialist winning a medium-size state. There is no real precedent for what happened tonight. Progressives across America will genuflect to him. For Republicans, he is the great new bogeyman,” Barkan wrote. “One parallel, if lofty, might be Barack Obama. Both Mamdani and Obama were initially derided by their opponents, regarded as too inexperienced, ineffectual, and even foreign… Mayor Zohran Mamdani, even a year ago, might have sounded far-fetched.”
“The power elite in the city — the real estate and finance class — are terrified of Mamdani and are casting about for someone who can block his ascent. Adams, who skipped the Democratic primary, is extremely unpopular and scandal-scarred, but he suddenly seems no less unappealing than Cuomo, who just got blasted apart by a young socialist,” Barkan said. “With this kind of victory, Mamdani is emboldened. The Democratic Establishment, which Cuomo so cowed, will now drift toward him. Labor endorsements will be forthcoming. Mamdani will have a great deal of money. He’ll be his own juggernaut.”
What the right is saying.
- The right says Mamdani ran an effective campaign but argues his proposals would be a disaster for the city.
- Some criticize Cuomo for his strategy in the race.
- Others say Mamdani is a threat to Jewish New Yorkers.
The New York Post editorial board said “Zohran Mamdani’s win leaves NYC staring at the curse of ‘interesting times.’”
“Credit Mamdani for running an energetic campaign with a forward-looking feel, for charm and grace under fire. Pity those who voted for him, believed his false promises and mistake his idealistic social media feed for real life,” the board wrote. “And blame Cuomo and the spineless Democratic Party machine for not really standing for anything at all, and for relying on ‘We’re your only hope’ blackmail of the city’s beleaguered business classes to gin up enough support to make it over the finish line.”
“This is certainly an opportunity for Mayor Eric Adams, who’s right now low in the polls thanks to his uneven first-term performance and a taint of corruption mainly created at the behest of a White House furious that he called out some obvious failings of a president who the nation now knows was unfit for the office,” the board said. “Maybe Adams can come back roaring off the mat, or another candidate such as GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa can rally the city’s silent majority behind a positive, credible vision for New York’s future. Or maybe the city will be stuck with a mayor whose vision is nothing but unicorns, rainbows and the fantasies of the privileged progressive elite.”
In National Review, Jeffrey Blehar described “Andrew Cuomo’s final humiliation.”
“The most obvious takeaway from tonight is that the citizens of New York simply don’t want Andrew Cuomo. To put it another way, they were as enthusiastic about Cuomo as Cuomo himself seemed to be about the city and the job he was seeking. Forget about Cuomo’s baggage as governor of New York,” Blehar said. “Forget about his toxic reputation as a crude sex pest. New Yorkers might have gotten past that, but they could not get past his arrogance and seeming indifference to the issues facing the city itself.”
“Long before Zohran Mamdani was perceived as a threat (or anything other than the obligatory joke “DSA” candidate in the race), back when Cuomo could portray himself as a historical inevitability, he treated both the press and voters alike with icily remote contempt, as if the duties of campaigning for a position as lowly as mere mayor of New York City were beneath the dignity of a former governor,” Blehar wrote. “Cuomo’s failed strategy reminds me of nobody so much as his fellow ’00s-era political allies Hillary Clinton and Bill Daley — that all of them hail from the same political generation of Democrats is probably no accident… Hillary ran both her 2008 and 2016 campaigns with a sense of regal and implacable inevitability — and paid a brutal and historic price for her presumption both times.”
In Commentary Magazine, John Podhoretz wrote about “the threat of Zohran Mamdani.”
“What you will hear is that Mamdani ran a brilliant race, and he did—he focused on the fact that living in New York City is ridiculously expensive and he would control costs by applying socialist principles to city government, somehow finding a way to ‘freeze’ rents and starting city-run grocery stores, among other free stuff,” Podhoretz said. “And while he ran on affordability and did not make his anti-Israel obsession (he opened a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin) a centerpiece of his campaign, he didn’t hide it even though he was running in the most Jewish city in America. Why? Because it was a feature and not a bug. Because it was a significant reason, if not the most significant reason, for his grass roots support.”
“Mamdani is bad in nearly every way. His economic policies are ruinous. He openly called for defunding the police, ending incarceration, and putting homeless beds in subway stations,” Podhoretz wrote. “But the real question now is the future of Jews in New York City with him as the mayor. Will he care about attacks on visible Jews? If the encampments reemerge on college campuses and Jewish students are again under threat, will he stand with those making the threats?… If he can rise to the mayoralty of the nation’s largest and most important city in a party that has been trending inexorably toward anti-Semitism for the past 15 years, will Jews in America be safe?”
My take.
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- Mamdani won not for his policies but because he was the better, more authentic candidate.
- I have a lot of concerns about some of his ideas, but he is far from the existential threat to the city many say he is.
