This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, would thrive. Buildings rarely exceed three stories, and the streets are lined with repair garages, laundromats, and mid-price food stores. It’s more blue-collar, Catholic, and Trumpy than the rest of the city, where Latino immigrants mix with older white-ethnic families with surnames like Temkin and Kowalski. 

In his trademark red beret and a crisp blue suit, Sliwa looks rather tame compared to those standing next to him: a KFC chicken, two baby dinosaurs, one ghost, and several Minions. In some ways, though, the scene is the perfect encapsulation of his campaign: comical, attention-grabbing, even endearing, — but fundamentally unserious. Even so, to dismiss his bid as a sideshow ignores the very real effect he has had on this race. 

Crucially, he has thrust issues like subway safety and public order into the spotlight, giving voice to outer-borough New Yorkers disillusioned by the choice between a socialist newcomer and a disgraced former governor. And by rebuffing former mayors, hedge-fund billionaires, and establishment Democrats who have been calling on him to step aside, he’s also exposed the anti-democratic maneuverings of the city’s elites, winning him respect on both sides of the aisle. 

Critics argue that by refusing to drop out, Sliwa has paved the way for New York’s first socialist mayor. But as I trailed Sliwa last weekend — from the GOP’s HQ in deep Staten Island to Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and then Astoria, Queens — many of the people I spoke with had no intention of backing either Cuomo or Mamdani, regardless of whether Sliwa remained on the ticket. Few said that they could bring themselves to vote for a governor who supported cashless bail, took away qualified immunity for cops, and undercounted nursing-home deaths during the pandemic. For them, it’s Sliwa or nothing.

“I have the same net favorability as Barack Obama,” Sliwa tells me after the Halloween parade. “Obama was loved by Democrats — and I’m loved in New York.” At six feet, the square-jawed 71-year-old still cuts an imposing figure, even if the costumed children playing nearby somewhat undermine that image.

“I’ve been shot, stabbed, and beaten on these streets, but the people love me,” he adds. “It’s like the TV program Everybody Loves Raymond, except it’s called Everybody Loves Curtis.” 

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A lot of people do love Curtis — and have done for many decades. Sliwa first caught the public eye in 1970, when, as a 16-year-old paperboy delivering the Daily News to his neighbors in Brooklyn, he spotted a building on fire. Without hesitation, he rushed inside and rescued several people, a feat that earned him an “International Newspaperboy” award — and even a visit to the White House. 

That early brush with heroism gave Sliwa his first taste of public adoration and a lasting commitment to civic engagement, which eventually led him to establish the Guardian Angels at age 23. The group, originally known as the “Magnificent 13,” was formed in response to New York City’s soaring murder and crime rates in the 1970s. They would patrol the subways to promote public safety, acting as unarmed civilian watchdogs to prevent crime.

They didn’t have much of an impact on the city’s crime levels, but their distinctive red berets and bomber jackets provided a sense of security to New Yorkers. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo was a fan, remarking at the time that the Guardian Angels were a “better expression of morality than our city deserves” — a comment his son may not appreciate today.  

Members of the group, mostly Latino and African-American, were unarmed but trained in karate. Sometimes, however, the bigger threat came not from would-be criminals, but the police. NYPD officers didn’t take kindly to these wannabe-cops patrolling their streets, and often there were clashes between the two groups. In 1981, a police officer fatally shot a Guardian Angel after mistakenly seeing a threat in him unzipping his jacket to show the group’s emblem. 

Yet nothing did quite as much to damage the group’s credibility as when the founder, Sliwa, confessed that many of the Guardians’ tales of heroism proved to be untrue. “I was wrong, but we were in a sprint for survival,” Sliwa claimed in 1992. “We were just little people trying to get recognition for doing good work. In a sense it was like being Don Quixote.” The Guardian Angels are still around, but their visibility has waned since those reputational hits.

Sliwa’s supporters remember those days fondly. It’s the reason so many of them support him now. “He protected the people when the city wouldn’t do anything,” said one Glendale resident. “His heart has always been in the right place.” Even in deep-blue Manhattan, Sliwa was treated more like a beloved court jester than a political enemy. “I don’t support Sliwa or any of his policies,” said one resident. “But he is entertaining.”

Sliwa acknowledges that the “love” he gets hasn’t yet turned into votes. The latest RealClearPolitics poll of polls has him at 17% — the lowest vote share of any Republican mayoral nominee in 40 years — and nearly 20 points behind Mamdani in first place. “There is fear and fright hanging over this election,” he says in his gruff Brooklyn accent. “This is the most dystopian election I’ve ever seen. … Cuomo’s an angry curmudgeon predicting the end of the world, which guilts people into voting for him.” 

This race is Sliwa’s second bite at the cherry. In 2021, Eric Adams, a former cop and a Democrat, trounced him by nearly half a million votes. Dogged by corruption allegations, Adams has dropped out and endorsed Cuomo. Pressure on Sliwa to follow suit has come from the soon-to-be-former-mayor, billionaires like Bill Ackman and John Katsimatides, several local newspapers, and Cuomo himself.

Sliwa has — thus far — refused to back down, saying that he would only exit the race if “they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” In Sliwa’s mind, he is a Republican standing on the Republican ticket. If anyone should drop out, it should be Cuomo, who, after all, lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani and chose to run as an independent. “Cuomo would put the last nail in the coffin of New York City like he did in destroying New York state,” he tells me. “Then he fled, fearing impeachment from his own Democrats, and then hung out with his billionaire friends in the Hamptons until he decided to somehow revive his career by trying to be mayor.”

Nevertheless, if Sliwa were to drop out, his chunk of votes might put Cuomo within striking distance of Mamdani, who is running a campaign far to the Left of either candidate. Public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, universal childcare, and free public buses make Mamdani’s proposals more radical than either Cuomo’s or Sliwa’s — but the need to save Cuomo doesn’t seem to trouble the Republican’s supporters. “He’s a lifelong New Yorker; he lives, breathes, and loves New York,” says Richard Huber, a Queens local. “Choosing between Cuomo and Mamdani is like choosing between cyanide and death by hanging.”

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To his detractors, though, this stubbornness is vintage Sliwa, a character streak (or flaw) that has stuck with him since high school. Even then, he clashed with authority: he was expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school, for refusing to fulfill the school’s jacket-and-tie requirement. He then dropped out of his next school, Canarsie High School, because all the kids were “doing acid and smoking reefer.”  

In adult life, this intractability has led to more serious, nearly lethal, consequences. During his career as a popular New York radio host in the 1980s and ’90s, Sliwa regularly attacked mobsters like John Gotti, who went to trial for charges including racketeering and murder in 1992. After Gotti’s conviction, three men jumped Sliwa outside his apartment, breaking his wrist and elbow. The next morning, he was back on air, adding Gotti’s son to his list of polemical targets. 

But that meant the next punishment was more severe: two months later, he climbed into a cab near his home — only for a gunman to spring from the front seat and shoot him in the groin and legs. Sliwa hurled himself out the window of the moving car, later recalling the sting of “pebbles shooting into my face off the tires.” Compared to that, Sliwa tells me, “a mayoral race ain’t so bad.”

When the cameras are off, Sliwa seems frail. His head swivels like a restless figurine, and his hands tremble. A sharp tan line from his beret cuts across his forehead, lending it a weathered, sun-beaten look. All this was on view moments before Sliwa appeared on stage at the GOP Staten Island rally. But once the show started, the radio persona emerged. “Cuomo’s like the grim reaper — he’s so cold-hearted,” he warned. “He’s a dirtbag.” 

