The Moderate's Dilemma

I’ve got some quick-ish thoughts on the Mayor’s race this week — a race that, unlike many pundits, I was actually able to vote in because I live here and will be directly impacted by the result.

Zohran won the first round of ranked-choice voting, which after a domino-chain of factors means that he is now the Democratic nominee and has at least a head-start in winning the mayoralty in November.

And everyone and their mom is talking about this win and why/how he won. You can find that stuff literally anywhere else, and it’s boring as hell, because 99% of it is someone going, “He actually won because of this thing that I personally am interested in and talk about for my job!” So some people point to social media use, some point to focusing more on economics than on culture issues, some focus on actually being chill and likable, some focus on being accessible, some focus on having a platform of things you’d actually do to make people’s lives better.

If you stare at the news that convo is… played out at best. I would rather talk about the other side of this race, one that’s scrambling to find a new strategy in real time. But to do that we have to talk about Moderate Democrats, and what I call The Moderate’s Dilemma.

There’s almost endless talk about moderates. Usually it’s from moderates about how moderates are actually who America wants to vote for and why we should have moderate candidates.

It’s important to notice that this only happens on the left. No one in the public sphere is suggesting Republicans run moderate candidates for Congress, or that moderate agenda items take the forefront of the administration.

Part of that is because the Republican party is a radical, transformational party and anyone wanting to be moderate was exiled. The other reason is that all those exiled Republicans pretended to become centrist Democrats so they could still pull down six-figure consultant/commentator jobs in DC.

But moderation has a fundamental problem. Moderation is a triangulated position. A moderate can’t exist without something to be moderate about.

Put a simpler way: Moderate is not a political position; it’s a response to someone else’s political position.

A moderate doesn’t have beliefs; they have a response to your beliefs. They don’t have policies; they have thoughts on why your policies can’t work. They don’t get mad about problems; they get mad at the way you’re getting mad about problems.

Important to note — moderation plays great on TV, because no matter what’s happening in the news a moderate can sit back and talk about what’s wrong with it. As long as there’s someone doing something, a moderate can bounce off that with a take that fills up 7 minutes before the ad break.

And they play an important role in that TV / newspaper / online ecosystem — they comfort the comforted. Moderates exist to speak to one audience: people who everything’s going pretty much okay for. People who look at change as possible loss of what the system has given them. And they promise these people that that change is a bad idea and won’t happen.

If tax rates change, you’d lose money! How could you pay off that third car or send your kid to the private school that lets in just enough brown kids to look good on the pamphlet?

If racial norms change, you’d lose the ability to send those funny emails to the entire office!

If poor people can finally get themselves out of poverty, you’d lose control of who moves into your carefully managed neighborhoo— oh wait, you have a Homeowner’s Association, phew, great, for a second was worried you’d have to see one of those Juneteenth flags on a lawn.

And look, this is just my opinion here, but someone who strongly and proudly identifies as a moderate is a coward. Bookmark it, read it back to me in ten years, I’m ready for it. To be moderate is to be too weak and too scared to truly believe in anything. It’s a way to add a sheen of respectability to being self-serving.

Now, at this point, if you have not ever read it before, you are required to stop and go read Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail. (If you have read it, good! What you thought I was going to give you extra credit for doing the basic work everyone should have already done? No! Come back when you’ve got some Malcolm X quotes memorized!)

MLK gave us some absolute gold in talking about white moderates. Let’s quote a guy who made white people mad enough to murder him!

Fire… is what white people said when they read this, and they killed the guy. What’d your grandparents think of him? Don’t ask; they’ll lie! Fun times!

Comfortable white Americans who want to feel like the good guys while doing nothing to stop the bad guys have existed from before our country was founded. They tried to stop Lincoln. They tried to stop MLK. They will always try, and they will always use the same tired, pathetic, soulless arguments. And just like during MLK, many of them are in the press and on TV, pretending that their devotion to stagnancy is “objectivity.” And when these never-change-agents meet someone trying to change things, their questioning generally boils down to one simple question: “Shouldn’t everyone be scared of you?” [Hold on to this point, we’ll come back to it in a second.]

And that brings us to the Mayor’s race in two big ways.

First, Cuomo was a really perfect example of a moderate Dem candidate. He was a nepo baby, which already scores a ton of points for “wants things to stay how they were” because you’re keeping the last name how it was. And he’s old as hell, so from his references to his political ideas to his beliefs about if sexual assault is good or bad… he’s firmly rooted in the old school.

But Andrew Cuomo didn’t run on anything other than moderation. What will I do on crime (that’s at historic lows but we won’t talk about that)? I’ll make it feel how it used to feel! When it was safe! Like those famous 1970s shots of Times Square, or The Taking of Pelham 123! What will I do with Trump? I’ll uhhhh be mean to him like I was before!

