Title: How Mamdani's Mass Politics Defeated the Establishment

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. First of all, it's another Supreme Court decision day, and they released them just after ten O'clock. The term is about to end, so we'll see if birthright citizenship or any of the other major rulings do come down today. We have law professor Kate Shaw standing by for later in the program. We'll see what emerges there. We'll start today with a New York City history lens on the nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor. Even if our Hundred Years of a Hundred Things series is ending, we hit number 99 yesterday, we'll still be doing history on this show as it informs the present. It's one of the things we do.

Journalist Will Bredderman had a really interesting New York politics history piece on Politico the other day. Ironically, it was titled If Cuomo Wins, It Was All But Inevitable. Here’s Why. Actually, the New York story he tells in the article also applies to the nomination of Mamdani. Here's a central reason why. A lot is being made today of the increase in turnout inspired by Mamdani in this Democratic primary, but that so-called impressive turnout is only about 30% of registered Democrats.

Consider this from Will Bredderman's article. It says the percentage of registered voters in New York who cast ballots declined from 93% in 1953 to 57% in 1993 and to just 24% in 2013, quoting from the article. I looked it up, it was just 23% in the 2021 general election. How did the city go from 90% turnout to barely 20% turnout? Let's discuss. Will Bredderman, thanks for joining us. We'll put this in the context of the nomination of Mamdani. Welcome to WNYC.

Will Bredderman: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being here to talk about this. I guess I would say off the bat is even if it looks like we're going to break a million votes in this election we've just had, that'll only put us up around where we were, where the city was in the Dinkins-Koch Primary in 1989 when the city had a million fewer people. I think that that's a really important context when we're talking about a boost in turnout. Of course, the boost in turnout was not even everywhere. A lot of communities that tend to be lower income did not see the same kind of increase.

Brian Lehrer: Right. We'll get back to that in some detail, but I really want to do some of the history first because I think it'll be fun for our listeners, and it informs this arc of how we got from the 1950s through the Dinkins-Koch primary that you just cited 1989, to now. Your article begins with an anecdote from Robert Caro's classic book The Power Broker, about how Vincent Impellitteri became mayor of New York. This is late '40s or 1950. The point was to show both the power of the Democratic Party machine and the power of an engaged electorate. Would you start with a Democratic machine part of that story?

Will Bredderman: Sure. What Caro details in The Power Broker, which I believe he was the first ever to describe this, is that essentially, I believe it's 1945, and they're attempting to assemble their balance ticket. That was the practice at the time. When we say they, we mean the Democratic leaders of the city who at the time were dominant and controlled the nomination process. It was not a process like we have today. They pick Bill O'Dwyer, who is the Brooklyn District District Attorney. If folks saw Drop Dead City, that's his brother who was later on the city council president in the '70s.

Bill O'Dwyer, though, is picked, the Brooklyn District Attorney, for mayor. They pick Lazarus Joseph, who was a state senator out of the Bronx, for city comptroller. In those days, there was the role of the city council president. Those are the three citywide posts on what used to be the Board of Estimate. At that time, they say, "We've got a little bit of a dilemma here because we've got an Irish guy from Brooklyn for mayor and we got a Jewish fellow from the Bronx for comptroller. We need to balance the ticket across the boroughs and across the major ethnic blocks," as they exist at the time.

As Caro describes it, they realize, "All the legal secretaries in the court system are our people." They're loyalists. They apparently just opened a book and went down it until they came across a name that nobody could mistake as being anything other than Italian. They verified he lived in Manhattan, and they threw him on the ticket for city council president. This guy is an individual of no account. He'd been a secretary to a judge whose last name was Schmuck.

Brian Lehrer: Isn't that what Scott Stringer called Trump in the primary the other week?

Will Bredderman: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: He actually did. Let me jump in on a piece of what you're describing, because if we think diversity, equity, and inclusion began in the so-called era of woke, that would be way wrong because, in 1945, you're telling us, like today, representing different voting blocs is a practical road to political power. Yes?