- He still hasn’t won, but if Mandami does win, the entire country will (rightly) judge democratic socialism based on his success.
Can everyone please take a big, deep breath?
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary is obviously a huge upset, laced with important political narratives. But some of the reactions to his win — that New York City will now collapse, that the mayoral nominee is a “commie jihadi apologist,”that Jews are no longer safe in the city with the largest Jewish population in the country — are politically manic responses that completely miss those dynamics.
So, as someone who lived in New York City for nearly a decade, and as a Jew who thinks Mamdani is wrong about a lot of stuff, let me try to rationally flesh out some dynamics underlying his primary victory.
First, it is no mystery why Mamdani won. He is a young, fresh new face in the aging and boring Democratic Party — and a fantastic orator to boot. Plus, he has excellent political instincts. Videos of him hitting the streets and actually interacting with New Yorkers had an authenticity to them that other candidates couldn’t match. Promising rent freezes, affordable groceries, taxes on the rich, and free public transportation also plays well in one of America’s most expensive cities. Yes, he is a self-described “democratic socialist,” but to a lot of young New Yorkers, “socialism” just means “tax the rich to strengthen the social safety net.”
Of all the words I just wrote to describe Mamdani, the most important one is this: authentic. I have spilled a lot of ink criticizing progressives for their bad ideas, purity politics, intolerance, and groupthink. Mamdani is unabashedly progressive, but he somehow avoids seeming preachy — he is not insufferably condescending, he doesn’t lecture about language use, and he doesn’t practice purity politics. He focused entirely on persuasion — pitching people outside the progressive base that he’s right about kitchen-table issues, and the old Democratic guard is wrong. In short: He’s a great politician.
Part of his authenticity comes from the willingness he’s shown to evolve — and often away from the extreme. If you listen to his engaging interview with Derek Thompson, you won’t hear an unreasonable, ideologically captured, crazed socialist candidate — you’ll hear someone open to having his views challenged. He’s already abandoned one of his more controversial positions, promising to “work with the police” to reduce their burden by hiring more cops as well as more social workers rather than “defunding the police.”
If you only spent a few minutes watching one of the Democratic mayoral debates, Mamdani clearly stuck out. One memorable exchange came when the moderator asked each candidate which foreign country they would visit first and why. It was a bizarre question for a mayoral primary, one transparently designed to allow the candidates to virtue-signal and pander. Predictably, every Democrat on stage fell over themselves trying to list how many times they’d been to Ukraine or Israel, and why they’d go back for their five millionth trip. Mamdani simply said he would stay in New York City to engage with his Jewish constituents, almost seeming surprised at how obvious this answer was.
That response was reminiscent of Trump’s “America First” mindset writ local — a leftist version of anti-establishment populism that Democrats have been sorely missing to combat Trump.
Mamdani was also running against a very bad primary opponent, Andrew Cuomo. Stop and consider this: The Democratic establishment — former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Governor David Paterson, and former President Bill Clinton — united against Mamdani and behind an alleged sexual predator who was receiving money from a high-profile Trump megadonor, diverted huge sums from the MTA, cut Medicaid, lied about nursing home deaths in Covid, and relied on his brother’s position in the media to avoid accountability. Why would it be surprising that New Yorkers aren’t buying that package? If you are trying to square Mamdani’s win with New York swinging rightward for Trump in 2024, here’s the lesson: Americans are fed up with cowardly, transparently inauthentic politicians who don't stand for anything.
Naturally, the Democratic establishment is scrambling to respond. It will be interesting to see if Democrats unify around Mamdani or spend the coming weeks trying to figure out how to defeat him. Fighting his victory would be pretty ironic, given that Democrats have spent the months since the 2024 election wondering aloud how to connect with young men and popularize progressive policies. And now that they have a candidate showing them how, they immediately perceive him as a threat to be crushed.
Of course, Mamdani is also wrong… about a lot! His housing policy is not actually nearly as ambitious as he claims, though it would require an eyebrow-raising $70 billion in new debt. His calls for rent control are a great way to actually make it harder to build, not easier, which is a pretty well explored phenomenon in housing economics that would further crush New Yorkers who are already struggling.
His plan for city-owned grocery stores is also genuinely bananas. Incredibly, his motivation for it is not to solve the food-desert problem in New York City, which would be reasonable justification, but to lower food prices, which — I’m sorry — is nuts. Naturally, because of the oversight government-run stores would require, they almost certainly would not out-compete the private sector on prices. This policy would likely hurt the very people Mamdani claims to be campaigning for, and could explain (in part) why low-income New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo.
