Today, I spoke with Derek Thompson, the co-author of Abundance, the host of Plain English podcast, and a new Substacker — his newsletter is simply named Derek Thompson1 — who recently ended a 17-year tenure at The Atlantic to join the platform.
I know I’ve been doing a lot of these video chats lately2, but I think this might be the best one yet. The conversation was split roughly into thirds:
The Substack economy and its role in the broader media ecosystem;
His book: you can find my review of Abundance here, which is quite positive overall, but I was able to probe Derek on some of the criticisms I have;
And Zohran Mamdani and the New York City mayor’s race. Thompson recently interviewed Mamdani, who like other politicians across the left and center —Gavin Newsom is another — have embraced some of the language of Abundance. But are they actually interested in the ideas in the book — which is critical of the left but perhaps even more so of establishment-y politicians like Newsom? Or are they just co-opting the brand for their own purposes? And is Abundance a book or a political project?
I’m going to take the rest of this newsletter for some opening thoughts on the November general election in New York, where Mamdani will compete against (again!) Andrew Cuomo, incumbent mayor Eric Adams, the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and a centrist independent named Jim Walden. New York City’s Board of Elections released its unofficial results of the Democratic primary for mayor just this morning. Mamdani won on first-choice preferences by 7 percent over Cuomo with just over 1 million votes cast. As expected, he also prevailed once second choices were accounted for using New York’s ranked choice system; in fact, his margin over Cuomo expanded to 12 points.
The general election could potentially be competitive; Polymarket gives Zohran a 72 percent chance of winning, Adams 18 percent, Cuomo 8 percent, and Sliwa 1 percent. Tens of millions of dollars — perhaps hundreds of millions — will be spent on the race, much of it by outside groups. As a New Yorker, I’m not looking forward to the ads, but I am excited to cast a general election ballot that could actually matter.
In theory, Zohran could be vulnerable. Whether you count his victory margin as 7 percent or 12 percent, that’s extremely impressive for a candidate who started out polling as low as 1 percent in some surveys. But it’s also not an insurmountable margin. While slightly over a million votes were cast in the Democratic primary, New York City has 5.1 million registered voters.
What has turnout looked like in general elections in NYC in the past? I looked up data from the city for every mayoral, gubernatorial and presidential election dating back to 2000. The 1.03 million votes cast in the Democratic primary were not only the highest number for any mayoral primary during this period, but also higher than for any presidential or gubernatorial primary, including some hotly-contested ones like Hillary vs. Bernie in 2016, and Cuomo against Cynthia Nixon for the gubernatorial nomination in 2018.
In mayoral races, general election turnout has averaged just 1.2 million — in other words, not much higher than in last month’s primary. But while gubernatorial turnout within the city was once fairly sleepy, it jumped to 2.1 million in 2018 and 1.8 million in 2022. And presidential general election turnout has been even higher, peaking at 3 million in 2020. (Turnout was slightly lower last year, and also much more Trump-friendly than in the past.)
If you told me that turnout in November will only be, say, 1.4 million, most of it overlapping with the primary electorate — of those 5.1 million registered voters, 3.3 million are Democrats — I’d be quite confident in Zohran’s chances of becoming the next mayor, as new voters would have to go overwhelmingly for other candidates if Mamdani also captures the votes that he did in the primary. If it’s midterm numbers instead — say, 1.8 million or 2 million — that’s potentially a different story.
But Mamdani comes in with two distinct advantages. One is that Adams, Cuomo and Sliwa have a lot of overlapping tendencies, such as emphasizing law-and-order themes. And unlike in the primary, New York general elections do not feature ranked-choice voting. So while you might bet against Zohran getting an outright majority in November, it won’t matter if he gets, say, 46 percent, and rest is divided something like: Adams 30, Cuomo 15, Sliwa 8 and Walden 1.
Of course, voters can behave tactically, and that’s perhaps especially likely for voters in New York, who are living in the nation’s media capital in a race where every new poll will generate headlines. If either Adams or Cuomo establish early momentum — as tough as that might be to envision in Cuomo’s case given how poorly his primary campaign went — it could become a two-horse race, with “Anybody but Zohran” voters consolidating around one alternative so as not to waste their votes.
The other advantage for Mamdani is what’s likely to be a tendency for his opponents to overplay their hand. It may look like elites are ganging up upon him, particularly if hedge funders like Bill Ackman are bankrolling his challengers.