Will Bredderman: Yes, no, absolutely. There's always been this aspect in New York and in urban politics across America, where you had various diverse groups that you tended to try to balance the ticket. This was a very long tradition in New York. Even in the last decade, this has changed now, it used to be, in the Bronx, the borough president had to be Hispanic and the DA had to be Black. That's changed. I guess what I'm saying is, yes, there's always been this aspect of balancing tickets and acknowledging the need for representation of different ethnic blocks if you want their votes.

Brian Lehrer: Moving ahead, then the Democratic machine dumped Impellitteri, yet he was elected mayor anyway, as an independent. That was 1950. Already I'm seeing relevance to this election year. The lesson you draw from that episode 75 years ago is that it encapsulates a tension about political life in New York for most of the last century. Would you describe that tension?

Will Bredderman: Yes, sure. Essentially, the 20th century was the first century we had a consolidated New York City. In that period, it was very consistently the situation where the Democratic organizations were effectively able to decide who became mayor and had a great deal of influence with Democratic mayors until there would be some kind of mismanagement scandal, some kind of corruption scandal. For a time you would either see a liberal Republican or a Democrat who broke with the machines very publicly, then take power on the back of mass backlash to whatever scandal had caused a breakdown.

I think we see in the case of Impellitteri, Bill O'Dwyer was being investigated for ties to organized crime. He was the mayor. Harry Truman, talking of historical precedents and presidents, appoints him the ambassador to Mexico essentially to get him out of the reach of prosecutors. As a result, the city council's president was the next in line of succession. Impellitteri is suddenly mayor, but also there's a special to fill the mayoralty. He's only an acting mayor for a short time, but he goes ahead, and he wins that special running as an anti-boss candidate even though he had been picked by the bosses just few years earlier, yes, because of the degree of public disgust with the corruption.

Brian Lehrer: The hyper-engaged voting public made that possible. That was the tension between the machine and all the control that they wanted to exert and the hyper-engaged voting public. Really interesting. What a footnote to history you just gave us. I saw it in the article, talk about machine politics, getting somebody appointed ambassador to Mexico so he couldn't be prosecuted in the United States. Wow. Right?

Will Bredderman: Yes, no, that was certainly a different era. There is a relationship between Truman and O'Dwyer, I think, because of just national Democratic Party politics. Yes, no, truly a different era. I guess I would say is that you could see the machines, because of how they engage the public, were part of an ecosystem that created and encouraged public engagement. Even though at times that backfired on the machines, you would see this, the public was very engaged in local affairs because they had these very responsive political leaders and small neighborhood scale political organizations, political clubs, where if you had an issue or you needed a job, they would try to help you out and try to set you up and some just gave out free food.

Brian Lehrer: Now you don't have to appoint a corrupt politician to Mexico. They just call it a witch hunt and they get away with it. Except Menendez. You write that the gears of yesterday's political machines in the city were political clubs organized at the neighborhood level. These do still exist to some degree, but they interacted with a larger machine. Now with the end of both, this is the premise of your article, with the end of the political clubs and the political machines, a candidate's star power is all that matters. That leads us to both Cuomo and Mamdani.

Right after Impellitteri, when Robert Wagner became mayor in 1954, you describe a new kind of political club for so-called reform Democrats. This is part of how the political clubs and voter engagement started to decline, according to your article. These new reform Democratic clubs were designed to cater less to the working-class residents who needed services and more to a transient, educated class of young professionals who were moving in in large numbers, mostly to Manhattan. Sounds like you're describing a split between the working class and the so-called elite.

Will Bredderman: Right.

Brian Lehrer: That's also a topic of conversation today in Democratic Party politics, but what was it in the 1950s and 1960s?

