The Shocking Win that Wasn't Particularly Shocking

 In what some would classify as a surprise, Zohran Mamdani was elected yesterday as Mayor of New York. Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist (so part of Bernie Sanders' party, though Mamdani ran as a Democrat), espoused a whole raft of progressive and socialist policy plans, and has been public with his support for Palestine. His opponents included the former Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and the head of the Guardian Angels (a pseudo-vigilante/neighborhood watch group), Curtis Silwa. The current Mayor, Eric Adams, dropped out of the race a few months before the election as he is generally despised.

Now, as someone from Southern California, and as someone who has young children, I haven't really  followed the election in NYC all that closely. But my general take away is really this - if you take away Mamdani's ethnicity (Indian, born in Uganda, and Muslim) - there really isn't anything shocking about this election. With one exception that I will get into.

Here's why it wasn't that shocking. Mamdani's views and policies were based around the idea of making NYC more affordable and making public services more efficient. That's basic bread and butter stuff, and the anti-rich tilt he had is bound to be popular in a modern era where the gap between the wealthy and everyone else grows more and more each day. But rather than being just a policy guy, Mamdani is also a capable communicator. He's telegenic, and can deliver speeches with the same kind of emotional punch as Barack Obama. And not surprisingly, his campaign, knowing that Mamdani was their best asset, utilized social media, particularly short videos on TikTock, etc., to get his message out. So, Mamdani not only had a message that resonated with New Yorkers, but he also had an effective communication methodology. 

In contrast, his opponents neither had a good policy message for voters, nor were they particularly good at communicating those messages. Silwa, the Republican in the race, had a message that New Yorkers appreciated for its eccentricity, but not for the actual policies he espoused. 

Cuomo, meanwhile, ran a campaign on his experience, which makes sense on paper (he is the former Governor, after all, and was Secretary of Transportation under Clinton), but only allowed Mamdani to attack Cuomo on his failures while Governor. And as Cuomo had to resign in disgrace but a few years ago, there was a lot to attack. And Mamdani attacked that record savagely in every debate.

The only wildcard in the race were the plutocrats and billionaires who poured millions of dollars into the campaign on Cuomo's behalf. Meanwhile, Fox News devoted so much attention to the race, that people in Kentucky were contacting state and local officials IN KENTUCKY asking how to vote in the Mayoral elections in NYC. 

But all that attention - from the President (who endorsed Cuomo) on down - only existed to try to reverse the flow of gravity. And, in fact, it likely strengthened Mamdani's message, because Mamdani's campaign suddenly became part of the overall narrative of the 2025 elections (which almost uniformly went against Trump). It's in that context that I learned about this race. 

And it is because of that broader context that this local election provides consequences for the country as a whole. Let me give you one example: the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, pointedly refused to endorse in this race, even though he represents New York in the Senate, is a resident of NYC, and Mamdani was the nominee of the Democratic Party (and was also featured in one of the Democratic Party's hype videos it aired yesterday), and was way ahead in all the polling. By every metric, Schumer's refusal to do endorse in this race was a disaster for him. The kind of disaster that could easily lead to a well-funded primary challenger. To stave off this outcome, Schumer will have to take a harder line in the negotiations on reopening the government.

Moreover, other Senators who favor fighting over caving to the GOP's demands on the budget can argue that yesterday's elections show that Trump and the Shutdown are highly unpopular (Trump recognizes this as well). Which means the Democratic Senators, for once, may not cave. Wonders will never cease, I know.

CalExit Part 2

Upon the election of Donald J. Trump for his first disastrous term, one idea that floated around was the secession of California from the Union. I wrote about it at the time here. Ultimately, the idea went nowhere because Californians are extremely patriotic people, and were at the core of the Democratic Party. Heck, Kamala Harris was Joe Biden's VP.

Now, 8 and half years later, as Trump 2.0 appears to be an even greater disaster than his first term, I am left to wonder about CalExit. There is a ballot initiative for secession which I believe is up for a vote in November of 2028. As things are currently going, I can see that ballot initiative doing better than most people expect.

And zooming out from the everyday politics, one thing we can see is that the history of American secession movements are quite strange. Secession movements happen in places that are far from are outside of the political centers, tend to generate a lot of tax revenue, and don't see that revenue come back in the form of beneficial spending. For example, Lombardy and Venezio were the major sources of tax revenue for the Hapsburg Empire in the early 19th Century. 1/3 of the total tax revenue for the entire Empire came from those regions. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, these regions were distinct from Vienna, and so the secession movements were not surprising. Similarly, the secession movements in Ireland, the 13 Colonies of the United States, Kashmir, the Soviet Republics, and most other secession movements follow the same pattern.

In the US, the secession by the Confederate states was so strange because rather than being far from the center of power, slave states literally surrounded Washington, D.C., and Southern politicians played prominent roles in American politics throughout the political history of the United States. And Southern states were tax generators, federal spending was so low in the Antebellum period that there was no significant tax burden from the federal government anywhere. So, it really was all about slavery.

But looking at California in 2025, California is exactly the sort of place where a secession movement would grow. California is a net generator of taxes - meaning Californians pay $80 billion more in taxes than the state receives back in federal funding. With Trump threatening to withhold all federal funding from California (well, not all of it, as there are significant military bases here, and the federal government owns most of the top third of the state), that number will grow larger.

It's also clear that Trump's isolationist policies hurt a number of Californian businesses which rely on both foreign labor (either factories abroad, or direct hire of foreign workers), and exports. It doesn't help that Trump has also directly threatened companies like Apple. Further, Trump's policy of deporting workers who have deep ties to the community (and not the "gang members" he promised), has only served to stoke anger here. That certainly has been amplified with the arrest of the President of the SEIU, the largest and most politically active labor union in California, and the recent protests in LA, which Trump has further inflamed by nationalizing the National Guard and sending in troops.

In short, the conditions are looking more and more ripe for a significant secession movement in California. Given the tremendous importance California has for the United States as a whole, it's highly unlikely we would be let go peacefully. All of which, at the end of the day, means that the next four years in California are not going to be great.