Urban and suburban politics/voting: NYC :Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani and homogeneity in US politics that leans to the center right

:In general, it's said that metropolitan areas vote progressive and that rural areas don't. A key example is how Oakland County, Michigan went from Republican to Democrat, but in a process that took decades.

But wrt urban areas that's a bit facile.  Typically, cities tend to be more left/progressive than the suburbs.  It means that there is a greater chance to elect left candidates in the city over the suburbs.

The press has been full of coverage about this in terms of the win in the primary by Zohran Mamdani, who trounced Andrew Cuomo, former governor.   Before election day personages like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Clinton endorsed Cuomo. 

Similarly, there are examples of a few more elected House members being more progressive, among them Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, in NYC.  What I think the left misses in these wins is that the voter makeup is key, AOC is about urban districts with a lot of left leaning voters, not so much about a left lean to politics overall.  Which is why a majority of the candidacies affiliated with Justice Democrats, the group that supported AOC, fail.

The New York case reminds me of Toronto and London.  In both cities, at times, depending on how the suburban tranche of residents votes, you can get conservative mayors, like Ford or Johnson, instead of more lefty ones like Chow and Khan.  Cuomo captured the more "suburban" segment of the electorate, Mamdani the urbanists.

Blue, Cuomo: 36.4%.  Red, Mamdani, 43.5%.

I've written about this in DC, "DC as a suburban agenda dominated city" (2013) more in terms of about policy being somewhat biased towards automobility, but not in terms of electoral politics as the city leans left.  Policy-wise it's not quite akin to the same dynamics of cities with both large urban and suburban contingents.

In writing about how Baltimore and St. Louis should merge with their respective counties to develop more "heft", this is an issue.  In both places the suburbs have more population, and could out vote candidates supported by residents in the city proper.

In Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky, this has been less of an issue.

Pollster Nate Cohn "agrees" with my take about differentiation ("What Democrats Can Learn From Mamdani's Victory," NYT):

Of all these changes, the most obvious one is that the Democratic electorate has simply moved farther to the left. Over the last few years, this hasn’t always been obvious. To many, the last presidential election seemed to mark a new rightward turn in the culture, including among the young voters who had powered the ascent of progressives. Looking even further back, progressives mostly seemed to stall after Mr. Sanders’s breakthrough in 2016, including in New York City.

... With Mr. Mamdani’s victory, progressives finally have another visible breakthrough. While it might be tempting to attribute this to his personal strengths and Mr. Cuomo’s weakness, much of the change can simply be attributed to today’s much more progressive electorate. ... It’s important to note that just because Democrats are moving to the left doesn’t mean the electorate is overall.

... Mr. Mamdani’s campaign was different. He focused on the cost of living. By talking about the prices of chicken and rice, groceries, rent and buses, he spoke much more directly to the concerns of ordinary people than he would have if he had campaigned on a Green New York Deal or Medicare for all of N.Y.C. Yes, he sometimes pushed a few buzzy ideas, like free buses and government-owned grocery stores, but even these were pretty prosaic by the vibey standards of Abolish ICE or Free College. He may support those things, but it wasn’t what he was known for. This is probably a reason he fared better in many of the working-class neighborhoods than previous progressive candidates. 

Mainstream Democrats might struggle to make such a clear affordability pitch. Usually, Democrats try to address affordability problems through subsidies, but subsidies put upward pressure on prices and could contribute to inflation. The federal budget deficit and high interest rates also make it more challenging for Democrats to propose ambitious spending initiatives.

Democrats seem unlikely to co-opt much of the left’s agenda. Many Democratic opinion leaders are skeptical of price controls, government-owned enterprises and other measures, even though they might poll well. Ms. Harris supported cracking down on price gouging, for instance, but she didn’t campaign in a full-throated way on these issues, perhaps in part because so many party elites were skeptical of these initiatives. 

Taken together, the Mamdani victory suggests there’s an opportunity for progressives. Their ranks have continued to grow in recent years, at least within the Democratic electorate, even though it hasn’t always seemed like it. Affordability and Israel give them new opportunities and put mainstream Democrats in a challenging spot. It still won’t be easy for progressives to win, especially in an area without a thriving left-wing community. But it’s not 2015 or 2019 anymore, either. There are new voters, new technologies, new issues and new opportunities.

This touches on what I call homogeneity versus hetereogeneity in local politics and governance, just as we have the same fealty to an automobile-centric land use and transportation planning paradigm, which provides little room for communities to have a transit or bike centric paradigm instead.

Also, surprisingly the Wall Street Journal, but inadvertently (:How Democratic Failure Made Mamdani":

The Democratic establishment is upset about socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in this week’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary. But Mr. Mamdani couldn’t have done it without the establishment’s help—to wit, the failure of big-city Democratic governance.

Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco—all are run by Democrats, and all are wracked by crime, homelessness and a punishing cost of living. New York City is another example, and Mr. Mamdani capitalized on voter frustration.

Local Progress is a national organization supporting progressive candidates at the local level ("This Group of Politicians Just Put Forward a Platform Progressives Can Embrace," The Nation)..

Ranked choice voting,  Another element in the victory was ranked choice voting.  People can rank up to five candidates, and the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, redistributing the votes to other candidates.  This process is repeated until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.

In the campaign, progressive Brad Lander vowed to vote for Mamdani second, and there was a campaign for people to not rank Cuomo from second to fifth.  Many people preferred Lander as he is still left leaning but has a lot of practical experience in improving communities as an organizer and within government ("This Is Brad Lander’s New York," NYT).

Unease of the center right.  The New York Times, in its editorial on the race, "Our Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor," did not make an endorsement, but weren't too into a progressive agenda. 

The first comment:

New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing. Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere. This version emerged in the latter stages of Barack Obama’s presidency, when some Democrats decided that he had been too cautious and adopted a bolder liberalism. At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.

I actually agree with the criticism, e.g., "defund the police" should have been "rearticulate public safety delivery"--you need police but a lot of functions they perform they're not the right fit (The End of Policing).  And that can be extended across the board, overreach is a big problem.  NYT puts it like this:

A more promising approach to city leadership is certainly not a local version of the current Republican agenda, which slashes valuable government programs, opposes accountability for police departments and disdains some basic civil rights. The answer instead is a more effective and thoughtful liberal governance, in which city leaders use empirical evidence and effective management to achieve results.

Their opinion on Mamdani

Unfortunately, Mr. Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges. He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing.

Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents. Mr. Mamdani, who has called Mr. de Blasio the best New York mayor of his lifetime, offers an agenda that remains alluring among elite progressives but has proved damaging to city life.

If this perception is reality, we're doomed.  Better instead to have a progressive politics that gets things done.  If the Republicans in Oklahoma City ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape" [2021]) an be national best practice in local government, why not NYC?  Why not progressive agendas more generally? ("Can Mamdani’s Energetic Campaign Be a Blueprint for Democrats?," NYT).

Nova Schultz on the steps of SF City Hall during International Overdose Awareness Day on Aug. 31, 2023.  Photo: Thomas Hawk

There's no question though that the "extreme" left version of local politics in Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland hasn't always worked out to the better.  Drug decriminalization abetted disorder in many ways.  A contingent of anarchists in Seattle and Portland didn't help.

All three cities have more moderate Mayors today.

Also see "Is a Mamdani repeat coming to the Midwest? A democratic socialist is getting a boost in Minnesota," Washington Post.  This was an issue in Seattle for awhile, which had a very left City Council including a representative from Socialist Alternative.  As some of the policies failed, the center right has re-shifted the Council, and Kshama Sawant decided not to run for reelection.

Minneapolis also has/had an SA member of City Council, if I remember correctly.

Pushback by the center-right.  Just like the Justice Democrats inadequately parse the electorate, the center-right which dominates the Democratic Party isn't too happy about a shift to the left, even in pockets like a handful of House Districts or city mayor elections judging by the comments about Mamdani ("New Yorkers Vote to Make Their Housing Shortage Worse," "NYC Mayoral Primary Is Latest Blow to Democratic Establishment: while Republicans see another chance to label the party as extreme," Wall Street Journal).

Typical of the sentiment, Florida City Boca Raton is marketing for "New York businesses" ("Boca Raton spent $70,000 on Times Square advertisement to lure New York businesses," Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel) because the city's becoming "socialist.".  They are failing to recognize that many business owners in NYC are okay with the current direction.  That compared to NYC, Boca Raton is the outsider.

Homogeneity in politics trickles down to the local level in the US.  Unlike the UK, which is able to stomach one city, Bristol, being run by the Green Party, or Canada, which forbids national parties from being affiliated with local parties, leaving Vancouver and Montreal to have left-leaning governments, the US wants homogeneity both in party (Republican, Democrat, or nonaffiliated) and policy (low taxes, real estate development, etc.).

Socialists in Milwaukee. Twin Cities PBS did a documentary on the period of Socialist control in Milwaukee ("America's Socialist Experiment") which went from 1910 to 1960..  It was pragmatic and successful, but still progressive elements in the Democratic Party preferred Democratic candidates.  This was true elsewhere during the New Deal too, wrt progressive Republicans like George Norris of Nebraska or Marriner Eccles in Utah.  They did plenty to support the New Deal, but it wasn't enough to get FDR's endorsement.

Still it's an example from history that heterogeneity in local politics can work out.