Mamdani, a proudly socialist 33-year-old, holds a 44-36 percent lead over over former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo – who was hoping that New Yorkers had short memories, and were ready to re-elect the textbook centrist Democrat.
However, after the disaster of Trump’s first year back in the White House – with everyday American life interrupted by protests, immigration raids, corruption allegations and the unshakebale feeling that the nation is about to enter World War 3… It seems the pendulum is swinging back towards left-wing politics.
It appears that the success of Mamdani isn’t so much a vote against Trumpian politics, but more a vote against the stale nothingness of the Democrats top brass – who, while pitching themselves as the progressive option in America’s political system, very seldom action – or even – offer – left-wing policies.
Sadly many voters do have the memory span of a moth…
They’re not shocked, they’re alarmed that the left has gained such a clear and dramatic groundswell of support and that they found a flaw in a mechanism they have traditionally used to tilt the scales in favor of machine incumbents.
They are taking steps to mitigate this, I would absolutely expect them to even overtly rig the general, and everyone should be paying attention to who owns the voting machines, whether the software is audited, and how the votes are tabulated.
If Mamdani pulls it off, I hope he can keep his promises or at least give a good fight for common sense. For the moment, the USA is fucked up.
*centrist but yeah.
I don’t consider any of Mamdani’s proposals especially left-wing, either. They’re all bare-minimum, common-sense social programs that pay dividends. The fact that people are going mad over this tells you exactly how far gone the US has become.
Wait, so if candidates actually run on what voters want, they can succeed?
Amazing
Yes, because the new normal expectation is that common sense is far from common, and that no matter who you vote for, the results will be more of everything that’s wrong with the world
absolutely disappointing that the Democrats would rather have a sex pest mayor than someone just a LITTLE more left than them.
I don’t think they care so much if you are left of them…. It’s left of center right that they are worried about….
There’s also kind of an answer here to why people voted for Trump.
People are angry. They don’t necessarily know the best policies to resolve the country’s poor direction, but it’s clear to so many people that what we have isn’t working.
Many of us have had a conversation over drinks with a confident person at a party who maybe has a job you don’t understand well, and who just speaks confidently about all the things that are fucked up, and what they’d do in charge. As long as they don’t make claims of “Things are mostly okay”, they can make up any target: Immigrants, trans people, government overspending on overseas programs. The key is, they have to match the voter’s anger. The rest follows naturally.
I’d also say that’s how Obama got elected. He had a message of hope and change.
Old guy Biden planted trees despite knowing he’d never see the shade. Harris said she’d care for the trees and let them grow so everyone would have shade. Electorate grows impatient. Trump promises to chop down all the saplings, and electorate somehow decides this will get them shade more quickly
Old guy Biden planted trees despite knowing he’d never see the shade.
That’s a very generous way to describe selling weapons for genocide.
I know people who voted for Trump specifically because they thought the best way to make things better in the long run was to elect someone who would make things drastically worse first. That it was necessary for him to win to teach a lesson to various dysfunctional parts of the system that would otherwise be complicit in a decline to the same destination, differing only in speed.
It’s unfortunate that fascists don’t give back power. I have a coworker who was getting fed up with people like Macron succeeding over here, and he was saying “sometimes I wonder about Le Pen getting elected, maybe it’ll work to show how bad they really are at doing anything and people will finally vote left” (he’s from Algeria, he absolutely 150% isn’t a far right voter or even heavily religious himself) and when he saw Trump the first time, on Jan. 6, it finally registered in his head that you really can’t give fascists a single step in the door, ever, even if they’re shit at doing anything, you have to erase them everywhere because they’re not shit at keeping and abusing power.
What’s even more unfortunate is that the other people who are in power most of the time (“center right”) don’t actually want to keep fascists out of power if doing anything costs them power.
What’s even more unfortunate is that the other people who are in power most of the time (“center right”) don’t actually want to keep fascists out of power if doing anything costs them power.
Like you said, fascists don’t give back power.
I have two points to add to this:
1 - As a liberal, there was nothing more frustrating than having to vote for Kamala, a candidate who was aggressively “pro-cop”, especially as many in the country were protesting for defunding cops. Youre not going to energize most people with an angle like “You want us to vote to stop Trump?”
