Opinion | Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics

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. Zohran Mamdani is a 33-year-old, dangerously inexperienced legislator who’s passed just three bills. Wants to defund the police. He actually wants to move the homeless into our subway stations. Zohran Mamdani, a risk New York can’t afford. Cuomo had this gigantic super PAC with tens of millions of dollars purchasing all the advertising money can buy. And then you had Mamdani, who was running a campaign on a very different theory of attention, a theory of viral attention. So what’s your take? I should be the mayor. New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called halal-flation. Today we’re going to get to the bottom of this. Did you know that Andrew Cuomo gutted the pensions of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers? The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it. 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 an 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, who 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 in politics. “The Sirens’ Call” to join me. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. It’s great to be back. So Zohran Mamdani won the primary. You sure did. You just wrote a book about political attention, and this was one of the most intentionally remarkable and innovative campaigns I’ve seen. Totally so I want to hear the siren’s call analysis of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. So the first thing I would say about him is he genuinely came from nowhere. Like, I live in New York City and spend between 16 and 20 hours a day reading about and thinking about politics. And I knew there was a Democratic socialist Assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani. I didn’t even know he was running for mayor until he popped up in my Instagram feed or TikTok. So at one level, 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? Yes And who did you vote for? The million dollar question. Trump. 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. Most of these people are working families. They’re working one to two or 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, who should I vote. Either side will go ahead and send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. 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 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 metro cards is totally unaffordable. Myself my name is Zohran Mamdani. I’m going to be running for mayor next year. Wow! Yes. Yes, sir. And I’m going to be running on that platform. I’m going to vote for you. Your energy is — Thank you, Thank you. My energy is getting up to inflation. What struck me about that video when I saw it was you think of 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 at the end, when he’s like, I’m running for mayor. I was like oh, and 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 the infamous noctua 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 features and is familiar. And then he’s doing this really innovative thing. 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 2 is much more algorithmic. You can come out of nowhere much easier and very visual. Vertical video, not primarily text based. Zohran was not dominant as a figure in text on X. No, it was videos. It was visuals. It was hit fucking. The graphic design in that campaign was beautiful. Yeah, there’s a great New York Magazine piece about this, and he’s a handsome guy, too, I gotta say. Great smile. Always in a suit. So highly recognizable outfit. I mean, he was very visual. Like there was an incredibly consistent visual grammar. Totally right. There are very certain filters on most of his videos. And then when he would do more like videos about more intense subjects like ice, they would take those videos, those filters off. Yes or make a starker one. His I mean, his mother is right. Like an amazing filmmaker. Exactly right. The visual 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. Or Trump on Twitter. Trump on Twitter. Trump was truly native to what Twitter is. You’re right. That’s a great point. Yes I’m thinking Democratic candidates, candidates, but Yes, Donald Trump and Twitter in 2015. And the way that his performance on Twitter became the way that people a lot of people came to know him 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. It’d be true if he was doing whistle stop, whistle stop tours the guy can talk. Yeah, he is a very talented communicator, so I don’t want to overstate the degree to which the medium is determinative. Could make short form videos and they wouldn’t work as well unless you. He’s got rizz like he just does. I think 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 what his foil was. Andrew Cuomo and zohran Mamdani were perfect foils for each other. Totally like you could not have scripted it better. And Cuomo had this gigantic super Pac behind him. And there was this real sense, I mean, correctly. So from any normal rules of politics, that how is Mamdani or anyone else going to climb uphill against the amount of attentional artillery that Super Pac could and would buy. And we know that they were just absolutely dominating the airwaves 24/7 7, basically. I cannot overstate to people outside the New York viewing area, O.K, how insane the same ad, I saw this ad was I saw this ad one time. I mean, I saw it like 17 times in this one experience. Yes Yeah. Because I was at a bar. Same and they had a TV on. Exact same. There was a moment in the middle of the campaign. Real fortune was on people 21 times. 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, Hamdani was a juggernaut. He didn’t. Cuomo didn’t exist. And in fact, I think this he was hiding from it, by the way, too. But like he didn’t exist. That’s another thing we can get to. Is there. Because there’s what Mamdani 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 so. 