Will Bredderman: Sure. To be clear, when Wagner first runs, he is a machine guy. It is only he breaks with Tammany later on when he's seeking reelection and he's able to utilize this infrastructure that has been developing in the 1950s within the Democratic Party. As I was saying, in the past, it had been a situation where the candidates who would fight the machine, beat the machine, were very often Republicans. Impellitteri was the exception to the rule. Basically, during the 1950s, and this was studied by the political scientist James Q. Wilson, and he wrote a book about this called The Amateur Democrat, which had two editions, one published in '62, the other in '66, what he describes is essentially you've got a lot of people who, they're moving to New York, they're getting jobs in a booming, growing office economy.

Professional class people, educated people. A lot of them are Anglo-Protestant or from the more educated end of the Jewish community compared to the majority of the population at that time would have been high school dropouts and folks who were in working-class jobs. They begin to form their own clubs. The clubs really were, as I described, the gears of the machine. They form their own clubs and their own mechanisms. The incentives that James Q. Wilson talks about in his book is that the old machines, it's a lot of material incentives. They help you get a job, they. There's free food at meetings.

There's also this environment and camaraderie of just people who are from the same neighborhood, they know each other. Sometimes there's ethnic loyalty elements of that. Some clubs were predominantly Jewish, some clubs predominately Black, some clubs predominately Italian. They all work together in the context of the machine. The reform clubs, they get together, and they're mostly motivated one, by these ideals and these ideas that we need to clean up government in New York City. We need to beat these recurring problems of corruption and mismanagement.

Also, though they do things like they have mixers where people can meet new friends and possibly romantic partners. There is a environment of conviviality that's established there. I want to stress is that I think it's a mistake to view these as purely oppositional organizations. I think James Q. Wilson stresses this is the reform clubs are taking the model of the machine clubs and just working on a different group of incentives and a different group of operating principles.

Brian Lehrer: Part of what I think you're arguing, and I know we must have listeners, especially of a certain age, who think, wait, the reform clubs were good. The reform clubs were about progressivism. The reform clubs were about idealism. The reform clubs were about good government as opposed to the old machines. I think what you're telling us is that they were more intellectual and the old neighborhood clubs were more about getting services provided to the working-class residents. Is that a fair way to put it?

Will Bredderman: Yes. I don't want to say anything is good or bad, but that, yes, there was a different set of incentives, and different needs of the population and the demographics that were involved in these respective clubs. The needs of a educated population are not the same, and middle-class population, upper middle-class population, are not the same as the needs of a working-class population or even an impoverished or working poor population. I think, though, I want to make a distinction is that both were about organizing at the neighborhood level and developing an environment of camaraderie and mass engagement in a way that I think is missing in our current environment. I think the clubs nowadays, it's funny, especially in Brooklyn, you'll see the reform clubs often endorse the same candidates as the machine clubs-

Brian Lehrer: Oh.

Will Bredderman: -because, essentially, they're playing for fewer parts, fewer pieces, for fewer chips.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but a new power structure was emerging. Yet in the outer boroughs, you write, the working class political machines remained strong. We're talking 1960s, 1970s, and Donald Trump makes an appearance in your article in this context. Why Trump in the context of what you call the baseball bat-wielding Brooklyn boss, Meade Esposito?

Will Bredderman: Trump, first off, his father is a big, both beneficiary of, and a big supporter of the Brooklyn Democratic Party organization, where, Trump grows up in Queens, but most of the family's buildings, especially at mid-century, are in Brooklyn. They had their office in Sheepshead Bay. Trump, yes, he grows up. It's been reported, I believe, first by Maggie Haberman with The Times that Trump had this admiration, still has this admiration for Meade Esposito, who was in many ways your prototypical 20th century, especially latter half of the 20th century, political boss, famous for wielding a baseball bat, famous for getting some trouble during the Koch administration.

