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If Mamdani pulls it off, I hope he can keep his promises or at least give a good fight for common sense. For the moment, the USA is fucked up.
I don’t consider any of Mamdani’s proposals especially left-wing, either. They’re all bare-minimum, common-sense social programs that pay dividends. The fact that people are going mad over this tells you exactly how far gone the US has become.
absolutely disappointing that the Democrats would rather have a sex pest mayor than someone just a LITTLE more left than them.
Wait, so if candidates actually run on what voters want, they can succeed?
Amazing
It appears that the success of Mamdani isn’t so much a vote against Trumpian politics, but more a vote against the stale nothingness of the Democrats top brass
People worth their salt, especially academics, mentioned this multiple times, neoliberal politics is no longer working. People want anything away from the forty-year old, outdated policies. Populism is getting a bad rap (either unintentionally or deliberately) but it is simply democracy. When surveyed, many voters who'd be open to vote right are also willing to vote left provided that bread and butter issues that affect day-to-day lives are addressed. Mamdani won the primary because he ran on providing common sense policies that the duopoly parties and oligarchs have brainwashed many Americans to fear. It seems that Americans are gradually waking up from establishment conditioning.
If American progressives continue with running on addressing bread and butter issues, and take away the narrative from the right, then the country could be saved from fascism. There may not need be a civil war to oust the Trump administration, but only time will tell.
I have met a shocking number of Trump voters who really like or liked Bernie Sanders. That number is four, but it's still shocking and I don't go out much. Obviously they aren't paying much attention to policy or reality, but I wonder how common this is? My father-in-law is one.
There’s also kind of an answer here to why people voted for Trump.
People are angry. They don’t necessarily know the best policies to resolve the country’s poor direction, but it’s clear to so many people that what we have isn’t working.
Many of us have had a conversation over drinks with a confident person at a party who maybe has a job you don’t understand well, and who just speaks confidently about all the things that are fucked up, and what they’d do in charge. As long as they don’t make claims of “Things are mostly okay”, they can make up any target: Immigrants, trans people, government overspending on overseas programs. The key is, they have to match the voter’s anger. The rest follows naturally.
I’d also say that’s how Obama got elected. He had a message of hope and change.
I know people who voted for Trump specifically because they thought the best way to make things better in the long run was to elect someone who would make things drastically worse first. That it was necessary for him to win to teach a lesson to various dysfunctional parts of the system that would otherwise be complicit in a decline to the same destination, differing only in speed.
It's unfortunate that fascists don't give back power. I have a coworker who was getting fed up with people like Macron succeeding over here, and he was saying "sometimes I wonder about Le Pen getting elected, maybe it'll work to show how bad they really are at doing anything and people will finally vote left" (he's from Algeria, he absolutely 150% isn't a far right voter or even heavily religious himself) and when he saw Trump the first time, on Jan. 6, it finally registered in his head that you really can't give fascists a single step in the door, ever, even if they're shit at doing anything, you have to erase them everywhere because they're not shit at keeping and abusing power.
What's even more unfortunate is that the other people who are in power most of the time ("center right") don't actually want to keep fascists out of power if doing anything costs them power.
I have two points to add to this:
1 - As a liberal, there was nothing more frustrating than having to vote for Kamala, a candidate who was aggressively "pro-cop", especially as many in the country were protesting for defunding cops. Youre not going to energize most people with an angle like "You want us to vote to stop Trump?"
2 - As a person who is part of the black/immigrant community, the government has a history of ignoring us for decades. It's not the federal government, but the local government too. Systematic racism has always kept us down. And I hate to say it, Trump got a wall going. Trump has ICE harassing immigrants. These are newsworthy events, even if they're in the wrong fucking direction. But a Democrat has a history of never wanting to create a ripple as they appeal to all sides.
I don't think anyone is actually shocked. It's quite obvious that if you push policies that benefit large numbers of people, you might get support from large numbers of people. Of course that's not a guarantee, but it doesn't need to be.
But many Democrat politicians have been keen on appeasing their corporate backers by pretending otherwise, even though they knew it, we knew it, Bernie was saying it The cat has been out of the bag for a long time.
Come on, look at the alternative that the PARTY chose. Cuomo was meant to be handed that position.
The parties don't give a shit about what the public wants. They have an agenda and they're working towards it. Any time a candidate comes along and tries to really help people with policy changes they are stabbed in the front by the other party, and stabbed in the back by their own.
I can only hope, and I hope mamdani inspired a new decade of socialist resurgence in elections, not just here but in LATAM, Africa, Europe and Asia
You need to understand how politically backward the US is compared to Lat Am, Africa or Asia. My country is currently led by the most right-wing Prime Minister in our history. Even he will not talk shit about socialism, or try to stop our system of heavily subsidized healthcare (free for the poor) and university. There are communists in our Parliament, and they are seen as serious politicians, not some radical outfit.
The idea that Mr Mamdani's policies are somehow novel to us is laughable.
Can I ask where?
India
Yes, India and the US are wildly disparate cultures
Frankly I don't know what folks should have otherwise expected. The "standard" candidate was a former governor who left the office in disgrace after misconduct.
Even if people were for whatever reason skeptical of a progressive candidate, the business as usual candidate was such a bad idea that people would rather go for it than vote for Cuomo.
Now we watch as Cuomo probably ruins everything by running in the general anyway. The same reason why people say the progressives that can't win Democrat primaries should bow out for general elections without RCV applies to "centrists" in the same boat. A progressive candidate won fair and square, stay out of his way.
With Adams and Cuomo running as independents, I think they are going to split the vote of the people that weren't voting for Mamdami anyway, and is going to actually help him.
Liberals in shock at effective policy choice 🙄