Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics

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The Democratic primary that just wrapped up in New York was a collision between two very different candidates on almost every level. Ideologically, outsider versus insider, name recognition.

But it was also a collision in a way that I think matters for much beyond New York City politics of two very different theories of attention. Andrew Cuomo ran a campaign that was based on a tried-and-true strategy. of buying attention. He had this gigantic super PAC with tens of millions of dollars, purchasing all the advertising money can buy, absolutely dominating airwaves with negative ads. about Zoran Mamdani.

A risk New York can't afford. Paid for by Fix the City. And then you had Mamdani, who was running a campaign on a very different theory of attention. A theory of viral attention. A campaign built on these vertical videos that if you opened Instagram, if you opened TikTok, and you were in any way connected to his ideas or to New York City. This was all you saw. So what's your take? I should be the mayor. New York is suffering from a crisis.

And it's called halal-flation. Did you know that Andrew Cuomo gutted the pensions of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers? Mr. Cuomo, and furthermore, the name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.

Attention works differently now. This is one of the core political theses of this entire podcast. It is laced through so many of these episodes. And you just watched these two incredibly different attentional strategies collide, and Cuomo got flattened. He got flattened. It was not close. There are things you cannot learn about how to win elections in other places from a...

off-year June Democratic primary in New York City using ranked-choice voting. But there are things you can learn about how attention works right now. And that's in a large part the subject of this conversation. Now, I'm not a New Yorker.

But I want somebody who is a New Yorker, has deep roots here, and who really understands political attention. And so I asked my friend Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor and the author of a phenomenal book on attention and politics, The Siren's Call. To join me. As always my email. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. It's great to be back. So Zora Mondani won the primary. He sure did. You just wrote a book about political attention. And this was one of the most attentionally...

sort of remarkable and innovative campaigns I've seen. Totally. So I want to hear the sirens call analysis of the Zoran Mamdani campaign. So the first thing I would say about him is he genuinely came from nowhere. I live in New York City and spend... between 16 and 20 hours a day reading about and thinking about politics. And like, I knew there was a Democratic Socialist Assemblyman named Zora Mundani. Right. I didn't even know he was running for mayor until he popped up in my...

Instagram feed or TikTok, right? So at one level, like just to level set here, this is someone who had zero attention on him, who went from having zero attention to him to monopolizing attention in the race. And I think the way he did it was viral videos. It's the first time I've seen a Democratic candidate be totally native to the medium of our time, which is short vertical video in the algorithmic feed.

I want to play one of them here. This is one of the first times he came across my radar, which was this video he did right after the 2024 election. Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? I didn't vote. And why did you not vote? Because I don't believe in the system anymore. Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? Yes! And who did you vote for? Trump! The million dollar question.

Trump. When I voted Donald Trump. Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift towards Trump in last week's election. Even more residents didn't vote at all. Most of these people are working families. They're working one to two, three jobs. And rent is expensive. Foods are going up, utility bills are up. And that's your hope, to see a little bit more of an affordable life.

Absolutely. You know, Gaza, who should I vote? Either side will go ahead, send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. You know, we have a mayor's race coming up next year. And if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent. making buses free, making universal childcare a reality, are those things that you'd support? Absolutely. He'd have my vote all day. We need childcare that is affordable. Buses should be free. The hike in the MetroCards is like totally...

unaffordable. My name is Zoran Mamdani. I'm going to be running for mayor next year. Yes, yes, sir. And I'm going to be running on that platform. Thank you. I'm going to vote for you. Your energy is... Thank you. Thank you.

What struck me about that video when I saw it was so many politicians do communication in terms of what they are telling you. And a lot of what was fascinating about Mamdani's campaign was... He turned the act of listening. Yes. Into a form of broadcasting. That's exactly what I found so striking about it. When I first saw the video, I didn't know he, until you get the end where he's like, I'm running for mayor. I was like, oh.

There's two things about it. One is the whole point is he's listening to people. And two, that is a very recognizable trope of this form of video. The guy on the street, like the infamous Hakitua girl. is because there's a guy walking around Broadway in Nashville sticking microphones in people's faces. This is an established genre. So he's taking this established genre that has its own kind of like features and is familiar.

And then he's doing this really innovative thing. I, as the politician, am not going to speak at you. I'm just going to put mics in people's faces and ask them questions. It's incredibly effective. He is the first politician I have seen be native.

to the thing that is after what I think we think of as social media. Yeah. Right. So there are a lot of politicians. Donald Trump is one of them. Bernie Sanders is another who, in a way, they were very dominant on. Twitter, on Facebook, on a kind of mostly text-based, high engagement, social sharing era of media. And the thing that's come after it... with TikTok on Instagram, you see it now more on X too, is much more algorithmic.

You can come out of nowhere much easier. And very visual, vertical video, not primarily text-based. Zoran was not dominant as a figure in, like, text on X. No. It was videos. It was visuals. It was... Fucking the graphic design in that campaign was beautiful. Yeah, there's a great New York magazine piece about this. And always in a suit, right? So highly recognizable outfit. I mean, he was very visual.

There was an incredibly consistent visual grammar. Totally. Right. There were very certain filters on most of his videos. And then when he would do like videos about more intense subjects like ice, they would take those filters off. Yes. Or make a starker one. Right. His mother is like an amazing filmmaker. His sense of film and visual grammar was very, very, very strong.

The last time I think I saw something like it would be Howard Dean with Meetup back in 2004 or Barack Obama with Facebook in 2008, right? Or Trump on Twitter. Trump on Twitter, yes. Trump was truly native to what Twitter is. Yes, you're right. That's a great point. Conflict. I'm thinking Democratic candidates. But yes, Donald Trump and Twitter in 2015 and the way that that his performance on Twitter became the way that people a lot of people came to know him. Right. As a politician.

One point I want to make here that I think it's important, I think we both agree on is with all these discussions, there's stuff that's new and there's stuff that's timeless, right? The guy is very charismatic. He is very politically talented. That would be true if he was running in the 1950s. If he was doing whistle-stop tours, the guy can talk. He is a very talented communicator. So I don't want to overstate the degree to which the medium is...

You could make short form videos and they wouldn't work as well unless you he's got Riz like he just does. The thing that's so wild about it, though, is that there's a perfect pairing between. that charisma, that way of communicating with the form that he used, and then the fact that the algorithmic social media means a thing can blow up.

And I don't think you can even talk about the Mamdani one without also like what his foil was. Andrew Como and Zoran Mamdani were perfect foils for each other. Like you could not have scripted it better. Cuomo had this gigantic super PAC behind him. And there was this real sense, I mean, correctly so, from any sort of normal rules of politics, that how is Mamdani or anyone else going to climb uphill?

against the amount of attentional artillery that that super PAC could and would buy. And we know that they were just absolutely dominating the airwaves. 24-7, basically. I cannot overstate to people outside the New York viewing area how insane the same ad 20 times. You know when I saw this ad was... I saw this ad...

One time, I mean, I saw it like 17 times in this one experience. Right, yes, yeah. Because I was at a bar and they had a TV on. Exact same. One of the things that struck me the whole way through on the Andrew Cuomo campaign. was how old its understanding of communication was. And the idea, at some point, I would watch people talking about Cuomo as a juggernaut, and intentionally, in my world...

He didn't exist. He didn't exist. And in fact, I think this. And he was hiding from it, by the way, too. But like, well, that's another thing we can get to is the sort of what Mondani was doing on social media through things he was creating. And then there was what he was doing on other media outlets, which was also.

the opposite of Cuomo. Yes, very much. But on the first point, to take a step back, I mean, people really have to understand that for probably, I'd say, the last 40 years, there's this formula for how And I think it's true for both parties, but I know Democratic politics better. You raise a lot of money and then you spend it on TV buys. That's what a campaign is. Raise a lot of money, spend it on TV buys. And that is how they choose candidates.

is can you raise the money so that you can do the TV buys? The DSCC and the DCCC who recruit congressional candidates and senatorial candidates, one of the main things that they are testing is can you raise the money? Yes. And what are you doing to raise them with the money? You are buying attention. And what you're doing is buying attention through 30-second ads that are going to run on the local news in the three weeks before the election. Yes. That is 90% of the campaign.

