Red Horizons Over America

This week’s elections shook up American politics and offer a warning for the rest of this decade

Off-cycle elections in the United States seldom matter greatly but the events of Tuesday, Nov. 4 constitute an exception. There can be no denying that it was a good day for Democrats and a bad one for Republicans, particularly for the Trump White House. Just one year after MAGA’s return to power with Donald J. Trump’s triumphant reelection on his third try, an outcome which few could have imagined just a couple years before, the GOP is in trouble with voters.

Democrats winning the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, which are blue-to-purple states, hardly constituted any surprise. Less pleasant was the election of Jay Jones as Virginia’s attorney general, notwithstanding that Democrat’s own troubles with the law and his making murderous threats about Republicans and even their children. Jones is a sociopath but Democrats voted for him anyway.

Tuesday’s big news was the election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, which is the plain triumph of the radical socialist Left wing of the Democrats, a turning which portends bumptious politics for the whole country for the remainder of this decade. Mamdani’s victory is a remarkable story no matter one’s politics. How a 34-year-old political neophyte whose practical experience for the job is as light as a feather managed to score the mayor’s job in America’s biggest city stands as something for the record books.

As for Mamdani himself, there’s not much to say. The son of privileged immigrants, Muslims from South Asia by way of Uganda, Mamdani possesses all the au courant progressive luxury views of his ilk, the expensively educated (his father is a Marxist Ivy League professor). Mamdani is a proud democratic socialist who is photogenic and ran an innovative social media-driven campaign. He was greatly helped that his opponents were the loathsome Andrew Cuomo, who lingers in New Yorkers’ minds as the grandma-killer during COVID-19, and the fun but hopeless GOP candidate Curtis Sliwa and his cats, who was hampered by the reality that Republicans barely exist in NYC outside Staten Island.