San Franciscans think the world revolves around them. New Yorkers know it does.
They’ve got a point: It’s not in every city that a Democratic primary in a mayoral election can become international news and be hailed as an inflection point in national history.
New York City’s Board of Elections will, on July 1, belatedly run ranked-choice voting permutations from last Tuesday’s contest. But it’s not going to tell you anything you didn’t already know: 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will handily beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, the scandal-plagued 67-year-old scion of the state’s desiccated Democratic establishment and, every day, more and more of a dead ringer for the Cardassian villains in “Star Trek.”
For San Franciscans of a certain vintage, the contest rang a distant bell. The notion of a charismatic young leftist firebrand taking on the avatar of the Democratic establishment against great odds and at a financial handicap harked to the epochal Matt Gonzalez vs. Gavin Newsom mayoral contest of 2003.
Despite being outspent by an order of magnitude, Gonzalez kept it close: Newsom prevailed by a 53-47 tilt. Like Tyrese Halliburton in this year’s NBA playoffs, Gonzalez will be remembered for a heroic losing effort.
This is how most underdog stories end. But that didn’t happen in New York City.
Regarding progressive politics in San Francisco, Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign feels more than a bit like Hunter S. Thompson’s line about the city in the late 1960s: “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
The progressive movement in San Francisco has rolled back. It is, at present, largely devoid of the youth, vigor, multiculturalism and organizational structure that marked Mamdani’s successful primary campaign. Just about the only San Francisco power base remaining to push a citywide progressive campaign is organized labor.
That wasn’t the case in San Francisco in 2003, and it isn’t the case in New York now. Mamdani’s primary victory prompts so many questions, but two loom large, if you’re a San Franciscan: How could Mamdani do what Gonzalez could not? And could a Mamdani-like candidate win here?
Asked the first question, Gonzalez himself notes, correctly, that 2003 was a long time ago. “Imagine the difference between 1981 and 2003. Now it’s 2003 to 2025,” he says. “It doesn’t seem that long ago, but Mamdani was 11 or 12 years old when I ran.”
Well, thanks for making us all feel old, Matt.
He’s right, but there’s no denying that, writ large, both the 2003 and 2025 contests pitted a youthful, photogenic, charismatic leftist who sparked a people-based movement against a far better-funded face of the establishment. And, in both contests, the powers-that-be were terrified that the upstart candidate might win — and pulled out all the stops.
In San Francisco, however, the face was far more appealing — and youthful, photogenic and charismatic. Supervisor Gavin Newsom in 2003 looked like Christian Bale in “American Psycho.” But if you’re going to look like Christian Bale, “American Psycho” Christian Bale is not the worst you could do: Far better than “Machinist” Christian Bale or “Vice” Christian Bale, and certainly preferable to “American Hustle” Christian Bale.
Newsom was young, just 36, and energetic. As was the case with Cuomo, President Bill Clinton himself came in and campaigned for the mainstream candidate in a municipal election. That was probably a better idea 22 years ago — and in support of a candidate who, at that time, did not have any baggage regarding alleged sexual improprieties.
Getting a president to stump for you is a big deal. But Newsom also attempted to run from the establishment while simultaneously embracing the advantages it brought.
“We knew they’d go after him as a feckless, young socialite,” recalled Jim Ross, Newsom’s campaign manager. “We did 25 policy papers. We kind of grounded him. For voters, it loses the contrast.”
That didn’t happen in New York City. In 2021, Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace as New York Governor after enough women to take the field for a soccer team filed sexual harassment complaints against him.
As governor, he seemed to take particular pleasure in antagonizing the state’s largest city. He focused on TV and media buys, whereas Team Newsom actually spent the bulk of its (considerable) war chest on Get Out the Vote efforts.
Cuomo did not walk the streets and mingle with the people, in marked contrast to Mamdani, who probably perspired through enough shirtsleeves and ties to exhaust a Century 21.
“People voted against Andrew Cuomo, who is reprehensible,” said Eric Jaye, who served as Newsom’s lead consultant in 2003. “He ran a shitty campaign, and Mamdani ran a good campaign.”
He also ran a sophisticated campaign that was well beyond what Gonzalez could muster 22 years ago. “Matt was a once-in-a-lifetime political talent,” sums up a contemporary, “but he didn’t have a lot of infrastructure.”
Unlike the outsider’s outsider, Gonzalez, who ran as a Green, Mamdani is a Democrat. The democratic socialists do have infrastructure, having previously put members into Congress, the state senate and the New York City Council.
Superior organization and ground game led Mamdani to sprint out to a huge lead in early voting, leaving his opponent to pray for a Hail Mary on election day. That’s the exact opposite of how things went with Gonzalez and Newsom. And if there was ever a chance Cuomo was going to pull it out with election day voters, infernal heat on that day surely didn’t help.
