I'm in a depressed New York state of mind

An awful mayor's race that's a microcosm of the biggest problems afflicting the Democratic Party and blue states

This was something I didn’t anticipate even mentioning, much less writing the bulk of a post about, but I’m an election junkie and the dynamics of this particular race are fascinating in a mostly very bad way. A week from Tuesday, the Democratic primary for mayor of NYC will happen. I don’t live there and don’t get to vote so you might be wondering why I’m fixated on it. The answer is because it’s the biggest city in the country, its cultural and economic significance are much bigger than its size and the race exemplifies many of the problems Democrats have when it comes to governing. It’s also a good example of how sometimes in politics your realistic choices all suck and you have to decide which one sucks the least.

In the interest of full transparency, I haven’t followed the race very closely. There are many writers I read and follow on X who have and they have all given me some great insights into what is going on. You don’t have to know a lot to figure out how bad it is.

There is at least one good candidate running and maybe two, but they have no chance of being nominated. The Republican primary is technically happening, too, but it’s just the same person who ran last time and he’s a joke. Eric Adams, the incumbent who was under indictment until Trump had the case dismissed on BS grounds, is running for reelection as an independent. There is also a former assistant US Attorney running as an independent.

The biggest deal is the Democratic primary as NYC is solidly blue and whoever wins the primary tends to be the next mayor.¹ There really are only two possible nominees. The most likely is Andrew Cuomo. For those in need of some memory refreshment, he resigned from the governorship in 2021 after being credibly accused of sexual misconduct. Even before that, his ethics were never good. He’s been a machine politician for his entire career and is nobody’s idea of a decent person.

As governor, he oversaw the closure of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which I wrote about soon after it happened. It was arguably the single biggest environmental own goal any individual American politician has presided over. He proudly boasted about it and lied through his teeth about the danger it posed to NYC. What happened when it was shut down? It was replaced by natural gas, meaning greenhouse gas emissions increased. Environmentalism for the win!

His handling of the pandemic looked good for a month and then it turned out he bungled it badly. He infamously ordered nursing homes to take in everyone, which helped kill a whole lot of people. To be fair, he was acting in real time and didn’t have the luxury of waiting around, but he still screwed up and never acknowledged it. In fact, he wrote a book boasting about how great he handled things while the pandemic was still raging. It later became an ethical and financial disaster for the publisher.

In campaigning for mayor, his plan to address the city’s housing shortage was written by ChatGPT. It caused a bit of an uproar, but I don’t care about that. What I do care about is that it’s a bad plan that amounts to very little. He’s basically running as if everything is fine and nothing needs to change.

That’s not a surprise given that he’s the choice of most of the unions. One writer I follow who lives in NYC has written about the many problems unions in the city cause that make public services lousy and increase the cost of living. Examples include the transit workers’ union lobbying to require trains to employ more people than needed and construction unions lobbying to require way more workers to be hired for certain projects than is warranted. As mayor, Cuomo will continue that.

While I’m very much a part of the more centrist wing of the Democratic Party, not every associated figure is good. Cuomo has long been a part of the more centrist wing, but he doesn’t challenge any of the party’s interest groups. There is good centrism and there is bad centrism. Cuomo is a great example of the latter.

Despite all that, I really hope he is nominated on Tuesday. Writing that makes me want to throw up, but when you consider the alternative, suddenly it’s not so bad. If Cuomo isn’t nominated, it will be Zohran Mamdani. He’s a state assemblyman and a self-declared socialist. The latter alone is disqualifying. Cuomo’s slogan should be, “Vote For The POS: It’s Important!”

Mamdani is way out in left-field on just about every issue there is. I’m not aware of a single far-left idea he hasn’t supported. That includes everything from abolishing ICE to defunding the police to wanting to get rid of capitalism. Someone like that has no business running anything.

The ideas he has campaigned on range from dumb and ineffective to catastrophic and suicidal. He wants busses to no longer charge fares.² He wants much higher taxes on the highest earners, a $30 an hour minimum wage and wants to have city-run grocery stores. He doesn’t just support existing rent control, he wants to freeze rents on all apartments subject to it.

On policing, all of the other candidates want to hire more officers, but he opposes it. He has said he wants to take police out of high crime areas and replace them with social workers. Like almost all cities across the country, NYC has seen a big decrease in crime over the last three years. He seems determined to reverse that.