The last 10% is, yes, you go to events and you shake hands. I mean, maybe it's 80%. I'm sort of overstating a little bit. But you saw Cuomo just run this play, which was limit media availabilities, only pick your spots. Be confident that this enormous carpet bombing is going to happen late down the stretch. And it totally backfired and didn't work. And I really want to hold on this for a minute.

Because you cannot buy attention now the way you once could. You can only earn it. This goes back to the conversation we had right after the 2024 election. Because, I mean, that was also a period for all that Donald Trump really did have a lot of money behind him in that election. Kamala Harris had more. Yeah. She raised a ton of money. They spent a ton of money. And they absolutely did not dominate the tension. Yeah. You are almost watching between Cuomo and Mamdani.

an almost pitch-perfect version of the old attentional strategy versus a pitch-perfect version of the most modern native attentional strategy collide. I do think the underlying product here matters. Cuomo is just a bad... He was a scandal-ridden, high negatives, very widely disliked, you know, former governor who had had to resign in disgrace, running against this sort of fresh-faced figure. But it also was a real collision.

of these strategies in a way that I do think people should watch. Like if I'm the DSCC or the CCCC, I would start thinking not about who do I think can raise money, but who can... raise attention themselves by being out there on all these platforms and actually creating things that are native to the places they're running in, which will be different if you're an Ohio Senate candidate.

or a Wisconsin Senate candidate than if you're a New York City mayor or a candidate. But Wisconsin and Ohio and Missouri and all these places and Kansas. They have their own things that people care about and their own cultures. And they also, just to be clear, how else are people getting information now? I mean, look, above a certain age.

And among certain demographics, people still sort of like consume the news as the news in whatever form that takes. More and more voters and particularly voters who are. in that outer concentric circle of political or news interest that Democrats lost by 15 points in 2024, that Democrats have struggled to win, that you have to win if you're going to win Ohio. Those folks.

How else are they going to know about you? They're not if they're not watching the evening news when you're buying your ad points and they're not watching network news and they're not watching linear cable. Literally, how do they find out about you? They're going to find out about you from from their phones. So, well, how do you get to them?

I mean, you really have to like think through this. Like, how will this person know that I'm running, what my face is, what I look like, what I stand for? How will they know? And if you don't have a theory for that, that's other than we, well, we bought a bunch of points on TV. You're cooked.

It's not going to work. We did this show a couple months ago about attention. It was after the election. And that particular show got very wide distribution among Democratic politicians. I'm sure you heard this too. And then so that some of them would come to talk to me later and they were trying to do video. And I have just thought a lot since then about why their videos are so bad.

Members of the Senate Democrats, and for that matter, the House Democrats, they have a lot of money in their campaign committees. They have a lot of money for communications. They could hire very, very good people. And it's actually not the case that you can't make an argument about, you know, the big, beautiful bill or something go viral. Like, I know you can because I do it. And you know you can because you do it. And I just look at...

What all of their content looks like. And I think, does nobody there have a sense of what they like to watch? Because definitely they don't like to watch this. But the absence of taste among people who are inferior, skilled political communicators is weird to me. Here's a structural answer.

to that question, which I don't hold me to, but here's a hypothesis. Democratic Party politics are really complicated politics of multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual coalitions. I think often the things that success in democratic politics selects for is skill at managing these coalitional tensions, which is a really difficult thing to do.

Hakeem Jeffries is very good at that. Nancy Pelosi is the best at it. No one, and I think including Nancy Pelosi, would be like, I want to listen to a Nancy Pelosi podcast. Nancy Pelosi is not a great public communicator. She is a legendary. all-time great manager of coalitional tension. I think the coalitional politics of democratic politics select for people who are very skilled at managing these very different, difficult...

coalitional issues. That is a different skill than public communication to the normies. Okay, but let me push on this a little bit. I think you're right about a Hakeem Jeffries here, a Chuck Schumer.

Right. Absolutely. But you think about a Cory Booker. Yeah, he is quite skilled. You think about a Chris Murphy. Yeah. There are high level... Why can't they do... Yeah, they are out there. And Chris Murphy walks across Connecticut every year. Yeah, he does that too. Cory Booker did the 25-hour filibuster. Right. or not quite filibuster, but long speech. There is a dimension where I know they want to communicate. I know they want...

what they're saying to break through. They are willing to say things. I mean, Chris Murphy's been very out there on the level of alarm he is raising. They're good podcast guests, right? If you were to rank Senate Democrats on how good they are on a podcast, Murphy and Booker would be high up there.

I guess the thing I am saying is that the amount of agita I have heard Democrats express about the lack of a liberal Joe Rogan, whatever it might be, as opposed to understanding attention as not something... other people gift to you. Right. But something you earn yourself or you look for as a skill in other people. Yeah. Or you have some other kind of filmmaker coach you in. It's just the gap is so much.

wider than it seems like it needs to be at this point. And like watching all these people just get flattened by someone like Mamdani, it really speaks to it. Yeah. I mean, part of the question here, though, right, is like about like being native to new forms. Yeah.

I have made a few TikTok videos and, like, they're not that good. Yes. And I think... I mean, yeah, I've not seen your TikTok videos. I think I'm a pretty skilled public communicator. Like, this is what I do for a living. It's what I've done for a long time. There are these, like, weird... You know, we talked about sort of grammar or like there are these sort of differences of different mediums, formats, visual grammars at different times that I also think here's actually a key thing.

I think you have to be a consumer to be a producer. And I think this is a huge gap. I really think this is a real problem. Now, if I started to get serious about making TikTok videos where I like talk to camera. Having watched a lot more, I would be better now, and if I practiced, I'd get better. But the sort of, like, textural sense Mamdani has for the format, you can't just, like...

read some packet or just jump in from nowhere. But that seems like a thing where you should be looking for certain kinds of talent. Yeah, that I agree with. Right? There's a reality that a lot of people who run for office are news anchors. Yeah. Mike Pence had been a talk radio host. Carrie...

Blake, right, had been a news anchor, right? Like a lot of these people have experience in front of a camera. And I just think you're going to start, if both parties were smart, they would be looking for people who have attentional skill.

So one thing we saw here is that, yes, Mamdani was trying to make this election about affordability, about material concerns. But Cuomo won the precincts where median income was under $50,000. What did you make of the somewhat strange structure of the coalitions? I don't really have a good theory on it yet. The one piece of election analysis that has stuck out the most to me is this triangle.

that breaks down precincts by their degree of racial integration. Have you seen this triangle? It's so fascinating. Basically, it breaks down precincts by how white they are, how black they are, or how other they are. This is by census. So these are not the racial categories that I would use to describe you. But basically, what it finds is that the precincts that are.

basically all black, and then the precincts that are all white were Cuomo precincts. And the more mixed a neighborhood was in its racial makeup, the better Mamdani did.

which I find to be a fascinating result. Now, that might just be a proxy for the income. Yeah, it might cross-correlate something. Between the income stuff you're talking about. I mean, I think I understand... my mom and I were talking about this because she was, my mom was talking about the Bronx and the Bronx was like a Cuomo borough, which is sort of ironic because like, if you go back to the whole like opening bid of Momdani, which is like, I'm here in the Bronx.

in Fordham Road, in this place that swung. I'm talking to people. I'm going to address your concerns. And then like, he like ran up the numbers in the like. DSA precincts but he couldn't have won unless he made it outside those perimeters I think look I think name recognition is part of it I think the devil you know or familiarity matters to voters often on the kind of periphery of an electorate

in a Democratic primary. But I don't have like a good theory of why it was the case. Like if it was, there are other patchworks that I could sort of theorize better than those. What do you think? I don't know either. I mean, I think you can come up with a couple of arguments. One is that maybe that's cross-correlating something that's just informational. Those voters were less attached to the discourse, not...

telling the algorithm they wanted to see a bunch of Sauron Mamdani videos. They sort of know who Andrew Cuomo is. And they're more mobilized by interest groups that used to be more powerful, but that were largely like the interest groups. largely signed out with Cuomo, the unions, churches, right? Cuomo did a lot of his campaigning among black churches. So you might be seeing something that has to do with almost machine politics and mobilization politics, which Cuomo was leaning on very heavily.

