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Gooder and Harder, New York
Last week, New York City’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced that he would end his predecessor’s policy of clearing homeless encampments in the city. On social media, this announcement was greeted by strong language which would not bear repeating here, but reminded me of H.L. Mencken’s timeless aphorism: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Maybe the best explanation of what’s gone wrong in the Big Apple is simply hubris.
Never has anyone more deserved this kind of democracy, gooder and harder than do the voters of New York City. Life in the city is already very bad — it’s been a steady downhill slide since Rudy Giuliani left the mayor’s office in December 2001 — but the decline has accelerated in recent years, and many observers are interpreting Mamdani’s election as the omen of an impending apocalypse. Maybe the best explanation of what’s gone wrong in the Big Apple is simply hubris. Figuring that their city has somehow managed to survive the blunderings of Mike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams, perhaps New York voters looked at Mamdani’s avowed radicalism and thought, “Why not? How could it possibly get worse?” (Snake Plissken could not be reached for comment.) (RELATED: Why Do Bad Economic Ideas Persist?)
Screenwriters seeking inspiration for dystopian thriller scripts are likely to get lots of ideas from real-life events in New York City over the next four years. The nightmare scenario has been foreshadowed by the long-term trend of an increasing Democratic Party stranglehold on the politics of both the city and state. (RELATED: The Anti-Colonial Shadow Over Mamdani’s Socialism)
It has been more than four decades since any Republican carried New York state in a presidential election, when Ronald Reagan got 54 percent of the statewide vote in his 1984 landslide reelection. More recently, Barack Obama twice received over 60 percent of New York’s votes, Hillary Clinton got 59 percent in 2016, Joe Biden got 61 percent in 2020, and even the woestruck Kamala Harris easily won New York by a double-digit margin last year, with 56 percent to Donald Trump’s 43 percent.
The permanent nature of the Democratic majority in New York — now a de facto one-party state — is made even clearer by gubernatorial elections. New York hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 2002, when incumbent Gov. George Pataki won a second term. Since then, despite twice having incumbents driven from office by sex scandals (Eliot Spitzer in 2008 and Andrew Cuomo in 2021), Democrats have held the governor’s office with relative ease. Cuomo got nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2018, and his successor, current Gov. Kathy Hochul, was reelected in 2022 with 53 percent. In addition to having a lock on the governor’s office, Democrats in New York face no effective opposition in the legislature, controlling both the state assembly and state senate by 2-to-1 margins. (RELATED: Mamdani Is NOT a New Phenomenon: He’s the Center of the Democrat Party)
How is it that the Democratic Party has managed to increase its control of New York to the point of political monopoly? Any serious investigation of this trend must lead the researcher eventually to what is known as “The Curley Effect”:
In Boston during the first half of the 20th century, Mayor James Michael Curley built a political machine by strategically shaping the electorate — taxing well-heeled ‘Brahmins’ heavily and redistributing the proceeds to poor Irish immigrants. This not only bought Irish votes but chased the old Yankees out to the suburbs, further tilting the political playing field in Curley’s favor.
By enacting policies that punish their targeted enemies, Democrats literally drive political opponents out of their jurisdictions. Taking their inspiration from Satan (“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven”), Democrats pursue a worse-is-better approach to governance, increasing misery and disorder to the point that no honest or intelligent person would wish to live under Democratic control. The departure of honest and intelligent voters strengthens the power of the Democratic Party, dependent as it is upon the votes of corrupt and stupid people. (RELATED: The Faulty Idealism of the Anti-Wealth Brigade)
If some readers think this verdict on the electorate of New York is too harsh, let them consider a few facts. In 1984, when a majority of New Yorkers voted to re-elect President Reagan, the state had 36 electoral votes; in the 2024 election, New York had only 28 votes in the Electoral College — a 22 percent reduction. And it is predicted that, after the 2030 census, New York will have only 26 electors. This precipitous decline in the erstwhile Empire State’s influence on national politics is, to a great extent, the result of a “Curley Effect” strategy of making New York terra incognita for the kind of decent, hard-working people who vote Republican.
Every year, tens of thousands of ex-New Yorkers relocate to Florida. Among this exodus of refugees in recent years was New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz, who departed for the Sunshine State in 2021 amid the COVID lockdowns that she blamed for driving her out of what she had once called “the greatest city in the history of the world.” The insanity of New York’s response to the COVID pandemic — e.g., closing schools in November 2020, months after schools had reopened in most of the rest of the country — was typical of the quasi-totalitarian policy approach favored by Democrats. The fact that many people choose to leave New York rather than to live under these policies is seen by Democrats as a blessing, because why would they want any Trump voters to remain in their state?