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 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, the SEC and the D CCC 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 your and what you’re doing is buying attention through second ads that are going to run on the local news in the three weeks before the election. Yes that is 90 percent of the campaign. I mean, the last 10 percent is. Yes You got to go. You go to events and you shake hands. I mean, maybe it’s 80 percent I’m 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 it backfired. 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. Yeah and I think 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 attention. Yeah you were almost watching between Cuomo and Mamdani. It’s like an almost pitch perfect version of the old attentional strategy versus a pitch perfect version, exactly of the most modern Native attentional strategy collide. And I do think the underlying product here matters. Cuomo is just a bad product. He was a scandal ridden, high negatives, very widely disliked former governor who had had to resign in disgrace running against this 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 SEC or the SEC, 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 mayoral primary 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 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 like that. You have to win if you’re going to win Ohio. If you’re going to be 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 their phones. So well, how do you get to them. I mean, you really have to 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. Like, how will they know. And if you don’t have a theory for that, that’s other than well, we bought a bunch of points on TV. You’re cooked, you’re cooked. It’s not going to work. We did this show a couple months ago about attention, and 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 some of them would come to talk to me later. And they were like they were trying to do video and they were. And I have just thought a lot since then about why their videos are so bad. Why the 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 the big beautiful bill or something go viral. Like, I know you can because I do it and 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. But you could put people in an interesting looking room. You could. Yeah, maybe it actually needs to be the principal, who has the taste. But the absence of taste among people who are well, you’ve been to Washington. You see people dress political communicators well, but that’s it’s weird to me. Here’s a structural 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 in a way that in a lot of places, Republican politics aren’t. Now, Republican politics are coalitional politics, too. You’ve got opposing interests, and I don’t want to minimize that. All Democratic politics in a pluralistic society are coalitional politics, but Democratic politics are particularly fraught, I think. I don’t think that’s a crazy thing to say. 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. Like 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 like she’s the Nancy Pelosi is not a great public communicator. She is a legendary all time great like manager of coalitional tension. I think the coalitional politics of Democratic politics often involve 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. O.K, but let me push on this a little bit. I don’t like I think you’re throwing this out there I think you’re right about Hakeem Jeffries here. A Chuck Schumer, right. Absolutely but you think about a Cory Booker. You think about quite skilled. You think about a Chris Murphy. Yeah right. There are many, right. There are high level. Why can’t they do. Yeah they are. Chris Murphy walks across Connecticut every year. Yeah, he does that too. Cory Booker did the 25 hour filibuster or not quite filibuster but 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. Yeah and he’s one of my favorite guests on the show. I mean, what Donald Trump represents, I like listening to Talking to him. Their ability to translate out of this Senate speeches, they’re even they’re good podcast guests. If you were to rank Senate Democrats on how good they are on a podcast, Murphy and Booker would be high up there. Yeah, definitely. But 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, but something you earn yourself or you look for as a skill in other people, 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 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, is like about there’s a question about being Native to New forms, where I do think that for instance, I’ve like it’s been really interesting to watch. Here’s an example. Your colleague Jamelle Bouie, who is one of my favorite writers and public intellectuals in America, love having him on my show. He’s basically our age, roughly our cohort. Like he’s gotten super good on TikTok. Yeah and it’s been kind of wild to watch because I look at it, I’m like generationally we’re the same. And he’s created a following. And he now like he’s come to inhabit the form in this really interesting way to me as I watch this development, I have made a few TikTok videos and they’re not that good. Yes And I think I don’t mean Yeah, I’ve not seen your TikTok, but 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 weird. We talked about grammar or there are these differences of different mediums, formats, visual grammars and 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. I think 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 textural sense Mamdani has for the format I think is real is both personally his talent and the people that are working with him. Which, by the way, I would love to read a reported piece on that, how they did it, but I think that you can’t just 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, it’s not an unbelievable number, but there’s a lot of rich people who run for office because they could self-fund, and then you would have a lot of people who had experience. I mean, Mike Pence had been a talk radio host, right. Kerry Blake, right, had been a news anchor. 