‘Hot Girls 4 Zohran’, ‘Cool Girls For Capitalism’: Inside the mayoral election of the century
Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeNew York: It’s the night before Halloween, a Thursday, and a couple of hundred young people dressed up as witches or Labubus toys are dancing at a warehouse-style bar beside an elevated subway station in Brooklyn.But this is no ordinary Halloween shindig. It’s a “party with purpose”, as they say, run by Hot Girls For Zohran – an unofficial grassroots campaign group supporting Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of New York City.Look around and you’ll find volunteers in campaign shirts that speak of rent freezes and a $US30 minimum wage. You’ll see QR codes where people can sign up to doorknock. “You know what’s really spooky?” one sign says. “There are still New Yorkers who have never heard of Zohran.”Campaign groups such as Hot Girls 4 Zohran and Cool Girls For Capitalism have cropped up across the city.Credit: Michael KoziolThat seems hard to believe. Mamdani, the 34-year-old state assembly member who upset the establishment by easily winning the Democratic primary in June, has fast become a national and even international figure. He is, polls suggest, days away from becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York, and the second democratic socialist to run America’s biggest, most important city.Young, handsome, charming, well spoken and unashamedly progressive, Mamdani is the antidote to Trumpism while tapping into many of the same populist grievances as US President Donald Trump himself. He has run a slick, social-media-driven campaign built for the times in the face of a generally hostile mainstream press.But his background, politics and promises also make him an enormously polarising figure. Some Republicans have called to review his citizenship (he was born in Uganda and was naturalised in 2018), while Trump called him a “100% Communist Lunatic” and says he won’t get any federal funding if elected.Much ink has been spilled over Mamdani’s past support for the “defund the police” movement, or his remarks about Israel and Zionism, which matter in a city that is home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. In the campaign, he has retreated from his previous stances and moved to the centre, but many voters won’t forgive or forget.His success, especially among young New Yorkers, also makes Mamdani a central figure in debates about the Democratic Party’s future. He is seen as both a symptom of the party’s problems in the Joe Biden years, and a model for how it can re-engage with voters in a post-Trump era.Miranda Devine, the conservative Australian-American columnist for The New York Post, calls Mamdani “Joe Biden’s parting gift to his party”.Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old Muslim and democratic socialist who is on the cusp of becoming mayor of New York City.Credit: AP“In the Democratic Party, young voters have been so badly let down,” she said at a debate in Manhattan on Thursday night about whether New Yorkers should fear Mamdani. “They’ve had a gerontocracy in Washington running everything – the Democratic establishment is just a decayed, corrupt rump.”Devine, who was born in New York and returned in 2019, said she understood the appeal of Mamdani, as the alternatives were not attractive. The contenders are former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations that he denies, and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican who wears a beret and is generally not considered a serious candidate.Polls released on Thursday by Emerson College and Marist University, respectively, gave Mamdani a commanding 25-point and 16-point lead over his closest rival, Cuomo, who is running as an independent – with support from the Democratic establishment – after being smashed by Mamdani in the primary.Nationally, the discourse about Mamdani centres on his status as a Muslim socialist bogeyman for conservative America and a punching bag for Trump. In New York, the campaign’s focus is at least as much on local issues. Affordability is at the centre of nearly all of them.New York is at the pointy end of a wider trend of people leaving big cities for states such as Florida or North Carolina. Rents in NYC have soared since the pandemic, with the median rent for a one- or two-bedroom apartment now $US3600 ($5500) a month – twice the national average, according to Realtor.com figures.New Yorkers earn more than the average American, but those figures are blown out by high-paying jobs in finance, law and technology. For the working-class, under-employed, essential workers and artists, the city is fast becoming prohibitively expensive.Andrew Cuomo, right, campaigns at a seniors’ centre in the Bronx. The former Democratic governor is running as an independent at this election.Credit: APMamdani’s main policy commitments aim to redistribute wealth, subsidising more services for the poor by moderately increasing taxes on the rich. He is promising universal childcare, fare-free buses, a rent freeze for about 2 million people living in rent-stabilised units and a pilot program of five city-owned grocery stores.The New York Times estimates those policies would cost about $US7 billion a year, mostly for the pledge of free childcare for all children under five, which it costed at $US6 billion. Mamdani has other ambitious plans, such as building 200,000 publicly subsidised, rent-stabilised homes over the next 10 years – likely to cost around $US100 billion.The democratic socialist plans to pay for his promises by lifting the top corporate tax rate from 7.25 per cent to 11.25 per cent, to match neighbouring New Jersey’s. He would also raise city income tax for people earning more than $US1 million a year. The campaign estimates these measures would raise $US9 billion a year.Mamdani’s supporters say his opponents prefer to focus on his attitudes to Israel or the police because they don’t want to talk about his actual plans, which are generally popular (and populist).