Cuomo was, literally as it turned out, cooked.
Because Gonzalez wasn’t a Democrat, the Democratic party had a free hand to spend gobs of money to boost Newsom under the auspices of “communicating with Democrats.” It did. Labor split in its endorsements, too — though a Gonzalez volunteer remembers a campaign strategist saying, with a straight face, that it was okay that labor wasn’t a key partner, as Larry Harvey would deliver the Burning Man vote.
Turns out, that’s not a thing. This kind of magical thinking did not occur on the Mamdani campaign.
New Yorkers this year did not react sharply to highly publicized and gory individual crimes in one of the nation’s safest big cities. Overt drug use and street chaos is neither tolerated nor prevalent in New York City, but it has been here.
San Francisco crime rates have dropped and dropped and dropped some more, but voters, confronted by filth and chaos, and besieged by years of media coverage of filth and chaos, do not feel safe. And, lo, public safety is the No. 1 priority in a city where homicides dropped to levels last seen in the Kennedy administration.
Mamdani, instead, focused on affordability. He pledged to freeze rents. He wants to make buses free. He wants to subsidize childcare and grocery stores. And you know what? He actually can freeze the rent.
If all Mayor Mamdani does is freeze rents, that would set him apart from Mayor Eric Adams and a potential Mayor Cuomo. This would satiate the No. 1 priority of scads of New York City voters — who, like San Franciscans of a generation ago, may place their identities as renters first and foremost.
Mamdani’s likeability and laser focus on municipal affordability appear to have resonated more than attempts to play on fears of public safety or Mamdani’s views on Israel — in what is, again, a municipal election.
Surely his views on international issues were paramount for some voters. But, for others, his local platform, their distaste for Cuomo or both may have simply outweighed them. It’s debatable whether Mamdani’s unapologetically critical views of Israel were an overall political boon, but they certainly weren’t a political third rail.
That is no small deal, and it bursts all manner of conventional wisdoms. For all the talk about how Democrats need to tack to the center and keep their heads down, Mamdani has shown that there is an alternative to that — an alternative that invigorated many of the demographics Democrats sorely need.
Still, it’s difficult to see his victory as an easily duplicable template. They don’t make politicians like Zohran Mamdani in laboratories; let’s give the man some credit. New York City’s size and demographics are unique, and New York state’s Democratic establishment is uniquely corrupt and ossified, with Cuomo as its avatar.
It is also far more affordable for big-money players to flood the political market in San Francisco than in a city-state like New York City.
Locally, Rep. Nancy Pelosi is old enough to remember the St. Louis Browns playing in the World Series. But nobody has ever accused her of incompetence or absenteeism, and 73 percent of San Franciscans voted for her in the 2024 primary election and 81 percent in the general. A lot can happen in the next year and change, but she does not seem like a particularly soft target.
Time will tell. In the meantime, voters nationwide appear ready for something different. In New York City, that was a democratic socialist who wants to subsidize groceries, buses and childcare. In San Francisco, it was a scion of great wealth who’d never before held conventional employment. In San Jose, it was a little-known former tech executive.
There appears to be a great thirst for change. What that change looks like, however? That’s harder to know.
Nancy Pelosi needs to step down and let someone younger start to build their career in The House. She has had a long and distinguished career in public service and we all thank her for it, but for the good of the party and the nation, she should fade into retirement.
Yes, a long and distinguished career in service to Wall St, Israel, and the military-police state-industrial-complex. By defecating on the working class and by coopting, squashing, and strangling actual left-of-center politics, the Pelosi-Clinton-Schumer-Obama paradigm paved the way for the rise of authoritarian rightwing pseudo-populism and are responsible for saddling us with the orange clown.
The Democrats are where leftwing politics go to die. The Democrats don’t need youth; they need to go away and die a miserable, painful, horrible death, so that actual leftwing movements not in service to Wall St, Israel, and Raytheon have a chance to grow.
This made me laugh, in agreement
Stepping out of the leadership was fine. If she dies in office, we’ve got a democratic governor to replace her.
I trust Pelosi much more than I trust Scott Wiener et al to uphold her district.
She has her baggage but her word is not something she throws around lightly.
Wiener is a liar. Pelosi may be too wealthy, out of touch to be touched by politics.
Wiener wants to wield that power more lucratively, if history is any judge.
Mamdani will raise taxes on the upper 1%. That makes his proposals viable. Sooner or later, SF will have to do the same if any progress is to be made. All this budget talk about cut cuts cuts and not even a whisper about revenue. There was zero discussion of revenue during the campaign and zero now. Get serious.