Sliwa clearly relishes his time in the limelight. Over the course of the campaign, he’s delivered some of the most memorable lines — Cuomo “slapping fannies and killing grannies,” in reference to the nursing-homes scandal and sexual-abuse allegations — and telling Mamdani, in Gen Z-speak, to stop “glazing him.” This is why Sliwa has won himself a cult following online, some of it driven by Mamdani’s supporters. 

But on a deeper level, Sliwa’s attacks on the Democratic establishment and the donor class have tapped into a very real anger that many New Yorkers feel toward the city’s elites. Amid record inequality and a persistent affordability crisis, that resentment helped fuel support for President Trump in the 2024 election. It’s a sentiment Mamdani has also capitalized on, despite sharing almost no ideological ground with the former president.

Ironically, Sliwa takes inspiration from Mamdani for his own campaign. Despite struggling to pronounce his first name (Zor-han instead of Zoh-ran), he commends Mamdani for coming from “almost zero” in the Democratic primary to beating Cuomo. “That’s why I say you can’t believe the polls,” he says. Many of his voters seem to agree, as does another well-known Republican, Rudy Giuliani. 

At the Staten Island rally, Giuliani appeared by Zoom to say, “When I first ran for mayor, I lost by 1% when the polls had me down by 12. And the second time, I was down by six and I won,” said Giuliani. “So don’t give up! Curtis is the best candidate by far.” The speech, however, had a slightly tragicomic quality to it, reminiscent of when Giuliani ended up hosting a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of the hotel after Trump’s 2020 loss. A combination of patchy connection and poor audio forced Sliwa’s handlers to hold a laptop up to a microphone so people could hear the former mayor speak.

Giuliani, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki, is Sliwa’s role model. As mayor, Giuliani revitalized the city and presided over a significant drop in crime. He was also fairly liberal on social issues like gay marriage and gun rights. Sliwa, for his part, has run a conventional conservative campaign focused on public safety and promising more police officers on the streets. The only difference is that he’s also running on an anti-animal-cruelty platform, which includes a ban on kill shelters. 

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I ask Sliwa whether he should be following in Giuliani’s footsteps to broaden his appeal to New York’s liberals. “I am very liberal!” he exclaims. “Well, not a liberal, but I’m liberal in some things, like gay marriage and gun rights. I also don’t like Medicaid and food stamps being cut back. There are poor people who will be hurt by this.”

Sliwa has also criticized his own party for vilifying Muslims. With the likes of Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and even the president himself fretting about the Islamization of New York (Mamdani is a Shiite Muslim), Sliwa defends the city’s almost million-strong Muslim community. “I condemned the national Republicans early on,” he says. “I told them: you’re attacking the Muslim religion and the way the culture is, like, eating with your fingers. I told them to back off, because Muslims are very conservative. They’re even way too conservative for me!”

Labeling himself a “populist but not MAGA,” Sliwa believes that one of the reasons Trump has not endorsed him is because he can’t be put in a “cookie-cutter box.” “You never know the position I’m going to take because I’m open-minded,” he says. I ask him what, if any, issue he has changed his mind on. He takes a long pause. “Well, there’s still some issues I haven’t quite come to grips with. Obviously, I don’t want sex-change surgery for teenagers,” he says. “But for adults, I haven’t come to a conclusion yet. I’m not opposed to it, but I really think it’s really more of a private concern.” 

A large number of New Yorkers may never forgive Sliwa for staying in the race. But as the Republican nominee, why should he? It isn’t his responsibility to champion a Democrat, let alone one accused of sexual abuse by multiple women. And unlike Cuomo, Sliwa actually won his party’s primary.

There is also something oddly endearing about this aging street tough. He is a classic New York eccentric, the last of a dying breed of why-I-outta fighters with a surprisingly big heart (at one point, he was fostering 16 cats). He’s shown a willingness to buck the Republican line on a range of issues and cares a great deal about the city he’s spent his whole life in. After Tuesday’s election, the Everybody Loves Curtis show will be over, and with it, an older New York will fade away — for good and ill. 

Cuomo has his problems, and we don’t need to hear about them one final time. No matter whom they choose, however, voters deserve a fair chance to consider the positive case for Andrew Cuomo. So here it is.

First, in an increasingly Left-wing city, Cuomo is the proven progressive option. That’s not a positive or a negative statement — it’s just a neutral fact. If you like higher taxes on the rich, Cuomo is your guy: during his final months as governor, he raised the rate on millionaire earners by nearly a full percentage point, to just under 10 percent. He also created two new, even higher tax brackets on personal income above $5 million, and a higher business-tax rate, all raising about $4.3 billion annually. Even earlier, he significantly boosted the minimum wage.

The obvious riposte here is that Cuomo didn’t want to hike taxes. Worried about a future primary challenge, he caved to pressure from progressive lawmakers, whose power was growing during President Trump’s first term. True enough, but an elected official being responsive to political pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, from many liberal New Yorkers’ perspective. Cuomo, if elected mayor, isn’t going to govern as some sort of crypto-conservative or even moderate autocrat. He will have to deal with the liberal and progressive City Council and the liberal and progressive state legislature.

After a close election, a Mayor Cuomo would presumably be concerned about another future challenge from the Left, and would accordingly maintain and enact progressive policies to head off that challenge.

A Left voter might reasonably think, “If I want a progressive, I’ll just vote for Mamdani.” But the more moderate among them might consider that checks and balances in a democracy are good. Cuomo failed to counteract the state legislature on several issues, from the tax hike to the details of eliminating and reducing cash bail. But at least he tried. When it comes to negotiating budgets with the council or tax policy with the state legislature, a Mayor Mamdani wouldn’t even try.

Cuomo’s well-known political flexibility isn’t a bad thing, if the result of that flexibility is to give voters a real choice when it matters. Cuomo is explicitly running against Mamdani’s proposed $9 billion annual tax hikes on New York City’s wealthy earners and corporations now. “You keep taxing businesses and wealthy people in New York City, there will be nobody left,” he told Fox News earlier in October.

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Yes, that’s an exaggeration — except the city (and state) are losing their fair share of millionaires, with the share of American millionaire earners in New York City falling to 4.2% in 2022, down from 6.5% to and 2010, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, echoing the analyst E.J. McMahon’s earlier research.

Voters without the ability to create a perfectly consistent mayor from scratch must ask themselves: are they going to punish Cuomo for being wrong back then, even if he is right, right now, and even if it means punishing themselves? Cuomo may have no strong ideological impulse either to raise or lower taxes, but, whether out of real conviction or political expediency, he is providing a critical contrast to Mamdani now, in saying that now is not the time for another increase.

Moreover, voters attracted to Mamdani because they want New York City to be more affordable should realize one big difference between Mamdani’s plans and Cuomo’s: Cuomo’s experience makes him a natural pragmatist, which makes it more likely that his affordability initiatives would succeed.

To wit: Cuomo would target his affordability plans to poorer people and people on the lower end of the middle class, whereas Mamdani would offer his subsidies to everybody. That’s an important distinction, because Gotham has finite funds; benefits that go to everyone, by definition, are benefits that can’t go to the people who most need them. For instance, Mamdani would make city buses free for everyone, whereas Cuomo would target families earning under $48,000 a year for free-transit subsidies, including subway subsidies. Similarly, Cuomo would increase benefits to lower-income New Yorkers to purchase food, whereas Mamdani would open five city-run grocery stores to cut food prices for everyone.

There are flaws in Cuomo’s affordability plans, sure. But in a choice between two transit plans — one that offers targeted subsidies and doesn’t favor only one type of transit, and one that offers a massive new universal entitlement but only on one type of mass transit — the latter is the more flawed. Similarly, in a choice between two grocery plans, Cuomo’s is superior because targeted to those who need help the most.

