Zohran Mamdani’s emergence in New York and a stunning poll result on the Iran attack underline the current political tumult.David Delgado/Reuters
Surprise! The partisan divide that might have been stanched in the wake of last week’s bomb-and-missile assault on Iran’s nuclear-production sites didn’t waver for even a week, let alone disappear. Surprise! The expected easy glide to victory and redemptive slide to respectability of one of the warhorses of New York politics in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary didn’t occur.
All of which underscores the fluid status of American politics in the second act of the Donald Trump presidency. Or, viewed in a different manner, it demonstrates how Mr. Trump has reshaped American politics in an age marked by upheaval and uncertainty.
The country remains split by party – and the Democrats remain split by ideology.
The emergence of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as the putative Democratic mayoral nominee in New York and a stunning poll result on the American attack on Iran underlined, and perhaps reinforced, the political tumult in the United States.
Andrew Cuomo concedes New York’s mayoral primary in surprise win for Zohran Mamdani
Who is Zohran Mamdani, the state lawmaker seeking to become New York’s first Muslim mayor?
American politics hasn’t been this confused, and this confusing, since 1972, when the Democrats’ decades-long nemesis Richard Nixon won a landslide re-election victory over a leftward-leaning candidate, troubling many elements of the party’s traditional political base.
It took the biggest scandal in American history, the Watergate break-in and the Nixon White House cover-up, to clarify things – and that lasted about a nanosecond as Jimmy Carter, the beneficiary of the political turbulence, squandered his 1976 White House victory and the breath of fresh air and goodwill that it provided.
One look at a new CBS News poll brings the divide in American life into sharp focus.
Some 85 per cent of Republicans said they approved of Mr. Trump’s order to send bunker-busting bombs and sea-launched cruise missiles against three Iranian nuclear targets. The rate of Democrats saying they disapproved is 87 per cent, a statistically insignificant difference. It follows that the rate of Republicans who disapproved of the attack is 15 per cent, virtually the same rate (13 per cent) of Democrats who approved.
This is no departure from the partisan divide that’s marked American politics since Mr. Trump’s gaudy New York presidential-campaign announcement almost exactly a decade before he ordered the bombs and missiles to fly.
But it’s a departure from customary American behaviour, which ordinarily prompts a “rally-round-the-flag” phenomenon, with voters of both parties initially supporting presidents engaged in military battle. That provided an upswing of support for Franklin D. Roosevelt (after the Pearl Harbor attack, 1941), Harry Truman (after U.S. involvement in the Korean War, 1950) and George H.W. Bush (after the first Gulf War began, 1991).
Cautionary note: Both Mr. Truman and Lyndon Johnson (escalation in Vietnam after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing increased American military commitment there) eventually lost favour as they were unable to find a swift exit from their respective Asian conflicts.
Opinion: What was the point of the conflict in Iran? To keep three men in power
Editorial: Donald Trump and the art of nuclear diplomacy
Countercautionary note: Even more than Ronald Reagan, Mr. Trump is an unusual figure on the American political scene, able to retain his popularity among his base, and more recently in the broader GOP, in the face of criticism and the cascade of new developments – perhaps including the leaked Pentagon report suggesting the Iran raid set back the country’s nuclear project by only a few months.
The partisan divide over Iran reflected in the CBS poll occurred as a democratic socialist, Mr. Mamdani, 33 years old, polled so strongly in the first round of the Democratic mayoral primary in New York that Andrew Cuomo, 67, conceded the race, though the former governor – accused of sexual impropriety and forced to resign the office he and his father, Mario Cuomo, both held – retained the option to run in November as an independent candidate.
Mr. Mamdani is a three-term New York State legislator whose campaign platform was the latest incarnation of a progressive surge that emerged in the Trump era, sweeping left-oriented political figures into seats in the House of Representatives in each of the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections. In Pittsburgh – customarily regarded as a redoubt of traditional, even conservative-leaning Democrats – progressives in the Mamdani model now hold the office of Allegheny County executive, a congressional seat and the mayor’s suite, though Mayor Ed Gainey was upended in the Democratic primary last month.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, rose to the top in a race that was for months dominated by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani's energetic campaign centered on lowering the city's cost of living.
The Associated Press
The emergence of Mr. Mamdani, largely on the strength of support from younger Democrats, illuminates the divide within the party, some of whom want it to move leftward, while others believe the key to its revival is to appeal to centrist voters.
Mr. Mamdani is now paired with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the leading young progressive in the country, and with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, another democratic socialist, the principals of the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies they’ve conducted across the U.S. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was the target of an especially acidic Trump social-media attack Tuesday that called her “one of the ‘dumbest’ people in Congress.”
Mr. Mamdani’s platform includes free transit service and child care, the establishment of city-owned grocery stores offering goods at wholesale prices, and stiff tax increases for corporations and the wealthy. It is a 21st-century version of the 1981 Sanders program – low-income housing, overhauled spending priorities, broadened competitive bidding and a tree-planting offensive – when he became mayor of Burlington, Vt.
The two also are similar in an unusual foreign-affairs preoccupation for a municipal-government figure: Mr. Sanders in the 1980s on American involvement in Nicaragua, and Mr. Mamdani supporting Palestinian rights and opposing what he’s described as Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Mr. Mamdani would become New York’s first Muslim mayor if he prevails in the November general election. First, however, he has to emerge, as expected, from the future stages of ranked-choice voting, the process that considers voters’ alternative choices and that was employed in Mark Carney’s successful campaign to become leader of the Liberal Party.