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 the 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. So 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 people. And basically what it finds is that the precincts that are really 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 Yeah, it might cross-correlate something between the income stuff you’re talking about. I mean, I think I understand. Look, I understand. My mom and I were talking about this because she was my mom. Mom was talking about the Bronx. And the Bronx was like a Cuomo borough, which is ironic because the whole like, if you go back to the whole opening bid of Mamdani, 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 right. He ran up the numbers in the DSA precincts. But he also made he also 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 voters. I think the devil or familiarity matters to voters, often on the kind of periphery of an electorate. In a Democratic primary. But I don’t have a good theory of why it was the case that if it was, there are other patchworks that I could theorize better than those. What do you think. I don’t know either. I mean, I think you could come up with a couple of arguments. One is that maybe that’s cross-correlating something that’s just informational. right. Those voters were less attached to the discourse. Not telling the algorithm. They wanted to see a bunch of Mamdani videos. They know who Andrew Cuomo is, and they’re more mobilized by interest groups. It used to be more powerful, but that were largely like the interest groups largely signed up with Cuomo, the unions and have relationships the establishment Democratic Party, NYHA housing. Cuomo did very well, where there was like intense NYHA housing. And that had to do with relationships with the groups in housing. 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. So if you are making if you’re a voter making $35,000 a year, you’re living in NYHA housing, you are much more exposed to crime and disorder than a voter in, Williamsburg making $137,000. Yeah Adams won, running against crime and disorder, running up the totals among, working class voters. So we know that politics is powerful. I have this 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 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. And I voted against my material interests in this election. So everyone gets to do that. Yeah, as did I. So I think you can cut politicians into these two categories there, the politicians for whom you can identify a policy that stands for them to 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 four or five, right. It was freezer rent. It was free buses. It was free daycare. It was publicly owned grocery stores. All of 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, 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. They had 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 detailed, and a lot of them are great. But 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 a 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 bumper sticker level of mimetic communication. And I kind of do lament it. But it’s also true abundance like 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, 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 what I mean. Like, certain people have talents for things. Like, so part of it I do think 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 one plus 1 equals 2 thing happening there. He goes up to Fordham Hill 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, he’s like, we’re going to try public grocery stores. The grocery. Now, to be clear, the grocery business runs at margins of like 1 percent to 3 percent So it’s not private profit that’s making the price of groceries more. I’m not convinced that the solution is going to solve the problem, particularly in this case, which I think is the most dubious. But it’s also, I don’t 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 was exposed to as getting caught trying on something. Yeah, right. I do think this gets to something very real. Are the only policies that can become memetic in this way. These 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, right. Ongoing rent freeze. Can policy be memetic? 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. And that’s not my belief. But there is a way in which to survive. Memetic products have to be simple. Yeah, memes are simple. The thing behind the meme might be complicated and good or bad or whatever, but. But there is just something for something to get energy. I think it has to be like, 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, right. Medicare for all dominated people. Forget this now. Every 2020 Democratic primary debate that 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 Medicare for all. Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders campaign manager, was on my show like earlier this year or maybe late last year saying, we would have gotten as close as we could get, but we basically we would have expanded the age range of Medicare. right. And everybody knew it. But the reason that it could dominate so much was that. It unleashed controversial energy. Yep right. There was a debate. Would you abolish all private health insurance. Were you willing to raise taxes on middle class Americans to fund potentially salient because conflict is potentially salient. Exactly and so one thing about these very big policies that are somewhat impractical in their nature is that they create that. Yeah, I don’t believe that. I’m saying that from the POV of the establishment, a lot of policy is built for compromise. Yeah right. Well, these are not built for compromise. We actually I think we have a good tangible example in recent history in exactly this context from