I think a key point to make is that Trump seems to admire Esposito's style, but a point I want to make is that Trump never has quite built an organization the way Esposito built an organization. Esposito could, I think, comport himself in a certain way because he had the organization and a large number of voters who were quite loyal to him and a large number of not just politicians, but a large part of the population was loyal, if not necessarily to him personally, to his organization. We see Trump, for example, a lot of his policy initiatives he has to achieve by executive order. The tax bill may wind up passing here, but he struggles to get big policy items across. I think that that can be argued that owes the fact he doesn't have the kind of organization to whip votes and keep his people from his party on the same page.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Listeners, if you're just joining us, yes, this is all leading to the nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor yesterday. Listeners, we invite your calls and texts on the history we're discussing here, the decline of the political machines in New York City, also the neighborhood political clubs, and notably, the decline of voter turnout over the last 75 years in New York City for journalist Will Bredderman with his political article and the victory of Zohran Mamdani in this week's primary. In that context, spoiler alert, Will wrote that Mamdani's rise is similar to its place in history to if Andrew Cuomo had won the primary, at least in this respect, even though obviously they offer many different things.

Your questions and comments welcome here. 212-433-WNYC on the history or the relevance to today. 212-433-9692, call or text. Now, you write that multiple developments in the late 20th and early 21st century shattered the political culture of New York as it was and made what you called in the article Cuomo style name recognition, I think you'd also say Mamdani style name recognition, the strongest force in politics. What broke the old political culture?

Will Bredderman: You could say there's a bunch of a few things happen. One I think we would all point to is you obviously had 20 years of Republican/independent mayors in New York City, which was unprecedented. To my understanding, I don't believe there was ever a Republican mayor who was able, as Giuliani was to Bloomberg, to just hand off to a favored successor. That was unheard of. It's largely we could say that it's almost certainly undeniably a consequence of 9/11 and Giuliani.

Brian Lehrer: 9/11, which, by the way, footnote to history, happened on New York City mayoral primary day in 2001.

Will Bredderman: Right.

Brian Lehrer: The voting had already begun, but then they had to stop and reschedule the primary for a couple of weeks later. Yes, in the general election that year, Rudy Giuliani, as you write, became the first Republican mayor to successfully hand over power to his preferred successor, Michael Bloomberg. This Giuliani-Bloomberg era of recent history lasted a long time. Two terms of Giuliani followed by three terms of Bloomberg. That was a full 20 years of Republican mayors before de Blasio in 2013, and then even without Bloomberg's money, back to a quasi-Republican mayor in Eric Adams. Does that trend in New York mayoral history relate to the fall of the political clubs and political machines that your article is largely about?

Will Bredderman: I think you can't say there was no effect. Now, Bloomberg did cultivate relationships with some of the old Democratic bosses, especially Vito Lopez, who was the Democratic boss in Brooklyn. I don't think you can totally say that that was the lone factor. I think, though, that there was a collective forgetting of what normal was. Essentially, you have 20 years of Republican/independent leadership. In the 2013 primary, Anthony Weiner jumps in late and shoots the top and becomes the frontrunner before self-destructing.

That should have told us that something had changed, that something was deeply different now than the Koch-Dinkins primary in '89. One of the things that John Mollenkopf from CUNY pointed me to was the advent of the matching funds system, which is introduced, rolled out after the scandals and the probes by Giuliani into the Koch administration. Matching funds, what they do, there's a few things that happens. One, no longer is it an organization that is the focal point of a campaign. The money is increasingly concentrated in an individual candidate, an individual campaign.

An election becomes more of a one-off rather than these things with both reform and machine clubs, where there's this continuous mission, this ongoing organization, this ongoing fraternization and engagement, where they're just constantly trying to elect people. The candidate is suddenly centered because the candidate has the ability to get matching funds, is able to get really what are now tens and tens of millions of dollars to run their campaigns. That also has the effect of essentially professionalizing things in the past that were more informal.

