“I kind of like Mamdani winning,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Vanity Fair, “because the worst thing in a way would be when [Andrew] Cuomo comes back in, you just keep losing a little bit of altitude for four or eight more years, and they kind of hold it together, and more people leave. So if you could just say, ‘Okay, he’s a shock to the system, and there’s a chance you can come back from it.’”

Bessent’s opinion of the situation in New York City fully reflects my own sentiments about the mayoral race. If forced to choose in a two-way race for mayor between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, I would give my vote unhesitatingly to the LGBTQ+ socialist from Uganda. Naturally, my heart is with Curtis Sliwa if he remains in the race as the Republican candidate. But since the big money and most of the big endorsements have gone to Andrew and Zohran, voting for Curtis, who is presently running in third place, will have no effect on the outcome. My fading Republican choice models himself after the crime-fighting Rudolph Giuliani, who served as New York mayor from 1994 to 2001 and who is now enthusiastically backing Sliwa. Unfortunately, America’s largest city has changed demographically and socially in the last 30 years and is no longer capable of electing either Sliwa or Rudy to any high municipal position.

In a race narrowed down to Cuomo and Mamdani, as I strongly suggested on the Chronicles website a few months ago, my vote must go to the young, morally wacko, and fiscally insane guy. The forever smiling Mamdani has a pleasant manner of speaking even to his most embattled opponents and. to his everlasting credit, he is not Cuomo. Unlike the former governor, Mamdani didn’t eliminate bail laws in New York State; he didn’t run around groping female employees while giving lip service to feminist tropes; and he didn’t help kill thousands of senior citizens by throwing them together with COVID carriers in homes for the aged. Except for the blubbery plutocratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker or the loud-mouthed, syntactically challenged, race-baiting Representative Jasmine Crockett, it is hard to think of any American politician whom I despise more than Cuomo.

But there’s another reason I’d vote for Mamdani against Cuomo, however reluctantly. The New York financiers and other local moneybags who have been throwing their dough at Cuomo could have backed Sliwa when he was running with better polling numbers than he can show right now. These luminaries chose not to take this step because many of them (and this would apply to our president as well) had friendly relations with Cuomo. Presumably, they thought this blackguard would be more useful to them than the leader of the subway Guardian Angels, who developed a well-earned reputation as a crime fighter. Besides, Cuomo obligingly ranted against Mamdani because of his anti-Israel stands, while Sliwa has stressed issues of more local concern to New York voters, like the crime wave in the Big Apple. For me it is shocking how the supposed pillars of New York society threw their weight behind the loathsome Cuomo when they had the chance to back a far worthier candidate for the mayoral office

Even more important for me, to quote Bessent, Mamdani will provide a “shock to the system.” This shock will either cause necessary changes in New York City or allow this place swarming with government dependents to collapse politically and financially.  Like Bessent, I’m all for stepping on the gas on the careening vehicle that is New York City and letting things reach a critical stage slightly sooner than they would if Cuomo wrecked the city more gradually. The very rich wokesters who support Mamdani in large numbers at least have the consolation of seeing their real estate prices continue to rise. They may be the last to be hurt.

Finally, Mamdani promised to do something which my New York based colleague at Chronicles Mark Brennan and I have been licking our chops over. He vowed, once elected, to eliminate gifted programs in public schools—you know, the kind that entitled feminists send their kids to, if they can’t quite manage the hefty tuition required for tony private schools. In this antiseptically segregated situation, the offspring of upwardly mobile wokesters can associate with their own kind, while parents can boast to their fellow virtue signalers about how their progeny rub shoulders with inner-city blacks. Mamdani’s “educational reform” will strike with special force many of those who voted heavily for him in the primary. Park Slope in Brooklyn and the Upper East Side in Manhattan, both Mamdani strongholds, should feel the effect of his educational policy disproportionately, which of course will be poetic justice. If the new mayor keeps the police force from protecting the city’s residents—opening the prisons and releasing felons, as he seems inclined to do—again we’ll have well-deserved punishments for the same social class (although unfortunately for many other innocents as well).

I do feel sorry for the remaining normies, but sooner or later they may have to leave the city as the crazies take over. Large firms and businesses have already begun to relocate, and this trend will likely accelerate, no matter who wins the upcoming mayoral race.  And that day may be coming sooner rather than a bit later.  

This doesn’t mean that I’d favor bailing out New York after Mamdani and his LGBTQ squad finish their wrecking operation. Bessent promised he would never do anything as stupid as bailing out those who cause the likely fiscal disaster. New Yorkers are free to plunge into the abyss (and I’m even willing to assist them), but I see no reason that the tax money of Red States should be given to those who take this plunge.