He has sometimes said the right things about the need to cut back on zoning laws and on the importance of private developers in building more housing. Some of the people I follow on X have been excited about those comments and believe he’s on the side of abundance. That would be nice, but it’s just grasping at straws. Everything else he wants to do would make building more housing impossible even if zoning laws and other restrictions were eliminated entirely.

Part of his housing plan would require all new units being built to use union labor or to pay union wages. That would make building it more costly and take longer to get done. He also wants to subject all new buildings to rent control. All the zoning reforms in the world are not going to overcome that.

The status quo in NYC is not good. A lot more housing needs to be built and it shouldn’t cost a fortune and take forever to build less than two miles of subway track. Cuomo has no intention of fixing that, but he probably won’t make things worse. Mamdani, if he had his way, would make NYC into a third world country.

If Mamdani gets nominated, Cuomo has secured a spot on the ballot anyway. The race then could become a real shit show with five candidates running. I’m not going to lie, in that scenario, I would probably want Eric Adams to win. He may be a corrupt sleaze, but he’s at least good on housing. That’s the soft bigotry of low expectations if there was ever such a thing, but that’s where we’d be at.

The one bit of good news if Mamdani does become mayor is he won’t get much done. Doing most anything would require the approval of city council or the state. His plans involve borrowing more money than the state would ever give him. There’s a good chance he could wind up being the next Brandon Johnson. For those not familiar, he is the mayor of Chicago and, prior to that, a far-left, teachers’ union activist. Since taking office in 2023, he has accomplished very little of his quasi-socialist agenda and is the most unpopular mayor in the city’s history.

The biggest worry I have about Mamdani being mayor is that he would instantly become a national figure. Being the mayor of NYC is a very high profile position, but especially so if you’re an attention seeker like he is. Having him there would almost certainly elevate all kinds of stupid and unpopular left-wing ideas. It would give them air time and legitimacy, which would be used by Republicans to attack Democrats everywhere, similar to how defund the police was used in 2020.

I can assure you his face would appear on Fox and other right-wing outlets all the time. There is no better monster than a coastal, educated, upper-class socialist. Yes, they will always find some left-wing monster(s) to scare their audience with, but that doesn’t mean you should hand them one on a silver platter.

If he becomes mayor, he’s not going to hunker down and focus on doing his job. He’s going to opine on all kinds of issues that have nothing to do with it. Every chance he gets to put on a show and give his opinion on whatever the latest national topic is, he will take advantage of it. He will enjoy doing it and so will Republicans and those on the right.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of all that. It’s not like Democrats would be doomed and lose elections across the country solely because of who the mayor of NYC is. Midterms revolve around the president and their (un)popularity, not anyone else. Still, having a socialist in charge of NYC would give the party’s left-wing a big shot in the arm and boost their confidence. The more centrist wing has been fighting back since November and I don’t want that to take a hit.

I have been encouraged by the energy among the party’s centrist wing, as was demonstrated last week at the WelcomeFest gathering. There are many candidates and elected officials who are a part of it and there are efforts to create think tanks and groups associated with it so as to compete with the left. The centrist wing has a lot going for it, but the leftist wing is not going to give up and will push back. Having the mayor of the biggest city in the country on their side would give them a big boost.

What abundance advocates are up against

Regardless of who is the next mayor, NYC’s housing shortage and other big problems it faces will continue. The only question is whether they stay more or less the same or are made much worse. The cost of living there will continue to go up and more people will be priced out and leave. It’s a real shame and it goes to show how much of a challenge those of us who advocate for abundance are facing.

The fight to change the culture and values of the Democratic Party is going to be a long one. It involves fundamentally changing not just what people in the party prioritize, but part of the core of the party’s identity. This piece in The Atlantic explains what is going on very well.

The Democratic Party is partly made up of many different groups pushing for all kinds of unrelated things. That has been true since the 1960s when all kinds of new movements and causes popped up. The book Abundance discusses that, too. The goal from the New Deal up until then had been to build as many things as possible. The emphasis was on having the government and private sector do things and do them fast. A whole lot of programs were created and infrastructure of all kinds was built.

Building things did a lot of good, but it had costs, particularly environmental costs. Addressing those costs was a new challenge and required new solutions. What came from that is what we have today, which is a lot more rules and procedures. The problem is what started off as fairly modest requirements has morphed into thousands of pages of red tape, endless meetings, lots of veto points and the ability a small number of people and groups to stop anything from happening.