Further, a big piece of New York’s affordability problem is education and childcare. One fact that came across in the two general-election debates in October is that Mamdani isn’t interested in K-12 education; it’s just not one of his issues. He’s so uninterested in the topic, in fact, that he’d even give up mayoral control of the 900,000-student school system. Cuomo, on the other hand, has a straightforward and implementable plan for parents trying to get their kids into a rigorous school in the higher grades: double the number of schools for which an entrance exam is required to meet the high demand.

As for childcare: Mamdani’s marquee plan for “no-cost” universal care, beginning with babies 5 weeks old, is perfect because it is nonexistent. He offers no timeline and no hint of how this would work: babies aren’t 4-year-olds. Would parents have to commit to sending infants and toddlers to “school” five days a week, for example, as pre-K works, or would they have emergency drop-off and part-time and nighttime options?

Cuomo, by contrast, commits to expanding guaranteed pre-K to 3-year-olds, which is where it makes sense to start, as it’s easier. On early childcare, he shows an interest, saying he’d “pioneer [a] new model to co-locate early childhood development services in public schools.” But he doesn’t promise too much — which is a good thing in the context of an idea that is both expensive and logistically hard, because of the higher ratio of adult minders to babies and toddlers required.

On criminal justice, Cuomo is most vulnerable to voters inclined to vote for Sliwa. After all, he is the governor who signed into law leniency on bail, discovery laws, and juvenile crimes. Despite tweaks by his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, over the past four years, this leniency continues to contribute to New York’s persistently higher crime rate, post-2020.

Again, though, the relevant question isn’t what he did then, but where we go from here. Voters can consider a key difference between Cuomo and Mamdani. Cuomo has, if rather belatedly, repudiated the city’s unworkable plan to close the jails on Rikers Island by 2027 and rebuild four much smaller jails in four of the city’s five boroughs. To replace the close-Rikers plan, Cuomo says that he would gradually rebuild new jails at Rikers and provide better transportation for family members to visit the island. Mamdani, instead, only repeats the empty vow that he’ll do everything “in my power” to close Rikers within two years.

This distinction is critical, because it will determine the Big Apple’s ability to cut crime by incapacitating criminal suspects. The close-Rikers plan is unworkable in part because the four-borough jail plan would cap inmate capacity at just above half the current population, about 7,373. This abrupt decrease in capacity would require the release of thousands of violent suspects.

Moreover, Cuomo’s recent criminal-justice legacy may work in the city’s favor: as mayor, he would be under intense centrist and conservative pressure to accelerate the modest crime declines that the Eric Adams administration has achieved.

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Mamdani, conversely, would face no such pressure from his own base. He predicates the ability of his new “department of community safety” to cut crime and disorder on “creating economic stability” and ensuring “that no New Yorker falls through the cracks of our social safety net.” Crime, then, wouldn’t be evidence of policing failures, but of Mamdani’s inability, constrained by the state government’s control of much of the city’s budget, to implement socialist policies fully. No matter how bad things get under Mamdani’s vision of public safety, he can’t be accountable — because full democratic socialism has never been tried. Or something.

One final issue looms: personality. Many people look at Andrew Cuomo and feel repulsion at the shape-shifting and other defects, fearing the lack of a core. Maybe so. But Mamdani, too, is showing the same capacity to shape-shift. Just five years ago, Mamdani wanted to defund the police; he has now fully denounced that position. Mamdani says that he’d like to retain Jessica Tisch, Adams’s appointee, as police commissioner, without explaining how he’d square her proactive approach to policing, including toward disturbed people in the subways, with his preferred reliance on social-service civilians.

Mamdani is not without his own personality flaws: a good anti-capitalist socialist really shouldn’t own investment property in a poor country (in Mamdani’s case, Uganda).

Sliwa’s potential voters, on the other hand, are rightly comfortable with his personality. The Guardian Angels co-founder and longtime civic activist has demonstrated a remarkable consistency in his professional values and goals over several decades.

But Sliwa also lacks part of what New Yorkers want from Mamdani, and could partially get from Cuomo: a nuanced, if last-minute, focus on affordability. And yes, Sliwa, a Republican in a Democratic town, is simply unlikely to win, unless all polls are wildly off. Though New Yorkers who prize pure principle over practicality and pragmatism should stick to their vote, in a race that may be closer than voters think, they are indeed helping to split the more centrist and conservative vote against one socialist candidate.

As it enters its final day, this race is between a man who has probably already made most of his mistakes and revealed his flaws — and one about to begin making and revealing his own.

This is the state of the Democrats in 2025. Bereft of ideas and riven by internal division, the party is no longer in control of itself. That has left it open to challenges from the ideological fringes, with a new wave of socialists and progressives emerging in America’s cities, from New York to Minneapolis to Albuquerque. Led by a new generation of young primary challengers, a broader realignment may be taking shape in the party — one that is more progressive, economically populist, and unapologetically pro-Palestine.

The forceful return of the Left has exposed the fecklessness of centrist Democrats, whose efforts to reclaim the party after President Trump’s victory last year have utterly failed. Back in November, moderates promised a sober reset: a return to pragmatism, competence, and electability. But they have since been out-organized, out-communicated, and increasingly out of step with a base that no longer sees triangulation as a virtue. With the midterms looming, it’s clear that the center isn’t holding, and the Left is on the march.

Over the last two months, a pair of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates, Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, have surfaced as contenders for mayor in two blue cities. In June, Mamdani — a democratic socialist who campaigned on city-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses — won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. His victory was followed by that of Fateh, who received a major boost when the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state’s version of the Democrats) endorsed him over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. It was the Minneapolis DFL’s first endorsement in 16 years.

Like Mamdani, Fateh’s pitch to voters focused almost exclusively on cost-of-living issues. He promised to implement widespread rent control, raise the city minimum wage to $20, and implement free transit. He is now well-positioned to win the general election later this year — even if Gov. Tim Walz has endorsed his rival Frey.

Progressives elsewhere are taking note. In Seattle, Katie Wilson looks set to defeat Mayor Bruce Harrell in a Democratic primary by promising affordable housing and better public transit. In a written statement, Wilson sounded almost like a MAGA Republican with her promise to take on “career politicians backed by corporate interests,” who have “presided for years over skyrocketing costs of living and out-of-control homelessness.” Similarly, in Albuquerque, NM, Alex Uballez is challenging Democratic Mayor Tim Keller on a progressive platform to combat income and housing inequality.

“Cost of living has for several years in a row now been top of mind for voters at all levels of elections,” says Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot newsletter. “For better or worse, this new contingent of socialist and progressive candidates has a message on this stuff. They are speaking about things — whether they’re workable ideas or not — that people really care about.”

Many remain skeptical. Citing Mamdani’s plan to tax “whiter” neighborhoods harder or Fateh’s pledge to expand city funding for progressive causes (including a “Trans Equity Summit”), they claim that these figures merely represent a “new phase” of wokeness — not a rejection of it. To them, the populist gloss is just that. “When I hear a politician being described as economically populist, I want to see if the working class is actually voting for them or not,” says the political economist and UnHerd contributor Michael Lind. “The public grocery store idea does not come from the working class — it comes from the nonprofit sector. It’s a classic case of ‘pity charity liberalism.’”

Given that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat Mamdani by a wide margin among lower-income and black voters — the only two groups he won — it is difficult to cast Mamdani as a tribune of the working class. Still, there are signs he is trying to address that weakness. After the Midtown Manhattan shooting, for example, the Democratic nominee went directly from the airport after his wedding trip to Uganda to visit the family of a slain police officer. Later that day, he walked back past posts calling to defund the police, which he admitted were “out of step.” This may not sound entirely convincing, but it is a significant, if cautious, course correction.