the mayor that Zohran Mamdani says was the best mayor of his life. That got the New York Times’ very mad at him for saying so, which was Bill Palacios universal pre-K. As a non-new York Mayor, Bill Blasio sure seemed like a perfectly good mayor to me. My kids in pre-K, I’m like, I’m a Blasio. So I got some talk about universal pre-K for a second De Blasio, universal pre-K. Universal pre-K did have that memetic energy. It’s simple and straightforward every kid in the city has to go to kindergarten. Yep 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. It 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 it’s like one of the biggest pre-K in the whole city. It’s 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 kids going here for free and comes out every day, so so that’s an example. I just want to give an example of everything that you said. It was memetic policy. It cut through. It identified bill Blasio. It was one of the hugest things. They got into power. They actually did it. It actually worked. Like that is an example of all of those things happening is memetic policy. Such a good question. Always like this. And then two does it then create a governing problem. Yeah, because look, here’s the thing I see a lot of people on Twitter celebrating mamdani’s win. And I think mamdani’s win is exciting. But I’ve said this before the downside for him was not that he loses a primary like the bad outcome is that he wins and fails at governing, right. 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 said, has already said no she has made it clearly a no. Like 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, Sam, and there are people who are ideologically aligned with Mamdani, and they do not think this is a good idea. Yeah, I know exactly. I know people in non-profit housing who feel the same. It’s over do it for one year. O.K, 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, oh, you have these other programs you can apply to for relief if you like. All that stuff is complicated and just make a market less profitable to 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 O.K because your supporters know you tried, or is it kind of like a structural thing where you have set yourself up for failure. I mean, 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 we’ll try it. And if it doesn’t work, say, love you. Yeah and I love that answer. Politicians never give that answer. They never give that answer. Like, let’s the person who really most embodied that spirit is FDR. If you go back and you read about the first 100 days. And 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. A lot of that stuff did not work fully failed. Like a lot of the interventions failed. They did a lot of clunky stuff, there was a lot of now totally different time. He had these enormous mandate. It was a crisis. But I will say that I like the idea of experimentation. I like the idea, the idea of these ideas coming from outside of what 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 the zeitgeist, but also to listen to voters. 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, that you could see this in the 2024 election, that it had to do with the inflationary crisis of 2022, 2023, but that inflation had left an attention to an affordability crisis that had been building for a very long time in homeownership and health care, et cetera, that was not going to go away. And so future politicians were 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. That was 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 cap, the price. Yeah the concern is whether or not from a policy perspective, my concern with Mamdani. Mamdani talks a very, very good. I don’t just think game like I think he gets that you need housing supply. Yeah but he is. His plans are all public housing, which is fine, but that’s much harder. And then when he talks about market rate housing, he is as I really believe in market rate housing 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 both raise the price. And so I really think there’s a question about whether or not he can deliver affordability if he’s not able to increase supply. 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. O.K, fine. Because maybe in three years, we have a lot of housing coming online. But if you at this level of supply creation, you freeze rent for an extended period of time, you might begin to constrict supply down the road and create a bigger problem for the future. And the thing is, nobody’s got 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, and we make it hard to build houses. You could. I’m very skeptical that Mamdani 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 3K. Yeah but you could conceptually do free daycare. You definitely do it nationally, right. 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, one person’s price is another person’s income. And we saw, I think, in the last week, we start to see in the case-shiller housing price index, some flattening, maybe even going down right after a period where they’ve been going up for the last five years. There is a real genuine material conflict in New York City between renters and homeowners. Like, 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 probably be a real problem. And you will not be excited about Mamdani or anyone come in saying, we’re going to build a ton of public housing next to you. Yes, that’s the other thing that’s very difficult about public housing and affordable and affordable housing is that all these homeowners who want their high home prices do not want that down the block from them. And that material fight huge problem in California, 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 there is no 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. There’s can. Can Zora Muldowney 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 yeah, he was never able to narrativize that. I think that’s true 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, yeah, I mean, things did change. I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. The Affordable Care Act was 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 Obama never did. They never build the wall. They don’t build the wall. But Donald Trump has his way of communicating throughout his entire presidency. And I mean, he loses re-election. So it doesn’t work exactly, but that he is always it’s like somehow he’s a president, but he’s not responsible for what happens. 