Hi, While I love Joe Eskanazi’s analysis and writing, this article leaves out a key component of Mamdami’s win– the teamwork that all 4 candidates endorsed by the Working Families Party (Mamdami, Lander, Adams, and Myrie) exhibited, so that someone decent could win the primary. Yes, Mamdami is extraordinary and rose to the top above much more established and recognized names. And simultaneously, no one does a campaign alone, and in this case there was admirable cooperation between the more progressive candidates. I wish collaboration got highlighted more in general in the media… might make the world better in general.
Thank you for considering!
1) Mamdani mastered modern communication
2) Cuomo was a terrible candidate
It’s really that simple.
I think if Cuomo were more like Newsom back in the day, he may have won outright. The fact that he is old and had to quit due to treating women poorly, he was the opposite of a young Newsom as this article points out. Careful what you glean from this one….
The problem with this article is that he chose the wrong race. The far more relevant race was the Ammiano-Brown race. Would like to see that article.
Ammiano had a platform far different from Browns, platform for the majority of people then in SF ( I’m sure you understand why I qualify that). He had a huge, activist base that walked precincts, phone banked, raised money from working people. The people in his Supervisors District loved him.
Waiting for that article.
Of course! The other best SF Mayoral election.. miss those days..
I still can’t get the image of former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg’s face out of my mind– after viewing him forced to endure Kamala Harris’s tasteless video presentation with Molly Shannon at the influential Alfred E. Smith Memorial Charity Dinner in 2024. For some reason, I imagined that beneath his stony, lizard-like face he was deeply embarrassed and appalled.
Donald Trump was then seated behind him, sucking in all the event’s air and attention .
It was then that I became certain that Trump would win the US presidential election.
He had the “it” that would appeal most to the oligarchs and the establishment stooges that run our country today– perhaps even to Bloomberg who had written some lukewarm checks to Harris.
Up to that moment, establishment politics in the US was largely business as usual. Smoke and mirrors and the politics of “lesser-evilism.”
Now the establishment’s gloves are off, reform is off the table, and the US Constitution is under attack.
Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Primary upset in New York City has put the US political establishment on notice that the support of workers and youth won’t be as easily bought as in the past. They are deeply troubled by the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. They are shocked by the police state being unleashed and the gestapo attacks on immigrants. They are also responding to the fear that they are being priced out of a decent future.
The biggest questions are: will the workers and youth rise to the occasion, or will they go home with a t-shirt and a future of more austerity and war?
There is only one way to stop Donald Trump’s trampling the US Constitution on his path to dictatorship and descent into deeper barbarism.
That is for all workers to take up a general strike!
In San Francisco, who will heed this call?
(Bloomberg also backed London Breed, and Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani.)
All of this rings true, but I think the money part deserves more than one sentence of consideration. San Francisco has as many billionaires as NYC, more if you include the Marin and San Mateo sets who have nothing better to do than meddle in our affairs (“neighbors” for a “”better”” SF indeed). The same number of people with reality-warping amounts of money, for 1/10th the population.
I remember the Gonzalez/Newsom campaign. It was disgusting. Newsom just innundated the news with half-truths and utter BS. I despised him as mayor, and it wasn’t until he showed some spine with Gay Marriage did I even being to not consider him purely a silver-spooned piece of entitled trash, but ALSO with a teeny bit of spine.
It really was infuriating, and I watched the same thing with Boudin’s recall, where the guy down the street from me got on an ad and talked about his store closing because of Boudin – but his store had been closed for YEARS before that. I watched cops literally ignore shoplifters in Walgreens because they wanted Jenkins to pardon that cop that Boudin was going to prosecute (and she did).
This guy in NY seems like a straight talker who’s got the interests of the people at heart, and that’s really the best we can expect. Let’s just hope he doesn’t spend the next 6 months facing an endless recall campaign full of lies and half-truths, spready by rich people who just want to save themselves some money.
D3, I suggest that when Newsom asks for money for his presidential preening you reply with ” care, not cash”.
And then screw his wife and hire Sam Singer, brilliant!
“For all the talk about how Democrats need to tack to the center […]
The Democrats have moved so far to the right, Mamdani policies would move them to the center.
“It’s debatable whether Mamdani’s unapologetically critical views of Israel were an overall political boon — but they certainly weren’t a political third rail.”
While the many Zionists of NY hate Mamdani’s winning, by and large, the young in NYC value and appreciate his criticism of Israel’s slaughter of Gaza’s. They came out in mass to power the 40-50,000 person “unprecedented” organizing effort for Mamdani. This part of the American politic was largely absent from Harris’s campaign, just as it was largely absent from Hubert Humphrey’s campaign in 1968. While the political incompetence of those two campaigns is now history, the lesson for future Democrats is to keep in mind who will work going door to door, tabling, organizing gatherings, etc etc. Young people do disproportionately more. Flout their interests at your peril.