There's also a crime and disorder question here, right? So if you're a voter making like $35,000 a year, you're living in NYCHA housing, you are much more exposed to crime and disorder. than, you know, a voter in Williamsburg making $137,000. Adams won. running against crime and disorder, running up the totals among, you know, working class voters. So we know that that politics is powerful. I have this sort of view that Mamdani could...

only have won in a time when crime had actually gone down quite a lot, as it has. Because if this really was a big crime and disorder election, I think that that would have been a big problem for him, and he wasn't well trusted on those issues. Another is that...

this is a consistent thing we see in the data with left-wing candidates. So I think you could just say this is something we've seen happening a lot. I mean... Donald Trump also won voters under $50,000. So that there are different things happening as you move up the income scale where people are voting much more expressively. Even though Mamdani tried...

desperately hard to run the most materialist campaign possible. But politics is very expressive. There's not a bad thing about it. It's just a reality. I voted against my material interest in this mayoral election, so everyone gets to do that. Yeah, as did I. My name is Jasmine Ulloa, and I'm a national politics reporter for The New York Times. I grew up in Texas, on the border with Mexico, and I've been reporting in the region since I was in high school.

Now I travel the country looking for stories and voices that really capture what immigration and the nation's demographic changes mean for people. What I keep encountering is that people don't fall into neat ideological boxes on this very volatile issue. There's a lot of gray. And that's where I feel the most interesting stories are.

I'm trying to bring that complexity and nuance to our audience. And that's really what all of my colleagues on the politics team and every journalist at The New York Times is aiming to do. Our mission is to help you understand the world. no matter how complicated it might be. If you want to support this mission, consider subscribing to The New York Times. You can do that at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

So I think you can cut politicians into these two categories. They're the politicians for whom you can identify a policy that stands for them immediately. Build the wall for Donald Trump. That is a policy, but it is a metonym for Donald Trump. Medicare for all for Bernie Sanders, the Green New Deal for AOC. Mamdani had like four or five, right? It was freezer rent, it was free buses, it was free daycare.

It was publicly on grocery stores. All these are actual policies and they're worth talking about. But what they are is mimetic. Yeah, totally. So Hillary Clinton running against Bernie Sanders had 70 policies. you know, or some very large number, but none that actually defined her. Kamala Harris, I cannot give you the policy that stands for Kamala.

Harris. The same is true for Brad Lander and a bunch of the other people in this campaign. Which is not to say they didn't have them. They had them. Brad Lander had a depth of policy on his campaign website in this mayoral race that I only associate with presidential campaigns. It was so...

So detailed. And a lot of them are great, right? Brad Lander was my choice in the campaign. But I said this when I wrote this piece about him, that there are politicians who communicate about policy. And there are politicians who use policy to communicate. And one problem with a lot of establishment politicians is they communicate about policy. And the people who thrive right now on the attentional networks use policy to communicate. And you can...

lament that what modern media is doing is flattening policy down to this sort of bumper sticker level of mimetic communication. And I kind of do lament it. But it's also true. Like abundance has been a big deal, but it's the word. And then it's like, there's all this stuff behind it. And that's a much more complicated set of conversations. But it cuts through. But if you don't have the memetic tip of the spear. Yes.

I mean, there's a question here that I think is interesting in terms of replicability is like how much that ability is structurally producible and how much is just like telling someone to dunk a basketball. You know what I mean? Like certain people have talents for things, right? Like there is a question here to me about how much it comes down to talent. Like people have instincts and knacks for this, but you're absolutely correct about this. And I think to go back to that video, like.

There is this kind of one plus one equals two thing happening there. He goes up to Fordham Road in the Bronx area I know well. It's like right by where my mom grew up. In fact, I was just having lunch around there for Father's Day. And he asked people and they're like, groceries cost too much. And then at the end, it's like, we're going to try public grocery stores. Now, to be clear.

The grocery business runs at margins of like one to three percent. It's not private profit that's making the price of groceries. I'm not convinced that the solution is going to solve the problem, particularly in this case, which I think is sort of the most dubious. But it's also like.

I don't know, worth trying. And it also is an attempt to address people's concerns. I've had a lot of conversations with people about publicly owned grocery stores. And I basically understand this modest pilot of like five stores that he has proposed. as getting caught trying on something. Yeah, right. I do think this gets to something very real. Are the only policies that can become a medic in this way these sort of...

huge sweeping, they have conflict at their heart, they make people not like them at the same time they make people like them, build the wall, Medicare for all, you know, ongoing rent freeze. Can policy be mimetic? can it be communicative? And be good. I don't just mean be good because I'm not, like, I think it would be great. Like, if you can pay for free daycare, terrific, right? I think we should have free daycare. So I don't want to just...

create a good, bad division here. Like all good policy is complicated. That's not my belief. But there is a way in which to survive mimetic products have to be simple. Yeah. Memes are simple. The thing behind the meme might be complicated and good or bad or whatever, but for something to get energy, I think it has to be easily rememberable. I think it has to be big. Yep. It has to...

activate something people care about. And it probably has to be controversial. Medicare for all dominated. People forget this now. Every 2020 Democratic primary debate, I remember, was like just a lot of Medicare for all debate. Anybody who knew anything about what kind of Congress that Democrat was going to be facing, no matter who won the primary, knew we were not going to get Medica for All. Faz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager, was on my show earlier this year.

or maybe late last year. Right, saying like, we would have gotten as close as we can get, but we, yeah. You may say we would have expanded the age range of Medicare. Right. Right, and everybody knew it. Right. But the reason that it could dominate so much was it unleashed controversial energy. Yep.

There was a debate. Would you abolish all private health insurance? Were you willing to raise taxes on middle class Americans to fund this? It was intentionally salient because conflict is intentionally salient. Exactly. A lot of policy is built for compromise. Yeah, right.

But memes are not built for compromise. I think we have a good tangible example in recent history in exactly this context from the mayor that Zoran Mandani says was the best mayor of his life that got the New York Times very mad at him, which was... Bill de Blasio's Universal Pre-K.

As a non-New Yorker, Bill de Blasio sure seemed like a perfectly good mayor to me. My kid's in 3K. I'm a de Blasio. Let's talk about universal pre-K for a second. Universal pre-K did have that mimetic energy. It's simple and straightforward. Every kid in the city has to go to kindergarten. We're going to make a new grade below it. And this is informed by real empirical work that's been done. And we're going to have a tax structure that funds it and makes it happen.

It was controversial at the time. There were lots of people who said this was a bad idea. You're going to put local daycares out of business. I mean, there was conflictual energy around it. And then they delivered it. And I sent my kid, my first kid, to... It was year two, maybe, that it was up and running. And I walked into this school that had been leased by the Department of Education, that had formerly, I think, been a big Catholic school. They were like...

this is like one of the biggest pre-Ks in the whole city. It was like 20 classes. I was like, this is the most extraordinary accomplishment I've ever, like, I can't believe you guys stood this thing up and that my kid's going here for free. comes out every day like so like so that's an example i just want to give an example of like everything that you said it was mimetic policy it cut through it identified bill de blasio it was one of the hugest

They got into power. They actually did it. It actually worked. That is an example of all of those things happening.

And yet it didn't stop everybody from turning on Bill de Blasio. Right, because then it's like, what have you done for me lately? Also, if you don't have a—here's the thing about that promise, I will say. If you don't have a kid that age, like, great. It's highly salient to me. I have a three-year-old. Yes, yeah. For me, I was like—

I was like, this is awesome. I see a lot of people like on Twitter celebrating Mamdani's win. And I think Mamdani's win is exciting. But I've said this before, like the downside for him was not that he loses a primary. Like the bad outcome is that he wins and fails at governing.