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 he’s not 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. 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 this 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 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 and you can get a long way by showing up a lot. I mean, Eric Adams actually does this pretty well. And I thought there was a club opening. What’s that. There’s a club and this is Chuck Schumer’s legendary talent. Not as mayor, as Senator, but before that, as Congressman, there is a little bit of 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. Can’t be a total failure as a mayor. Like the city has to feel like it feels. It has to feel like there’s tangible improvements in people’s lives. But that alone won’t be enough. You basically need both. 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, having people up, eating a slice of pizza. Drinking water like that. 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 the key part of that. Let me go back to the other question that I tucked in there, which is I think this gets to 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, which is to make it a performance. Yeah he performs everything, including war, including war, the deportations, the sending PeopleCode to foreign prisons and having Kristi Noem pose at them in her, in her flak jacket that there’s a way that he feels to me. I mean, it’s a genuine, intentional innovator. Say what you will about Donald Trump and that he is trying to make much more of policy into a public performance. I mean, there is a reason. I mean, Doctor Phil is embedded with the ice teams. Doctor Phil is embedded with the ice teams. His cabinet is full of people from TV, be they reality TV stars from one period Sean Duffy, all the way over to the Secretary of defense, who’s a weekend cable news host. So there is this way in which I think Trump has been trying to 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. Like, he’s 10 points underwater and all the stuff’s polling at exactly what you would predict from thermostatic public opinion and from 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 negative bully pulpit. And so 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 intentional 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 re-election. 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 would say this is true for Mamdani, right. Mamdani as a discourse object, Trump is a discourse object. It’s not like Zohran Mamdani is the only person to have recently won a Democratic primary anywhere in the country in Jersey, right. Just over Mikie Sherrill. Yep just one House member just won the primary for governor. Cheryl, I think, is an incredibly impressive politician, a former Navy helicopter pilot. I find her very, very, very charismatic. Yeah, she’s very good. More on the moderate side of things. There was not a debate after those wins. Does every Democrat need to reckon with the victory of Sherrill 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 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 intentionally salient qualities. And we talked about this last time, which is high risk, high reward, high volatility stuff. Like there, 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 were saying, does this kind of attentional dominance net out as a positive. It can clearly win. It can clearly win primaries. It clearly can help you exert a cultural and narrative force and an ideological force and an ideological force, just like above and beyond what you would be able to do. AOC is not like the only Democrat who has knocked off another Democrat in a 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, a lot. Like I recently was talking to a bunch of various people in The 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 in 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. And so these things work and don’t work in different places. And I don’t think we have a good way of answering the question of when is it valuable to drive this kind of attention. And when is it. O.K, so here’s what I would say. I think one place where it matters is presidential politics. Yes so I think presidential politics, 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 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. So we’re seeing right now, Donald Trump recreates some of the thermostatic public opinion on immigration, that he had the first term, 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 potential trade than there are for the incumbent. And they so they work better for the challenger than they do 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 mimetic 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 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. 