My recollection of the Gonzalez campaign is that it was a 40 day wonder, put together late in the year bereft of long term plans. Did Tom Amiano drop out? I don’t think the two campaigns are very similar.
Mamdani’s success is a harbinger of what’s to come to the United States – universal health care, strong social safety nets, labor and environmental protections and more. What we have here is a message to the GOP and Moderate Establishment Dems: You can’t have this level of wealth polarization and think average people will just keep sucking it up. And SF? We will get on board sooner or later.
> “It’s debatable whether Mamdani’s unapologetically critical views of Israel were an overall political boon…”
Sure. ‘Is the sky blue?’ is debatable.
If Mamdani held the same politics, yet toed the line for the Israel lobby/ donor class, he’d be a dud.
https://youtu.be/Ms8tGyopFrQ?feature=shared
Newsom’s 53-47 win wasn’t that close. It translates to 12.7% more people voting for Gavin than Matt. That said it is the closest Progressives have come to winning in 37 years.
22 years on Gavin is Governor and possibly the next POTUS. Matt is basically doing the same job he was before he became a Supervisor, working for a guy who had been his junior. In terms of career progression, there is no contest. Hopefully Matt still doesn’t live in a roomshare rental but I don’t know.
I’m glad that you brought up Gonzalez v Newsom-a very different time, but an opportunity lost in this city to have embraced bold and clear thinking, with Matt’s experience. Lucky us that he’s remained in service! Greatly uplifted by Mamdani’s win, as well as the collaboration between he and Brad Lander-we need these examples. He has a clear message- that I feel applies to we San Franciscans as well- free transit (and we had a chance to try this a couple of years ago, but it was voted down by the BoS-still rattled by that one) rent freezes, and community grocery stores. I also have to say I was impressed by his backbone, his response to Cuomo during the debate was righteous and factual regarding ‘experience’. I hope Mumdani keeps inspiring all of us to be clear, forthright in serving our SHARED HUMANITY. TY-
Great prose Joe. How many will follow all the detail is debatable, but, you at least took. this one on amid a lot of frustration confusion that is coming out of our less than educated public due to the takeover of the Texas schoolbook publishing world that I barely remember and was probably before our time. When did our educators quit teaching us how to think and solve problems? Was it before or after the institutions dropped civics and social studies requirements to be sure no one understood how the government functions?
I wonder what difference the SF Bay Guardian’s misguided endorsement of Angela Alioto made in that election. Their voter guide carried a lot of influence.
Dating yourself my friend. Best and most exciting Mayoral election … Gonzalez 4-Ever!
I’m never voting for Nancy Pelosi again, and I always have in the past. It’s time for so many in congress to retire due to age and she’s no exception. She recently voted against impeaching Trump, she’s worked against the younger voices on congress, like AOC… I’m tired of it.
> Surely his views on [Palestinian rights] were paramount for some voters.
Yeah, but it’s becoming clear that it’s the political message more than the need for voters to have a candidate that champions Palestinian rights. There was no way I could have seen Harris as looking out for the working class when she was utterly subordinate to her pro-Israel megadonors (which was every one of them).
Mamdani rebuked the Israel lobby in snubbing the “Jewish State” (see video). And the Israel lobby now injects more loot into US politics than does the pharmaceutical lobby. It doesn’t matter the mayor of NYC will not be making policy relevant to how many bombs we send to Israel, he is still up against the Israel lobby and the Zionist billionaire donor class (undeniable). And he gave them the finger, leaving Bill Ackman in tatters, feeling powerless in the penthouse while posting an opening for a his dream candidate on X.
I think you need to reconsider your view that Israel is an “international issue,” Joe. It’s dismissive of what is happening on the ground, here, in the States.
A fair point. When we were closer in time to WWII and the holocaust, the argument that the Jews needed their own country held much more sway. Now, with the genocidal acts undertaken by the Israeli government, they have much less support from the younger generations in this country. And it’s important to make clear the US sends massive subsidies to Israel, not only weapons but, as I understand it, they also have free healthcare, and college – and yet we don’t. Why do we send them money to fund services that this country’s own citizens desperately need?
Support for Israel has dropped. I’d recommend a clear distinction, less use of clumsy language, and a capital ‘H’ in that context — unless you just don’t care, but I don’t read that.
Baseline US funds to Israel fall under an Obama era MOU and it’s all military. We don’t fund their healthcare and such, but I get what you’re saying.
San Francisco conservative Democrats learned their lesson well and plugged the holes.
San Francisco’s Mamdani’s are confined at the bottom of dry wells in the basement of nonprofit offices, being told to “put the lotion in the basket” by nonprofit CEOs who want to be outfitted in a leftist skin suit to try to pass. Goodbye Horses!