During last week’s New York City mayoral debate, the three candidates answered a question about what would be their ideal headline after a year in office.  The Democrat party candidate and Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani answered, “Fighting Trump.”  Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent Andrew Cuomo responded with achievements in reversing the city’s slide into street crime and deteriorating public education.

Given the city’s multitude of problems, Mamdani’s pretension of “fighting Trump” is perverse, but Mamdani knows that the slogan appeals to the ignorant young voters who could make him the Big Apple’s next mayor.  Crafting a campaign based on the ignorance of voters is nothing new, but the other element in the campaign’s strategy is troubling: enmity for Americans and our heritage.

Buoyed by his debate performance, the next day, the frontrunner committed a major affront to New Yorkers by cavorting in a photo op with one of the most reprehensible still-surviving imams connected with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing at his Brooklyn mosque.  Imam Siraj Wahhaj was named as a co-conspirator by federal prosecutors in the trial of the infamous blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted in 1995 of conspiring to bomb NYC landmarks.  The influential Islamist has told followers that strict Islamic law is superior to American democracy, according to a 2003 account in the Wall Street Journal. The imam’s three children were sentenced to life in prison in 2024 on charges of terrorism, kidnapping, and conspiracy to murder for organizing a jihadist training compound in New Mexico.

Wahhaj is “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote on X, rubbing his own Muslim affiliation in the face of a city still wracked by the 9/11 attack and ongoing terrorist threats.

Mamdani has publicly called for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  When interviewed on a national Fox News show, he could barely acknowledge the ceasefire in the Mideast and agreement to disarm Hamas.

Antipathy for New Yorkers appears to permeate the campaign.  After the debate, a citizen-journalist exposed Mamdani’s campaign canvassing director Robert Akleh, via the Louder with Crowder podcast, as using Islam and dumb Americans to win the election.  Speaking to a woman in what appears to be a bar after multiple drinks, Akleh said that at mosques, “we get young lesbian white women to give out flyers” and that they visited a “hundred in a week.”  The hidden camera also caught Akleh commenting on police officers: “Who gives a s--- what they think?”

Mamdani’s brazen disrespect for the city’s residents, police force, and melting-pot heritage may yet be fatal missteps of an overconfident candidate and a campaign tasting victory prematurely.

A poll released after the October 17 debate but taken before the debate shows that if the race is narrowed to a Mamdani versus Cuomo, the contest becomes a statistical dead heat, with 44.6% for Mamdani and 40.7% for Cuomo.  Undecideds were a high 15%.  What was even more interesting about the polling is that voters over the age of 50 will likely determine the outcome.  Most of the undecideds are over 50.  The poll was conducted by Gotham Polling, sponsored by the AARP, of 1,040 likely voters between October 14 and 16.

Polls can be discounted for many reasons, and perhaps this one had an agenda.  However, the underlying analysis shows that in the Democrat primary, where Mamdani walloped Cuomo, over-50 voters dropped in absolute turnout and percentage to less than 50% of primary voters, which was an aberration.  On primary day, the temperature in the city that day topped 100 degrees, which probably discouraged that demographic from turning out.  In the general election, over-50 voters constitute at least 60% of the total vote.  In 2021, they were 63%, and in 2017, they were 60%.

Following the Gotham Polling release, the calls for Sliwa to drop out intensified, many of them from his supporters.  The New York Post; the Daily News; and the influential owner of WABC Radio, where Sliwa was employed as a talk show host prior to his campaign, appealed to Sliwa to step aside.  On Tuesday morning, Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, who has been an avid supporter, urged Sliwa to look at the numbers to decide what is best for the city he loves.  As of this writing, influential New York politicians, including congressional Reps. Elise Stefanik and Mike Lawler, the state Republican Party leader, and former Governor George Pataki were still publicly backing Sliwa.

Last night’s debate confirmed that both Sliwa and Cuomo have a firm grasp on the realities of governance and further exposed Mamdani as a mountebank.  Early voting starts October 25.

Mamdani and his DSA backers have been effective in targeting and exploiting young New Yorkers who feel barred from moving up economically.  These voters perseverate over issues that have no bearing on their quality of life or future prospects, like hating President Trump and Israel and “freeing” Palestine, while ignoring pragmatic solutions that could have direct and positive impacts on their daily lives, like public safety.

In a cynical calculation, the Mamdani campaign made fighting Trump, globalizing the intifada, defunding the police, and free stuff its rallying standards, despite their irrelevance and destructiveness to the welfare of New York City and its 8 million residents.  He’s made abundant and infeasible promises to these ill informed potential voters, like freezing their rents, free buses, and low-cost groceries at city-owned stores.

His contempt for his fellow elected officials is barefaced.  Fearful of a primary challenge, New York governor Kathy Hochul endorsed him.  But when asked at the debate whether he’d support her for re-election, he refused.  The state Democrat party chairman, Jay Jacobs, was smarter; he outright declined to endorse Mamdani, saying that he disagrees with Mamdani’s views on Israel and that the DSA does not represent the “principles, values or polices of the Democratic Party.”  Senator Chuck Schumer and congressional Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Thomas Suozzi are holdouts and could remain so after Mamdani’s public disrespect for the governor.

Voters encountered a similarly untested politician over twenty years ago in Barrack Obama, who employed the “stupid voters” strategy.  Perhaps you remember Obama’s mantra: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”  The architect of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, was caught on video gloating about how Obamacare passed only due to the “stupidity of the American voter” and a lack of transparency.

Generation Z may feel uniquely circumscribed in their misery, but they are not alone in facing difficult environments after graduating from college.  Many other generations have overcome economic hardships and obstacles without reverting to communism.

The outcome of the NYC mayoral election is likely to depend on the older and wiser voters who recognize misdirection even if it’s delivered with a disarming smile.  The city’s welfare depends on them choosing pragmatic solutions to crime, lousy schools, and high taxes, not alluring promises that mask a hateful agenda.

Linda R. Killian is a retired financial analyst and a local chairman of the Republican Party.

Image: Zohran Mamdani.  Credit: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.