It should go without saying that most voters in New York City are in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome. In the 2024 presidential election, Harris got 81 percent of the vote in Manhattan (New York County), 72 percent in the Bronx, 70 percent in Brooklyn, and 61 percent in Queens. The only one of the city’s five boroughs that went for Trump was Staten Island (Richmond County), where 64 percent voted for the Republican. Citywide, counting all five boroughs, of the nearly 2.8 million votes cast in New York City, Harris got 68 percent, a more than 2-to-1 margin over Trump, whose campaign slogan was “Make America Great Again.”
Democrats in New York hate Trump, and they hate America, too.
Democrats in New York hate Trump, and they hate America, too. Analysis of polls in the mayoral election showed a curious anomaly. Among those born in the United States, only 31 percent supported Mamdani, who was favored by 62 percent of immigrant voters. After Mamdani won, exit polls showed that he got only 34 percent of the vote among those who had been born in New York City, but 83 percent among those who had lived in the city for five years or less. It’s said that “The Great Replacement” is a racist conspiracy theory, but in New York, it’s an accurate description of the Democratic Party strategy for victory — drive out the native-born population and replace them with immigrants who vote for Democrats.
Is it merely a coincidence that the avowed socialist Mamdami, born in Uganda to a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, is the new poster boy for the Democratic Party’s “progressive” agenda? Certainly not. Nor is it coincidental that Mamdami’s policy proposals are in direct opposition to those favored by Americans who voted for Trump. Mamdami’s declaration that the city will no longer remove homeless encampments was typical of this polar antithesis of Trumpism:
The Democratic Socialist flatly told reporters … that he would stop all sweeps of makeshift settlements come the new year when he is sworn in as mayor.
“If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success,” Mamdani said of the Adams policy, which has faced criticism for not getting those homeless people into permanent homes after the sweeps.
“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing,” Mamdani said.
“Whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is, because what we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact, it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made.”
The young incoming mayor, though, offered up no specifics on how he planned to address scores of complaints about the homeless camps around the city.
According to 311 data, city officials received more than 45,000 complaints for encampments in the first 11 months of 2025.
There are several points to be made about this. First of all, it can be demonstrated that the main contributors to the homelessness problem are substance abuse and mental illness. To talk about a desperate need for housing ignores this reality. There are homeless shelters in New York, so why aren’t the people camping on the sidewalks already in shelters? Because they can’t (or at least won’t) follow the rules of shelter residency, that’s why. Mamdani’s rhetoric about “supportive housing” is not going to turn gibbering schizophrenics and thievish crackheads into desirable tenants, no matter how “affordable” the rent may be, and they’d rather be sleeping under a tarp in a park than put up with the rules in homeless shelters that would prevent them from doing as they please.
However, even if you are the kind of hopeless fool who believes Mamdani’s rhetoric about “connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need,” you cannot evade the second point: How the heck is New York supposed to pay for this housing? The city is already spending some $400 million a year on “rental assistance” and $150 million annually for its homeless shelters, and Mamdani will take over as mayor with an annual budget deficit of at least $5 billion (that’s billion with a “B”).
Whatever other miraculous powers Mamdani may think he possesses, he cannot conjure into existence money that doesn’t exist, and the overwhelming likelihood is that his policy will result in homeless encampments proliferating in New York City. This is the exact opposite of the kind of “quality of life” policy that helped Giuliani make the city livable 30 years ago, reversing decades of decline. Because Mamdani is only 34, he knows nothing of the David Dinkins era, the previous nadir of misrule at Gracie Mansion. Just as the disaster of Joe Biden’s White House tenure elevated Jimmy Carter from his prior status as Worst President Ever, Mamdani is likely to outdo even Dinkins when it comes to inflicting misery on the inhabitants of New York.
“Worse than Dinkins?” some old-time New Yorkers might be muttering to themselves. “How could anything be worse than Dinkins?”
Even if it seems impossible, however, Mayor Mamdani can be expected to rise to the challenge, forging new frontiers in urban policy failure. Karol Markowicz and other New York refugees now residing in Florida can expect lots of new arrivals in the months and years ahead, as the writing on the wall of Mamdani’s city becomes legible to everyone. As much as anyone may lament the forthcoming destruction of New York City, it’s what the Democratic majority there has voted for and, as Mencken said, they deserve to get it good and hard.
READ MORE from Robert Stacy McCain:
The Dangerous Delusion of ‘Equality’
Dots and Patterns: What History Can Teach Us
Demons and Demonization
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