Mamdani Holds Huge Lead in NYC Mayor's Race, But Top Democrats Still Won't Back Him
Mamdani Holds Huge Lead in NYC Mayor's Race, But Top Dems Still Won't Back Him | Common Dreams
In an interview on CNN, former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod suggested that the refusal to back Mamdani was probably the result of "donor pressure."
So the Democrats are really the Party of the Corporate donors and not the membership. Continues reading the article.
Though Mamdani has surged in recent months with small-dollar donors, big money in the city has been behind Cuomo and other centrist candidates.
The biggest of these is the billionaire-funded Fix the City PAC, which received an $8.3 million donation from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and as of late August had dropped more than $15 million to keep Cuomo afloat.
Another fund, called New Yorkers for a Better Future Mayor '25 has yet to declare a favorite, but has both barrels locked on Mamdani. Under a similar name, this PAC marshalled support for more than a dozen corporate-friendly city council candidates early this year, with support from the pro-Israel hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and several major players in New York's real estate industry. It has announced a goal of raising $25 million to defeat Mamdani in November.
There it is. The Democrat leadership is firmly for the billionaires and corpos.
The biggest of these is the billionaire-funded Fix the City PAC, which received an $8.3 million donation from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and as of late August had dropped more than $15 million to keep Cuomo afloat.
Michael Bloomberg is sponsoring him? That'd be enough to make me vote for almost literally anyone else.
Election reform is the greatest issue of our time. Ranked choice voting or similar will fix this party allegiance nonsense.
Second is money in politics. Politicians across the spectrum conspiring against the people in the name of their donors.
Fix these 2 problems and everything else will trickle down.
Yeah. I read a pretty good article that made the case for downplaying political parties as the unit of power entirely, and focusing on unions built and operated by the workers as the primary method of organizing and batching up power in elections. It was a lot more that way in the middle of the 20th century and definitely things were a fuck of a lot better back then.
It does make sense that if you make a specific class of people whose job is wield and collect power, and nothing in particular else, then they'll become fuckheads over time.
NYC Mayoral Race uses Ranked Choice Voting.
NYC Mayoral Race uses Ranked Choice Voting.
ehhh...sort of. they use a half-assed version of it, in a way that's very common for RCV implementations in the US.
the Democratic primary used RCV to select the Democratic nominee. the Republicans didn't bother with a primary and nominated Curtis Sliwa.
the general election reverts back to first-past-the-post, with a Democrat, a Republican, and two independents (Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo).
He made such a remarkable point about Eric Adams - youre going to trust the guy getting help from Donald Trump to push back against Trump? Nuh huh.
Maybe the party should worry about his endorsement, not the other way round.
centrist Democrats have a slogan, "vote blue no matter who" - the idea being that if you're progressive or leftist, you have an obligation to vote for the Democrat, even if the Democratic nominee is a centrist.
that slogan has always been bullshit, but Mamdani's campaign is providing the ultimate example of why. "vote blue no matter who" is a one-way street - you can use it to browbeat progressives into voting for a centrist, but it vanishes into thin air if you're trying to convince centrists to vote for a progressive.
centrist Democrats have a slogan, "vote blue no matter who"
I know some centrist Democrats, and I've literally never heard them say this for any reason. I've only ever heard it said on Lemmy by people who are applying it sarcastically.
I heard it on the radio over 15 years ago. Haven't heard it since but then I've been pretty hostile towards and talk of Democrats since the Obama era and all the copium they've tried to force down my throat.
It was a never a particularly common slogan in everyday discussions, but it was something that was fairly common during the 2020 primaries, notably Pete Buttigieg saying it during his concession speech in the New Hampshire primary, saying he heard it from organizers and canvassers.
Even if the exact wording isn’t exactly common by this point, outside of people mocking it, the sentiment behind it has been a consistent backdrop. That whoever the Democratic candidate, there is an obligation for supporters of left wing and progressive candidates to support, in turn, a centrists candidate who wins the primary.
So the question here is, if the left wing and progressives are obligated to support a centrist candidate when they win the primary, how come it’s okay for a centrist to loose the primary and not only not throw their support behind the winner, but to go out and run as an independent?
It's not so much a quote, as it is a voting strategy that is promoted among DNC insiders, to encourage progressives to vote for the "lesser evil", every time.
And yeah, if you're talking to progressives, they will almost always refer to it sarcastically, since it means always voting for a candidate that doesn't actually represent their views, simply because the alternative is objectively worse.
For people on the actual left, it represents a form of socio-political extortion.
it had its heyday, at least in my experience, during the 2020 Democratic primary, when the idea was that you'd vote for whichever Democrat was nominated, regardless of who you had supported in the primary.
I've heard it used since then, but usually in the context of state/local elections other than the President. in 2024 "no matter who" didn't make sense because there was no primary and it was obvious who the Democratic nominee would be (except when it wasn't, but that didn't involve an open primary with a clown car of candidates like 2020 had)
It happened a lot when Biden was the nominee, and again for Harris too. It's probably not the kind of thing you'd hear from regular people though—most political sayings aren't, because real people in real life touching grass together tend to be more normal than that. It's more common on social media and the like, and can probably be traced back to political campaigns, honestly. Still important to push back against, because even if people don't say it, that doesn't mean they won't believe it.
it's like they don't even want to win!
"They" is pretty fluid.
A lot of people in Washington will be fine if the Ds win, they'll be fine if the Rs win, but they will be out of a job if the people win.
A lot of those people are in the Democratic party, some of the worst of them are in Democratic leadership, some of them are in this article. I don't really think "Let's stop voting for Democrats!" is a solution to any of that, since it will do nothing at all to resolve the corruption that led to things being that way, but yes it is important to realize that Chuck Shumer among other people is completely fine with Democrats losing elections, as long as him and the assholes he hangs out with get to keep divvying up the work output of the country among themselves and not having to work all that hard.
Donor (Zionist supremacist) Pressure on DNC was for them to lose last presidential election. Bill Ackman appoplectic over NYC election is about his single Zionist supremacism issue. Andrew Cuomo only still exists for this cause. As a democrat, this shitstain says he wants to kick out people from rent stabilized housing (exists in every western large city in the world) based on income gains, and restrict access, all because we should all want to hurt Mamdani's housing access, instead of selecting the best mayor... hint, it's not you, shitstain Cuomo.