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Cuomo, for his part, tried to run a conventional campaign focused on public safety in the primary. But Mamdani, despite starting with almost no name recognition, succeeded in shifting the conversation. He reframed the race around housing, affordability, and the cost of living, which proved so effective that Cuomo, in his campaign relaunch, mimicked both Mamdani’s visual style and his economic focus. What was meant to be a law-and-order referendum has since become a debate on rent, wages, and whom the city is for.

The fact that Mamdani remains a viable candidate speaks to a deeper shift in the Democratic Party. Ten or even five years ago, it is doubtful that figures like him or Fateh would have emerged as serious contenders for office. In any other Democratic leadership contest, a candidate who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or who declined to support then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary — over his stance on Israel — would have been dead on arrival.

But these are different times. Democratic voters have undergone a dramatic shift on Israel — so much so that even former senior Barack Obama advisers are now calling for a re-evaluation of the party’s position. Chris Van Hollen, a US senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen UN aid, while 24 Democratic senators supported blocking the sale of more than $675 million in arms sales to Israel. Meanwhile, in the House, 13 progressive lawmakers have signed onto a letter urging the Trump administration to recognize a Palestinian state, and at least one plans to introduce a pro-statehood resolution.

It would be a stretch to credit Mamdani and his fellow progressives for this shift, but their refusal to tone down criticism of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has forced once-taboo positions into the mainstream. This dynamic was in full display during a mayoral debate, at which the candidates were asked to name the first foreign country they’d visit upon being elected mayor. Nearly all the other candidates named Israel, offering effusive praise for the Jewish state. Mamdani, however, indicated that he would stay put in the Big Apple, visiting local synagogues to connect with Jewish New Yorkers. The stance won him applause from the Left — and even many on the MAGA Right.

In fact, Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza has twisted centrist Democrats into knots, with fears spreading that the war in the Middle East could become a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries. In the face of mass starvation and an IDF push to take over the entire Gaza strip, the only consensus the party’s moderate wing has managed to reach is this: criticize the Netanyahu government, but not the Jewish state.

This stance has produced some painfully tin-eared moments online. Challenged on a popular YouTube show on why she wasn’t taking a stronger position on Gaza, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan deflected, insisting, “I would offer that Democrats own nothing in Washington,” before shifting the conversation to the difference between sending offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. Even on that point, she struggled. Asked whether she would support a ban on offensive arms to Israel, she meekly responded: “That, to me, would certainly be a place to look.” In the end, she skipped the vote on the offensive-weapons resolution for an appearance on the Stephen Colbert talkshow.

The center, then, is no longer setting the terms of the debate; it’s struggling to keep up.

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The upheaval is playing out at the ballot box, too. In safe blue districts across the country, a new generation of candidates — almost all under 40 — is mounting primary challenges against long-serving Democratic incumbents. In New York, a 26-year-old Jewish democratic socialist is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman, drawing inspiration from Mamdani’s high-profile run. In California, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a challenge from a onetime aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Illinois, a progressive content creator is running to unseat a 14-term congressman. And in a pair of open Senate races, Gen X and Millennial Democrats have launched bids to fill seats vacated by retiring Boomers in New Hampshire and Michigan. As Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician endorsed by Bernie Sanders who is running in Michigan, told Politico, his position on Gaza is a “symbol for something greater. Gaza, unfortunately, has become a Rorschach test for values. Do your morals apply anywhere and everywhere?”

What these races show is that the anti-establishment feeling that fueled Trump’s return is moving in both directions. As polling analysis by the election-data site Split Ticket illustrates, Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans viewed theirs from 2009 to 2015, when Bush-Romney neoliberal dogma ruled the GOP. That insurgency reshaped the GOP from the ground up, dragging the party toward populism. A similar dynamic may now be unfolding on the Left. Polling in June found that roughly half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” with 62% calling for the “party leaders to be replaced” — a level of disaffection that suggests something bigger is stirring inside the party.

The Democrats have yet to find their own answer to Trump. But the most obvious contender is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has successfully straddled both wings of the party, serving as a bridge between the establishment and progressives. She has the highest net approval out of any Democrat not running for president, and she is still young enough to position herself as an outsider candidate.

Unlike most of her colleagues, AOC has also cultivated a political identity that operates largely independent of the Democratic Party’s institutional machinery. But the real test will be whether she can break through beyond the progressive base and win over moderates and independents — the very voters needed to beat Trump’s successor.

She is also exactly who, like Mamdani, Republicans want front and center in the Democratic Party. Just as Trump painted her and The Squad as the face of the party during his first term, the president is now targeting Mamdani in a similar fashion. This could have a deleterious effect on Democratic efforts to win back independents and moderates ahead of next year’s midterms. As Karl Rove aptly put it on Fox News last weekend, “the more that we get people like this representing the face of the Democratic Party, the harder it is [for them] to win back voters in the middle of American politics.”

For that to happen — to win back a national majority — these progressive challengers actually need to win their races first. Beyond that, a lot will also depend on the progressives’ ability to stay singularly focused on issues like the cost of living and Republicans’ attacks on hugely popular entitlements, while eschewing “peak woke” slogans like police abolition and “queer liberation.”

Still, their success so far signals a deeper shift underway in the party. What once looked like fringe discontent is beginning to coalesce into a coherent, organized revolt. Far from being isolated local phenomena, their victories would legitimize a new template for Left-wing politics: one rooted in economic populism with a deep skepticism of the party establishment. In a few years’ time, it may not be Mamdani, Fateh, and others who seem like outliers — but the party leadership, scrambling to catch up.

In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.

As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.

As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.

The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing the media in favor of a few limited public appearances across the city.

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Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.

Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.

Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”

It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”

The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”

That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.

“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”

Recognising Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomised by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”

Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy-mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.

There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighbourhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.

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For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighbourhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, supports community-led alternatives to public safety — a stance that very few working-class New Yorkers would likely support.

Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well received by these communities.

Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the centre to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.

In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”

My father died at a nursing home in Long Beach, and my mother died at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset after contracting Covid-19 in her senior-care residence in Far Rockaway. Her passing was recorded as a hospital fatality. We would later find out that my mom’s death along with thousands of others would be undercounted by the former governor as he infamously said, “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

Now, as Cuomo tries to revive his political career as the next mayor of New York City, I feel duty-bound to recall his lapse in judgment, and what it did to my family.

I first began tracking Covid in December 2019 as part of my job as a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York City. My family was visiting my mother-in-law in Canada over the Christmas holiday, and even though I was on vacation, I couldn’t help looking at the news feeds. I read that another “flu-like” virus was causing illnesses in China, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

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By late January 2020, it was obvious that Covid wasn’t your ordinary “flu-like” virus from the People’s Republic like SARS, say. Covid-19 was a disease that no one could hide from. It was a pandemic that would turn all our lives upside down and, in my case, result in an unbearable tragedy.

By early March, Covid was no longer an abstraction. Universities were closing. My oldest son’s concert for the Long Island String Festival Association was canceled two days before the performance. Masks became commonplace in grocery stores and other public settings. Rumors swirled of sweeping lockdowns to come, including at nursing homes like the ones my parents lived in.

The last time I had a conversation with my father was probably 7 March, based on a photo I took from the window of the care center, which shows massive waves crashing along the Long Beach coastline. We talked about the waves, the winter storm that sent the swell, the weather in general.

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Dad had competed in road races since the 1970s as a way to stay and fit and socialize, and he was always aware of what was going on outside. I don’t recall what else we discussed, but I had no way of knowing this was to be our last chat. I visited him one more time, before the lockdowns kicked in, but he was napping, so I decided not the wake him.