There’s much that could be critiqued from the center and the right about Mamdani’s past positions, like a 2021 clip in which he played off a socialist trope by saying one of his goals was “seizing the means of production” or his past calls (which he’s since recanted) to defund the police. The New York metro area also has the second-highest number of Jews in the world outside of Tel Aviv, although public sentiment has become much less sympathetic to Israel on the left and even in the center, Mamdani’s every word on Palestine will be litigated.
Other Democrats have been haunted by left-wing positions they took in the past — notably, for instance, Kamala Harris’s past stances on transgender issues. Mamdani, less afraid to break with the establishment than Democrats like Harris, might have an easier time distancing himself from his previous views.
But also, his opponents could surface more noise than signal. What can start out seeming like valid criticisms — like that only about 5 percent of New Yorkers actually voted for him in the primary — can sometimes devolve into criticisms of Mamdani’s ethnicity or his religion, or into anti-NYC screeds.3 Like a lot of New Yorkers, I pay a lot to live in the city, and I’m fiercely partisan to it. While there’s much to criticize in how the city is run — although crime has declined and a lot of new infrastructure has been built — I’m not sure that many New Yorkers are going to be that interested in criticisms from hedge-funders and Fox News personalities who are commuting in from Chappaqua.
Still, as I spoke about with Thompson, there are basically two reads that one might take on Zohran. And I suspect that people on the center-left like me are going to be watching carefully for which thesis is more valid.
Theory #1 is that Mamdani will govern as what I termed to Derek as a “pantheistic” progressive. He’s a bright and ambitious young guy, and sure, maybe he said a lot of overly woke things in 2019 and 2020. But anybody seeking to gain influence in Democratic politics at that time might have spouted the same shibboleths. More recently, he’s explicitly tipped his hat toward pragmatism and moderation — “I clearly have ideas and politics, but ultimately beyond all of those things I care more about outcomes,” he told Thompson. And by going on centrist-friendly programs like Plain English or Odd Lots or The Dispatch, he’s shown he’s willing to expand the tent of the left — which especially in online spaces, too often treats people with disagree with it with hostility. So you’d be “hiring” Zohran based on his talent, the possibility that he’d bring other bright young New Yorkers on the center and left into office with him — and banking on the fact that he probably can’t get too carried away, constrained by public opinion and because Albany significantly checks the New York mayor on tax and budgeting issues.
Theory #2, conversely, is that essentially he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That the left-wing positions espoused by Mamdani in ~2020 are the “real” Zohran, that is ideological commitments to socialism run deep in a city that is the center of global capitalism, that he’ll owe favors to the left that elected him, and that the extremely unpopular Brandon Johnson in Chicago is an example of what happens when the left-wing rubber meets the road.4 Precisely because he’s charming and media-savvy, and precisely because his opponents tend to overreach, this theory might say, he’s been able to put a gloss on what are ultimately some fairly radical positions.
Again, it helps Zohran that both Adams and Cuomo have obvious flaws that have nothing to do with their politics per se. If voters are otherwise indifferent between Theory #1 and #2, they might be willing to give the new guy a try. The economic left hasn’t really had a “turn” in American politics lately, and Zohran’s at least a fresh face with some highly specific suggestions on an issue (the cost of living) that both wealthy and poor New Yorkers are concerned about.
But the 30 percent chance that prediction markets give to Mamdani’s opponents strikes me as a roughly appropriate hedge. (I might round that down to 20 or 25 percent, but we’re fiddling at the margins here.) If turnout approaches the numbers that we’ve seen in recent midterms, let alone in presidential years, the November electorate will likely be a lot older than in the unusually youth-skewed primary, with voters who not only disagree with Mamdani on substance but also don’t vibe with his style. So while he’s the favorite, he’s not going to occupy Gracie Mansion without earning it.
It’s hard to criticize when I came up with the name Silver Bulletin as a placeholder in approximately five seconds.
I know some readers love these conversations and some are indifferent. The long-term equilibrium is probably going to be more like one of these a month rather than once a week; there’s been an, um, abundance of them recently due to somewhat random reasons.
The Twitter post I cited, for instance, implied that “Muslim immigrants” and “white hipsters” are not real New Yorkers. Um, have you been to the East Village? Walk a block in one direction from my apartment, and there’s a mosque; walk one block in the other direction, and you’ll find a series of hipster bars.
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