What occurs is we have, matching funds becomes, for better or worse, and you can argue matching funds has had a net positive effect, and Dr. Mollenkopf said that to me, what it does is it effectively becomes public subsidies for political consultants. The political consultants get better and better and develop more techniques, or at least advertise more techniques for micro-targeting particular voters. It's no longer becomes this collective effort where you're doing these rallies, you're doing door knocking, you're doing the phone banking as a organization.

Now this is professionalized, and this is turned into an industry which was already forming before then, I want to be clear, but the matching fund system just pours huge quantities of resources into the political consulting industry. They become much larger, much more sophisticated, much more influential. He says to me that the political consulting firm has replaced the political club.

Brian Lehrer: This is the last point I want to make before we break and then bring it right to Mamdani's nomination. Professor Mollenkopf said the consultants, rather than working for maximum political engagement on behalf of their candidate, actually work to depress voter turnout. Why would they do that?

Will Bredderman: Mollenkopf is speaking particularly of there is, he says nowadays, the party organizations are less interested in mass mobilization than they were in the past because we have this slump in turnout, slump in engagement because we're now micro targeting. We're no longer trying to get out as many people to vote as possible. We're now talking about how can we find these people who are most likely to vote. We get a mailer to them, we get an ad to them. We can target them in ways that were not possible. We make sure that somebody who is getting a paycheck goes and knocks on their door and pitches them.

It's not about attempting to turn out an entire neighborhood or an entire community for an election. It's about trying to find the most specific voters who are either most persuadable or most likely to vote and just getting and activating those people. The efforts fall by the wayside to mobilize the larger population. Because the clubs are no longer the focal point of money, the organization they're able to do is depleted somewhat and diminished somewhat. The machines then also, nowadays, Mollenkopf argued, want to have lower turnout because essentially, they have far fewer people they really have any sway over.

As a result of that, they want only those people that they have sway over. If you only have a few thousand people who support you, but the turnout in an election for a city council race or a state assembly race is decided by a few hundred votes or by only a few thousand people come out entirely, your voters have much more power. Everyone begins to benefit, the consultancy efficiencies, in fewer people voting because that's more money they get to keep and less they have to spend on activating large numbers of people. The machines, they have only a handful of loyalists anymore, so that lower turnout winds up working for them because that just gives their people disproportionate power.

Brian Lehrer: A listener texts, "Part of Trump's appeal is he has brought back transactional politics, clientelism, not policy. Part of the Democrats issue is they can only think in terms of policy. They miss the importance of charisma and clientelism in linking to voters," in the opinion of that listener. That's a quick 25-minute romp through 75 years of New York City political history contained in Will Bredderman's Politico article. After the break, we will land it in the present with how it all relates to the nomination of Zohran Mamdani, the good and the bad from the standpoint of democracy and voter engagement. Speaking of voter engagement, your calls and texts, 212-433-WNYC. Stay tuned.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with journalist Will Bredderman and his Politico article about the decline of voter engagement in New York City and the rise of political consultants and superstar candidates. If a premise of the piece Will, is that that politics has led to a decline in voter turnout, the superstar politics, consultant politics, turnout increased in this election. Here's an exchange I had with Mamdani on yesterday's show when he came on after winning the nomination. This begins with my question. The early voting stats we have show nearly a quarter of those people had not voted in a primary since at least 2012. Probably then most were new. How does that part of the victory make you feel?

Zohran Mamdani: It's one of the most meaningful things. I grew up in the city. I moved to this city and country when I was seven years old and have known many New Yorkers for many years who love this city, belong to this city, and yet have never seen themselves in the politics of the city. Some of the moments of these last eight months that I look back on with the most fondness is the screenshots of voter registration forms filled out, the call from a friend who voted for the first time in their life. I think ultimately it's part of a long-needed recognition that our democracy isn't just under attack from an authoritarian administration in Washington, DC, it's also under attack from a withering faith in its ability to resolve the most pressing crises in New Yorkers' lives.

