What would a Mamdani win mean for Trump's America?

0:01Zohran Mamdani:This is a Global Player original podcast. Young people showed up in record numbers as immigrants saw themselves in the politics of their city. As seniors, once skeptical, dared to dream again. We spoke with one voice. New York is not for sale. That is Zoran Mamdani, the man who hopes next week to become the New York mayor. He's speaking alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. They represent the new flank of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists. Is this a turning point for that party? make no mistake Zoramah Dhani would represent a massive change in New York he is 34 a Muslim a socialist no one has ever held the city with those sort of credentials before and it looks like he's going to do it welcome to the News Agents USA the News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel it's John it's Emily And we should start with a caveat because we know and love elections and we know and love surprises.

1:24Zohran Mamdani:There's only one poll that matters. There is only one poll that matters, as every single politician ever has said. But we are a week out now and early voting has already begun. In other words, you can go and vote, postal vote and put your vote in a ballot if you are eligible in New York City. And currently the betting markets, the poly markets are reckoning there is a 92 percent of Zoran Mamdani, the Ugandan born Muslim mayoral candidate winning New York, which would be a seismic shift. Right. I mean, a hurricane. Yeah. And there are other candidates and we are going to get round to those other candidates.

2:03Zohran Mamdani:And there are other flavours of Democrats that also look like they could be victorious in their own elections. But right now, all eyes are on Mamdani to the point where even Fox News was asking if he had this one in the bag. With all the voters talking to you, do you feel like you have it in the bag or you still want people to show up or do you think you got it? You can never take anything for granted. If you want to take something for granted, that's Andrew Cuomo, what he did in the primary. We don't want to end up like Andrew Cuomo. So he mentions Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo was the former governor who was disgraced after allegations of sexual harassment.

2:40Zohran Mamdani:removed him from his job. It was astonishing, really, to see him trying to make a comeback and trying to gain the Democratic ticket. He didn't. He's running as an independent. And Eric Adams, who was the former mayor, also disgraced for fraud allegations, has now pulled out. And another candidate representing the Republican Party, who has kind of weirdly gained a sort of niche following on TikTok and Insta, is called Curtis Sliwa. He goes around everywhere with a red berry. But none of them seem to be making the inroads that would represent a serious challenge to Mamdani now. And so Democrats are starting to get not just excited, but possibly overawed by the idea that this is what the Democratic Party should look like, will look like, is going to look like in 2025.

3:33Zohran Mamdani:Look, you have to be lucky in who your opponents are. Big time. And I think that Zora Mamdani is very lucky that he is against Andrew Cuomo, who, as you say, is kind of seen like this establishment politician. The family have been involved in New York politics for decades, and he had kind of various awful allegations made against him when he was the governor of New York state. but beyond that you can't take away from the fact that if mamdani wins next week this will be the most significant win for the left in the history of u.s politics i mean yeah bernie sanders the left of the left yeah the left not just the democrats but the progressive you know there have been other politicians in america who have self-identified as socialist bernie sanders the senator in vermont does that but he is a state so he's a senator in the senate this is someone who is going to be leading new york city the preeminent financial capital of the u.s and that will be something that is going to galvanize politics and so yeah people are excited on the democratic side and they're also terrified because establishment democrats kind of are more comfortable with people who can cosy up to the billionaires, who've got good relations with Wall Street, who speak the same language as business.

4:59Zohran Mamdani:And Zoram Amdani is gaining his support and his electoral strength from grassroots and grassroots upwards. Yeah, and his rallying cry there is, as you just heard, New York is not for sale. So his policies have caught a lot of public attention. One, he wants to do free bus fares in a whole city, could cost up to a billion dollars. It's not cheap, but he's promising that. He wants to freeze rents in New York. A lot of New York rentals go up year on year, which makes it almost impossibly unaffordable. And the other thing he's talked about is these grocery stores, state run grocery stores, which has had everyone running around saying, oh, it's going to be like Cuba.

5:38Zohran Mamdani:It's going to be like the Soviet Union. He's actually only talking about five of those stores in the whole of New York. And in my mind, I guess they are more like a sort of food bank equivalent where the prices are kept low. And if you want to find state sponsored, low cost groceries, you have to go and find one of these five stores. I don't think it's a takeover of every shopping mall in America. And the other big platform is childcare, universal childcare. Universal childcare. So it's expensive in other words. So if you are on the kind of the business side of the sort of centre right, business right of New York, you think this is a man who's going to bankrupt your city and it's all working pretty well.