He cannot get the tax increases he needs from Albany. He does not control the tax increases he needs for this agenda. And Kathy Hochul has already said no. She has made a no raising taxes like this pledge, and she's not going to break it. So he's not going to have the money he needs.

An extended rent freeze. I know people do non-profit housing. Same. And they're people who are ideologically aligned with Momdani. And they do not think this is a good idea. Yeah. I know people in non-profit housing who feel the same way. And the reason is like over... You know, you do it for one year. OK, fine. But over an extended period of time.

You will reduce the incentive to build that housing. You will reduce the incentive to care for that housing. He's like, Mamdani will say like, oh, you have these other programs you can apply to for relief. All that stuff is complicated and you make a market less. profit will be in and fewer people will be in it. A lot of the things like free daycare, he probably just can't pay for. So if you set up these expectations and then you don't meet them, is it okay because you're...

supporters know you tried? Or is it a kind of like a structural thing where you have set yourself up for failure? I think it's the most important question in some ways. I mean, one thing I would say is I like...

experimentation and new ideas. So when he was asked about the public groceries. I think it's in the Bulwark podcast. And he says like, we'll try it. And if it doesn't work, c'est la vie. Yeah. And like, I love that answer. Politicians never give that answer. They never give that answer. Like...

Let's, you know, the person who really most embodied that spirit is FDR. If you go back and you read about like, you know, the first hundred days and like, they're just trying a lot. Like we now think about FDR as this Colossus who. remade the relationship between the citizen and the federal government, right? A lot of that stuff did not work. Like, fully failed. Like, a lot of the interventions failed. They did a lot of clunky stuff. Like, there was a lot of... Now...

Totally different time. He had these enormous mandate. It was a crisis. But I will say that like. I like the idea of experimentation. I like the idea of these ideas coming from outside of what like the consensus around sensible policy is. But the test for it is, can you deliver?

One thing that struck me a lot about Mamdani was his ability to listen. To sense a zeitgeist, but also to listen to voters, right? The relentless focus on affordability. That was an act of listening. Totally. And then being able to respond to it. And it's been one of... my views for a while, it's actually is the introduction of my book, that we have moved into an era of politics that is going to be all about affordability. Housing inflation. Yeah. Cost of childcare inflation.

Cost of health care inflation is actually moderated in some ways, but it's still quite bad. Educational pricing, right, for four-year colleges, that kind of thing. That had been building for decades. That is not a thing that happened in 2022 and 2023. That had been building for decades. And now...

You know, things are like they kind of rise and like they're an issue and then like they're actually intolerable. Yeah, right. And so like future politicians, we're going to have to develop a set of ideas and a way of talking about. bringing costs down, not just bringing subsidies up. And whether Mamdani's particular policies will work to do that, he really struck me as a politician native to this era of concerns. I mean...

Think about the rent freeze, right? He wasn't saying, we're going to give rent rebates through a tax filing where you file a tax and we'll give you $150 back. It was like, no, we're just going to cap the price. The concern is whether or not... from a policy perspective. Right, whether that works. Mamdani talks a very, very good, I'm just in game, like, I think he gets that you need housing supply. Yeah. But...

His plans are all public housing, which is fine, but that's much harder. And then when he talks about market rate housing. he sort of is like, I really believe in Margaret Hussing as long as it accords to our sustainability, union, and affordability needs. And it's like...

When you need a lot of housing, adding a lot of conditions to that housing is going to raise the price. So I really think there's a question about whether or not he can deliver affordability if he's not able to increase supply. Yeah.

I would feel better about a rent freeze that was paired with an incredible explosion of building. If what was happening was like we were freezing rents and there were cranes everywhere. Right. Yeah. OK, fine. Like because maybe in three years we have a lot of housing coming online. Right. But if you.

At this level of supply creation, you freeze around for an extended period of time, you might begin to constrict supply down the road and create a bigger problem for the future. There are some levers we could pull on this.

Housing is a particularly tough one because it takes time to build houses and we make it hard to build houses. I'm very skeptical that Momdani can make free daycare happen. I don't think he's got the money to do it. There's more infrastructure that would need than was needed even for a 3K.

But you could conceptually do free day care. You could definitely do it nationally. There are ways to approach some of these things, but I think this is what politics economically is going to be about for an extended period.

I think one wrinkle to the housing question, which I think is a really important thing to always keep coming back to when you discuss in your book, you know, one person's price is another person's income. There is a real genuine material conflict in New York City between renters and homeowners. It's not false consciousness. It's not a distraction. It's not culture war bullshit. Like if you own a home and most of your wealth is in your home.

you want to see that wealth go up. If you are trying to enter the housing market or a renter, rising house prices are bad for you. And you will not be excited about Momdani or anyone to come in saying, we're going to build a ton of public housing next to you. That's the other thing that's very difficult about public housing and affordable housing. All these homeowners who want their high home prices do not want that down the block from them.

fight, you know, which the homeowners have been winning in California have been beating the brains out of the people trying to buy homes and renters for decades now to a degree that's like truly catastrophic, I think it's fair to say. I do worry.

That the structural nature of public opinion now is negative in a way that makes even good governance not resonate with people, if that makes sense. Or the structural limitations on governing. One of the two. That it's just very hard because of how many things contribute to a working class person who lives on Fordham Road being like, man, I am squeezed in every direction.

Can Zora Mondani unilaterally make it so they don't feel that way? It's hard to say. Can they feel that I got a mayor who's trying to make my life better? Yes. So translating this kind of communication.

from campaign to governance. Not that many people have had to do it, but Obama had to do it. And I think I would say he failed to do that. I think the sense is that he was an amazing, amazing, amazing campaigner. And then given the... reality of incremental victory. He was never sort of able to narrativize that in a way that could ease the disappointment a lot of people felt. And I think that's in some ways why the liberalism he represented after him.

for at least some time, had a hard time because he had raised hopes so high for a lot of people. And then it's like, eh, you know, I mean, things did change. I'm a big fan of Barack Obama. The affordable character is a huge and ongoing achievement. But how do you narrativize the difference between people's hopes for your campaign and what they got? Donald Trump is interesting because he comes after Obama. He also makes huge, sweeping...

wild promises. They never built the wall. Obama never did, right? They never built the wall. They don't build the wall. But Donald Trump has this way of communicating throughout his entire presidency. And I mean, he loses reelection, right? So it doesn't work exactly. But that he is...

It's like somehow he's a president, but he's not responsible for what happens. No, he's at war with his own government. The deep state. So there was a narrative that Donald Trump maintained as president that allowed him to explain away. the difference between what he attempted and what he achieved. And now Trump is president again, and he has much more control over the government. So it's not as much of a deep state narrative this time.

Although he has spent the last 24 hours railing against the intelligence apparatus. Yes, exactly. Like it's very classic. So, yes, because they say that the Iranian strikes only set it back by a couple of months and he's saying it's false. So there's one is like, can you use it as a form of power? But then is. Can you use it if you're not being able to get it done, right? Can you narrativize the grimy, gritty, just reality of governing in a way that maintains like...

the faith people have in you, even as you're not being able to deliver to them what you promised? I think there's a few things I'd say about that. One, I think mayor is different than president in a lot of ways, partly because it is much more retail. you can get a long way by showing up a lot. I mean, Eric Adams actually does that pretty well. And, you know, I thought the... There's a club opening. What's that? He's going to be there.

You know, and this is Chuck Schumer's legendary talent, not as mayor, as senator, but before that as congressman. There is a little bit of a just trap that is difficult to avoid, which is like, it will be more difficult. to govern than it is to campaign always. Andrew Cuomo's father quite famously said, we campaign in poetry and we govern in prose. And I think that part of the way, I guess, that you escape that trap is talented political communication.