Brian Lehrer: A withering faith in democracy's ability to resolve the most pressing crises in New Yorkers' lives, Mamdani here yesterday. Journalist Will Bredderman with his Politico article here now. What do you make of that exchange and the increase in voter turnout even though it was only to about 30%, hardly the 90% that your article tells us there were in the city 60 or 70 years ago?

Will Bredderman: Right. As I said at the top of the show, definitely there was a spike in turnout relative to 21st-century primaries. As we were only going to be around where we were with this primary, it looks like the total turnout or rather I should say the total number of voters, which would be a little over a million, where the city was in 1989 in the Koch-Dinkins primary. At that time, the city had a million fewer residents. As a proportion of the city's population, we're essentially looking at the same number of people voting as voted 1989.

Sorry, doing math off the top of my head, but it's close to 40 years ago. It's 37 years ago. We're talking about if the general trend is, as a proportion of the population, still pretty low. I think Mamdani did a very good job of getting a lot of folks, a lot of people who were educated, affluent, maybe had moved in recent years or recent months to sign up and vote. Maybe some people who were registered independents. 10 years ago, there was always a joke in Democratic Party circles that all the hipsters are registered to vote in Ohio, which also just tells you at that time Ohio was a swing state.

The turnout that Mamdani achieved, while impressive in more affluent, more educated, predominantly or among white voters largely, educated white voters, in particular, that is coupled with a decrease in turnout in lower-income communities in the Bronx, in large parts of Brooklyn that are predominantly Black American and Caribbean Americans. The turnout increase, I guess I would say is if you are looking at where the Democratic Party is losing voters right now, they're not losing voters among the college graduates. They're not losing voters among particularly the white college graduates. They're gaining voters, and those voters are coming into the Democratic Party. The losses have been with lower income voters, with less educated voters, either not coming out to vote, or in some cases, particularly among Hispanic American voters, flipping over to the Republican Party.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in because I think we have a very interesting caller probably right to this point. It is Jacqueline Torres in the Bronx, who is actually a candidate in the city council District 13 race right now waiting for the results of the ranked choice voting and who wants to comment on the kinds of things you were just saying. Hello, Jacqueline Torres, thank you very much for calling in.

Jacqueline Torres: Hello. Thank you for taking my call. It's great to speak with you.

Brian Lehrer: What would you like to add?

Jacqueline Torres: I want to add that, in my experience, the machine is not dead. The machine is very live and well and working. I can tell you in terms of endorsements, I was shut out. I reached out for endorsements, and I'm not going to give names or anything of that sort, but given my background, because I was a major in the army and I came back home and I can tell you, people said, "You were a major in the Army. You traveled the world. Why would you go back to the Bronx?" I said I want to raise my children in the Bronx and I want to make a difference. I want to come back home and help my community.

Then, to come back home after being an Iraq War veteran, and not even being allowed the opportunity for an endorsement, it's really sad. I can tell you that the unions, it looks like the last tally that I saw someone post was about $800,000 to my opponent. I raised under $800,000 and we're within 1,000 votes. I can say proudly that, regardless of what happens, this is a win for people like me, for small campaigns and for people who really are passionate about getting [unintelligible 00:34:22]

Brian Lehrer: You told our screener that it takes people like Mamdani and AOC to break through the machine power in this respect.

Jacqueline Torres: Yes, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Will was just describing, and there's been a lot of other reporting to this effect, you're in the Bronx, you're in the Throggs Neck area, right? Where a Republican beat a Democrat for the first time in a long time in the last election cycle.

Jacqueline Torres: Right. Correct. Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: How is The Democratic Party, in your view, failing to serve the Bronx, largely people of color, working class constituents who voted for Trump in larger numbers in 2024 than previously, and for Kristy Marmorato, the Republican incumbent there?

