Looking at the Democratic primary results, it would be easy to assume that Zohran Mamdani supporters are the sort of rich liberals who claim to advocate for the less fortunate … when the less fortunate actually want something totally different.  They are fools.

     Mamdani had a 13-point margin over Andrew Cuomo in high-income neighborhoods, while Cuomo had a 13-point margin in low-income areas.  I also initially assumed this was like the self-flagellating people who denounced their white privilege and championed defunding the police in the summer of 2020 — all ostensibly for the benefit of black people.  But I’m realizing now that this is not the case for many Zohran supporters.

     Mamdani is the champion of the faux-working class: those who are actually quite well off but feel otherwise.  In the minds of his voters, the free-free-freebies Mamdani is promising — frozen rent, free buses, cheap groceries — are not for New York’s least fortunate. It’s also for… themselves.  Mamdani’s base are disproportionately young, importunately young, educated and white, and live in trendy areas  educated and white, and live in trendy areas of Brooklyn. A great number are well-compensated Zoomers and Millennials who truly believe they are New York’s downtrodden.  They live in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. They’ve never been to Brownsville or Mott Haven. 

     Theirs is a world of fusion tapas bars and indie coffee shops. Hey, $20 lychee martinis and $7 lattes with cashew milk can, indeed, make a dent in a starting salary.  With their visual arts or sociology degrees, they don’t make as much as classmates who majored in engineering or economics or went to law school.  That is partly the result of their own choices, yet they see the economic outcome as a travesty.  They may be transplants who decided to call the most expensive city in the nation home. But if an immigrant landlord who nearly lost his property during the pandemic tries to raise the rent because of rising utilities — well, he’s guilty of extorting them.