I sat at his side for about 15 to 20 minutes, then tidied up his area the best I could, got a quick update from the desk nurse and left. Looking back, I was relieved that he was sleeping, because one-on-one conversations had become more taxing as his dementia progressed. I thought I was getting a one-time reprieve, and the next time I would bring Mom, who lived at a different facility nearby. The poor state of my father’s health precluded him from leaving nursing home-rehab for my mother’s senior care living center, but the plan was to get my dad well enough to join his wife in the double room that we had secured for both of them in the assisted living residence.

I had no idea that I missed my last opportunity to talk to the man who raised me and instilled in me a love of history, athletics for sake of wellness, and personal accountability. I carry that guilt to this day.

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Before the lockdown, it was hard to get my father to eat. But we had no way of knowing how much his health deteriorated behind the closed doors of the lockdown and away from the watchful eyes of visiting family members.

Daily phone calls from staff were cold and inadequate (Dad was incapable of using the phone on his own). I do remember a call I received near the end of March letting me know they were moving my father to a different floor. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. But looking back on it now, I believe it was to make room for the Covid-positive patients, as mandated by Cuomo’s orders. As for Mom, it was much easier to say in touch; she still had her cellphone and we remained in constant contact.

The living center that we chose for Mom was close by, and they agreed to accept Dad when he was released from rehab (Dad’s health was not good enough to be accepted at most other centers). Tragically, they were never reunited, since my father suffered a urinary-tract infection in the summer of 2019, which was the same illness that brought my mother to the hospital a month after Dad.

On 29 March, at around 11 a.m., I received a call from a doctor at Dad’s nursing home explaining that he was running a low-grade fever and that he was lethargic. Three hours later, the same doctor called to tell me that my father had died. The call was professional and brief. To be clear, we don’t blame these facilities. They were following the governor’s health orders.

One of the hardest things I ever had to do was to call my mother and tell her that her husband of 60 years had passed. Another pressing issue was that my father’s body had to be removed within a certain number of hours, or they would be forced to send his remains to the county morgue; the clock was ticking.

Our deus ex machina came in the form of a friend from the old neighborhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn: Frankie. He was a funeral director on Staten Island and was closer in age to my older sister, Donna, who put in the call. Frankie promised to get Dad out of there before he was sent to the morgue, which was significant, because these facilities were already overwhelmed with Covid patients who succumbed to the illness, and there was no way of knowing how quickly we could have gotten him out of there for a proper service.

By the early evening, Frankie let us know his nephew was going to pick up Dad and take him back to Staten Island. My sister Donna and I decided to meet him there. I called my good friend Mark, a fellow fireman, who lived nearby, and asked him to come by with whatever uniform he could muster on short notice.

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I found an official FDNY sweatshirt in my house and headed over myself. We weren’t pretty, but this meant my father had an honor guard. We waited in front of the nursing home for Dad to come. We gave my father a proper salute and made sure to put his body bag in the van ourselves — a final show of respect for a man who was a military veteran and a retired member of the Fire Department, having served during one of the busiest eras of fire duty in urban history.

My dad told my mom a while back that he wished to be cremated, so Frankie handled it, and even took my dad home with him, saving me a trip to Staten Island until we figured out what to do with his ashes. An appropriate resting place for my father became available within two weeks.

I got some flowers and headed over to Mom’s care center a couple of days after Dad passed. When I arrived, they were kind enough to let me into the lobby, as there were still no visitors allowed. I handed Mom the flowers, but didn’t hug or kiss her, as I didn’t want to infect her nor anyone else there.

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We spoke through masks from 10 feet away for a few minutes, and I left. As I drove home, the song “Mickey” by Dick Robertson played on SiriusXM’s 40’s Junction station. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard that song. I would not expect Dad to be dramatic, but you never know.

As with the nursing-home rehab facility my father had been living in, Andrew Cuomo would also direct Covid-positive patients into assisted-living facilities like the one my mom was at.

About a week after I saw Mom, she said that she wasn’t feeling well. Her symptoms worsened, and she was admitted to the hospital. The day she arrived, we talked several times from her cellphone as she waited in the emergency room or transfer area for a room to open up. On the evening of her second day there, we had our final conversation. The last thing she said to me was to make sure my two boys were given Easter presents on her behalf. The next day, the hospital called to say that my mother had passed away. It was 14 April.

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Frankie continued his work as our angel of mercy. He organized everything he could for us. A church funeral service was out of the question with all the restrictions in place, but he was able to arrange for a burial service at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where my family has had plots for many generations. What I didn’t anticipate was that my mother needed a dress for the burial.

Returning to the apartment where I grew up, on the top floor of the four-story walk-up, felt like strolling through a mausoleum. It was quiet and stuffy. I had been there many times since my parents entered care homes, but this visit felt suffocating. I picked out a dress and some jewelry and made my way to Frankie at his Staten Island funeral home. We hadn’t seen each other in many years, but that neighborhood bond remained strong.

The graveside burial service was held on 18 April. The sky was gray and undecided. Flashes of light briefly broke through the clouds but never held, bathing everything around us in a sepia tone. Donna, my sister, was able to secure a priest from nearby Good Shepherd Parish to perform the service (within days, it would be close to impossible to get a priest, what with so many people dying).

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Frankie also arranged for two US Air Force airmen to attend the service and present an American flag to my family. Donna, my brother, Michael, and I decided that our niece Danielle (Donna’s daughter) should accept the flag. Danielle spent a great deal of time with my parents growing up, and it just made sense. After the service, there was no collation. We couldn’t have a lunch where we could unwind and console each other. We retreated to our respective cars, still wearing our masks, and returned to our homes. It was the best goodbye we could have hoped for, given the circumstance.

Dad and Mom were always “MickeyandDee”, as if they were one entity. The last six months of their lives in care facilities was the only time they were ever separated. Fittingly, Frankie got approval from the director of the cemetery to place Dad’s ashes in Mom’s casket. In the end, they were reunited, and they would spend eternity together, the same way they lived their lives.

Five years later, it’s important to remember that then-Gov. Cuomo’s 25 March nursing-home directive willfully brought disease to the group least prepared to defend themselves against the novel coronavirus. Their only chance was isolation. Nursing homes and similar care centers were the keep in the castle for these seniors. They had nowhere else to run. Instead of putting up barricades and putting up a final defense, Covid was helped through the front by a decree from the man who now wants to lead Gotham.

The men, mostly from West Africa, are the latest arrivals at a 2,200-bed, male-only migrant center that opened two weeks ago. Some have come from other parts of the city, where shelters are closing down; others from out of state, with one telling me he was sleeping on the subway for two weeks until he heard about the new opening. “I was kicked out of the last shelter for getting in a fight, so I had to find somewhere new,” he says.

It’s conditions like these that have triggered a massive backlash among working-class communities of color in New York. The South Bronx, where I visited, saw a significant red shift in the 2024 election, along with several other neighborhoods in New York’s outer boroughs. This shift has prompted some soul-searching — and shape-shifting — on the Democratic side. Most notably, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rebranded himself from a pot-legalizing progressive to a law-and-order moderate in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City.

Given his clear frontrunner status, Cuomo’s “clean-up-the-mess” campaign has already attracted a number of key endorsements. And with the incumbent Eric Adams’s approval rating in the drain, it is likely that Cuomo will clinch the June primary (which would make him a shoo-in for the general election come November, in light of the city’s Democratic tilt). The question, though, is whether his hardened rhetoric will translate into real policy — or if, like Adams, he’ll find himself trapped between an angry electorate and an uncooperative party.

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New York’s migrant crisis is not over. An estimated 44,000 newcomers are still being housed and sheltered — the same number that the city’s entire homeless-shelter system served just three years ago. To date, it has cost the city nearly $7 billion (more than all emergency services combined). According to a poll last month, more than half of Gotham’s residents believe that the situation is “less under control” than it was four years ago, while 32% believe it is “about the same”. Just 9% believe conditions have improved.

