politics

Zohran’s massive success in connecting with NYers is especially melting the brains of the worst kinds of capitalists.

Hellgate:

I was expecting a crowd outside of the Gristedes on 40th Street and Second Avenue, because I had gotten an email telling me that John Catsimatidis, the tycoon who owns the chain, would be leading 100 supermarket and bodega employees in a "dramatic, worker-led press conference and protest rally" late Monday morning. Instead, I found a few news cameras pointed at Catsimatidis himself, who was checking his watch and promising that he'd be joined by United Bodegas of America spokesperson Fernando Mateo "any minute!" Catsimatidis held the conference in protest of Democratic candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani's proposed pilot program for five City-run grocery stores. Behind him, five uniformed workers from the Midtown Gristedes lined up dutifully, but didn't say much.

"I've been in the supermarket business for 54 years," Catsimatidis said when he took the podium. He went on a real tear, on topics that ranged from helping run Bill Clinton's campaign in New York City to casting doubt on the validity of Mamdani's election. "It's not the same Democratic Party we know," he said. "The socialists have taken over the Democratic Party." Catsimatidis opined that, because the common-sense Democrats had too much common sense to come out and vote in the 102-degree heat last week, he's "not sure how much of an accurate vote it is." (More New Yorkers voted in the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary than in 2021.)

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/218953

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

Last Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani accomplished what few predicted was possible: a decisive defeat of Andrew Cuomo, the veteran politician backed by sizable money and institutional support. To do so, the 33-year-old assemblymember put together a grassroots coalition across racial and cultural lines that stretched across the five boroughs, turning out voters at rarely seen rates. For months, political strategist and researcher Michael Lange has been breaking down the mayoral race on his Substack, The Narrative Wars, analyzing the neighborhoods and bellwether districts that would likely determine the race.

I spoke with Lange about those neighborhoods and the groups who ultimately made up Mamdani’s coalition, where Cuomo underperformed in the city, and how he saw Mamdani’s victory coming.

Last Monday, you put out your own prediction **that Zohran Mamdani would emerge victorious in the primary. How did you come to that conclusion?**I felt like the polls were kind of overindexing their samples and surveys to mirror the 2021 mayoral primary results, but I thought that this time the electorate was going to be different. He was capturing younger voter energy across all races and classes, native New Yorkers, non-native New Yorkers, in a way that the candidates in 2021 just were not doing. And that also extended to rent-stabilized tenants and to South Asian and Muslim voters. The electorate sometimes changes based on who the candidates are — and he was running this excellent campaign. I thought he would really run up the score in young neighborhoods. I thought he would do quite well in left, liberal, and progressive neighborhoods like Park Slope, Morningside Heights, and then I was very bullish about how, particularly with Asian voters and with Hispanic voters, their electorates are kind of younger. And also, as we’ve seen, some realignment toward the Republican Party in those voting blocs takes some of the more “moderate or conservative” voters out of the Democratic electorate, which they also happen to be some of the older voters. So, these demographics that are already young, they’re getting even younger. I just felt like these were real ingredients for him to do quite well with his base.

I also had real questions about Andrew Cuomo being able to motivate, specifically the Black electorate the way that Eric Adams had in 2021. There were folks who would be willing to walk over broken glass to make sure that Eric Adams, one of their own, would have been able to become the second Black mayor. Andrew Cuomo ran this sleepy, arrogant campaign where he’s like, Oh, I’m going to one church a week. That counts as me showing up in your neighborhood. Whereas Eric Adams was out on the trail all the time. So, I anticipated that there would not only be some slippage in terms of Cuomo’s vote share, but that turnout would either plateau or even go down from what it was in 2021.

And then the Mamdani-favorable part of the electorate is super energized, either by him or just by the fact that Donald Trump is president again and Andrew Cuomo is this caricature of the Democratic Party Establishment, basically, kind of all the worst excesses of it. So I thought that group was going to be super motivated to get out to vote. And then I thought Cuomo took his working-class base entirely for granted. If you look at where he started and where he’s finished, he’s just hemorrhaged support.

You look at these neighborhoods, basically a lot of upper Manhattan. You look at Bushwick, you look at Bedford-Stuyvesant. If someone like Zohran Mamdani is exclusively winning the young, professional, college-educated class, that alone can’t sweep every election district in the neighborhood — which is basically what he did. He was making inroads everywhere, right? And that was because the campaign was ubiquitous, really, on all the mediums that people under 50 use. They didn’t have the money to compete on broadcast television with the super-PAC, but their videos were everywhere, and they were being spread organically. And then they were really pressing the flesh, in terms of trying to meet voters where they were, in their native languages, in their neighborhoods, in a way that the Cuomo campaign just never really chose to do. Again, they took their votes for granted in these neighborhoods. Cuomo was only winning housing developments and senior-housing buildings. Even in the really working-class parts of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick that are relatively untouched by gentrification, he was still struggling.