Jacqueline Torres: Correct. I did want to make a note on this. My district is a little different. My district is one of the only districts in the Bronx that has about 30% to 35% Caucasian voters, and so it's a little different. I feel that these individuals were Democrat at some point and a lot of them are still registered Democrats, but they tend to vote Republican. Some of them purposefully because they want a say, and they feel like maybe being a Republican is a wasted vote in our community. I do think that, to your point about people not showing up, they are tired. They're tired of unions becoming so strong that they become what they're fighting against. They're tired of unions picking the candidate regardless of the fact that you may have someone who may be better received that wasn't even given a chance. I feel that was the case in my race. I'm very proud of the race that I ran, and I'm grateful for my supporters. It's a close race.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to leave it there for time. Jacqueline Torres, candidate in the 13th city council district, waiting for the ranked choice voting results. We'll see how it turns out. We'll have you back on the show as a guest if you win. A very interesting call, Will, in the context of your article, right?

Will Bredderman: Absolutely. I think it goes to show though that, yes, the Bronx, the county organization is one of the stronger ones. I think that reflects to some extent, the reality that machines have always been stronger in low income areas and lower-income areas and areas where not so many folks are in professional-class jobs and many folks may be struggling financially. Even there, Ms. Torres has a shot at beating the machine's favored candidate. I think that that tells us something about the ability of the machine in this era to elevate its own people.

If the machine can't elect people, the machine has basically broken down. It has ceased to function. I think that there is some truth that, yes, again, as I stressed in my article and Dr. Mollenkopf stressed, nowadays the political machines, such as they are, don't necessarily want a high turnout, high engagement election because they retain so few loyalists today. They're better off with there being fewer participants, fewer people getting out to the polls. It is, the machines of today are not the machines of the 20th century.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, let's go to the last thread of conversation that we'll have time for in this segment. Listeners, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is going to be standing by in a couple of minutes for a monthly call, your senator segment. We're certainly going to ask her if she's endorsing Mamdani for mayor yet, which I believe she hasn't so far, as well as talk about the Iran strike and other things with Senator Gillibrand coming right up.

Will Bredderman from Politico, for these last few minutes, you wrote that the Democratic Socialists of America New York City branch is the best example of a newer political organization that resembles the reform clubs of old. Why compare the DSA, which is more of an ideas or ideology-based organization, to the old political clubs of any kind, which were built around providing neighborhoods with services?

Will Bredderman: Right. I guess I would say I'm a little skeptical of any claim that an organization is primarily ideological, or any organization worth its salt is primarily a social experience. People who share experiences and share certain conceptions of the world, yes, they may group together in certain organizations. What I think with the DSA, similar to the reform clubs James Q. Wilson is writing about in the '60s, is you got people who have moved to New York, are professional class or at least college degree holding, and they dislike what they see in the political system, and they try to run their own candidates.

I think the difference with DSA, and this is what I get into, is that DSA does not seem to have the cohesive glue that the reform clubs had in their heyday, which can be shown in the fact that the DSA had a huge spike during the first Trump administration, huge spike around Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Then, however, during the Biden administration, its membership slumps. Then when Trump comes back and Mamdani starts running, it shoots back up, which tells me that they're an organization powered at this point not by a internal cohesion and a social camaraderie that defined the political clubs and is the real glue and sinew of society, but by this phenomenon, a term I borrow from Professor Heather James at BMCC, of superstar politics.

That is what we have now. I think we've seen now several cycles in the post-Bloomberg era. First, Anthony Weiner in 2013, then Andrew Yang in 2021, and now this most recent cycle where a candidate who has explosive name recognition, a explosive engagement, particularly with Wiener and Yang and now with Mamdani, powered by social media, is they're able to come in. The difference between Wiener imploded, Yang imploded, Cuomo didn't implode so much as deflate, but I would say that you look at Mamdani, what we had this year is two superstars running.

I think that may be the future that we're looking at, is that every cycle in the future or many cycles in the future will be defined by this dynamic, at least for prominent offices, by people who are essentially either influencer-style superstars like Mamdani, like Ocasio Cortez, people communicating through short form video, through Instagram, TikTok, assuming that continues to exist or whatever comes next.

