SAUNDERS: Will New York voters back Mamdani, turn Gotham into Detroit?

WASHINGTON

There’s a saying you hear from disgruntled voters: “It couldn’t get worse.”

Wrong. Things always can get worse. And if unhappy voters in New York City elect democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to be their next mayor, as top polls and prognosticators predict, they likely will experience an inevitable decline after wealthy New Yorkers and small businesses pull up stakes.

To be sure, Mamdani, 34, is a compelling and charismatic candidate who, as a Muslim an Indian-Ugandan immigrant who moved to New York as a child, may signal a change in attitude among young voters who want to move on from the status quo.

Sadly, many of the state assemblyman’s positions are train wrecks in the making.

Mamdani supports raising Gotham’s minimum wage — now $16.50 per hour for most workers — to $30 per hour by 2030 because, he said during last week’s debate, that wage represents the minimum it takes to live in America’s largest city.

For his part, Republican rival Curtis Sliwa countered, “You know what the corporate sector is going to do, they’re going to bring in robotics” and driverless cars and AI.

“Affordability” may be Mamdani’s watchword, but his minimum wage would make it too costly to do business in the Big Apple.

Ditto Mamdani’s support for free public transit, which would drive up the cost of government, and a freeze on rents, which would squeeze housing.

As he eyed City Hall, Mamdani’s positions moved from far left to left-of-center.

Early on, the assemblyman from Queens was a vocal proponent of the “de-fund the police” movement. In 2020, he posted on Twitter, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”

And: “What we need is to #Defundthe NYPD.”

Now that he is running citywide, Mamdani touts his plan for a Department of Community Safety “to prevent violence before it happens by prioritizing solutions which have been consistently shown to improve safety.”

As you can see, he’s learned to parse like a politician.

It’s on the foreign policy front that Mamdani won’t back down. He has refused to renounce the “from the river to the Sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” rhetoric of the anti-Israel left, and still he leads in the polls. (As the American Jewish Committee noted, the call to globalize the intifada “calls for people from around the globe to participate in rising up against Israel.”)

In September, Mamdani told The New York Times that, if elected, he would order New York police to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he steps foot in the city, because he sees Netanyahu as a war criminal who has committed genocide in Gaza.

On the one hand, his Department of Community Safety would reduce the footprint of New York’s finest. On the other hand, Mamdani wants to enforce a warrant from the toothless International Criminal Court, even though the United States is not a party to the ICC.

In 2023, Mamdani said he wanted to make the Middle East conflict “hyper-local.”

Then Mamdani added, “We have to make clear that when the foot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” That’s a two-fer, a slam that paints law enforcement officers as violent bullies and hits the Israeli Defense Forces — but not Palestinian terrorists.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Zohran hates Jews more than he hates cops or if he hates cops more than he hates Jews,” said fellow state Rep. Kalman Yeger, according to the New York Post.

In a sense, Mamdani is the New York Left’s Donald Trump before he won office: a great talker, an outsider and a cypher.

But it’s hard to see how the socialist’s economic plans don’t hurt New Yorkers’ pocketbooks; how, if he wins on Nov. 4, his low view of police doesn’t threaten public safety; or how his “river to the sea” sympathies don’t make the Middle East less stable.

Mamdani is polling ahead of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who likes to point out that Mamdani has never managed an agency or authored a bill. Cuomo is not as charming as Mamdani, and he has many faults, but he doesn’t want to kill the city’s economy.

And yet Mamdani is ahead. The youth vote may be about to take New York — and remake the city into Detroit.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.