Polls taken before Election Day suggested that Cuomo’s campaign was supported by older and working-class voters and a significant portion of Black and Latino voters, while Mamdani’s supporters seemed to skew younger, whiter, and in a higher income bracket. How would you describe the coalition that ultimately elevated the Mamdani campaign to victory? I wrote about this in the New York Times. It was a coalition of the in-between. Seventy percent of the precincts in New York are people who rent or are majority renter. That was one of Mamdani’s best demographics. And he also did really well with people that are “middle income,” which is kind of an amorphous definition, but it’s like $50,000 to $100,000 a year. He did well in working-class neighborhoods like Elmhurst, which is basically a Chinatown. He did well in middle-class-ish neighborhoods. I would say Astoria is a middle-class neighborhood, also Jamaica Hills, Richmond Hill, these are middle-class areas. And then he also did well in upper-middle-class areas like Fort Greene, Williamsburg, things like that.

But the thread that unites a lot of this is that these were renter-majority communities. Cuomo’s coalition was at the bookend of the economic spectrum. The wealthiest areas: Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Central Park West, Riverside Drive. That’s really where he was running it up, in addition to Black, middle-class neighborhoods, Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish areas. But then also with very low-income residents, many of whom I think are rightfully distrustful — they’re wary of anyone who’s overpromising things, and they have a relationship that is very real to someone like Cuomo, who’s been around for a long time. He’s a known commodity. Kind of “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” So, Cuomo did really well with lower-income voters, and he also did really well with ultrawealthy voters, and then the middle-class part of his coalition, it was more skewed toward the homeowner areas, I would say.

Where did Cuomo underperform, from what you’ve seen? I think Cuomo underperformed significantly with Chinese voters. I think people predicted that, okay, Zohran will probably do well with South Asian voters, Muslim voters, right? Kind of inspired by one of their own. Cuomo hemorrhaged support in the Chinese community. Even in southern Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Bath Beach where he has people like Susan Zhuang and Bill Colton supporting him. In this era of institutions that don’t matter, those two have proved their muscle. They have a ton of volunteers, they run an active club. Cuomo lost both of those areas.

I think he also really underperformed with middle-age Hispanic and Black voters. There are all these interesting charts that are coming out about how, again, his support by the end among Hispanic and among Black voters was very much concentrated in the senior demographic and that he was losing voters at the margins.

When Cuomo was last on the ballot in New York City in a primary, he won like 66 percent of the vote against Cynthia Nixon. That was all the way reduced to 36 percent. I mean, this was an epic collapse. I also think Cuomo really underperformed in some middle-class majority-white ethnic areas like Northeast Queens. He only won Staten Island by 9 percent — I mean, the most Italian county in the United States? And I think he, compared to Eric Adams, really underperformed with Black voters. Of the core Cuomo coalition, the only segment that really turned out more than 2021 was Orthodox and Hasidic voters. Whereas Mamdani’s coalition, if you look at where the turnout was compared to Maya Wiley, turnout was going up 40 to 50 percent. All of his voters were so motivated.

Not to get too into the weeds here, but I sometimes look at these little election districts, which are like a couple blocks split up. They’re supposed to have the same amount of people roughly each, but it’s like this little block-level analysis. And I think four years ago, you look at a neighborhood like Astoria, Greenpoint, those little blocks had like 150 votes apiece, 200, 250 votes. Now, they were like 500 votes apiece, 600 votes apiece, 700 votes apiece. And then you go to a place like Southeast Queens and you have these little South Asian election districts. Four years ago, the Black election districts were outvoting these enclaves, two to one, three to one, four to one. And now it’s like, wow, we’re actually sometimes seeing better turnout in South Asian enclaves than we are in Black neighborhoods. That would have been unheard of four years ago. It really just underscores that there was a tremendous enthusiasm gap between Mamdani voters and Cuomo voters.

It seems likely that if and when Mamdani surpasses 50 percent of the vote and wins, it’ll likely be due, in large part, to second-round votes from voters who ranked Brad Lander first. Right now we only have the first-round returns, but are there any signs that the Mamdani-Lander cross-endorsement had an effect on turnout? I think their cross-endorsement had a huge effect, particularly on Lander’s base. I think it created a permission structure maybe for Manhattan voters to go for Mamdani. I mean, in Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Windsor Terrace, the highest-turnout districts in the city by far, Andrew Cuomo is just getting annihilated. Like 14 percent, 16 percent. I think between the two assembly districts that are Lander’s base, Mamdani beat Cuomo by so much that it was a greater margin than everything Cuomo earned from the Bronx and Staten Island, because there were so many votes from just those two neighborhoods.

