[ Analysis ] Zohran the Red, Mayor of the Big Apple
Zohran Mamdani was manufactured by the same process that produced Barack Obama. His election has no national impact. And the Democratic Party remains underwater.
Never in history has a New York City mayor gone on to become President of the United States.
Journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon offers a great definition of the political creature that Zohran Mamdani is — a description that fits neatly the urban bourgeoisie who, in France, make up the bulk of La France Insoumise’s (the radical left party ) voters.
Cities and states that are overwhelmingly Democratic elect Democrats — big surprise! — and yet the French chattering class gushes about a “Democratic wave.” Meanwhile, every Republican has either been re-elected or replaced by another Republican in solidly Republican areas — so should we also call that a “Republican wave”? The ability of some people to mistake their wishful thinking for reality truly knows no bounds…
The Democratic Party is in shambles. The latest Pew Research Center study — arguably the most credible polster in the world — shows that 50% of Americans feel anger toward the Dems, and 75% feel frustration. A separate Newsweek poll puts Democratic disapproval at 63%.
It takes a rare mix of ignorance and hypocrisy — the kind that thrives among French politicians already gearing up for the 2026 municipal elections — not to see that Zohran Mamdani is a manufactured product of a wing of the establishment, which can thus keep pulling the strings. Think Soros and all the usual suspects. Same playbook as Barack Obama — just running on a much lower wattage.
As for the $20 million that billionaires reportedly spent trying to sink Mamdani, that has everything to do with his stance on Palestine and the growing public backlash against unconditional support for Israel — a shift that has thrown much of the American Jewish elite into panic mode. As Michael Shellenberger and I discussed a few days ago, the cracks in the old consensus are starting to show.
Note that these same billionaires are behind efforts to “deplatform” Tucker Carlson and anyone else who dares to criticize Israel or U.S. policy toward it.
Manon Aubry, the LFI Member of the European Parliament, flew to New York to campaign for “Zorhan.” Let’s hope she paid for that little getaway out of her own pocket.
It’s curious, this urge left-wing politicians have to call the new mayor of New York by his first name, as if he were their old high school buddy from Queens. It’s an odd echo of Nicolas Sarkozy’s familiar “Barack.” Equally strange is watching this same left proclaim that Mamdani — born with a silver spoon in his mouth — somehow embodies a radical, anti-establishment left, when in truth there’s nothing more bourgeois, in the pejorative sense of the word, than this kind of left.
Let’s cut to the chase: there’s no real merit in being elected Democratic mayor of New York — the most Democratic city in the U.S. A city that has been fully gentrified for more than fifteen years, where the upper-middle class and the financial elite have even gone so far as to select their preferred minorities for electoral purposes. Sound familiar? Exactly the same strategy the Socialist Party employed in France in the 1970s and ’80s.
Here is a reminder to all those cheering a victory that isn’t theirs, hoping for some reflected glory on their own careers in Europe: New York is not America. Neither are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, or Seattle. Just look at last year’s presidential results, county by county, and contrast that with the polls cited earlier on the popularity of the American left.
The election for New York mayor isn’t done by a two-round proportional list system with a majority bonus like in France; it’s a single-member, first-past-the-post vote. The same goes for city councilors, who are elected individually and represent the voters of their specific districts. First-past-the-post means that whoever comes out on top wins the election, even without a majority of the votes.
The consequence of this system is that the mayor of New York is not some feudal potentate like in France, because there’s no majority bonus. Here, the list that comes first in the second round automatically receives 50% of the municipal council seats. The other half is then distributed proportionally among all lists that received at least 5% of the votes. Democracy at work: minority elected officials are magically transformed into hyper-majority omnipotent political power, completely disconnected from the actual vote of the citizens - and without any check and balance.