It’s that time of year again: We’re prepping to sit across from la familia at the Thanksgiving table, and want to make sure we are armed to the teeth with facts for the inevitable, uncomfortable, politically polarizing conversations…
Epicenter: First, Zohran Mamdani was just elected mayor and suddenly it seems like everyone is running in a Democratic primary! What gives? Is this the Zohran effect or is something else going on? By our count, we’ve got:
- In Brooklyn, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader (and likely House speaker if Democrats take the chamber in the 2026 midterms) is being challenged by Council member Chi Ossé.
- In Queens, Rep. Grace Meng is being challenged by Chuck Park, former chief of staff for Councilman Shekar Krishnan and a State Department diplomat who resigned to protest President Donald Trump’s policies.
- In Manhattan, more than 10 candidates have tossed their hats in the ring to succeed retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, including one of JFK’s grandsons, Jack Schlossberg; two members of the state assembly, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, and Council member Erik Bottcher.
- Also in Manhattan, first-term Rep. Dan Goldman faces a challenge from Council member Alexa Avilés, while Comptroller Brad Lander is considering a bid.
Felipe: I think it’s a confluence of factors. Zohran has pretty clearly demonstrated that you can harness a sort of dormant young leftist energy, and he did it on more difficult terrain than some of these folks, having run a citywide campaign in a city with its fair share of conservative enclaves. Nadler’s district, for example, is notably liberal turf where his long tenure had bottled up the ambitions of many progressive would-be successors. It’s not surprising to see such a crowded field in a prominent neighborhood where no challenger holds a clear advantage.
We’ve had waves like this before. The energy of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign fed directly into groups like Indivisible and bolstered the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which in turn propelled new progressive candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 win in turn inspired new progressive candidates, and so on. This moment, of course, is happening in the context not only of Zohran’s win but the mounting backlash to Trump.
As we discussed in the immediate aftermath of last year’s presidential election, Trump gained ground around the country and in NYC on the strength of a simplistic message revolving mainly around economic discontent. Now, as prices rise and Trump’s administration goes to the mat to strip people of benefits and health care — not to mention his incredibly unpopular surges of federal forces into Democratic cities — it’s dawning on some of his voters that this was all bull. Trump’s approval rating is at record lows, as even support among his hardcore base is eroded by the fights over the Jeffrey Epstein files. We saw the impact of this discontent in this month’s elections, as the more Trump-connected candidates mostly got crushed.
Meanwhile, Zohran has managed to tap into some of that same concern over affordability that partly animated Trump’s campaign. I think a lot of candidates can tell it’s the right moment for that kind of focus. There’s also a sense that the culture war issues the consultants have spent years telling Democrats are campaign-killers might actually be neutral or even beneficial. Candidates including not only Zohran but Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, for example, refused to take the bait and be on the defensive about LGBTQ rights and immigrants, among other things, and outperformed expectations. Some of the newer candidates are taking this as a sign that the tenet of focusing only on so-called kitchen table issues while capitulating or compromising on some progressive agenda items is outmoded at best, and that there are gains to be made by sticking to their guns.
Epicenter: Can you give us a pulse check on the gubernatorial election? You’ve repeatedly written about MAGA forces in NY and we wonder how they might play out for Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik right now in her candidacy against Hochul?
Felipe: Making any kind of prognosis in a public forum like this is probably folly, as they will exist in perpetuity even if I’m wrong, but I feel pretty comfortable at this point saying that Elise Stefanik is not going to be a major threat to Kathy Hochul in next year’s election. Yes, I’m aware that there have been some polls showing Stefanik with narrow leads (catnip for the New York Post) and that some more recent polling shows Hochul with only a narrow lead. No, I don’t think this really matters because so far out from the actual election this reads to me like a pure expression of current discontent with how state government is being run, not really an expression of support for the specific opposition candidate.
Sure, Stefanik made some waves with her aggressive questioning of college presidents and other tidbits that were excellent for Fox News soundbites, but which I’m not sure are going to be particularly good fuel for a gubernatorial run in New York. She has gone from relatively run-of-the-mill moderate Republican to ultra-MAGA in a few short years in a way that I think reads as somewhat cynical and opportunistic, and she is now very closely tied to Trump. He’s probably going to go to the mat for her — even if her own campaign asks him to lie low in the gubernatorial race, which I suspect they might — and that is going to be a political kiss of death here.
I mean, look at Jack Ciattarelli, the GOP candidate for governor in our neighboring, relatively purple state of New Jersey, hoping to fill a seat being vacated by the middlingly popular current Democrat Phil Murphy. In 2021, Ciattarelli came within roughly three points of defeating the incumbent Murphy. This month, he was crushed in a 14-point blowout by Mikie Sherrill, who a lot of national Democrats had fretted was not running a good campaign. There are a number of factors to that, but I have to say a big one appears to be the mutual embrace with Trump.
Stefanik has spent some 11 years in her reliably red upstate district, which is almost 90% white and largely rural and has a total population of less than a third of Queens. She’s never run a statewide race and has some significant liabilities. So does Hochul, but she’s an incumbent who already won a gubernatorial election (albeit relatively narrowly) in a state that last elected a GOP governor in 2002, in a year that promises to be a wave election for Democrats nationally. I just don’t see it. If Hochul faces a serious electoral threat next year, quite frankly I think it’d be from the left.
Epicenter: Does Kathy Hochul’s endorsement of Mamdani help or hurt her as she appeals across the state? Any other thoughts here?