6:19Zohran Mamdani:And please don't touch the transport system. Please don't touch the housing market. Please don't start offering huge amounts of subsidy for childcare. The city can't afford it. if you are somebody who has felt completely ignored by the establishment over generations and decades, you probably think, finally, thank God somebody is listening to what we need. But if you look at it in the context of a European social democratic model, you kind of think, why are people getting so worried? Why is their hair on fire at the moment over it? Because in American politics, it is quite different. And it's for New York City.

7:01Zohran Mamdani:Again, underline New York City. And this is why people in America are thinking this is a leap into the socialist unknown. Yeah. And his position on Israel-Palestine. Yes. He has been much less of an advocate for Israel and its activities than many in American politics have been, even those within the Democratic Party. And it's been interesting to see how, I'm going to say reluctant or slow, some of the sort of senior establishment Democrats have been to align themselves with him. I think, I mean, not least over that issue. You know, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have been much less, much more wary, I think, of giving him their endorsement until very late on in the race.

7:45Zohran Mamdani:And Mamdani himself has had to kind of, you know, shift quite a bit on some of the positions that were taken earlier. And I heard an interview he did the other day where he was talking about Israel. Would you go to Israel? No, he wouldn't go to Israel. He was saying, but he said, but, you know, there are a lot of countries I'm not going to go to because I'm going to be mayor of New York. I'm not a foreign policy person. And I thought, actually, you know, you need to work your line out a bit better on that, because just to say, well, it's not going to arise because, you know, I'm just going to be focusing on New York is not a satisfactory answer.

8:16Zohran Mamdani:Does he believe that Israel has a right to exist and defend itself? And, you know, if so, what does that look like? I think those are questions he hasn't answered. But again, it shows that politics in America is changing. And, you know, his attitude towards Israel and the fact that he's likely to win the election is one of those things. And also a policy platform which is much more radical than the Democratic Party has dared to do. And he's also a brilliant communicator. Yeah, he is. But I think it's important to put this in context as well, because Mamdani is fighting for New York mayor and that is getting all the airtime, that is getting all the energy.

8:57Zohran Mamdani:He's an exciting candidate for many who want to see this kind of progressive politics on the left. But there are other races going on next week with Democrats who may also triumph in their own spaces, in their own field, which offer a very, very different type of Democratic politician. One is Abigail Spanberg. I remember interviewing her when she first went for her House seat in Virginia. She now wants to become Virginia governor. She's former CIA. She's a totally different type of Democrat. She's much more on the centre right, I'd say. She is what they call one of the sort of security mums. You know, she's on the sort of centre right of the party.

9:33Zohran Mamdani:She used to work for the CIA. She is a totally different colour, totally different stripe to Mamdani in a Virginia race, which is very different to New York. She could triumph there and give Democrats on the centre right cause to think, well, actually, that's what the future looks like. There's another guy in Nebraska called Dan Osborne. People are getting very excited about Dan Osborne. Again, somebody who is weirdly much more aligned with somebody like Trump on immigration than much of the Democratic Party. So I think there is also a danger that you sort of leapfrog over. Oh, this is what the Democratic Party has to look like for the next five years.

10:11Zohran Mamdani:It may not be. It may just be that New York is an outlier and this is what works here right now. Look, attitudes in southern Virginia, you know, where there used to be tobacco plantations and all the rest of it is going to be very different than the metropolitan New York state. I mean, the CIA headquarters is right by the side of, you know, is on the Washington edge of Virginia. But go to southern Virginia. It's a completely different place and very different from New York. America is not one country. It's many different countries. But nonetheless, what's happening in New York is significant. We'll be back in a moment speaking to a very good friend, an old friend of Zora Mandani's, Ross Barkin.

11:05Zohran Mamdani:The News Agents USA. Well, joining us now is Ross Barkin. He's the journalist and author, editor in chief of the Metropolitan Review. He has known Zora Mandani for nearly a decade. And I guess in another world or another sort of parallel world, Ross, you might have been running his campaign. He ran yours originally.