That’s not to say changing the way things were done was a mistake. It was a response to legitimate problems and has had a lot of success. Air quality is a lot better today than it was 60 years ago and rivers don’t catch on fire anymore. Climate change is a problem, but most other environmental problems from the 1960s through the 1980s are much better now.

Making it harder to do things in the public and private sectors is what has, often inadvertently, given rise to a culture of NIMBYism where bad faith actors can take advantage of laws passed with good intentions. California exemplifies that better than anywhere (see the California Environmental Quality Act and how much it has been expanded beyond its original aim), but it exists all over the country. It has happened on the federal level, too, with laws like the National Environmental Policy Act. What began as a small, insignificant requirement has blown up over the decades to become a behemoth that takes years to get through.³

The big fight within the Democratic Party is between those who recognize the need to build more to achieve all kinds of goals and those who don’t. A lot goes into that, but at its core it really is that simple. In the case of the NYC mayor’s race, the bad side has already won. Anyone hoping to see abundance pursued there will have to wait at least another four years.

What is keeping places like NYC from living up to their potential is not Trump or any right-wing monster. It’s the culture that has built up over the last 60 years and the refusal of many of those in the Democratic Party to address it or even acknowledge it. Many of those are on the left, but not all of them are. Cuomo is a great example of a centrist Democrat who opposes making it easier to build things not on ideological grounds, but because the party’s many different groups support him and they like things the way they are.

The most painful part of the needed fight within the Democratic Party is going to be saying no to groups they have come to know and love. I often mention unions and environmental groups as being the biggest ones, but there are others depending on the issue and the jurisdiction.⁴ It’s not that Democrats everywhere will have to say no to every group who supports them, but they will have to say no to some and be willing to take heat for it.

The way things are today in most blue jurisdictions, like NYC, process is valued over outcomes. The many different interest groups in the Democratic Party are largely fine with that because they benefit from it. By creating all kinds of barriers to doing anything, groups gain leverage by having the ability to stop things from going forward. Nobody is ever going to voluntarily give that up. What is needed in the Democratic Party is a willingness to reduce that power if not take it away altogether.

Changing the culture and values is the first step to having a Democratic Party that addresses the problems we’re facing today. Part of how to get there is to recognize that some people in their coalition are part of the problem. I’ve noticed that the biggest pushback against those arguing for abundance has come from not just the entire leftist wing of the party, but most forcefully from those whose entire thing is bashing billionaires and corporations.

If you believe billionaires and corporations are the cause of every problem on earth, then you don’t think it’s possible for unions to cause problems. In someone like that’s eyes, it’s not possible for environmental groups to be barriers to getting more clean energy nor is it possible for endless procedures and meetings to do more bad than good. Someone who thinks that is going to wind up arguing by default that everything is fine.

Those in the abundance camp recognize that the world is way more complicated. Tradeoffs do exist and you have to decide what it is that you want to accomplish. In many blue states and cities, that is not a calculation those in charge make. That has to change.

For too long, the dominant culture in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party has been one of risk aversion. Particularly in the post-Obama years, the goal has been to keep everyone happy and not upset anyone. With Trump as the face of the Republican Party, that goal became priority A-Z. The idea was that defeating him required all Democrats to be on the same page and to not fight with each other. It was the Biden Administration’s lodestar.

The problem is it didn’t work. In practice, it often meant catering to the left to avoid fighting, which made Democrats as a whole less appealing to many voters. Trump is in charge again and it’s time for a fight. Party actors are always fighting among themselves, but sometimes it’s much more consequential and this is one of those times. Way too many of those in positions of power and influence in the Democratic Party are stuck in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not going to cut it in 2025 and beyond.

Dislodging the culture of NIMBYism and deference to process that has become dominant since the 1960s is going to be a long, arduous fight. It’s not going to happen overnight and, as we’re seeing in NYC, there will be plenty of setbacks. My guess is it’s probably going to take a generation for it all to play out.

It might even require a literal generational change of power for the change in culture and values to fully materialize. Many of those pushing for abundance are Millennials. That’s not a surprise given that we have been experiencing shortages of everything, especially housing, much of which is caused by things Boomers and their elders pushed for before we were born.