2 - As a person who is part of the black/immigrant community, the government has a history of ignoring us for decades. It’s not the federal government, but the local government too. Systematic racism has always kept us down. And I hate to say it, Trump got a wall going. Trump has ICE harassing immigrants. These are newsworthy events, even if they’re in the wrong fucking direction. But a Democrat has a history of never wanting to create a ripple as they appeal to all sides.
It appears that the success of Mamdani isn’t so much a vote against Trumpian politics, but more a vote against the stale nothingness of the Democrats top brass
People worth their salt, especially academics, mentioned this multiple times, neoliberal politics is no longer working. People want anything away from the forty-year old, outdated policies. Populism is getting a bad rap (either unintentionally or deliberately) but it is simply democracy. When surveyed, many voters who’d be open to vote right are also willing to vote left provided that bread and butter issues that affect day-to-day lives are addressed. Mamdani won the primary because he ran on providing common sense policies that the duopoly parties and oligarchs have brainwashed many Americans to fear. It seems that Americans are gradually waking up from establishment conditioning.
If American progressives continue with running on addressing bread and butter issues, and take away the narrative from the right, then the country could be saved from fascism. There may not need be a civil war to oust the Trump administration, but only time will tell.
I have met a shocking number of Trump voters who really like or liked Bernie Sanders. That number is four, but it’s still shocking and I don’t go out much. Obviously they aren’t paying much attention to policy or reality, but I wonder how common this is? My father-in-law is one.
The Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real. They both promised to shake things up, but the Democrats decided that they’d rather promote Trump, then let Bernie win. Most voters are sick of the status quo, but they don’t know enough of the details, and vote for whichever candidate promises to fix things.
They like Trump because he promises change. They also like Bernie because he also promises change. But for the last three elections, the Democrats have run status-quo politicians that keep telling the voters everything is fine. And the voters aren’t having it.
Now we have a chance to point out the direction that the Democrats need to turn to if they want to actually win.
If you look at it in the way that both people promise to shake up the system
Sometimes the direction is less important than the action
I mean, fuck trump and the only thing he wants to shake is the pockets of everyone else, but there is a commonality that can’t be ignored
I have you tagged as a whacky RP account in my client, but your posts have been markedly sane as of late.
Is it the meds?
I don’t think anyone is actually shocked. It’s quite obvious that if you push policies that benefit large numbers of people, you might get support from large numbers of people. Of course that’s not a guarantee, but it doesn’t need to be.
But many Democrat politicians have been keen on appeasing their corporate backers by pretending otherwise, even though they knew it, we knew it, Bernie was saying it The cat has been out of the bag for a long time.
Bernie has corporate backers too. I think that might be just because he’s old and doing what AOC is doing by not having backers is maybe a new progressive thing. I mean, she has a few small donors, but not like the older dems.
Which? He ran his presidential campaigns without any corporate backing.
Come on, look at the alternative that the PARTY chose. Cuomo was meant to be handed that position.
The parties don’t give a shit about what the public wants. They have an agenda and they’re working towards it. Any time a candidate comes along and tries to really help people with policy changes they are stabbed in the front by the other party, and stabbed in the back by their own.
Frankly I don’t know what folks should have otherwise expected. The “standard” candidate was a former governor who left the office in disgrace after misconduct.
Even if people were for whatever reason skeptical of a progressive candidate, the business as usual candidate was such a bad idea that people would rather go for it than vote for Cuomo.
Now we watch as Cuomo probably ruins everything by running in the general anyway. The same reason why people say the progressives that can’t win Democrat primaries should bow out for general elections without RCV applies to “centrists” in the same boat. A progressive candidate won fair and square, stay out of his way.
With Adams and Cuomo running as independents, I think they are going to split the vote of the people that weren’t voting for Mamdami anyway, and is going to actually help him.
Posting this to offend the white supremacist mods in the politics forum
White supremacists mods in the politics forum?
On Lemmy?
Out of the loop here.
They whip out the ban hammer if you talk about actually pushing back against the Nazis. They’re Lemmy’s own Occupy Democrats who post whiny rage bait for karma but still want the status quo protected.
I’ll add a tangentially connected piece of my own opinion - immigration is clearly beneficial, following a few simple rules:
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No labor migration, unless it’s a wider agreement meaning citizens another country can freely cross the border. Otherwise a labor migrant can be threatened by deportation, thus becoming legally disadvantaged de-facto. The points further describe immigration, a one-way ticket.
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No legal disadvantage, an immigrant should be certain that if they get robbed\killed\bullied, there’s a legal mechanism that will work to get some kind of justice (until they get citizenship).