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 just the expectation is if you have won the Democratic primary, you have won. The fact that is not a complete expectation with Mamdani speaks to the way that there’s at least a belief that he will generate a 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 O.K for him in New York City, because, again, it’s so dominated by Democrats. But this 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 Yeah. Then what do you do with these positions. You’ve taken it practically. If you’re dealing with a general electorate that is not all the way to your side. So I always think just to finish this, one example in it is that in Ohio, when JD Vance ran for Senate, Mike DeWine, who was like an intentionally not very skilled, kind 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 6, 7, 8 points. It was not an amazing performance, in part because he had taken very, very mega positions. Now, has it worked out for JD Vance. Yeah but not in the sense that JD Vance overperforms with general election audiences like this is where it’s like, Yes, 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 wheezy but worthwhile is that, 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 go to Brad Lander, who came in third in the first round of voting was that there was all these cross endorsements and this 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. There kind of wasn’t that Mamdani wasn’t running against the Democratic establishment. He wasn’t running against like, there wasn’t this see this amongst the left flank of the Democratic Party of like, these corporate sellouts, they suck. There was not very much of that. There was directed at Cuomo. But it was a pretty 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 so the idea that the expectation is that the Democrat wins is like a fairly recent vintage Giuliani won twice. Bloomberg was three terms. That was 20 years in a row of Republican mayor. I think 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, 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 a true people, and then the 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 hit 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 effect because TikTok. I mean, people forget this. Tick TikTok was like this 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 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 Wright Wright, 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. And to me, this was both politically meaningful and substantively meaningful because it undercut the central argument of Cuomo’s candidacy they all hated. Not all Jessica Ramos endorsed him, but 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 rule that ends up happening, which is like if you’re hearing that the guy’s just terrifying, scary figure who’s an extremist. But then the other candidates in the field are cross endorsing with him and appearing with him like it. It makes it much harder for that to land. And I think to again, to mamdani’s credit, I agree with you that he does not have I think it’s well said that he animated by synthesis as opposed to his resentments. His affect is welcoming and pluralistic and also not like they’re out to get me like he has. He really just does not portray that at all, which I think can be a real problem for a certain form of left populist politics. Like it’s a rigged system, it’s all rigged. The fix is in which again, he got $25 million dropped on his head by super Pac money. Bloomberg wrote a $5 million check two weeks. There was a little bit of a rigged game against him, but he did not let that. If you look at that again, if you look at that walking the length of Manhattan video, 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 the message and everybody is shaped by their mediums. Because obviously a lot of people on TikTok are in vertical video who are not like Zohran Mamdani or don’t even 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, right. I think it was the rise of these central communication platforms of politics being high conflict. Yeah, high engagement like compressed text. Yeah 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. They’re not well suited for on the one hand. On the other hand. The things that make deliberative, liberal democracy kind of function, those habits of mind, the way you hear when Barack Obama, Barack Obama is not good at Twitter. He’s just not his 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 form of 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, 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 really our first vine politician. Yeah like, I mean, people forget all this, but I think there was something there. His grammar was not Twitter’s grammar, kind of goofy. Kind of. His grammar was TikTok’s grammar. Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point. I mean, I’m thinking this through. So I think I agree that social media, as constituted over the last tech 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. Deliberation Yes, right. So, I have a whole chapter in the book about lincoln-douglas debates and how different that is, not that should be the model for everything the. So I agree with that. I think it’s I’m thinking through this idea of the visual grammar and kind of like affect of the vertical video as being less conflict populist in its nature, which I think is 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 methods are great. One minute clips in his speeches, though, there are great one minute clips in his speeches. But like his speech performance, his vertical video performance is a 10 out 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 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 partly this has to do with the weird black box of the algorithm. Is they do start to get more and more conflict embracing because the clap back video and the posting of the comment of someone said something and then respond to the comment and it’s up there in a window. And the stitching stitching became this thing that really generates conflict. Like, here’s this 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, there’s a little less true now, but still is basically true. Is it. It’s a compression mechanism. Yeah and the move towards a languid podcasting. Where we’re just like sitting here vibing for two hours. Or longer. I was amazed, I knew this was out there. But on the abundance store, I went and did some of these podcasts Lex Fridman and others, where it’s really do three to four hours. But even in this what you can do, you can put up, six minute videos. I mean, I have videos that go out on TikTok that are 6, 12 minutes. Actually, a lot can be in there. Yeah, it is not that it is compressed compared to the lincoln-douglas debates, but it is a lot less compressed than what the original Instagram box allowed you than what the dominant for a very long time. Twitter box allowed you then what if Facebook post offered. And then I mean, what Mamdani was doing a ton of was podcasting. Yeah right. And then getting clipped from that and then it gets clipped. But it does come in the context of these much longer conversations that created a different vibe between people. I actually find it very hard to maintain. I find 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 extended social dynamic, devious of you. Well, it’s not. It’s actually sometimes a problem. Sometimes I have to cue them. Remember, you hate. 