I mean, I really do. Like, I think you have to do a good job. Like, you can't be a total failure as a mayor, right? Like, the city has to feel like there's tangible improvements in people's lives. But that alone won't be enough. You basically need both.

You know, I thought the Mamdani video to close out the campaign where he walks the length of Manhattan and he's just like talking to people, dabbing people up, eating a slice of pizza, drinking water. Like, you have to keep doing that, I think, to be an effective mayor.

And I think that does actually allow you to narrativize. Yeah. Because it's like, I'm out here in the streets and I'm talking to people and I'm hearing what you're saying about what you're trying to do and I'm communicating to you about what we're trying to do.

The getting caught trying, I think, is sort of the key part of that. I think this is something you're seeing with Donald Trump right now, which is he actually has an instinct for how to turn policy that isn't affecting that many people. into something that is intentionally salient. Yeah. Which is to make it a performance. Yeah, he performs everything. Including war. Including war, the deportations, the sending people to foreign prisons and having Kristi Noem like pose at them in her flak jacket.

That there is a way that he feels to me, I mean, he's a genuine attentional innovator, say what you will about Donald Trump. Yeah. And that he is trying to make much more of policy into a public performance. I mean, there is a reason. I mean, Dr. Phil is embedded with the ice teams. Dr. Phil is embedded with the ice teams. His cabinet is full of...

People from TV, be they reality TV stars from one period like Sean Duffy, all the way over to the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who's a weekend cable news host. So there is this way in which I think Trump has been trying to sort of square this. Most people will not feel the effect of most of his policies. But what if he can turn those policies into programming? Yes, but here's the irony, right?

he's at 10 points underwater and like all the stuff's pulling at exactly what you would predict from thermostatic public opinion. And from like the use of the bully pulpit. I mean, David Shore had a thing the other day about one of the most consistent counterintuitive findings is that... When a president talks about something, its negatives go up. Yep. Right? The sort of negative bully pulpit.

Now, the question to me is, and this is the thing that I think feels very unresolved because of how sui generis Trump is and how sui generis his trajectory has been, is like, does it net out as a positive? The question of attentional domination, he does it better than anyone. He is a genuine innovator and a weird genius for attention at a pathological and feral level that is not replicable. But...

The constant show, the constant conflict, like his negatives are high. He lost reelection. He stuck around. He won. He almost immediately started to tank in the polls. He's a very polarizing figure. It works at some level. There's some power to it. But like, how much does it work still remains unclear to me. I think that's right. But what it works to do is set narrative.

And that is its own dimension of power. It is a kind of power that he exerts in a way few presidents do over culture. And I'd say this is true for Mamdani, right? Mamdani as a discourse object. Trump is a discourse object, right? It's not like...

Zoran Mamdani is the only person to have recently won a Democratic primary anywhere in the country in Jersey. Mikey Sherrill. Yep. Just won the primary for governor. Cheryl, I think, is an incredibly impressive politician, a former Navy helicopter pilot, right? Like, I find her very, very, very charismatic. Yeah, she's very good. More on the moderate side of things, right? There was not a debate. Does every Democrat need to reckon?

with the victory of Cheryl in the way that right now there's a discourse of how does every Democrat and possibly every politician, possibly every human being need to reckon with what we just saw in this June Democratic primary in New York City? The governor... You know, the former governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, who served two terms in a state that Trump has won every time that he's been on the ballot there and left with, I think, 55, 56 percent approval rating. No one's like.

We need to find the next Roy Cooper. Like that guy. It's like he was an insanely effective politician in very difficult terrain and has none of these like attentionally salient qualities. Right. And we talked about this last time, which is like. high risk, high reward, high volatility stuff. Like, there are trade-offs here. I guess this is where the question you were asking a minute ago feels like it bites to me, which is, you were saying, does this kind of attentional dominance

net out as a positive. It can clearly... It can clearly win primaries. It clearly can help you exert a cultural and narrative force. And an ideological force, I would say, which is important. Like above and beyond what you would be able to do, right? AOC is not...

the only Democrat who has, like, knocked off another Democrat in the primary. She's not the only Democrat to win a House seat. She is incredibly salient as a national politician because of her ability to drive attention. And on the other hand, like...

I recently was talking to a bunch of various people in the sort of New Democrats caucus, which is like the more moderate House Democrats caucus. And one thing that struck me just talking to them is a couple of them are very talented communicators, but they're actually.

What most of them communicate in their bearing and the way they are is not flashy, aggressive, ideological projects. It's a kind of, like this person might coach your Little League team. Yeah, yeah. You know, and so these things work and don't work. in different places. And I'm, I don't think we have a good way of answering the question of like, when is it valuable to drive this kind of attention? And when is it not? So here's what I would say. I think.

one place where it matters is presidential politics. Yes. I think presidential politics, like there's just no question that it matters at that level. And you need someone who is a insanely skilled communicator with an incredible appetite. and instinct for attention. The kind of person who wants to go do three-hour podcast interviews. Yes. I think if you have a person who's not that, you're really in trouble.

The other thing that I think is worth considering is the valence of incumbent versus challenger, where I actually think this sort of is interesting to think about. I think this kind of attentional dominance works better as a challenger than an incumbent.

Sure. For exactly the reason we're talking about. Right. So like we're seeing right now. Donald Trump recreate some of the thermostatic public opinion on immigration that he had the first term. Yeah. Which was part of what drove Democrats to adopting. a line on immigration that was to the left of what their previous line had been, partly along the lines of how public opinion had changed in recoiling in horror at what Donald Trump was doing on immigration. So...

My point being here is that there are more upsides to downsides of the challenger for this high volatility, high risk, high reward attentional trade than there are for the incumbent. I also think there's a... dimension here where they work. This is very, very, very valuable in primaries. Yeah. Everything we were saying a minute ago about policy that becomes memetic is policy that unlocks a lot of attention.

usually through controversy, where some people really like it and other people really hate it. And what you're hoping to do when you unleash that kind of attentional energy, that kind of conflict energy, is that there are more people who really like the thing than really hate it. And the trade that you often see some of these candidates make is they are unleashing energy in the primary that might hurt them in the general. Yeah, yeah. So it is a...

often made observation about Donald Trump, that he seems to underperform in the general. He's incredibly dominant at the primary level. But Trump and then candidates like him who are less talented than him, MAGA candidates, tend to underperform in the general, right? The view is that another, you know... I think a lot of people believe, and I'm one of them, that if Republicans had run Marco Rubio...

in 2016, they would have won by more. And I actually think that's true in 2024 also. They run Nikki Haley, if they run probably even Ron DeSantis, they would have won by more. Like the conditions were there for that. Trump creates a lot of negative attention on him in general elections. New York is weird in a lot of ways. But one is that the expectation is if you have won the Democratic primary, you have won. Right. The fact that that is not a.

complete expectation with Mamdani speaks to the way that there's at least a belief that he will generate counter-mobilization against him at a higher rate than like a Brad Lander would than some of these other candidates. But it'll probably be okay for him. in New York City, because again, it's so dominated by Democrats. But this sort of thing where there's this question of how do you stand out in a primary campaign in a non-representative electorate that agrees with you?

much more than the general electorate will. But then if you've done that, then what do you do with these positions you've taken? Partly if you're dealing with a general electorate that is not all the way to your side. So I always think like just to finish this one example in it is that in Ohio, when J.D. Vance ran for Senate, Mike DeWine, who's like.

an intentionally not very skilled, kind of more older school Republican. He was governor. He won his reelection campaign that year by like 20-ish points. Vance underperformed in the Senate race. I mean, he won, but it was by six, seven, eight points. It was not an amazing performance, in part because he had taken very, very MAGA positions. Now, has it worked out for J.D. Vance? Yeah. But not in the sense that J.D. Vance overperforms with general election.

Like, this is where it's like, it's an uncertain trade a lot of the time. It's a really uncertain trade. And I think...

