Are Democrats about to commit political suicide?

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” July 25, 2025)

Guest column by Patrick Lawrence

Maybe there was a time in the past when a candidate to become New York City’s mayor prompted as much fervour in some quarters and as much fear and loathing in others as Zohran Mamdani, but I do not recall it.

In the 100-odd days until the city votes Nov. 4, we — New Yorkers and the rest of us — are in for political warfare that could turn out to be epochal. This will be a riveting campaign season; it is unlikely to be a pretty one. 

Mamdani wowed New York City and the rest of the country when, on July 1, he trounced the Democratic field to win the party’s nomination to run for mayor this autumn.

The Democratic establishment, which had bet on Andrew Cuomo, was stunned. Cuomo, a machine pol who resigned as governor of New York four years ago amid accusations of sexual harassment, was considered a shoo-in.

Then came the blow: Mamdani took 56% of the vote in the Democratic primary, to Cuomo’s 44%.

Figures don’t always lie and liars don’t always figure. 

Mamdani is a true phenom, an energetic 33-year-old full of policy proposals that address the real problems of real people. A free bus system, a freeze on rents in half the city’s apartments, supermarkets run by the city, a properly redistributive tax regime to address the near-to-obscene inequality New Yorkers endure: These are good ideas, ideas with obvious appeal to Democratic voters, ideas expressive of his commitment to dynamic change.

Mamdani also takes a principled position against the Israelis’ shocking barbarities in Gaza and then America’s support of them.

But one’s strengths are at times also one’s vulnerabilities, as Mamdani is about to discover. On July 14, Cuomo announced in a brief video that, rather than step aside after his punishing defeat, he will stay in the race as an independent with the all-but-stated intent of preventing New York from falling “in the hands of the far left.”

(Cuomo, whose term as governor reeked of opportunism and corruptibility if not proven corruption, is now the unseemly front end of an attack on Mamdani that is unlikely to relent until this race is decided.)

Wall Street and the banks, hedge-fund billionaires, major corporations, New York real estate developers, the Israel lobby, corporate media, the Democratic mainstream are all lining up to make sure Mamdani does not win come Nov. 4. He’s a Marxist, a socialist, a Communist, a lunatic, of course, an anti-Semite. President Donald Trump has wondered aloud whether he should have Mamdani arrested or have Mamdani’s citizenship stripped. 

(Financial and corporate interests spent $22 million on Cuomo’s failed primary campaign. There is every indication they will spend more this time.)

Let us, then, view this in the large: The battle has been joined between Democratic Party elites and the voters they are increasingly committed to suppressing, between money and democratic process, between power and the forces for change that gather as we speak not only in New York but across the country.

We have been here before, of course. But the risk that the Democrats will destroy themselves as they attempt to destroy Mamdani is greater than ever.    

Here is Mamdani on “Meet the Press” July 1, just after his victory:

“We can beat anyone that’s in this race because what we’ve shown is that this is a campaign that has the support of more than 400,000 New Yorkers. For too long, politicians have pretended to simply be bystanders to a cost-of-living crisis. They’ve actually exacerbated it. And our vision is one that will respond to it and make this a city affordable for every New Yorker.”

And Mamdani, when asked about the Gaza crisis in an interview with Politico during his campaign in April:

‘I think what is incumbent to do is to stop subsidising a genocide. And that’s what we’ve seen over more than a year. And it’s what we’ve seen intensify right now with Donald Trump.’

This is a political candidate who says what he means and what he means reflects the realities currently facing Americans. I could not help noticing a couple of things in the news as Mamdani’s victory sank in. 

One, there has been a spate of worry recently as various studies have come out indicating a radical shift in public opinion about Israel, Palestinians and the former’s campaign of terror against the latter in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. A decade ago, a Gallup poll showed Democrats favoured Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points. Last February, Gallup found that Democrats sympathised with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 36 percentage points.

Two, just as I was putting these events side-by-side in my mind — the opinion polls on Israel, Mamdani’s brilliant rise to political prominence and the instantly frenetic response among various elites, The Grayzone published a six-minute segment concerning the annual retreat of the great and good that Allen & Co., a long-influential merchant bank that keeps well out of the public eye, has run for many years.

Here is Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone’s editor, on the occasion. The segment was published Tuesday, July 15:

‘Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader [in the Senate] is heading for Sun Valley, Idaho, this week to meet with Hollywood elites and Big Tech elites in a semi-secret, off-the-record retreat .… and they’re basically all conspiring to determine who will be the next Democratic. This is how it works.’

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, promises hundreds of millions of dollars to support Eric Adams, New York’s current mayor, as the man to take down Mamdani. Adams, of course, faced federal corruption charges until President Trump ordered the case thrown out. 

My question is how long this kind of anti-democratic ugliness can remain how it works.   

Voters in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of six to one, have just told their party they favour a candidate who promises imaginative change.

They have announced that they want America to be something new, another kind of America. But there is no reply from the party’s upper reaches. You would think these elites would listen and learn at this point, but they show no inclination to do either.

They continue to cast Mamdani as some kind of anti-Israel radical — lots of Islamophobia going around since he won the primary — but his position on the genocide in Gaza is in line with those polling numbers and appears to have contributed to his support even among New York Jews. 

What we are examining, within the context Mamdani provides, is a conflict of interest: the moneyed class versus the working and middle class that Mamdani represents. This is the unholy symmetry of American politics in this, the third decade of our new century.  

This is no new emerging opposition. Neither is the mainstream Democrats’ effort to sink Mamdani’s ship anything we haven’t seen before. They did it to Bernie Sanders — twice, indeed, in 2016 and again in 2020 — and, with the assistance of the Israeli lobbies, they did it to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, legislators from New York and Missouri, respectively, when monied interests and the lobbies destroyed them in primary contests last year. 

But Mamdani is a case of another order. He is too exciting to too many voters. His ideas resonate too well beyond New York’s five boroughs. He stands too effectively for another idea of America. The gang-up against him is too easily legible. 

This puts the party’s elites and all the interests behind them in a bind. They cannot afford to allow Mamdani to take City Hall in New York, and I conclude with the greatest reluctance that they won’t. A win for Mamdani in November would change the complexion of American politics too drastically.

At the same time, given the national attention his campaign has attracted, Mamdani has instantly acquired a totemic significance in American political culture. Stopping him this autumn would almost certainly be an undemocratic mess. 

To the extent the Democrats succeed in destroying this man, they will also destroy themselves.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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