11:27Ross Barkan:He did. So many years ago, I made a pivot to politics and I ran for state senate in New York City in Brooklyn where I grew up. And he was my campaign manager. So we spent many, many months together. And I saw him up close when he was a state anonymous but very well regarded organizer. So it's been exciting for me to see him rise all the way. We'll see perhaps to the tunnel that looks that way.

11:54Zohran Mamdani:So I guess you're sort of politically close and politically aligned. When we're looking a week out from the election, the poly markets, the betting markets suggest a 92 percent victory for Mamdani at this point. You would be just to sort of categorize this for our listeners who are maybe coming to this race for the first or second time. You think it is very unlikely that Mamdani would lose the New York mayoral? It's unlikely.

12:23Ross Barkan:Listen, there have been shock upsets before Zoran Mamdani authored his own upset of Andrew Cuomo in the primary. I think there's a lot going for him this time around, and Cuomo is a very damaged candidate. I think it's two factors are true simultaneously in this race. Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation talent. He's exciting people. And also Cuomo is a disgraced former governor who, you know, could theoretically have a path to victory against a 34-year-old socialist assemblyman, but he's finding it hard to close the gap, even though he's moved up in the polls. It's difficult to see what his actual path of victory would be.

13:08Ross Barkan:But, you know, you never know in these things. But I do think that the betting markets reflect the reality that Zoramandani is the heavy favourite.

13:15Zohran Mamdani:So I'm sure a lot of people, as Emily says, are coming to Zoramandani kind of relatively new. They've heard maybe a bit about him, that he's running for mayor, that he's a bit different from a lot of people who have gone before in that role. as you know him please tell us more because 34 socialist muslim he's not exactly cut in the same mold as other people who've held the mayoralty of new york city he's not at all

13:44Ross Barkan:if you look at who becomes mayor typically they're ladder climbing politicians who spent many years in the trenches or in the case of michael bloomberg you know he was extremely wealthy and a known businessman. The thing about Zoran Mamdani is he actually shares a fair amount in common with another unlikely politician. That was Barack Obama. When Obama was running for president, they said many of the same things they say about Zoran Mamdani right now. He's inexperienced. He has a thin resume. No one like him has ever been president. America can't vote for a man with a strange name, a foreign sounding name, who's also black.

14:24Ross Barkan:This country cannot do it. Of course, they did. So I think with someone like Saran Mandani, you know, yes, he is completely outside of any conception of what a New York City mayor could be. But he's on the cucks. And knowing him personally, I'll say he's very competent. He's more competent than he seems. He's very focused. He's extremely hardworking. And he's bright. He's got a high IQ. And I think those things all matter. If you say you want someone who's experienced but is less capable, someone who's not experienced and more capable, you know, right now, I think New Yorkers are leaning towards someone who is exciting, who is new, who is fresh, who is capable.

15:06Ross Barkan:And of course, as mayor, he's going to have many challenges and no one knows what type of mayor he'll be. But I can say that the talent is there.

15:12Zohran Mamdani:Yeah, Ross, I get the point you make about the sort of similarities with Barack Obama, the excitement, the foreign sounding name, the color of the skin and all the rest of it. But isn't a big distinguishing feature that actually Zoran Mandani is a lot, lot further to the left than Barack. Barack Obama was not describing himself as a socialist when he was, you know, a state congressman in Springfield, Illinois.

15:40Ross Barkan:He was not pro-Palestine either, for sure. I mean, I mean, Zoran Mandani in some ways embodies all the fear mongering around Obama. My little joke is, Zoran is the Muslim socialist born in Africa, which they all said about Obama. So certainly he exists on the left spectrum. At the same time, if you look at his actual policies and what he's campaigning on, within the New York City context, they're not radical at all. He's calling for free buses, which is something Michael Bloomberg wanted to do. He's calling for a rent freeze and rent stabilized apartment, something the prior mayor, Bill de Blasio, did.

16:19Ross Barkan:Five city run grocery stores, which would be new, but there's only five of them. And universal child care is something that most Democrats support, which is very expensive. So when you actually break down the platform, it's not so radical. But, you know, he's exciting people who self-identify as socialists and he himself identifies that way. He believes in a sort of social democracy, a strong social safety net, the things that Europeans often take for granted. So I think, yes, he presents to the left of Obama. And I think on foreign policy, he certainly is. But look, he's not going to be president.

16:52Ross Barkan:So when you actually look at the platform, it's fairly achievable as platforms go.