To add one wrinkle here that I think is interesting and slightly weedsy but worthwhile is that, you know, New York City has ranked choice voting. The ranked choice voting allows voters to rank five different candidates. That created some interesting incentives that are a little different in this race that I actually think worked against part of what you're saying there, which is like being the biggest bomb thrower is the most distinguishing.

But the way ranked choice voting works is you don't want to alienate other people's supporters because you want them to rank you second or third or fourth. And one of the things I thought was very interesting about how Mamdani navigated this, and I think huge props here to Brad Lander, who came in third in the sort of first round of voting.

was that there was all these cross-endorsements and this sort of coalition building. So it wasn't just bomb-throwing, like, there's a kind of politics you see, particularly in Republican primaries, where it's like, the rest of these people are sellouts, and I'm the truest MAGA, you know? There kind of wasn't that Mamdani wasn't running against like the Democratic establishment. There wasn't this kind of like you see this amongst the sort of.

left flank of the Democratic Party of like these corporate sellouts like they suck. There was not very much of that. There was directed at Cuomo. But it was a pretty like he cross endorsed other candidates as well. And I think the reason that's salient for the general is that it's yes, it's in a primary, but it's also coalition building.

Yes. And I think that coalition building actually ends up being extremely important in general, which, by the way, New York City had five straight terms of a Republican mayor. Let's not forget. Yes. The idea that the expectation is the Democrat wins is like. of fairly recent vintage. Like, Giuliani won twice, Bloomberg was three terms. That was 20 years in a row, Republican mayor, I think.

I think some of his people will not like hearing me say this. I read Mamdani as a left pluralist, not a left populist. Yeah, I agree. Which is to say that people, I think... have very, very shifty definitions of populism, but in its classic definition, like what actually makes somebody a populist politician is not that they believe in redistribution or believe that the working man is getting screwed a bit.

It's that they believe that the system is built around, like, true people and then the, like, small conspiratorial enemies of the people who are keeping everybody else down. And if you could just break through them and have your villains and destroy your villains, you can sort of hit the... the more utopic politics you're looking for. I have seen many, like, right populists and left populists. Mamdani's, what struck me often about his affect, which I often thought was a bit of a TikTok affect.

Because TikTok, I mean, people forget this, but TikTok was like its whole thing and it doesn't really work this way anymore. But for a very long time, they were really pushing it to be a positive platform. Yeah. Right. Like they positioned it. algorithmically against what was happening on Twitter and Facebook and other things at that time. Mamdani always seemed much more motivated by his sympathies than his resentments. And Cuomo...

felt to me much more motivated by his resentments than his sympathies. And this also then played into the RCV dynamic you're discussing, which is, I think it would have been natural to assume.

that these other more establishment, long-serving New York politicians would be likelier to cross-endorse and work with the front-runner, former governor, who could both, in theory, give them more because he was likely to be elected for most of the campaign, but also somebody they would have known better because he's been in New York politics forever.

To me, this was both like politically meaningful and substantively meaningful because it undercut the central argument of Cuomo's candidacy. They all hate it. Not all. Jessica Ramos endorsed him, but like... they largely really, really disliked him. Like, Brad Lander really clearly dislikes Cuomo, and so do a lot of them. Like, they did not want Cuomo ranked. So it created this interesting space where...

The dynamics were not what you would have thought in a left insurgent versus Democratic establishment race. And there's this validation role that ends up happening from that, which is like, if you're hearing that the guy's just like... terrifying, scary figure who's an extremist, but then the other candidates...

in the field or cross-endorsing with him and appearing with him, like, it makes it much harder for that to land. And I think, again, to Mamdani's credit, I agree with you that he does not have a kind of, like, I think it's well said that he's sort of animated by his sympathies as opposed to his resentments. His affect is welcoming and pluralistic and also not like they're out to get me. Like he hasn't, he really just does not.

portray that at all, which I think can be a real problem for a certain form of kind of left populist politics. Like it's a reg system. It's all rigged. The fix is in the, you know, which again. He got $25 million dropped on his head by super PAC money. Bloomberg wrote a $5 million check like two weeks. Like there was a little bit of a rigged game against him, but he did not let that. Again, if you look at that walking the length of Manhattan.

that's the affect there is welcoming and inclusive at all times. But this is where I don't want to over McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan, everything and say the medium is always a message and everybody's shaped by their mediums because obviously a lot of people on TikTok are in vertical video. who are not like Zoran Mamdani or don't even follow what I'm talking about. But I believe, I believe this strongly, that

The rise of populist right and to a lesser extent populist left politics all across the world, all at the same time. I believe the single strongest force there was not just immigration. And it wasn't. I mean, you can really look at this in the data. It was not economics. I think it was the rise of these central communication platforms of politics being high conflict, high engagement.

compressed text platforms. And I think those platforms, in a way that we do not have incredibly good even language for, are somewhat illiberal. in their design, that they are, and by that I mean that they are structured in a way that makes...

the fundamental temperament of liberalism hard to do. They're not well suited for deliberation. They're not well suited for tolerance, right? They're not well suited for on the one hand, on the other hand, right? The things that make deliberative, liberal democracy. kind of function, those habits of mind, the way you hear when like Barack Obama, Barack Obama is not good at Twitter. He's just not. Twitter is bad. No, he's not. It's terrible. Because they're about groups.

They're about engagement within and then against other groups. They're about drawing these lines very, very carefully. And I think they just create by nature. a more populist formative politics, or at least they create a communicative structure of politics where it is easier for outsider populist politicians to thrive. The thing coming after it, which I don't know if it will hold this way.

But this kind of vertical, like when you look at TikTok, when you look at Instagram reels, again, it's not that no content is high conflict political content, but most of it just. isn't. It's much more like day in the life stuff. It's very highly visual. And you just kind of...

saw that a little bit in this campaign. I think there was something in the grammar of Mamdani that was so inflected by that era. I mean, he's like really our first Vine politician. People forget all this, but I think there was something there. His grammar was... not Twitter's grammar. Fun, kind of goofy, kind of like... His grammar was TikTok's grammar. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. I mean, I'm sort of thinking this through. So I think I agree that...

Social media as constituted over the last decade is structurally illiberal. I think I agree with that. Relentlessly algorithmically competitive attention markets are going to drive towards the parts of us. as ourselves that are the furthest from

Yes. Right? So, like, I have a whole chapter in the book about Lincoln-Douglas debates and, like, how different that is. Not that, you know, not that that should be the model for everything. So, I agree with that. I think it's, I'm sort of thinking through this idea of the visual. and kind of like affect of the vertical video as being less conflict populist in its nature, which I think is a really interesting idea. I mean, one thought I had...

and you just said that about Barack Obama's bad at Twitter, is that it was funny. I watched the whole Mamdani speech and I was like, it's fine. He's not great at giving a speech. Like Barack Obama was great at giving a speech.

That is not his message. There are great one minute clips in his speeches, though. There are great one minute clips in his speeches, but like his vertical video performance is a 10 of 10. His speech performance was not a 10 of 10 to me. And I think that speaks to something about. the nature of that. And I think you're right that like, I guess the one, here's the one counterpoint I would say. It seems to me like there are ways in which those algorithms over time, and partly this is.

probably this has to do with the weird black box of the algorithm, right? Is they do start to get more and more conflict embracing because the like clap back video and the posting of the comment of someone said something and then you... you like respond to the comment and it's up there in a window and the stitching, like stitching became this thing that like really generates conflict. Like here's this, like.

dumb, clueless person saying this thing. And I come in and I stitch and talk about how stupid they are. So I do think there is still that incentive. But I think you're right that overall, the vibes directionally. in vertical video right now are more positive than the vibes of, say, the cesspool that is X. It's also, the other thing here, just reality, is it's more capacious. I mean, the fundamental reality.

of the Twitter text box, I mean, it's a little less true now, but it still is basically true, is that it's a compression mechanism. Yeah. And the move towards... Languid podcasting. Well, we're just like sitting here vibing for two hours, you know, or longer, right? I was amazed. You know, I knew this was out there, but on The Abundance Drive, I went and did some of these podcasts.