**I think an often underdiscussed portion of the city electorate is Asian voters. We saw Mamdani make direct overtures to these communities, filming ads in Hindi, Bangla, and Urdu. You seem to think that paid off.**Absolutely. You contrast that with Cuomo either taking these voters for granted, or just saying, Oh, they’re not going to vote in real enough numbers where I have to care. Not only was Mamdani meeting them where they were at, in native languages, on the mediums they frequent like WhatsApp, things like that, but he was also meeting these folks in their neighborhoods. I think the campaign knocked their one millionth door in Elmhurst. You cannot put a price on showing up in neighborhoods over and over and over again, building that familiarity. That really is the most important thing in politics.

The vast majority of voters are not driven by any particular ideological prescriptions. It is about trust and relationship building. This is kind of the bullish prediction that I’m making for the general election: I think Mamdani will perform a lot better in some of these neighborhoods that saw real shifts to the right over the last four years than people will anticipate. I think it will break people’s brains how well he will do because he will have the time, the money, and the foot soldiers and the infrastructure to really speak to those communities as he did in the primary. I know that is something that matters to him, and I think the cost-of-living message that national Democrats maybe have gotten away from too much, that he really foregrounded in his campaign, is the best way to reach into these pockets.

**Since you mentioned it, do you think there were a lot of Trump-Mamdani voters?**I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’m sure there were a couple. You don’t want to read into, like, a Democratic primary versus a presidential election, right? A lot of the swings to Trump, it happened from independents or just Republicans who turned out and a couple nominal Democrats. Those are not the folks voting in the primary. Maybe if there were Democrats who swung to Trump and made them less likely to vote in the primary.

But I don’t think it’s also an accident that it’s the guy whose first real breakout moment is like, I’m speaking to Trump voters on Hillside Avenue in Queens, Fordham Road in the Bronx. I don’t think it was a secret that he then goes into some of these neighborhoods where there is some backlash toward how Democrats have handled quality of life or how national Democrats have handled the war in Gaza and he was able to speak to people’s concerns, but also engineer some real turnout. I think it will be a challenge for him to bring some of these communities and voters back into the Democratic Party. But I think it is a challenge he is up for.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

More on Mamdani

Israel Was Supposed to Sink Zohran Mamdani‘It’s Nice to Be Right!’Zohran Mamdani on Why He Won

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/218966

Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, mindless DOGE cuts, or captured regulators, the U.S. right wing, usually in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying all federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental standards, and regulatory autonomy.

I bolded that last bit because it’s not clear the U.S. press and a huge swath of the electorate (or even many people in policy circles) have figured this out yet.

A cornerstone of this effort has been the Supreme Court. Last year’s Loper Bright ruling effectively gutted any remaining independence of expert regulators, ensuring they literally can’t do much of anything without the explicit approval of a Congress too corrupt to function (and sometimes, not even then). If they do try, they’re all but guaranteed to be drowned in legal fights with deep-pocketed corporations for years.

You can easily see the immediate impact at agencies like the FCC. From net neutrality to privacy, the regulatory agency literally can’t accomplish any efforts to protect markets or consumers without being bogged down in endless legal quagmire, quite by design.

When the agency does shake off regulatory capture and actually try to act, Trump-stocked courts quickly kill the effort (see the 5th Circuit recently vacating an AT&T fine for repeatedly lying to customers about spying on their location data). Even basic, historically bipartisan and noncontroversial efforts to do things like help school kids get online are being destroyed by authoritarian Trump zealots.

Last week it got worse, with a new Supreme Court ruling that quietly crippled regulatory independence further, ensuring agencies like the FCC are even less able to do basic aspects of their jobs. The case, McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., started more than a decade ago after McKesson sent unsolicited ads by fax to class members of the suit, including McLaughlin Chiropractic.

Class action plaintiffs in the case argued that the unsolicited faxes were in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which bans unsolicited communications with consumers without giving them a chance to opt out of the communications.

While the case was stumbling through our already broken court system, the FCC (under the leadership of now cable industry lobbyist Michael Powell) issued a ruling excluding online fax services from the TCPA. It was part of a steady erosion of our already flimsy consumer protections, and part of the reason the FCC already fails utterly to keep robocallers from annoying the shit out of you.

Consumer rights experts have long pointed out that shitheads and scammers have hijacked U.S. voice networks thanks to steady, generational lobbying by debt collectors and the marketing industry, who’ve ensured that oversight no longer functions. Still, every so often, the FCC would at least try to do something about the problem within the ever-shrinking confines of their legal authority.

