The fear that by not dropping out, Republican Curtis Sliwa would tip the election proved a mirage. For Andrew Cuomo, it was déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. Or maybe it was like father like son. When Andrew Cuomo ran his father Mario Cuomo’s primary campaign for mayor in 1977, his dad lost with 45% of the vote. The winner in that race was Mayor Ed “how am I doing” Koch. By many accounts, it was a poorly run and, according to Koch, a dirty campaign.

Queens Assemblyman and socialist Muslim Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race with over 50% of the vote. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa took a combined 48.7% of the ballots with 91% of votes counted, meaning that even had Sliwa quit the race, Mamdani’s opposition would have fallen short.

Mamdani delivered a victory speech after Cuomo conceded the race in which he quoted socialists, leaned into identity politics, and made sweeping promises about a “new age” for New York. He mentioned the “new age” five times. That “new age,” he said, will deliver “relentless improvement,” defined by “competence and compassion.” He touted his win as a triumph for the “working people of New York.”

“The sun may have set over our city this evening,” he began, “but as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity. For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands… The future is in our hands, my friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.”

The full quote from Debs, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World and a socialist, was “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own,” and he delivered it upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act.

Later in his speech, Mamdani quoted Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister after independence from Britain and an anti-colonial nationalist. “A moment comes, but rarely in history,” Mamdani said, “when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.” Those words were first spoken by Nehru in his Tryst with Destiny speech as India gained independence in 1947.

Mamdani said that the voters “have delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford, and a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that on January 1, I will be sworn in as the mayor of New York City.”

… The results are in. Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill, Abigail Spanberger, Jay Jones, and, out in California, Prop 50 all won their respective races. Not unexpected, but admittedly disappointing. In looking at the quality of the winners, I’m more convinced than ever that if there is ever a true blue wave, they’ll all be arriving in one tiny car.

Of course, the leftist media will be having lots of fun rubbing this in over the next several months. However, as Kruiser points out in his Morning Briefing, there’s a bigger picture to consider.

Two of the races will make it nigh on impossible for the Dems to come up with a sales pitch to win back those who felt that the party had become uncomfortably extreme. Now the aforementioned commie jihadist will be front and center for the Democrats as the mayor of the biggest city in the country. Virginia Dems giving Jay Jones a pass for openly fantasizing about murdering Republicans isn’t going to make the case to flyover country Dems and independents that the party is making a return to normalcy. The only thing that they could have done worse in that regard is elect a drag queen serial killer to one of the offices up for grabs last night.

The mayoral election in New York City is about to spark the strangest American political dynamic since the mid-19th century. Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory Tuesday has put the Democrats in the unenviable position of having to decide what their party is, and how it moves forward into the 2026 midterm election cycle.

By virtue of Mamdani’s election and campaign endorsements by high-profile Democrats, he is now the putative leader of his party. This gives Republicans the opportunity to demand that their opponents in every local, state and federal race explain whether they embrace or denounce Mamdani’s socialist ideology, which now defines Democratic Party. This situation is far more perilous for Democrats than the identity crises they faced after Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election and Nixon’s shellacking of George McGovern four years later. The party’s socialist ideological and policy schisms are growing deeper and wider, creating the same conundrum faced by the Whig Party in the years before the Civil War.