They really keep going. You really do three to four hours. But even in this, like what you can do, like you can put up six minute videos. I mean, I have videos that go out on TikTok that are six, 12 minutes. Actually, a lot can be in there. It is compressed compared to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it is a lot less compressed than what the original Instagram box allowed you. Yeah.

you know, dominant for a very long time Twitter box allowed you than what a Facebook post offered. And then, I mean, what Mamdani was doing a ton of was podcasting. Yeah. And then getting clipped from that. And then it gets clipped, but it does come in the context, you know, of these sort of much longer conversations that create a different vibe between people. You know, I actually find it very hard to maintain.

I've had many people into this show because they are such harsh critics of me, and I find that they find it very hard to maintain the... criticism when you're in a sort of extended social dynamic. It's devious of you. Well, it's actually sometimes a problem. Sometimes I have to like cue them. Remember you hate, right? Like we're here to talk about this. But these things, you just really see when you do that, like how much.

mediums shape us all. It's much harder to be a jerk to somebody's face than it is under these dynamics. And so it's not that it's all, like all vertical video is going to be sunny. But it just is going to be different in ways that I'm not even sure we're quite ready to understand in politics. Yes, I totally go with that. And I also think that like, you know, this is I'm just sort of spitballing here. So.

I can hear already in my head the academics who study this being like, you're totally wrong. But let me just throw this out. We've got the kind of like semi-apocryphal story of the 1960 debate with Nixon and Kennedy and how people listen thought Nixon won and people that watch thought Kennedy won. If you go watch that debate, Nixon just does not look that bad to me. No, I agree. I've done this a few times and Nixon looks totally fine.

the reason I say apocryphal is that I'm not even sure it's true. It's sort of become this kind of mythos about how this works. And it's capturing the central sort of McLuhan insight about like how much the medium structure says. There was this kind of...

There's a sort of preliterate politics in America when you have very small percentage of voters who can actually read. Then you have like the beginnings of radio politics and, you know, people know about the fireside chat. Television is totally transformative. to American politics. The first wave of internet politics that lasts for a very long time is written politics. It's the politics of text. I mean, all the stuff that's happening with, like, blogs when we came up and...

you know, Facebook posts and all this stuff. We are now moving, like we're going through this transformation where everything will be video. I mean, at least for the foreseeable future, who knows? These trends change on a dime.

I think it's interesting to consider what that does. The media strategy, too. Okay, I'm recruiting candidates, people that can get attention. Those are going to be scarier propositions because part of attention is... sometimes conflict, provocation, views that are not boring, that jump out at you, and...

interviews and talking to a lot of people where you might say something that is a quote-unquote gaffe or that people don't like or offend certain people. The institutional orientation of the Democratic Party is like, yeah, no.

And I think there's a great example of this with Mamdani down the stretch. Talk about his media. He went everywhere. He said yes to everything. He gave an interview to a Pakistani news channel in Urdu. Have you seen this? No. At some level, I was like... why are you doing this? This is down the stretch, just like in the last week. But it's like, right, maybe that gets back to Urdu-speaking New Yorkers who share the clip. Like, you know, he then also goes on.

mainstream, he goes on alternative, he goes on subway takes, and then he does the bulwark. Now the bulwark is like sort of a... you know, centrist, center-right anti-Trump network. Center-left. I'm at this point. Okay, fine. It's center-left at this point. It's in the big— I love the boy. Tim Miller's great, but— Yeah, it's in the big Democratic— It's in the anti-Trump tent very strongly. It's strongly in the anti-Trump tent.

But it is founded by people who used to be Republicans and whose feelings about, say, Israel tend more towards the right of the Democratic coalition. And they ask him this question about. this phrase, globalize the intifada. Which is a very popular phrase at protests on the left. And maybe some people say that phrase with good intent, but there are certainly some people who are saying that phrase with violent intent. So I wonder...

what you think about that. He gives an answer that starts off with, I thought, a very long and good thing about Jewish safety and the Jewish folks that he's talked to in New York City. And then just a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a Jewish man in Williamsburg who told me that he...

The same door he would keep unlocked for decades is one that he now locks out of a fear of what could happen in his own neighborhood. And then he basically says, look, you know, Intifada is Arabic for struggle and that. In fact, word is used in the Holocaust Museum website to mean struggle. The very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it's a word that means struggle. Sure.

As a Muslim man who grew up post 9-11, I'm all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words... can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that's where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe and the... question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven't ventured into. The headline that comes out from it, I don't think it was a great answer, to be very clear, is...

refuses to condemn global as the Intifada. And so I thought to myself, I'm like, oh, okay, so now we're seeing the cost, right? Like we've seen the benefit, he's been everywhere, but going everywhere means you might have a news cycle where you say something like that.

And I think it's pretty striking that he won anyway. Because I do think the old way of thinking is like... say no to 10 things if it means that you never have the news cycle about globalization and him embracing the strategy he did meant that he had a news cycle in a city with a million Jewish voters.

We're like, people's views on this can be very strong. That was all about him refusing to contemn globalizing Nevada, a kind of nightmare scenario if you're a political staffer on that campaign, a genuine nightmare scenario. That didn't have the effect that I think a lot of people would have. It implies the politics of that are not what people think they are. I will say, I will only speak for myself on this. So my priors on Andrew Cuomo.

I was not like an incredible fan of the governorship from afar back when he was being talked about as a presidential candidate. And then everything that happened led to his resignation struck me as really kind of upsetting. But I was sort of, you know, I'm open to people's redemption. Like, I think you have to be open to redemption. Two things about that campaign. One was that the number of people, even people who endorsed Cuomo, who talked to me about his cruelty or his tendency for revenge.

Like, I had somebody tell me he was a sociopath and then endorse him a couple of days later. And so that was like one line that I just couldn't get over. Right. Somebody who this is the way they have treated people in public life. Like, that's a bar I don't I want.

candidates to be above. But the other thing that like actually closed it, that made for me that I would not rank him, was the way he used Israel in the campaign. Like, I'm a Jewish person. I have very, very deep feelings about what is happening in Israel and Gaza. And I found it so cynical, so repulsive, just such a vicious way to weaponize, I thought, both sort of Mamdani's ethnicity.

But also, I don't know what's happening. Gaza is a horror. People should be horrified. Like the whole thing just struck me as good. And I knew a lot of people for whom it. It read that way. The thing in the debates where they got into a fight over visiting Israel. What's the first country you're going to visit? Mr. Mamdani. I would stay in New York City. My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that. Mr. Mamdani, can I just jump in? Would you visit Israel?

As mayor? I've said in a UJA questionnaire that I believe that you need not travel to Israel to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers. And that is what I will be doing as the mayor. I'll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I'll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether...

That's in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform. Because ultimately, we need to focus on delivering on their concerns. And just yes or no, do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel? I believe Israel has the right to exist. As a Jewish state? As a state with equal rights. He won't say it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And his answer was no, he won't visit Israel. That's what he was trying to say. It was such an obvious political game.

Yeah, it was cynical. It was. Yeah, it was deathlessly cynical. Yes. And I have to say, I mean, it was also comical at a certain level, like my. Formative years were spent at like. Shabbat dinner at my friend's houses and going to bar mitzvahs and being in this milieu of Jewish New York. And it's incredibly precious to me. And I feel like incredible, like profound gratitude and affection for that.

you know, my wife's half Jewish, like, I'm not like doing the Bonafides, but it's close to me. Like, I'm not Jewish, but it's a culture that I like love deeply and feel bound to. And so...

Yeah, I found it deathlessly cynical, deathlessly cynical. The other thing that complicated this, and this is an interesting angle of this whole thing, is that Andrew Cuomo, like me, is a paisan from New York. The guy's not Jewish. Yeah. Brad Lander, who cross-endorsed Mom Donnie, is Jewish and very devoted to questions around Israel and justice. He's also the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York City. Yes.