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No filters other than quota, sufficient language knowledge and personal crime history. Filters can be easily abused. Except one - they must have a plan on how do they intend to make their living. Needed in most countries even for long-term visas, so not much to ask. A crowd of third-world country peasants trying to sneak somehow speaking worse English than me (not in text) is not going to pass that. Or if some will - it’s for the better even. The rest can look for some other way.
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Advanced language, basic history (high school level), law (same), economics (same) and culture (the things that natives usually take for given, like not using your left hand for a handshake in an Arab country, or pop culture references, or the general perception of this and that idea, say, ex-Soviet immigrants in many countries, like some my relatives, seem to think they get to be conservative and racist to “brown” immigrants purely due to skin color and that they themselves are perceived as civilized people, well, LOL, why did you immigrate then) courses for immigrants, with exams mandatory to pass very well to get citizenship. However, their children get citizenship due to being born in the country (and receiving the mandatory education and going through other necessary procedures making them, well, not very different from anyone else in the country).
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No special support nets for immigrants. No tolerance to, say, crowds of illiterate Afghan people who’ve moved through a few countries, call them shit, but expect to get unemployment payments and social support and live like in heaven once they reach, say, Germany (in this example Germany will be called shit too once the person sees that there it’s too expected that they find a job and work for themselves).
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Maybe programs to help new immigrants with finding a job are fine.
I generally think that citizenship of some countries being an unachievable dream for some who don’t have it is a wrong situation. Horizontal mobility has been historically a source of good things. Just have to make sure the rule #3 is followed. And rule #4 - people in some countries live so differently from the west, that their perception of it is as of some magic land where white people give them candy and free stuff, some heaven they have to only get into. Rule #2 too - because we don’t know which governments will put which rules into policy, affecting the composition of immigration. Some might prefer ex-Soviet idiots because they vote for people like Trump. Some might prefer Muslims because they vote for the more authoritarian kind of Democrats no questions asked. Some might prefer to let in a wave of poor Afghanis, because it’d be both a good scarecrow for something like sundown towns and a source of cheap labor, affecting labor rights of everyone else and the ability of protests to paralyze economy, for example.
OK, I’m talking about this from Russia, where the problem with Central Asian and other immigrants is that they are basically legally disadvantaged. It’s very hard for them to get citizenship, but as a source of cheap labor they work very well. At the same time they won’t do anything if the employer, say, takes half of their formal pay, or does something else illegal. Without Russian citizenship they in practice can’t do it. All this while technically CIS and EAEU rules forbid all such stuff, but, eh, who can prevent Russia from doing what it can in its own toy integration projects.
Sorry I’m not reading that wall of text, but yes, the US has unequivocally benefitted from migration. It’s a good thing, in many ways, and clearly in our best interest to guide and encourage, to continue taking advantage of.
A big part of our mythos is welcoming immigrants, becoming a “melting pot” combining the strengths of many peoples. While we may struggle to live up to that sometimes, it’s a worthwhile goal to work toward
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Republican: I can’t tell a socialist from a communist but I can be racist at the same time.
Amazing! A week ago they were all saying how awful NYC is. Now it’s great. What an incredible transformation.
without looking at the name, it’s impossible to tell which party he’s from.
Can you give me an example of a democrat saying something this Islamophobic anr calling for someone’s deportation?
Not deportation specifically but very Islamophobic: https://omar.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-omar-spokesperson-statement-islamophobic-statement-democratic-colleagues
It could be verbatim and he wouldn’t accept it.
It won’t be verbatim because Democrats wouldn’t be so direct with their hatred, which is why I disagree with your assessment that its impossible to tell which party that comment was from.
The sentiment is identical, though.
Yeah, but the wording are usually not.
I can only hope, and I hope mamdani inspired a new decade of socialist resurgence in elections, not just here but in LATAM, Africa, Europe and Asia
You need to understand how politically backward the US is compared to Lat Am, Africa or Asia. My country is currently led by the most right-wing Prime Minister in our history. Even he will not talk shit about socialism, or try to stop our system of heavily subsidized healthcare (free for the poor) and university. There are communists in our Parliament, and they are seen as serious politicians, not some radical outfit.
The idea that Mr Mamdani’s policies are somehow novel to us is laughable.
Can I ask where?
India
Yes, India and the US are wildly disparate cultures
