Serious People

Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo was striking for any number of reasons, not least of which was the obvious shock that comes from seeing a young, Muslim, democratic socialist triumph over a centrist, Italian-American former governor. The coalition he put together in order to achieve that win was almost as remarkable as the win itself: as Mara Gay noted in The New York Times, he conquered neighborhoods that only rarely coalesce around the same candidate.

We’ll learn more in the coming weeks, but at first glance the glue holding this coalition together does not appear to be any of the usual demographic markers that tend to correlate with partisan affiliation, such as race, level of educational attainment, income, etc. Instead, the big factor appeared to be level of urbanization. Particularly in Brooklyn and State Island, Mamdani did best in areas with a lot of multifamily housing. Similarly, he seems to have swept areas with relatively low levels of car ownership, while Cuomo held onto the parts of the city where people tend to drive more and take transit less.

In other words, Mamdani was largely the candidate of straphangers and apartment-dwellers, the people who lose out when rents get more expensive and public transit deteriorates. Little wonder that his campaign also attracted urbanists of many ideological stripes, from market-skeptical social housing enthusiasts to some of the more libertarian-leaning YIMBYs. Both the DSA and Abundance New York recommended ranking Mamdani over Cuomo.

Which is not to say that everyone who identifies as a YIMBY or abundance liberal was pleased with this week’s election results. The self-consciously “neoliberal” Center for New Liberalism has been insisting that Mamdani’s turn toward YIMBYism is a con job. Similarly, Jonathan Chait — who just last month published a long piece about why abundance should be the future of the Democratic Party — issued a hyperventilating and, in my view, patently Islamophobic essay about Mamdani’s reluctance to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

Various figures on the anti-abundance, anti-YIMBY left have similarly tried to paint Mamdani’s win as anything but a YIMBY victory. My former colleague David Sirota sneered that “the Abundance Guys” are cynical bandwagoners who rushed to bearhug Mamdani as soon as it became clear he was the favorite to win. Comedian turned full-time Twitter poisoning victim Kate Willett dismissed the YIMBY excitement over Mamdani’s victory as “cope.”

I feel a little bit embarrassed to even cite these posts, as if anyone should care one way or the other about what a middling standup comedian says on a slowly dying microblogging website. But that is in part why I think the above examples are so instructive. As one prominent Sacramento YIMBY put it, “This election separated the wheat (people with sincere views on urban policy reform) from the chaff (people who use urban policy reform as a cudgel against their enemies).” Among those who genuinely care about housing affordability, Mamdani attracted support both from the left and (though not without reservations) from the center. The centrists who loathe the left more than they care about YIMBY policy reform denounced Mamdani, while the leftists who hate shitlibs more than they like winning elections did everything they could to make clear that shitlibs were not welcome in the Mamdani coalition.

All of this stands in striking contrast to the behavior of Mamdani himself, who welcomed support from all corners of the Democratic Party. What’s more important, Mamdani distinguished himself from the ideologues of both left and center by demonstrating an admirable willingness to change his mind: over the course of the campaign, he became more open to encouraging market-rate housing development after apparently listening to some good, evidence-based arguments from YIMBY interlocutors. Despite what either Sirota or the Center for New Liberalism might tell you, that evolution was pretty clearly more than a matter of pandering or lip service: Mamdani spoke fluent YIMBY in his appearance on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.

This is not to say Mamdani has shown any sign of abandoning his socialist ideological commitments. Instead, his YIMBY conversion is evidence that he takes his ideological commitments seriously: he has an egalitarian vision for the city, and realizing that vision is more important to him than adhering to the rigid standards of any particular clique. Another way to put this is that Zohran Mamdani shows every indication of being a serious person.

That is not to say I think every one of his proposals is particularly serious. In my last Public Comment, I aired my misgivings about his plans for New York City’s bus system. I also think the proposal for publicly owned grocery stores sounds kind of silly, though I don’t think it’s going to wind up mattering much one way or another. But Mamdani and I are generally aligned when it comes to values, and he’s made clear that he prioritizes adherence to those values over the various shibboleths and free-floating signifiers that social media addicts use to identify themselves as members of one faction or another. That’s the minimum standard for what it means to be a serious person, and it’s a test that certain keyboard warriors of both the pro-Mamdani left and the anti-Mamdani center have once again failed.

Editor’s note: Now that the People’s Republic of New York has been liberated from the capitalist pigs, I will be going there on vacation from July 2 to July 9. Public Comment will return once I’m back in the neoliberal hellscape of Northern California.