Brian Lehrer: Is that a little unfair to Mamdani? Because, in February, nobody knew who he was. It was on the strength of his actual campaign that he became a superstar in the last few weeks.

Will Bredderman: Yes, he ran the best campaign. I don't think anybody would say that, and I don't want to diminish in any way or disparage the campaign he ran. He's a charming, attractive fella, and I don't want to take away from that, but we look at how he drove engagement. We no longer live in an era where fame in the style of Donald Trump, or I would argue Andrew Cuomo, as well as driven by TV and newspapers and a long-standing recognizable brand. People today engage with the world and engage with politics through social media, through the window of social media. I love Marshall McLuhan, who always talked about the medium is the message.

There is a different way of reaching people in a different manner of social organization that has developed along the lines of social media and short-form video. Ocasio Cortez was the first to really utilize that for politics in a huge way. Mamdani took some pages out of her playbook, and like her, is this attractive, charismatic person who presents very well.

Brian Lehrer: Right. You compare him to an influencer. You use that word.

Will Bredderman: Yes. I think that if you were looking at the style of communication, much in the way you would say that Trump is a TV star, it's fair to say that Mamdani and Ocasio Cortez, the way that they relate to their audience and to their supporters and their base is similar to that of an influencer. I guess that is what is fundamentally different today, is that people can become famous not by going on TV. In fact, increasingly, TV takes its cues from social media. You become social media famous, and then you can go on TV, and then you can maybe be in movies or you can be a celebrity boxer or something.

Brian Lehrer: Before we bring on Senator Gillibrand, who's about ready to go, here's one more exchange with Mamdani from yesterday's show. I think it speaks to this old-fashioned tension you write about in the article from the old days between an emerging electorate and the party machine. It begins with my question. I wonder if you have any thoughts about whether the New York Democratic Party establishment will or even should fall in line behind you now that you won the primary. Governor Hochul and Leader Hakeem Jeffries both said nice things about the campaign, but they both stopped short of endorsing you even last night and this morning from what I've seen.

Zohran Mamdani: My thinking throughout this primary has been for each and every day to earn the support of another New Yorker with every call I make, every text I send, every conversation that I have. Ultimately, that's how we got to this point where we won this race. I'm excited to continue to grow that coalition as the Democratic nominee for this city's mayoralty and to show that this is the coalition that will deliver on the most pressing crisis in this city, which is that of affordability.

Brian Lehrer: Mamdani here yesterday. Will, 30 seconds, then, we're out of time, your reaction to that?

Will Bredderman: I think he is a very effective communicator, especially in short formats, which is the dominant medium of our era, especially among younger people.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Although another text, I'll throw this in, just came in from a listener, "Your guest is failing to mention over 1.5 million doors knocked." He had an army of canvassers.

Will Bredderman: Absolutely. He was very good at accessing the young folks, particularly people who are not previously engaged in the political system, usually don't have as many needs from the political system that I don't want to disparage or diminish the campaign he ran, which was impressive. I'm saying that the way that he accesses them is through social media and that that has, I guess, a compounding effect or an effect on how his coalition is bound together and on whether there is a sustainable political culture that can sustain engagement.

I guess there's a graph that got deleted from my article just because of space that I pointed out every social movement of the social media era, starting with Occupy Wall Street, has done a great job of getting people out in the streets. It has done a great job of bringing issues to people's attention and capturing the focus, and exciting people, especially younger people, especially very often, educated people, and getting them engaged and involved, but they don't crystallize into institutions. To work issues through the legislative process, to get things done in a complex, representative democracy, you need to have institutions. You need to have sustained organization that when people are out of the streets, when they're no longer knocking doors, they're still engaged, they're still making themselves heard and still influencing the process.

Brian Lehrer: Journalist Will Bredderman has rommed through 75 years of New York City political history. Landing in the present, is on Politico, technically on what they call Politico Magazine. Thank you for sharing it with us.

 

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