16:59Zohran Mamdani:I think you've said something quite interesting, which is that for a European model, he doesn't particularly strike listeners to anything that out of the ordinary. We sort of get a lot of stuff on the welfare state. We believe in health care. We believe in subsidized travel and all the rest of it. I guess there are a couple of phrases that have docked him, that have followed him around, some of which he sort of had to spend a long time re-explaining or casting off. One was about defunding the police that was in the days following the murder of George Floyd. And I think he at the time called the New York police racist and homophobic.

17:38Zohran Mamdani:And the other was this phrase that was used, globalise the Intifada, which has got a lot of particularly sort of older Jewish Americans or older pro-Israel Americans really concerned that he sees a world order in which, you know, the state of Israel doesn't exist.

17:56Ross Barkan:Well, I'd say it's half true. He never used the phrase globalizing in Tephada. He was asked about it on a podcast, and then he had to talk about why certain groups saw it as a slogan of liberation, so to speak. And he backed away from that. But I'd say globalizing the photos has not been part of his rhetorical toolkit at any point. Defund the police was. There's no doubt a lot of progressives and leftists were for defunding the police in 2020 have now backed away. He certainly has pivoted on that flip-flop, whatever you want to say. And now he's not for it anymore. And yes, he's had to contend with that.

18:35Ross Barkan:And that is the reality of politics. And he said repeatedly he doesn't want to defund them. he wants to have a nonviolent mental health responders work with the police, which I think makes sense. And this model has been used in other cities. But in terms of the rhetoric, you know, some he's uttered and he must account for that. And some he's not. Some has been, I would argue, quite unfair. And I think for Jewish New Yorkers, listen, if you are a Zionist, if you are an Israel hawk, it's a tough time politically for you because the political establishment in America is no longer completely aligned around the goals of the Israeli government.

19:14Ross Barkan:And I don't think it should be. But he's not anti-Semitic, I can say that. And he's said repeatedly he's going to denounce anti-Semitism and protect Jewish New Yorkers. But that doesn't mean compromising your beliefs around Palestine. It doesn't mean you neglect the struggle that the people in Gaza and the West Bank are having. So that's something, listen, Jewish New Yorkers are divided on this too. younger Jewish New Yorkers like Mamdani, older ones who are very pro-Israel don't. And the Jewish community of New York is not monolith. There's Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, progressive younger Jews.

19:49Ross Barkan:It's a real mix. And he's going to get a lot of those votes. He's not getting all of them. And for some who believe in really unstinting support for Netanyahu and the Israeli government, he's not going to be their mayor. That's just a fact.

20:03Zohran Mamdani:Mamdani put out a post over the weekend saying yesterday Andrew Cuomo laughed and agreed when a radio host said that I would cheer another 9-11. The terrorist attacks, obviously, on New York. He is often portrayed by his opponents as a danger, dangerous. Is this just Islamophobia at this point? I mean, here was his own response to what he heard. I want to use this moment to speak to the Muslims of New York City.

20:39Zohran Mamdani:I want to speak to the memory of my aunt

20:47Ross Barkan:who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab.

20:56Zohran Mamdani:I want to speak to the Muslim who works for our city. whether they teach in our schools or walk the beat for the NYPD

21:06Ross Barkan:New Yorkers who all make daily sacrifices for the city they call home only to see their leaders spit in their face yeah well look he's not a danger to Jewish New Yorkers or New Yorkers in general the worst that happens is he tries and fails to implement these policies that I just talked about some of which are expensive, some of which are not. The city will churn onward. Business will be business. You can't expropriate wealth. You can't seize the means of production. So what is this danger, right? That's all very ethereal. There's no actual danger.

21:43Zohran Mamdani:Do you think it's race-based or do you think it is genuinely coming from people who think he's going to bankrupt New York?

21:50Ross Barkan:I think it's a mix. Look, I think there are people who are very pro-business and who are either wealthy or conservative who don't believe in his policies, and they're allowed to oppose them. Now, I think anyone who has a brain in their head and actually has examined them can see these will not destroy the fiscal situation or not ruin the fiscal situation in any way. Some are expensive, and some might be done in piecemeal. I mean, you look at the history of New York City policy. It's about negotiation, right? He wants a$6 billion child care program. Maybe it starts at three. Maybe it starts at two.