It’s true that some shelters are closing, and 188,000 migrants have, according to the mayor, been “helped… to take the next steps in their journey”. It is not exactly clear, however, what these next steps are. No measures have been taken to track or monitor those who have left, and many have been found living in squalid conditions.

Some have crammed into apartments in New York’s outer boroughs, while others have slept outdoors, on trains, or in houses of worship. Last month, for example, the New York Fire Department discovered 70 migrants living in the basement of a Queens furniture store, followed by another discovery of dozens more living in a commercial space in The Bronx.

“They’re either on the street or selling items illegally,” Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the City Council, tells me. “They’re selling food illegally, they’re selling drinks in traffic, they’re on the expressway. And they commit crimes, because many can’t work.”

Holden, who represents a district that swung for Trump in last year’s presidential election, says that residents were tired of the “anarchy” during the Biden administration. Border crossings soared under the Democratic president, averaging two million per year between 2021 and 2023, the effects of which are still being felt today. “Everyone knows people that have moved out over the last five years,” Holden says. “They see the quality of life of their neighborhoods around the city dropping. Everywhere was affected but it hit the working people the hardest.”

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Then there are the shelters that still exist. The mayor’s office states that a total of 53 shelters will close down by June 2025, but new ones, such as the converted storage facility in the South Bronx, are still popping up. “No one told us this was happening,” Alejandro Lopez, a South Bronx resident, says, “so now we have hundreds of jobless men hanging around the neighborhood. It can’t be good.”

“I want them gone — all of them,” says another passerby. “All they do is bring trouble.”

Over the past three years, city leaders struggled to cope with the influx of migrants into their neighborhoods. From deep-blue neighborhoods like Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to more Trump-supporting areas like Staten Island, the message was the same: get them out. But as frustration grew, it created an opening for the ghosts of New York’s past to return.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor over sexual-harassment allegations in 2021, leveraged the crisis to quietly tiptoe back into the limelight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, he described the migrant crisis as a “tipping point” for Gotham, suggesting that the city was stuck in a “death spiral” — a point he doubled down on two months later. And in last week’s announcement video, he tapped into similar themes. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo said. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway … the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening.”

This marks quite the turnaround for a man who once proudly described himself as an “undocumented person”. In a decade as governor, Cuomo pushed or acquiesced to a raft of progressive measures to support illegal immigrants. In 2019, he strongly backed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and signed the New York DREAM Act, which provided illegal students access to state financial aid for college. That same year, he passed the Green Light Law, granting illegal immigrants the right to obtain driver’s licenses in the Empire State.

As part of the first anti-Trump #Resistance, he issued executive orders opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and sued the Trump administration over policies like the Public Charge Rule, which aimed to deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits. Most famously, when he announced his opposition to the then-president’s so-called Muslim ban, he declared: “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices, because, as a New Yorker, we are one community, and the New York community is composed of all of the above.”

Yet the Big Apple in 2025 is vastly different from what it was when Cuomo left office in 2021. Public fatigue with traditionally liberal policies on immigration, public safety, and crime allowed Trump to expand his support across nearly every neighborhood, particularly in districts with sizeable migrant populations.

In The Bronx, for example, where there was (and still is) a big migrant presence, 27% of the borough’s residents backed Trump — almost three times the share in 2016. “Most migrants are good, hard-working people,” says Lisandra Martinez, who lives 10 blocks away from the new South Bronx migrant center. “But there are always one or two who cause problems. If the shelter closes, where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We are a close community, and I don’t want them doing bad things around here.”

This, in large part, explains Cuomo’s own transformation from progressive governor to a law-and-order moderate who now says that he will “work” with Trump. New polling shows that 81% of New Yorkers support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, versus just 16% who oppose it.

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But New York’s status as a sanctuary city, combined with resistance from progressive Democrats, has made even this straightforwardly popular initiative difficult to accomplish. Adams in recent weeks has endured heavy attacks from members of his own party for cooperating with ICE in deporting criminal illegal immigrants. Recently, he issued an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, which prompted calls by House Democrats that he was “selling New York out”.

The question then, is whether Mayor Cuomo would continue in the same vein as his predecessor. As governor, Cuomo was not afraid to take on the progressives in his party when dealing with relatively “safe” issues like taxing the rich, universal health care, and education reform. But on immigration, he marched in lockstep with the Left, even criticizing the ultra-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to do enough to protect illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And when de Blasio maintained that city law enforcement would not cooperate with ICE unless absolutely required, Cuomo went further by threatening legal action against ICE during Trump’s first term.

All of which casts doubt on Cuomo’s rebrand as a border hawk. If the Trump crackdown turns ugly, and ICE deportations accelerate, Cuomo may find it politically expedient to return to his previously progressive positions. Ever attuned to shifts in public sentiment (and among his own party), he will not want to be seen as bending the knee to Trump.

But it is not Cuomo or any political leader who will suffer as a result. As Robert Holden tells me, it is New York’s forgotten class: “My constituents are middle class, and the illegal immigrants are threatening their very existence. They’re making New York less affordable to live in and it’s driving people away. For the past four years we’ve been losing our city. We need to get it back.”

On the day he resigned, August 10, 2021, Cuomo was famously photographed, coffee cup in hand, entering a helicopter alongside his daughter Michaela. His mayoral campaign launch visually called back to that moment. It’s a testament to how rapidly the cultural atmosphere has shifted: though Cuomo remained largely unapologetic, at one point blaming his handsiness with women on his Italian heritage, he did resign. Now, a little more than three years later, the ex-governor is more brazen, expecting forgiveness for his sexual lapses.

He isn’t alone. In 2017, the comedian Louis CK was accused of masturbating in front of female comedians. But since being canceled, he has toured the country, appeared on several podcasts, and sold out a show at Madison Square Garden. Today, tickets to his upcoming Los Angeles performance are going for several thousands of dollars. #MeToo, it seems, is sunsetting along with the woke era.

It would be tempting to look at this turn of events and conclude that #MeToo failed completely. It would also be wrong: the movement succeeded in dethroning big-time, violent abusers and in raising barriers to the sort of harassment that used to be routine in many workplaces. However, the path to redemption created by the movement has been less than satisfactory, especially for accused men without the benefit of money and fame.

The re-election of Donald Trump and events since his inauguration have confirmed the decline of wokeness. For many people, that means no longer living in fear of the Left’s lifestyle and language police. While #MeToo is in some ways a different phenomenon from woke, the two were blended in the public mind, as part of the same culture of accusation and interrogation. But no more. Comebacks like Louis CK’s and Cuomo’s will proliferate amid the vibe shift, even as the collateral of the #MeToo movement is still settling.

Seven years since the movement first emerged, the men accused in #MeToo fall into three categories: the imprisoned, the forgotten, and the forgiven. Those who have been accused, tried, and convicted of the worst crimes, such as Harvey Weinstein with his numerous assault charges, have been managed and dealt with. The forgotten include men who weren’t all that relevant to begin with, like the actor Scott Baio; men only relevant to niche corners, like the former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein; or men we don’t even recall being accused of in the first place, like Morgan Freeman. However, it’s the third category, those whom we’ve “forgiven” — or at least, those men allowed back into the public eye, men who continue to be afforded opportunities, visibility, and money — that we continue to reckon with.

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Most of the biggest villains of #MeToo, those accused of drugging and raping women, remain either in custody or entirely shunned from society. We felt the ripple effects of those men in more recent exposés about Neil Gaiman and Sean “Diddy” Combs. But for some of the rest — those who perhaps made unwelcome advances upon women, made them uncomfortable, exploited their position of power for otherwise consensual sex, etc. — the cultural and political gates have re-opened.

