No way to sugar coat last night’s election results. The stunner has to be that New York actually did it. “New York City Has Fallen, Socialist Mamdani Elected Mayor” is Townhall’s headline. Not to be outdone, the New York Post cover features diabolical looking Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani brandishing a hammer and sickle: “On Your Marx, Get Set Zo!”
“Mamdani’s Revolution Has Arrived” is the lead story at The Free Press. “The old rules don’t apply. The new fault lines are clear,” TFP writer Olivia Reingold proposes. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, is headlined “Zohran Mamdani Captures New York:”
Zohran Mamdani won his race for mayor on Tuesday, and it wasn’t close. The people have spoken, for better or worse, and his voters were willing to take a risk on his radicalism in the name of change. We’ll soon learn if the 34-year-old Assemblyman has a pragmatic streak or sees his mission as making the city that never sleeps a socialist lab experiment.
New York is arguably the greatest city in the world. But is Mamdani’s win an omen for the future of all big cities in the U.S.? “Mamdani Heralds the Radical American City” is the headline on a Joel Kotkin take at Unherd. Kotkin writes:
The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centred in urban areas. Having survived the pandemic and the 2020 “summer of love”, America’s cities — most critically, New York — are adopting politics that seem designed to make the much-feared “urban doom loop” a reality.
Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in liveability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. …
Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.
“Localize the Intifada: Mamdani Seizes New York City Mayoralty” is the headline on the Free Beacon’s lead story early this morning. AOC says that the Dems can no longer deny that Mamdani is the future. Pollster Mark Penn acknowledges the big moment for the left but argues that leftward tilt will ultimately endanger the Dems. Writing in the London Spectator, Heather Mac Donald is blunt: “Zohran Mamdani Will Destroy New York.” Mamdani made sure to taunt President Trump in his victory speech.
The mayor’s race was only the beginning. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal says that the Dems began a comeback last night and calls the election results “a warning” to the GOP. Abigail Spanberger will succeed Republican Glenn Youngkin as Governor of Virginia, having won 55 percent of the vote to Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears 45 percent. There will be an effort to portray Spanberger as “a moderate,” though in reality Spanberger’s “radical agenda” will “threaten women’s spaces safeguarded under the previous administration.” Spanberger opposed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.
In New Jersey, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli extending her party’s 12-year hold on the Governor’s Mansion. The gender gap was crucial to Sherrill’s win:
There was also a 20-point gender gap: about 6 in 10 women backed Sherrill while about 5 in 10 men favored Ciattarelli. Sherrill’s domination among women continued across all age groups, with her highest level of support coming from women under 30.
As with Spanberger, there will be an effort to depict Sherrill as “a moderate,” but her record shows otherwise. It was the Republican Ciattarelli who signed the Stand with Women Commitment.
California Governor Gavin Newsom wasn’t running, but he nevertheless scored a victory: Californians voted “yes” on Proposition 50, which will allow Newsom’s redistricting plan, which could determine who wins the House next year.
“Democrats Embrace the Fringe—From Socialists to Assassination Nuts,” according to Ben Domenech, who writes:
The voters spoke Tuesday night, and rather than reject Democrat extremism, they embraced it emphatically.
In New Jersey and Virginia, two fake moderates — high-test resume female candidates practically built in a lab by the party establishment, who nonetheless hold to extreme leftist views on social policy — cruised to victory, in line with polls and the expectations of the political elite.
None of the outcomes were surprises, except perhaps one — the Virginia Attorney General race, where Jay Jones, the bloody-minded partisan who was exposed for openly fantasizing about murdering a Republican political opponent and hoping his children died in their mother’s arms, won handily.
Kudos to whoever wrote this spot on headline for the lefty Slate: “It Turns Out You Can Fantasize About Your Colleague’s Kids Getting Shot and Still Win an Election.”
But there was a small race that will bring a glimmer of hope to Republicans. The infamous Loudoun County elected a school board member opposed to transgender ideology. Fox Digital reports that Senate Democrats are “eyeing” a way to end the government shutdown, while the Hill reports that Senate Democrats who want to end the shutdown are getting pushback. Uncertainty about food stamps grows, while air travel interruptions are on the upswing. Will last night’s election results embolden the Democrats to continue the shutdown or decide that it’s safe to climb down now?
The Supreme Court hears oral arguments about President Trump’s tariffs today. This is one of the most consequential economic cases in decades. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, which has been adamantly opposed to the Trump tariffs, argues that Trump’s sweeping tariffs are “a bridge too far.” In addition to the constitutional issues, we’re all wondering how this will affect our finances. The Washington Post explores how this will hit our pocketbooks. Just one more tidbit of economic news: Private payrolls rose 42,000 in October, more than expected and countering labor market fears, ADP says.
The odd thing about homelessness is that the more money that’s spent on affordable housing and other supposed remedies, the more homelessness. Ned Ryun says that this is part of the “ruling class/Democrat Party Leviathan.” Ryun writes:
Every year, Americans pour billions of dollars into programs meant to “end homelessness”—through taxes, through donations, through good intentions. And yet the tents multiply. The needles pile up. The despair deepens. The reason isn’t failure. It’s design.
The crisis sustains the bureaucracy that claims to fight it. The administrative state has simply built a new limb of itself—what the Capital Research Center rightly calls the “Homeless Industrial Complex.” In truth, it’s a Homeless Leviathan: a vast, unelected empire of nonprofits, bureaucrats, and activists, united not by compassion but by ideology and the pursuit of power.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney died yesterday. I. Lewis—Scooter–Libby recalls Mr. Cheney as “a champion of free markets and conservative values during his long lifetime of public service” in today’s Wall Street Journal. Byron York examines “Dick Cheney’s Complicated Legacy:”
In the case of Cheney, here was a man with broad and deep knowledge of how the world and the U.S. government worked, who dedicated himself to protecting the United States in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in history, who meant well — and who made terrible mistakes that ensured his time in office would be seen as a failure.
Cheney’s time in office also changed Republican politics. It is impossible to imagine the 2016 GOP primary race going the way it did absent the legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. The Bush-Cheney team was in the field in 2016 in the person of Jeb Bush. Candidate Donald Trump took great delight in bashing Jeb, and he was remarkably effective at it.
A long ago brave new world.