Even when Cuomo just thought he was running against Eric Adams, his entire pitch was please forget I’m a huge piece of shit who had to abandon being the governor of this state I will make NYC great again, how it used to be at a time I cannot specify but you all remember. Ultimately, it was “I’ll keep things the same.”

So then Zohran zooms out of nowhere and is the challenger, thanks in part to the left working together with ranked choice voting and a lot of good candidates, and in part to Eric Adams being a criminal who took a blackmail deal from the President (allegedly).

And this is something a lot of dumb people paid to talk or type are missing. Then the race became a simple choice.

“I’m gonna make it how it was” VS “I’m gonna try to make it better.”

There is so much gum-flapping and heavy breathing over Mamdani’s proposals. “They can’t work! They aren’t realistic! His voters think all these amazing free things are going to happen!” And what they miss is that a lot of his voters don’t think he’ll accomplish all those things, but they sure as hell want to vote for someone who’s going to try. “60% of something is more than 100% of nothing” — a truism for life and also what I tell my kids when I take a large bite out of their dessert before handing it to them.

Zohran had 50,000 volunteers. He had fifty thousand people volunteering for the campaign. That’s more people than vote in some congressional districts.

If just Zohran’s volunteers had voted for him, he would have come in fourth on a ballot with 11 other candidates.

People got excited. I had people knock on my door for Zohran 3 times. I ran into him at a party in Manhattan. I saw his flyers and stickers everywhere, along with the brilliant “Don’t Rank Cuomo” slogan.¹ There was momentum, excitement, vibes, whatever you want to call it.

The Moderate’s Dilemma is that no one is excited about putting the engine in neutral. The people hammering Mamdani publicly were, for a large part, rich people threatening the city with their absence. They’ll sell their apartments and close their stores and go. They will! They’re warning you! Again, this presents the problem — none of that is a case for Cuomo, it’s just a negatively polarized vote against Mamdani. And negative passion might get people online or in the press or in a bar… but it doesn’t get them to the polls the same way it does when you feel like you’re voting for a change you want to see.

This is the same reason the establishment right lost to MAGA, and had to go create the NeverTrump Economy where they make newsletters buddying up with Democrats until those Democrats start talking about race or gender. Because MAGA voters are excited about a change — specifically the change of “making America a white nationalist theocracy.”

But the other way this applies to this mayor’s race is what’s happening now, post-primary. The moderate brain trust is scrambling to find some combination of candidate and message that wins in November. They’ve gotta find someone who promises that nothing will change, in an appealing way, while also painting the spectre of change as terrifyingly as possible.

Is that why Mamdani got hammered on a late-night TV show about if Jewish people could feel safe in a city he was mayor of? Or why he was asked on CNN if he “liked capitalism?” Or why Jake Tapper spent his time asking Brad Lander - the highest ranking Jewish person in NYC government - if Mamdani was an anti-semite? Or CNBC went out to find CEOs that are promising to move their companies if he wins?

Yes. Because the middle — including “living reminder that Walter Cronkite never held back reporting so he could sell a book a year later” Jake Tapper — has a vested interest in driving up the heat on the question “Isn’t this guy scary?”

And that “he’s scary” part has to be most of their strategy. Because otherwise if you’re in the “don’t rock the boat” part of American politics your choices are:

• Curtis Sliwa, previously discussed TMNT villain and cat enthusiast

• Eric Adams, guy who clearly owes Trump for a pardon and is currently the mayor of a NYC he has to prove is doing well.

• Andrew Cuomo, who just lost to this guy, but is waiting to see if his hubris levels can recharge to a point where he runs as vanilla in a race with two other flavors of vanilla.

Two last points here because this suddenly became my not so quick thoughts.

1. The old guard of politics, across the spectrum, completely misunderstands Millennial and younger voters. They cannot reconcile the combination of cynicism about the system and belief in someone who’s actually gonna go try to do something in the system. And it keeps burning them.

2. Much like happens with Presidential elections, all the math of this race is going to change on Tuesday when NYC runs the ranked-choice numbers. Zohran will find out how many people ranked him but didn’t put him first — a number that will certainly put him over 50% but might also get him over 500,000 votes. Cuomo will see how many people ranked him anywhere below first, which may have some impact on the hubris level. And, if the crosstabs get crunched the right way, we’ll have a more complete picture of who and where in the city Zohran got support.

Luckily there are five more months until the general, so this can cook while everyone deals with the other huge problems happeni— oh no, this is just gonna be a proxy for who the nominee is in 2028?²  

Fun. Fun times.

1  Reminder to self: write about ranked choice voting.

2  Reminder to self: explain that the winners of primaries should be decided by getting the most votes by people allowed to vote in the primary.