When we look to how our culture has reintegrated men whose transgressions have largely been nonviolent and semi-consensual, perhaps we can begin to trace #MeToo as a broader project, one that remains unfinished. As a movement, #MeToo has succeeded thus far in reorienting how we view both perpetrators of sexual violence and victims. It is indeed harder now for men in positions of power to quietly continue hurting people thanks to that power. For this, #MeToo should be considered a triumph.

Which brings us to the downsides of #MeToo. In some cases, these have been either been overestimated or largely remedied — with some critical exceptions. There is a dominant cultural narrative among #MeToo’s critics that the movement’s biggest impact has been in making young men more fearful of approaching women and pursuing romance. According to Gallup data, however, this has not panned out: young men report being unaffected by #MeToo, while the share of women who “often or sometimes” worry about being sexually assaulted has risen 15%.

As Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life explained: “#MeToo effectively undercut victim-blaming narratives that perpetuated the idea that sexual assault is the result of poor decisions, miscommunication, or unlucky happenstance…. In the wake of #MeToo, there was recognition that sexual assault and harassment were pervasive problems in American society. Many have come to believe it could happen to anyone”.

This, too, is a triumph, but one that requires more interrogation. Women are now more fearful of sexual assault. Are they right to be? Has the awareness element of the campaign made us any safer? Are we ultimately any less likely to be assaulted, and are those who commit assaults any more likely to be caught?

Our legal system rarely convicts rapists, and reporting your boss for sexual misconduct is very different for someone without the resources of some of Weinstein’s famous accusers like Gwyneth Paltrow. But the kind of justice found outside the legal system, in the social isolation of being cancelled, has had awful consequences for normal people, like the Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who took his life after being ostracized for a bad sexual encounter.

Stars with the platform to do so can rebuild their image. In certain cases, like Louis CK’s, their cancellation can even serve as material for their redemption. A politician like Cuomo, meanwhile, will no doubt persuade some voters to overlook his personal shortcomings to save their city from its crises. Whether Cuomo has a good case to make in this regard is a different question. As it is, his pitch amounts to: forget about my personal lousiness — Gotham is going to hell.

Not everyone is so lucky. #MeToo traveled a long way beyond the rich and famous. In our anti-woke era, we have mostly turned away from the routine of cancellation the movement brought out, but the instinct from which it emerged — our desire to uncover and arbitrate the most personal details of someone’s life and to place them under moral scrutiny accordingly — endures. It isn’t just women of Hollywood who experienced sexual violence or threats of it, and it isn’t just famous people whom we place under this culture of surveillance. Perhaps celebrities can be uncancelled now. But what about the nameless?

This looks to be how it’s going to end for Andrew Cuomo, the New York state governor who resigned this week after an investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James found that he’d sexually harassed eleven women over the course of his political career. The report detailed a pervasive pattern of harassment that included everything from overfamiliar touching to suggestive comments; the most serious allegation was that he’d put his hand up a woman’s shirt and groped her breast.

Cuomo has flatly denied some of the allegations (including the groping charge); others, he’s tried to contextualise as the innocuous byproducts of his affectionate, gregarious nature. The governor argued that he’s always hugged and kissed people, men and women alike; he simply hadn’t realised how much he’d fallen out of step with the norms of a more enlightened age.

“There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate, and I should have,” he said, in a statement that utterly failed to win over his detractors but did launch a cottage industry of I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian T-shirts.

But even as it’s being treated like a bombshell, the 165-page report raises at least as many questions as it answers. Tablet‘s Michael Tracey has pointed out several oddities and inconsistencies, including the fact that some of Cuomo’s behaviour was found offensive by James but not, remarkably, by the women who were subjected to it — and that despite accusing him in a press conference of having violated federal law, James has not brought charges against the governor.

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By Kat Rosenfield

In this way, the Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment scandal contains echoes of an earlier, hastier takedown: in 2017, at the height of MeToo fervour, Democratic Senator Al Franken stepped down amid multiple allegations of harassment and intense pressure from his peers on the Left. His case followed a similar trajectory to Cuomo’s, beginning with an allegation from a former colleague-turned-political rival. In Franken’s case, conservative talk-radio personality Leeann Tweeden accused the senator of having forced her to repeatedly rehearse a kissing scene against her will during a USO tour in 2006; in Cuomo’s case, the controversy began with allegations from Lindsey Boylan, a former aide who was now running for office herself.

Boylan complained on Twitter about a toxic work environment at Cuomo’s office before upping the ante with a claim of sexual harassment, then famously refused to elaborate or cooperate with journalists who were attempting to report the story. But as with Franken, once the first allegation drew attention, others followed. And as with Franken, it wasn’t the details of any one incident but the sheer volume of women claiming to be harassed that made all the difference.

The most charitable reading of this #MeToo trajectory is that there’s safety, and courage, in numbers — that women are empowered to come forward with allegations once they realise they’re not alone. The cynical one is that #MeToo-ings have a certain glow — one that attracts not just true victims, but also attention-seekers and fabulists, like moths to the flame. Look at these brave and valiant women speaking truth to a powerful, abusive man; who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Anyone over the age of 40 will recognise Andrew Cuomo as the sort of old lecher whose behaviour is grossly inappropriate by the enlightened standards of the current year, but who was quite recently considered tolerable and toothless if not charming (and some people did find him charming, including those now pretending otherwise). He’s also not the first politician with a long history of displaying open affection for constituents and staff to get tripped up by evolving norms; after all, it was only last year that we were still trying to decide if Joe Biden’s handsiness was an encouraging sign of human warmth or something more sinister.

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For Biden, warmth won out. But Cuomo, for reasons of both identity and self-presentation, couldn’t project that same grandfatherly vibe. He was younger, rougher, and unmarried after a notoriously acrimonious split from his wife in the early 2000s. And far from being cautious about how these things might impact his image, he leaned into it: “I’ve always been a soft guy,” he joked with his brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, early on in the pandemic. “I am the love gov. I’m a cool dude in a loose mood.”

Of course, until about five minutes ago, people were eating this up — which explains why it took nearly nine months between those first allegations of misconduct and Cuomo’s unhappy ouster from office. It’s not that Andrew Cuomo was a good guy; it’s just that we desperately wanted him to be. New York was one of the first states to be hit hard by the pandemic, and before long, New York’s governor was being hailed as a Covid hero. Andrew Cuomo developed a reputation for taking the virus seriously (unlike those science-denying yokels in, say, Florida, who wouldn’t even wear masks at the beach), and for taking control of a population that refused to control itself. In hindsight, it was all a bit much.

“I love Governor Cuomo, his soothing Queens accent, his stories about his dad Mario (himself a three-time governor of New York) and his 88-year-old mother Matilda,” gushed Molly Jong-Fast at Vogue, while Jezebel’s Rebecca Fishbein swooned over his “measured bullying, his love of circumventing the federal government, his sparring with increasingly incompetent city leadership.” The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah declared himself a proud Cuomosexual. When a photo surfaced that suggested the presence of nipple piercings under Cuomo’s polo shirt, media Twitter lost its mind for three straight days.

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And as long as Andrew Cuomo said all the right things, nobody seemed to care much that he was doing all the wrong ones. This was the man who mandated that Covid-infected patients be admitted to nursing homes without testing, resulting in tens of thousands of fatalities, and then tried to cover up the scandal by undercounting the dead. In the early days of the pandemic, when tests were scarce, he diverted them away from essential workers and gave them to his friends, family, and administration VIPs. This was the man who got a $4 million book deal to write a pandemic memoir about his amazing leadership, then violated the ethics of his office by making state employees work on the manuscript.