“These are all things that have been tried, have been done before,” says Lindsey Boylan, a Democratic activist who worked for then-governor Cuomo and became his first public accuser. “But because people don’t like that, and (because) it will mean more burden on our wealthiest, people try to make him seem extreme. Media tries to make him seem extreme. But all these things have been done before.”They also say Mamdani has listened to the community and moderated his positions, citing his plans to retain police numbers and funding, and his intention to keep tough-on-crime police commissioner Jessica Tisch (if she accepts the role).Nearly 13,000 people packed into Forest Hills Stadium on a recent weekend for a rally to support Mamdani.Credit: BloombergThat will not satisfy critics such as Devine, who says it doesn’t matter what Mamdani says now. “I just don’t believe anything he says,” she told the debate audience. “He’s a shape-shifting chameleon. All politicians are, but he’s more slick at it than most.”Mamdani says he doesn’t begrudge New Yorkers who are sceptical, especially given the wall of negative advertisements about him, and welcomes any opportunity to clarify what he will and won’t do.“I will freeze the rent, I won’t defund the police,” he told Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. “I will make buses fast and free, I won’t decriminalise misdemeanours. I will deliver universal childcare, I won’t require everyone to eat halal food.”And he argued his age was an asset, not a liability. “Youth gives you an innate sense of possibility, and a humility that you don’t know enough yet. It’s time to have people around you that are not just characterised by the quickness with which they say ‘yes’ to every idea you put in front of them.”Mamdani has received a handful of endorsements from Democrats, including House leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is from Brooklyn, New York governor Kathy Hochul, firebrand congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The Times reported former president Barack Obama called Mamdani on Saturday to congratulate him on an impressive campaign and offer to be a “sounding board” if he won.On October 26, nearly 13,000 people packed a stadium in Queens for a Mamdani rally that featured Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.The campaign to stop Mamdani has drawn in a broad cross-section of big business donors, Wall Street figures, conservatives, parts of the Jewish community and some of the Democratic old guard, including billionaire former mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg.Mamdani hugs Bernie Sanders, also a democratic socialist, at a rally in Queens.Credit: APBloomberg spent $US8 million supporting Cuomo’s failed attempt to win the primary, and recently plunged another $US1.5 million into a campaign vehicle, Fix the City, which is backing Cuomo. He says being mayor of New York is the second-toughest job in America, and only Cuomo has the “experience and toughness” to get things done. Cuomo’s detractors like to say that he brings exactly the wrong kind of experience to the job.Bill Ackman, a billionaire investor who supported Trump, has chipped in more than $US1.5 million to various campaign groups – or super PACs, as they are known – opposing Mamdani. He has rejected suggestions that he is operating out of self-interest to avoid a tax hike.“Mamdani is not the right mayor because he is a socialist with no experience running anything,” Ackman says. “Rent freezes won’t reduce the cost of living for all but a select few New Yorkers and only temporarily. City-run supermarkets will have empty shelves. Free buses will become homeless shelters. And his anti-business policies, including higher corporate taxes, will kill NYC jobs and cause companies to flee.”But it’s not just the top end of town. Indeed, Mamdani has struggled in the Bronx, New York’s poorest borough. In the primary, Cuomo smashed Mamdani by 18 points in the Bronx (the same margin by which Mamdani beat Cuomo in Brooklyn).On a rainy weekday morning, I meet educational consultant Selma Bartholomew at a Panera Bread bakery in a sprawling JCPenney outdoor shopping mall in Co-op City. Far from the glamour of Manhattan, this co-operative housing development at the north-east end of the Bronx was completed in the 1970s, and it feels like little has changed since.Bartholomew was on the ballot for the Democratic primary but received only a handful of votes. She is critical of Mamdani for what she sees as his populist giveaways rather than a serious attempt to solve the problems facing New York’s most disadvantaged.Donald Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding to a Mamdani-run New York City.Credit: AP“Nothing is free. People pay taxes,” she says. “He’s using the rhetoric of affordability. He figured out that in this system, if you tell the biggest lies, you get the attention of the media.”When Bartholomew looks at Mamdani, she sees not an authentic grassroots candidate rising from the suburbs, but the son of a wealthy Ugandan family who is just as much a part of the Democratic “boys’ club” as anyone else (New York has had 110 mayors since 1665; none have been women).That boys’ club attitude is partly why Cait Camelia and Kaif Kabir founded Hot Girls 4 Zohran, the campaign group that held the Halloween party in Bushwick. The group holds frequent events – make-your-own-merch sessions, debate watch parties, a Mamdani lookalike competition, queer networking socials – in addition to hitting the streets to canvass for votes.Selma Bartholomew, who contested the Democratic primary, says Mamdani is exploiting the language of affordability but not offering real solutions.Credit: Michael KoziolSuch is the pulse of this election that many campaign groups such as this have sprung up. Venture capitalist Erica Wenger said 500 people showed up to an event last week for Cool Girls For Capitalism, a group she started with business owner Danielle Goldman to support Cuomo.“I don’t support antisemitism or socialism, so that makes my vote easy,” Wenger says.Mamdani’s all-but-guaranteed victory means New Yorkers are set to put their city government on a collision course with Washington – as well as potentially the state administration in Albany.LoadingHochul, the Democratic governor, has endorsed Mamdani but opposes tax increases on the top 1.5 per cent, fearing that an exodus of the city’s wealthiest would force her to raise taxes on the middle class to fill a budget black hole.Meanwhile, Trump could select New York as the next site for his crackdown on undocumented migrants and crime, and make good on his threats to withhold federal funding.Ross Barkan, an author, journalist and Mamdani associate (Mamdani managed his state Senate campaign in 2018), says New York voters won’t be afraid to make enemies with the powers-that-be elsewhere.“This is, in every sense, a change election, and New Yorkers are largely excited to see what comes next,” he recently wrote on his blog, Political Currents. “We need fresh energy in this town.”Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. 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已发布: 2025-11-02 18:00:00
来源: www.smh.com.au