The McLaughlin case found its way to the Supreme Court because the District Court found that it was required to follow the new FCC order, though it disagreed with the FCC’s interpretation of the TCPA. The District Court also felt constrained by the Hobbs Act, 1950s era legislation long interpreted as barring district courts from meddling with and undermining a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute.

On June 20th, the Supreme Court sided with the District Court by a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court ruled that “The Hobbs Act does not preclude district courts from independently assessing whether an agency’s interpretation of the relevant statute is correct.”

This is, superficially, so fucking boring I probably lost most readers paragraphs ago. But it’s important and the majority’s convoluted legalese hides a much seedier agenda. Broadband industry consultant Doug Dawson put it this way in his excellent breakdown of what this will ultimately mean for the FCC:

“This is a significant ruling because it gives more explicit power to District Courts to disagree with an administrative ruling of a federal agency. It’s likely that there is a District Court somewhere in the country that will disagree with almost any federal agency ruling, meaning that it will be that much easier to tie up every decision made by the FCC or other federal agency in court.”

Bogging any and all government oversight of corporate power in endless legal hell is, of course, the entire point. But this effort has historically been dressed up by the right wing and “free market” Libertarian folks as some kind of noble rebalancing of constitutional power. The lie is that regulators were “running amok” (a joke if you’ve watched the FCC fail to do basic things), and this somehow “fixed” it.

The route the right wing is taking to effectively lobotomize corporate oversight is brutally efficient, but it’s also ironically so meandering, dull, and jam-packed with convoluted legalese, it barely gets covered by the press. In this case, only a handful of outlets bothered to mention the June 20th ruling.

But the real world harms of this entire movement will be kind of hard for the press and public to ignore. In the case of the FCC, it most assuredly means that the FCC will have even less authority to rein in shitty telecom monopolies. America’s already shitty robocall problem (a direct result of widespread corruption), will also absolutely be getting significantly worse:

“This new ruling also has practical implications since it explicitly weakens FCC enforcement of the TCPA. Among other things, the TCPA rules are the FCC’s primary tool for its effort to restrain the use of autodialers and artificial voices used in spam messages to consumers.”

You can see similar points made in the dissenting opinions. Great stuff! Very much the good faith, blue collar populism Trump is (ignorantly) lauded for.

The FCC’s inability to police scams and fraud is only a small part of the picture. More broadly, regulators that govern every sensitive aspect of your lives — from health insurance to undercooked car automation — are finding themselves literally incapable of standing up to corporate power in the United States. That’s going to have dramatic, often deadly impacts on every last aspect of your lives.

I genuinely don’t know what it takes to get the press and public to truly comprehend what’s happening. We’re going to see a steady parade of concussive, systemic failures to systems people to take for granted everywhere you look. All because rich corporate executives and their proxy “free market innovation” think tanks wanted to dress up unbridled greed as some sort of sophisticated, academic ethos.

The last year has been a brutal, generational win for unchecked corporate power. The check is coming due, and none of it’s going to be subtle.

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

I'm no expert on Iran, so I was hoping some knowledgeable people here could give some context. I find it hard to figure out the speaker's exact strategy from the discussion. Any thoughts?

Hi all, Something that I'm curious about with regards to China and the CPC are the different ideological factions that exist in the present day, particularly with regards to economic strategy, at home and abroad.

Going off of @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net's many useful comments in the news mega regarding Chinese trade policy, its commitment to dollarization, and continuing the export-led growth model that it has benefited from, I am curious to know what kind of discussions are taking place within the CPC between what I assume to be various liberal and left factions related to these topics. I know the party is lock-step when it comes time to make decisions, but surely there are many CPC members within the national congress who have differing views about how they should navigate the evolving international situation with a belligerent US and a global south that desperately wants more sovereignty and an end to Western unilateralism.

Is there any way a Westerner can be privvy to these kind of conversations within the Chinese government? Thanks!

Founded as a paramilitary Zionist organization in 1923, Betar Worldwide has a prominent far-right chapter in the US that has aided the Trump administration’s deportation efforts by doxxing and agitating against pro-Palestine organizers.

The chat logs show its members, including individuals publicly affiliated with Betar US, discussing a range of plans and ideas: to protest at mosques, burn Qurans to provoke confrontations, and coordinate buying pepper spray, lasers, and other illicit devices to confront pro-Palestine protests in New York City.

In that same chat, others shared that they are collecting information on pro-Palestine activists to forward to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

https://soundcloud.com/africanowonline/africanow-jun-25-2025-dr-congo-rwanda-agreement-contextualized

idk, not exactly news but not gossip either

tweet linky

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/42589831

The lawmakers asserted that "smears from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle" cannot be allowed to continue.