Felipe: I think it helps. Will there be some hand-wringing about it upstate and on Long Island? No doubt. But Mamdani won a million votes in an off-year election with historically low turnout in NYC, which in 2022 represented just under a third of all votes cast in the state gubernatorial election. I think she endorsed him in part because she could see the momentum building, and whether or not she is personally a fan of Mamdani’s approach, she’s throwing in her lot with him. Having endorsed the mayor-elect, it’s now a political imperative for her to help him succeed. I think their relationship will be symbiotic, as I wrote recently: Mamdani needs Albany to enact his agenda and Hochul probably needs some of his electoral energy to be comfortable in her gubernatorial campaign.
I think it’s a little amusing that some of Hochul’s critics are trying to make hay out of her association with Mamdani. Oh, the horror of being tied to perhaps one of the most successful campaigners in recent memory, who went from being a complete unknown to eviscerating the former governor of the state while increasing turnout across the city! Yes, there are some vulnerabilities around Mamdani’s political brand, but all in all I don’t see how this doesn’t help Hochul.
Epicenter: Back to Mamdani, any thoughts on his all-woman transition team and first key appointments? Are you hearing it’s going to be a de Blasio 2.0 administration and how do you feel about that?
Felipe: I don’t think it’ll be de Blasio 2.0. It’s a different era, he’s a very different politician. He’s bringing in de Blasio veterans, including Dean Fulehan as first deputy mayor. That’s mostly to counteract the I think valid criticism that the pretty ambitious agenda for a one-term assemblyman is going to require a lot of delicate political maneuvering and procedural know-how and that that’s not going to happen without people who’ve been around the block and seen city government from the inside.
Maria Torres-Springer was seen as basically one of the only people keeping the teetering Adams administration running along even as Eric Adams’ incompetent cronies set fires everywhere. And Lina Khan has a lot of clout in progressive circles and was very effective when she was Federal Trade Commission chair in the Biden administration. Khan’s selection in particular probably signals that he wants a mayoralty of another sort, one that is interested in somewhat reinventing the processes of city government rather than just using them.
Epicenter: Another race happening is within the New York City Council — in January the body will be electing a new leader. If the race for speaker comes down to the two current leading candidates, Crystal Hudson of Brooklyn and Julie Menin from Manhattan’s East Side, what would each represent for governing under a Mamdani administration and for the balance of power across NYC’s political factions?
Felipe: Zohran has the benefit of both candidates seeming eager to work with him. That means he can end up with a City Council speaker who will want to help advance his agenda without him having had to pick his way through the treacherous territory of endorsing or otherwise having a hand in the elections somehow. That inevitably backfires. If your preferred candidate wins, then they are somewhat tainted by the perception that they were hand-picked by the mayor, which saps some of their credibility; if they lose, then you have to contend with a Council speaker who knows you worked against them.
While Menin is seen as more moderate than Hudson, that’s Manhattan moderate, which means she’s still in favor of Zohran’s agenda on things like childcare, which will be one of the biggest-ticket items of the new mayoralty. Menin actually helped conceive a program that gives kindergartners in NYC public schools college-saving funds via 529 accounts. She’s a longtime political player, having served as the head of several city departments under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and is well-connected with the county machines and the big unions that have enormous sway in the city. Hudson is much more new-guard progressive, and better-connected with the Brooklyn Democratic establishment. Both are emphasizing their willingness to work with the mayor-elect and also their resolve to keep the Council independent.
Epicenter: We know our uncle is going to talk about how “our people” came to America “the right way.” We always appreciate your perspective on this, Felipe. What’s the “right way” and “wrong way”?
Felipe: I could write 3,000 words on this right now, but suffice it to say here that what constitutes the “right” and “wrong” ways is constantly in flux and has evolved dramatically over the decades and even just the past year. The Trump administration has worked assiduously to terminate the legal standing of millions of recipients of humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status. Those are immigrants and asylum seekers who had been given “right way” seal of approval only to get rug-pulled. All manner of visas are getting more difficult and more chaotic and uncertain to obtain. If you go back far enough, of course, there was no distinction here at all between “right” and “wrong” ways of entering the country — you got off some steamship and waltzed in. We didn’t even have visas until the early 20th century.
Also, for a lot of people with that perspective, if they actually dug a little bit into their own family histories, they’d find rather quickly that their ancestors had been without legal status or lied, obfuscated, avoided registration and so on before the family finally integrated into the civic fabric.
Epicenter: We’re worried about the cruelty we are seeing in these ICE videos. Is cruelty the point? People are screaming that they have their papers or they did nothing wrong and it all feels such a spectacle. What effect is this having on immigrant communities?
Felipe: Spectacle is, I think, a good way to describe it. As I’ve said before, the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has leaned heavily into slick propagandistic content is a clear sign that these operations are mostly being done for show. The idea is to conduct a sort of stochastic terror campaign — the vast majority of immigrants in the country are not ultimately going to be targeted by the immigration authorities, just from a logistical standpoint, but everyone can be made to feel like they could be targeted at any time. That’s how authoritarian regimes maintain their power – they create the impression that none of its perceived and selected enemies are safe.
Epicenter: I’m going to see unemployed cousins at Thanksgiving. Is there any hope the economy might be turning around for them?
Felipe: I hate to be the bearer of bad news but things are not looking good. At this point we can hope that we don’t plunge fully into deep recession as a result of political instability, tariffs and the almost inevitable popping of the AI bubble, which has represented a huge portion of market growth over the last year. The federal government shutdown is over but the impacts are still being felt, and we are weeks out from the impact of health care premiums skyrocketing. The best we can hope for right now is stability rather than turnaround. That’s already much better than the alternative.