A lot of the things that happened in this campaign happened on like a literal level and a metaphorical, symbolic level at the same time. And one thing that I thought about that moment. when Mamdani didn't condemn Globalizing Nevada, was it had this quality of, this is what he... He is not going to sell out a politics and a community who he either belongs to or has very, very deep sympathy for why they feel the way they do. And with Cuomo...

I'm not saying he does not have beliefs about Israel, but it felt like the OPPO researchers had come to him with a packet, and he was now going to use what was in the packet. And a lot of things are not...

I mean, we could talk about the popularity of different ideas, but some things are also just communicating what kind of person you are. But also, I've been very interested by the way that... Israel and Gaza have become highly kind of symbolic, like attentional in both directions, right? There is the Gaza's genocide, you know.

And also, the people who have made themselves aggressively into, like, moderates, anti-leftist moderates, and you see this a bit with Cuomo, but you see it with Richie Torres, right? You see it with John Fetterman. is like the strongest and most consistent fight they pick is on Israel. It's like now weirdly the ideological mediator. Israel's become the culture war, I think, within the Democratic Party.

And if you want to really send a strong signal, like I'm just struck by how many of the signals sent for people who do not have a lot of power over, you know, American policy towards Israel are sent on this issue. And I think there's also...

an added dimension to that, which is that there's just enormous estrangement between the establishment of the party and the base of the party. That's right. I saw the polling on the Iran strikes were like 85% of Democrats opposed and I think 13% approved. Yeah. Now, if you looked at Democratic legislators' responses, you would not think that those were the numbers. Donald Trump really exploited a huge gap between the...

elites in the party in the establishment on immigration and trade and the base of the party to tremendous effect. There is something like that in the Democratic Party right now on the issue of Israel. There is just...

poll after poll after poll. And I think this has to do with a bunch of complicated factors, although I think the driving factor has been the war in Gaza since October 2023. And I think you really saw it play out in this race. I mean, New York City is the most... Jewish city in the country and the most Jewish city in the world, one of the most Jewish cities in the world. Outside Tel Aviv. It's the second, you know, highest number of Jewish citizens. It's also like...

that number fails to represent how Jewish the city is in terms of its cultural milieu and like the fabric of New York, right? And I think it's shocking to a lot of people and even to me, I have to say. That someone with his politics on this conflict just wanted Democratic primary. And did it without shifting from that. No. He used to support defund the police. And now I think Bush says he does it and actually doesn't. He does not want to defund the police as mayor.

He held his line here. He is an anti-Zionist, I think, and is now still. Right. He said, like, Israel should not be a Jewish state. Yeah. I mean, I think that—I feel a little weird about this conversation.

Because I really, it's thorny for a million reasons, but it's also like I respect the views of people that are closest to it and I am not the closest to it. So I'm always kind of like trying to check that in me. So it's weird for me to be like, it's bad for the Jews. I'm not a Jew. I think the way this is developing within the Democratic Party is kind of dangerous. Yeah. I think the idea of like...

This is a signifier of the rich elites who control everything behind closed doors, which is both an anti-Semitic trope and something that touches on something close to being true. about how money flows in democratic politics is like a really combustible mix. I think that's right. But I'd say two other things about it being a signifier. One is it's a signifier in two directions, right? It's a signifier in one direction of being willing to stick to your beliefs.

That I think a lot of people in the base feel that even Democrats who actually agree with them will not say on Gaza and how bad and horrifying that has been. will not quite say it or sugarcoat it or will not vote with it. And so there is something both, again, I believe the belief is authentic to Mamdani, but also- It's expressive, yeah. Showing that you will stand up to that kind of pressure, right? In the other direction, it's-

showing that you will not be cowed if you're Richie Torres's, you're Fetterman's. It's showing you'll not be cowed by a different thing. Yes, exactly. The woke mob. Right? So it's become a kind of declaration of independence from that. I will just say on the point you just made about how saying something true can veer close to saying something anti-Semitic. One thing I have just appreciated about Momdani and I appreciate about the Momdani Lander Alliance. I'm a Jewish person.

It is very important. It is very important that it is possible and understood to be possible that you can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. And I'm not anti-Zionist in that way. I'm like a kind of two-state solution person who doesn't really believe that that is possible, and I'm not sure what I think is plausible at this point. But putting my own politics aside...

I very fundamentally believe, like, Mamdani is anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. And he did a very, very, very good job, in my view, in answers of making that clear. Lander acted as a very important cross-validator for him. But in a world where... Israel is going to be as brutal as it has been in Gaza and is going to play much more of a role of like a regional hegemon militarily, which is what it has stepped into.

And people are going to have very, very strong opinions, including very, very strong negative opinions on what it means for there to be roughly 7 million Palestinians who do not have equal rights and are under Israeli control. It is very, very, very important that... You just have to be able to be against what the Israeli state has become and not anti-Semitic. I think it is an incredibly dangerous game that pro-Zionist people have played.

trying to conflate those things. Because if you tell people enough that to oppose Israel is to be anti-Semitic, at some point they're going to say, well, then I guess I'm anti-Semitic. I guess I'm anti-Semitic. Yeah, that's the fear. I think that the taboo around anti-Semitism...

which is born of the worst atrocities in human history, is like a wildly important taboo that is breaking down everywhere we look. Let's be clear. Like that taboo is disintegrating. Yes. And it's disintegrating for a lot of people and it's terrifying that it's disintegrating. And I...

You know, the one thing I'll say again, and this is me like offering advice that no one asked for from the position of just like, you know, the Catholic boy from the Bronx who now lives in Brooklyn. But like, I think there's tangible, concrete things that Mondani can do.

He should be going to Borough Park and he should be going to Ocean Parkway and he should be talking to folks there and being like, we're not going to agree on Israel. Let's just say that from the beginning. I want you to feel safe. and heard, I want your communities to thrive. I want the city to work for you. Let's talk about how we make that happen. And I think they're tangible. Like, there's huge security concerns. Huge.

If you heard him on Colbert, I thought he did a very beautiful job walking that line. Yeah, I agree. You know, I remember the words of Mayor Koch, who said, if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist. And... And I had an older Jewish woman come up to me at B'nai Jeshur in a synagogue many months ago after a Democratic club forum. And she whispered in my ear, I disagree with you on one issue. I'm pretty sure you know which one it is.

and I agree with you on the others, and I'm going to be ranking you on my ballot. And I say this because I know there are many New Yorkers with whom I have a disagreement about the Israeli government's policies. And also... there are many who understand that that's a disagreement still rooted in shared humanity. Because the conclusions I've come to, they are the conclusions of Israeli historians like Amos Goldberg. They are echoing the words of an Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud al-Mer, who said,

Recently, what we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation. It is cruel. It is indiscriminate. It is limitless. It is criminal killing of civilians. These are the conclusions I've come to. Stephen, please. And by the way, I think that is a good place to end. I'll ask our final question.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? This is an oldie but a goodie, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which is the most recent novel I've read. It was one of these things that I started, put down for months and then took back up. And you know how you do that with novels where you're like, I sort of remember where we are, but the book is incredible. The second one is an incredible book that is not out yet, that I am.

able to read an advanced reader copy of. It's by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. It's called Tomorrow's Yesterday. She also got recommended in the last episode, too. It's really something else. Partly, it's beautifully written. It's two people that have... genuinely incredibly distinct perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who have been in the room at a bunch of times. So that is a great book.

And the last book is a history of the Cultural Revolution called Mao's Last Revolution by Michael Schoenhaus and Roderick McFarquhar. And I don't know why I suddenly was seized with an interest in reading about the Cultural Revolution, except that I was looking. to escape to a political environment that was like more dire and toxic than our own. So I was like, for some reason, like scramble to that. And I read, uh, that book's amazing. Although.

I mean, my God, sort of suffocating in some ways to be inside that universe. And then there are like a few whiffs of familiarity that are unnerving.

Chris Hayes, always such a pleasure man. Thank you. Loved it. This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Amin Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Annie Galvin, Jan Koble, and Chris Stinlin.

We have original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.