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. Yeah and so it’s not that it’s all like all vertical video is going to be sunny, right. 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 this is I’m just spitballing here. So like, 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. Like, we’ve got the semi apocryphal story of the 1960 debate with Nixon and Kennedy and how people listened, thought Nixon won, and people that watched thought Kennedy won. And, if you go watch that debate, Nixon just does not look that bad to me. No, I agree this a few times, and Nixon looks totally no. The reason I say apocryphal is I’m not even sure it’s true. It’s become this kind of mythos about how this works, and it’s capturing the central McLuhan insight about how much the medium structures this there was this kind of there’s a preliterate politics in America when you have very small percentage of voters who can actually read. Then you have the beginnings of radio politics and 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 blogs when we came up and 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 right. Like is the media strategy to O.K, 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. If 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. Was down the stretch. This is like in the last week, but it’s like, right. Maybe that gets back to Urdu speaking New Yorkers who share the clip. Like, 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 a centrist center, right, anti-trump network center left that I’m at this point. O.K, fine. It’s center left at this point. It’s in the big I love the boy. Tim Miller is great, but it’s in the big Democratic. It’s in the anti-trump tent. It’s in the anti-trump. 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 globalizing 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, 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. And 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, I haven’t ventured into. And the headline that comes out from it, I don’t think it was a great answer, to be very clear, is refuses to condemn globalized the Intifada. And so I thought to myself, I’m like, oh, O.K. So now we’re seeing the cost. 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 globalizing Intifada and him embracing the strategy he did meant that he had a news cycle in a city with a million Jewish voters, where people’s views on this can be very strong. That was all about him refusing to condemn globalizing Intifada, 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 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 his governorship from afar, back when he was being talked about as a presidential candidate. And then everything that happened that led to his resignation struck me as really kind of upsetting. Two things turn, but I’m open to people’s redemption, right. He wants to run a great campaign, and he’s learned a lot. Maybe he’ll be a good mayor. Who knows. I don’t think you can have. 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, I had some amazing sentences. 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 somebody who this is the way they have treated people in public life. Like that’s a bar. I want candidates to be above. But the other thing that actually closed it, that made it 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, in Gaza. And I found it so cynical, so repulsive, just such a vicious way to weaponize. I thought both mamdani’s ethnicity, but also, I don’t know what’s happening in Gaza is a horror. People should be horrified. The mayor of the whole thing just struck me as grotesque. And I knew a lot of people for whom it read that way. The thing in the debates where they got into a fight over like visiting Israel, what’s the first country you’re going to visit. 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. 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 not say it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And his answer was, no, he won’t visit Israel. I said that that’s what he was trying to say. It was such an obvious political game. Yeah, it was deathlessly cynical. And I have to say, I mean, it was also comical at a certain level. Like, to me, I mean my formative years were spent at Shabbat dinner at my friends’ 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 profound gratitude and affection for that. And my wife’s half Jewish. I’m not doing the bona fides, but it’s close to me. Like, I’m not Jewish, but it’s a culture that I love deeply and feel bound to. And so Yeah, I found it devilishly cynical deathlessly cynical, I mean comical to the point also where the other thing that complicated. This, and this is an interesting angle of this whole thing, is that Andrew Cuomo me, is a partisan from New York. The guy’s not Jewish. Yeah Brad Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani is Jewish and very devoted to questions around Israel. He’s also the highest ranking Jewish official in New York City. And so you have Andrew Cuomo I’m like, what are we doing here. Yeah Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo is browbeating Brown. This is something I want to get at. A lot of the things that happened in this campaign happened on, a literal level and a metaphorical or symbolic level at the same time. And one thing that I thought about that moment when Mamdani didn’t condemn globalized Intifada was it had this quality of this is what he believes. 