Boomers are wedded to their ways and aren’t going to push for change. Generation X is kind of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It’s going to be us Millennials who have to clean up the mess the Boomers are leaving behind. Don’t feel too bad, Boomers, in 50 years some other generation will be stuck cleaning up the mess us Millennials leave for them. That’s the circle of life.

Blue state Republicans can be even worse on housing

As much as I am a committed Democrat, there are some circumstances where I can see myself voting Republican. I currently live in Texas so that’s unlikely to happen, but it might be different if I ever live in a blue state. In national elections, my Democratic loyalty is rock solid, but not necessarily in state and local elections.

Let’s say there was a Republican running for mayor of NYC or governor of New York. If they ran on cutting back on zoning laws and other building restrictions and I knew it would be their top priority and they would be willing to spend all their political capital on it, they would probably get my vote. Unfortunately, no such person like that exists that I know of. There are plenty of Republicans in blue states, but they are frequently part of the problem.

It’s really frustrating to see. The problem of housing being unaffordable in blue states is because there is too much regulation, not because they don’t spend enough money on it. A lot of times regulation is wrongly blamed for every problem there is, but in the case of housing it’s absolutely the culprit. The message you often hear from Republicans nationally and in non-blue states that the government needs to get out of the way is 100% true for housing.

Granted, a Republican running in a blue state who is serious about winning would be unlikely to talk about housing like a Republican from a red or purple state would. Railing against government and preaching deregulation is right-coded language and would likely drive away the blue-leaning voters they would need. Still, they could find a way to make it clear to those voters why housing costs so much and connect it to excessive regulation.

In practice, blue state Republicans not only don’t push for more housing, they often will do the opposite. Two years ago in New York, Kathy Hochul pushed for fairly ambitious housing legislation that would have done a lot of good. Some Democrats supported it while others were opposed. Republicans were unanimously and vitriolically opposed. The legislation never went anywhere. Republicans there, as it turned out, are even bigger NIMBYs than Democrats.

Last year, NYC enacted what is called City of Yes. It will allow for more housing to be built to help address the city’s shortage. By itself it’s woefully inadequate, but it’s a good start. Eric Adams supported it, which is why, if he’s the only one who can crush the NIMBYs, I’ll take it. There aren’t many Republicans on the city council, but the few it has voted against it. The place with the most opposition to it was Staten Island, which is the one borough of NYC that is red.

The same pattern has happened in Connecticut. The legislature recently passed some good housing legislation, but with all Republicans opposed. In New Jersey, the Republican nominee for governor is a NIMBY. In Virginia, one influential Republican state senator is leading the charge against a very modest housing reform pushed for by the Democratic nominee for governor.

You might wonder why it even matters what blue state Republicans think. By definition, they are in the minority and can’t do anything on their own. What they think matters for two reasons. First, while many Democrats are good on housing and have recognized the problem, others are NIMBYs (see California’s recent housing legislation). Second, while Democrats can pass housing legislation on their own, they still have to make all kinds of intraparty compromises that can water it down.

If legislation has bipartisan support, it means the majority Democrats can ignore their Democratic NIMBY colleagues. Legislation that is supported by mostly Democrats, but some Republicans means the former can rely on the latter’s support and not have to make expensive concessions, i.e., inclusionary zoning rules. I have written many times about the problem of everything bagels and it’s especially bad on housing. Every group supporting Democrats will want to have something in it for them. By getting Republican support, many if not all of those groups can be pushed aside and actual pro-housing legislation can get enacted.

1. Candidates in party primaries are nominated using ranked choice voting. I’m not going to go into detail about how it can work, but if you’re interested see here.

2. If you want to make bus service better, you should address what people are actually concerned about, which is the waiting time for buses.

3. A problem with laws like NEPA is they rely heavily on litigation to be enforced. Over time, judges have issued rulings that have dramatically expanded its scope and the required paperwork to comply with it. Even if there is a slim possibility that a project could be subject to NEPA’s jurisdiction, it will undergo a lengthy environmental review to avoid litigation in the future. The Supreme Court just ruled on a case involving NEPA, which looks like it could reduce its impact, but it’s no substitute for legislative reform.

4. Everything bagel requirements sometimes have toppings from civil rights groups, women’s groups, LGBT groups, small business groups, requirements to hire locally, etc.