I am curious to see Mamdani pursue some of his ideas, though — mostly because I no longer live in New York City and my tax dollars won’t have to fund the experiment. For instance, he has an ambitious free childcare plan for all children from six weeks to five years old. The plan will require a lot of city resources and higher taxes (specifically on wealthy New Yorkers and corporations), but it would provide an incredible public good that many residents desperately want and would benefit from. I doubt the math will make this plan a net positive, but I’m curious to see him try — and I definitely don’t consider “offering free childcare in the country’s wealthiest city” an evil, Marxist policy.
Other things concern me, but I’m not freaking out about them. Yes, Mamdani has embraced expressions like “globalize the intifada” — speciously claiming it is a peaceful call for Palestinian human rights even as anti-Zionist violence against Jews in the U.S. ramps up. Some of his online supporters really do not seem like good people. And apparently, eight years ago, during his rather embarrassing attempt at a rap career, he praised a Hamas-supporting group in one of his lyrics. His messaging in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks also left much to be desired.
As concerning (and often cringey) as these things are, I find the epic meltdown around them totally unreasonable. Plenty of non-hateful people (including some Jews) think “globalize the intifada” is a peaceful call to action. Every politician who gets popular enough will have dark corners of their coalition. And I don’t take juvenile rap lyrics from nearly 10 years ago all that seriously — neither should you.
Mamdani has addressed all of these criticisms head on, most recently an interview with Stephen Colbert. He has also been endorsed by Brad Lander, an early opponent in the race and a proud Jew and Zionist. He was the campaign manager for a Jewish state senate candidate in 2018. He has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the most well known Jewish politician in America and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — who literally wrote a book on antisemitism — came out this morning to praise his campaign and harken back to their experiences working together.
A lot of people need to just take a beat and stop acting like a literal Hamas spokesperson is about to become the mayor of the most populous Jewish city in America. New York will be fine. Sharia Law is not coming for the Big Apple, and it isn’t societal decline for New Yorkers to elect a Muslim mayor 25 years after 9/11 — in fact, it shows our capacity to see people as individuals and not caricatures of some larger monolith.
If Mamdani actually becomes mayor — still a big if, by the way — he will face massive pressure to moderate his politics, and he probably will. He will experiment with grand policy promises — and probably fail on some and succeed on others.
And if he does become mayor, New Yorkers will have to hope for the best. Meanwhile, the rest of us will see how a “democratic socialist” can actually govern in a major American city, and we’ll judge the merits of his ideology accordingly. As a former New Yorker, I’ll be rooting for Mamdani — the same way I root for Trump or Biden or any other American leader — to succeed and deliver for his constituents. I have serious doubts he will, but New Yorkers will cast the final judgment on his successes and failures.
That's democracy at work, and we’ll all survive it.
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Under the radar.
On Monday, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that an investigation led by the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) rescued 60 “critically missing” children in the Tampa Bay area. The initiative involved 20 agencies and focused on children aged nine to 17 “at risk of crimes of violence or those with other elevated risk factors, such as substance abuse, sexual exploitation, crime exposure, or domestic violence.” 69% of the children rescued had been missing from the community, while 31% were missing from foster homes; the operation is believed to be the most successful missing child-recovery effort in the history of the USMS. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune has the story.
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Numbers.
- +17%. Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo in Brooklyn, his largest lead in any borough, with 358,000 votes reported.
- +18%. Cuomo’s lead over Mamdani in the Bronx, his largest lead in any borough, with 104,600 votes reported.
- +24.2%. Andrew Cuomo’s average first-choice polling lead on April 1, according to Race to the White House.
- +7.9%. Andrew Cuomo’s average first-choice polling lead on primary day.
- $16 million. The amount spent by the primary super PAC supporting Andrew Cuomo as of June 20.
- $1.2 million. The amount spent by the primary super PAC supporting Zohran Mamdani as of June 24.
- 99°. The high in New York City on primary day, the city’s hottest recorded temperature in over a decade.
- 33. Mamdani’s age, which would make him New York City’s youngest mayor in more than a century if he is elected in November.
The extras.
- One year ago today we covered Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law.
- The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the Labubu craze.
- Nothing to do with politics: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first breathtaking deep-space photographs.
- Yesterday’s survey: 2,675 readers responded to our survey on treatments for trans minors with 35% saying all treatments should require parental consent. “They are minors and the parents should have the right to make that decision. They must make that decision on all other aspects of raising a child, so I don’t understand why this would not apply,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
A 45-year-old man had been suffering from advanced heart failure for months before receiving a successful transplant in March — but this was no typical surgery. Instead, surgeons at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston used a robot to reach the patient’s heart through small incisions — without opening his chest — marking the first fully robotic heart transplant in U.S. history. By avoiding large incisions, the revolutionary procedure reduces the need for blood transfusions and lowers the risk of rejecting the new heart, explains Dr. Todd Rosengart, chair of Baylor’s Surgery Department. “This robotic heart transplantation represents a remarkable, giant step forward in making even the most complex surgery safer,” he said. CBS News has the story.
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