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’s not, 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 can 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 attentional in both directions. There is the Gaza as genocide, direction. And also the people who have made themselves aggressively into moderates, anti-leftist moderates. And you see this a bit with Cuomo, but you see it with Ritchie Torres. 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 delineator Israel has become the culture war. I think within the Democratic Party. Yeah and just if you want to really send a strong signal, I’m just struck by how many the signals sent for people who do not have a lot of power over America policy, American policy towards Israel are sent this issue. I think there’s 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 where 85 percent of Democrats opposed, and I think 13 percent approved. Yeah now, if you looked at Democratic legislators responses, you would not think that those were the numbers. It reminds me a little bit, and I think it’s actually a dangerous gap for the party because someone will come into that vacuum Donald Trump really exploited a huge gap between the elites in the party and 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, Tel Aviv, outside Tel Aviv, it’s the second highest number of Jewish citizens. It’s also that number fails to represent how Jewish the city is in terms of its cultural milieu. And I said, 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 like that. That is really like. And I think it and did it without I mean without shifting from that. No he used to support Defund the Police. And now I think both says he does it and actually doesn’t. I think 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 right. He said like he Israel should not be a Jewish state. Yeah I mean, I think that and I think you’re right that there’s I think there’s something I mean, again, I feel a little weird about this conversation because I really I. It’s thorny for a million reasons. But it’s also, I respect the views of people that are closest to it, and I am not the closest to it. So I’m always 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, but I think the idea of 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 that 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 expressive. Yeah showing that you will stand up to that kind of pressure. Yeah right in the other direction. It’s showing that you will not be cowed. If you’re Ritchie Richie Torres, you’re Fetterman’s. It’s showing you will not be cowed by a different thing in the party. Like the woke mob. So it’s become a kind of declaration of independence. It’s a signifier that I will just say, on the point you just made about how saying something true can very veer close to saying something anti-Semitic. One thing I have just appreciated about Mamdani, and I appreciate about the Mamdani Landherr 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 is possible. And I’m not sure where what I think is plausible at this point. But putting my own politics aside I very fundamentally believe 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 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. Yeah, it is very, very, very important that there like just have to be able to be anti against what the Israeli state has become and not anti-Semitic. And it’s going to be it is 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 you 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. Yeah and I think the taboo around anti-Semitism, which is born of the worst atrocities in human history, is like an extremely a wildly important taboo that is breaking down everywhere we look like. Let’s be clear, that taboo is disintegrating and it’s disintegrating for a lot of people. And it’s terrifying that it’s disintegrating. And the one thing I’ll say again. And this is me offering advice to know and ask for from the position of just like the Catholic boy from the Bronx who now lives in Brooklyn. But I also think there’s tangible, concrete things. I think there’s tangible, concrete things that Mamdani can do. Like he should be going to 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. Like, let’s talk about how we make that happen. And I think they’re tangible. Like, there’s huge security concerns. Huge have you heard him on Colbert. I thought he did a very beautiful job walking that line. Yeah, I agree. 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 jeshurun, 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 say this because I know there are many New Yorkers with whom I have a disagreement about these really 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 Olmert, who said just 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 Steven. I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would 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 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 Is Yesterday.” Just got recommended in the last episode, too. It’s really something else. I mean, 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 Schoenhals and Roderick MacFarquhar. It’s a history of the Cultural Revolution, 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 situation, escape to a political environment that was more dire and toxic than our own doom reading. And so I was like, for some reason scrambled to that. And I read that book’s amazing. Although, I mean, my God, suffocating in some ways to be inside that universe. And then there are a few whiffs of familiarity that are unnerving. Chris Hayes, always such a pleasure, man. Thank you. Loved it.