And yet, throughout all this, he continued to play moral authority — and the media, including his brother Chris at CNN, colluded to reinforce the message. Without this MeToo moment to interrupt his stride, who knows how long New York’s naked emperor would’ve kept on strolling?

Cuomo has raged that the allegations against him are politically motivated. And in truth, yes, some of them probably are. Just as tax evasion was hardly Al Capone’s worst offence, the imperviousness to scandal of someone like Cuomo begets a prosecutorial, let’s-find-something-to-charge-him-with mentality, which in turn begets the weaponisation of sexual misconduct allegations against a man whose worst crimes are something else entirely.

And yes, this is a trend that threatens to weaken due process and cheapen the legitimate issue of workplace harassment.

But if the opportunistic tarring of Andrew Cuomo as a pervert is bad, so too is corruption, and conspiracy, and nepotism, and finger-wagging at the public over their Thanksgiving travel plans after your egotism and ineptitude just killed off fifteen thousand grandparents. And if the government and media would stop providing partisan cover for political werewolves, maybe desperate citizens wouldn’t feel the need to use MeToo as a silver bullet.

What ties the impeachment drama that began the year together with the pandemic, months of political violence and faulty predictions of a Biden blowout, is a system-wide failure of expert knowledge and elite institutional response. “Where were all the experts?” asked New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo in April, at the height of his state’s Covid outbreak. Cuomo blamed more or less every wing of the sprawling structure of elite expertise, pointing the finger for what happened on his watch at “the international health community… the WHO, the NIH, the CDC… the intelligence community… the New York Times… the Wall Street Journal”.

Sure, the governor’s complaint was self-serving given his own disastrous handling of the pandemic, but it wasn’t wrong. Weeks earlier, the Center for Disease Control, after months of declaring face masks ineffective and imploring the public not to wear them — a position echoed by the US Surgeon General, by Biden’s soon-to-be chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, and by most of the media — abruptly reversed course and endorsed face covering as vital to containing the spread of Covid.

Masks were the most visible representation of this: a year defined by politicised expert opinion detaching itself from reality and undergoing sudden reversals. Mass gatherings went from deadly superspreader events to being practically mandatory as a matter of public moral hygiene, with the rise of the BLM protests in May. Covering up such absurdities required the combined effort of ideological enforcers in the press and on social media, brute intimidation by people with hiring and firing power, and the constant appearance of a new crisis to distract from the last.

The compound effect was a cleavage in which half the country now rejects the legitimacy of America’s nominally non-political institutions. Tucker Carlson, whose relentless criticism of the ruling class has made him the top-rated cable news host in the country, summed up the sentiment in a recent segment on how the “experts have been exposed as frauds”. But this is not only a right-wing or populist phenomenon. From the liberal centre, Yascha Mounk wrote in late December about “losing trust in the institutions”.

The first important lesson from the past year is that this revolt against the experts is not a fringe phenomenon driven by QAnon loons, hysterical anti-vaxxers and other untouchables. It is widespread and its consequences are already profound. On the surface, people are simply rejecting the authority of institutions such as the CDC, which now openly advocates for racial preferences and places political calculations before the public good. But beneath that rejection, there is a cultural shift at the level of animating beliefs.

For millions of people, a disenchantment has broken the spell which upheld their faith in rational, scientific knowledge as the best means to tame the natural chaos of reality and administer the business of society. On top of all the other disenchantments undermining America’s founding myths, this one erodes the foundation on which the entire technocratic regime of modern society rests.

Given the rather obvious importance of public health officials in the midst of a pandemic, why not seek to replace them with a better class of expert, instead of attacking the basis of expertise? The answer to that is in the second lesson of 2020: far from losing status after the repeated errors and deceptions of the past year, America’s institutional elite is more powerful than ever.

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

Perhaps some reputational damage has been inflicted on the experts who warned that the real threat of the coronavirus was overreacting, or worse, racism, and on the elite activists who advanced a deeply unpopular police abolition agenda ahead of national elections, and on the scientific establishment that declared “white supremacy” to be “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19”.

But those costs are marginal compared to the material and political gains. If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.

The collective fortunes of the experts who failed Andrew Cuomo and the citizens of New York have run in parallel with those of the governor. Cuomo oversaw a fiercely politicised coronavirus response. He made costly mistakes, including his mandate that nursing homes accept discharged Covid-19 patients without testing to determine if they were still contagious, a policy that resulted in thousands of deaths (we don’t know exactly how many because he refuses to release the numbers). And yet, somehow in the midst of a death toll approaching 40,000 he found the time to write a book touting “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic” and do a victory tour.

He’s laundered his reputation in a way that can only be compared to the Russiagate diehards. The political actors and intelligence operatives claiming a Trump-Putin conspiracy who were exposed as, at best, delusional frauds have faced no consequences. Rather, they’ve been rewarded with campaign contributions, book deals, TV appearances, and other tokens of commercial and cultural prestige. The vast surveillance apparatus that engineered the domestic spying operation has been legitimised as a tool for correcting against unfortunate errors in democracy when the will of the people gets it wrong.

The future is looking bright for the DC foreign policy elite whose combined wisdom produced the Iraq War, abetted the catastrophe in Syria, scoffed at Trump’s efforts at a peace deal in the Middle East, and who now fight tooth and nail to keep US troops stranded in a lost war in Afghanistan.

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In the last week of December, that paragon of public expertise, Dr Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he admitted to lying to the American public. “Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” on the necessary threshold of vaccinations before America would achieve herd immunity, according to the Times. His reason for misleading the public? “His gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”

Sometimes, good leaders deceive the public in moments of crisis to achieve a greater good. But that is not the case here. If you are bragging to the media about it, it was not a noble lie. Fauci’s lie appears to have served no vital purpose related to public health — as if anyone opposed to vaccination would be moved by a 10-point spread in Fauci’s estimates. I don’t envy any leader charged with directing policy in the midst of a plague, but Fauci’s problem is not that he made errors but is so utterly unaware of that fact; that insulated by political celebrity and bureaucratic sinecure, he would choose to conspicuously gloat about his deceptions in the Times. On the same day, the interview appeared, the good doctor received a birthday serenade from Joe and Jill Biden.

The political elites of both parties are ending the year on top. The Democratic leadership defeated the populist threat from Bernie Sanders and now has one of its own, Joe Biden, leading the country. The Republican leadership has its own reasons to be happy about a Biden White House. The GOP got very comfortable adopting the symbolism of Trumpism while blocking White House policies like stimulus spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. With Trump out of office, Republicans can drop the balancing act and go back to satisfying the party’s donor base with cheap labour, austerity policies, foreign military adventures and the distraction of permanent culture war.

Underwriting the growing power of this interconnected media-administrative-political elite is the new American oligarchy led by Silicon Valley. The same tech industry that led a heavy-handed approach to the pandemic, censoring non-expert opinions while amplifying institutions like the World Health Authority, while the WHO at various points opposed wearing masks, criticised travel bans as ineffective, and disputed that the virus is highly contagious — all while lavishing praise on China. The US is down 10 million jobs since the start of the year. One hundred and sixty thousand small businesses have shuttered. Children are going without school and friendship, ordinary people are languishing in isolation and despair. But with government stimulus spending facilitating an immense upward transfer of wealth, the top tier of corporate profits has soared along with the stock market.

“The tactics that helped many corporate titans thrive — laying off thousands of workers, going deep into debt, and grabbing market share from struggling competitors — will shape the recovery for months, if not years,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December. In the past year, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple have added a total of $2 trillion in market value between them.

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The spillover from that record-setting cash grab will go directly to subsidising the failing elite institutions and expert bodies that are cutting off the oxygen to American society. But the crucial question is why elite institutions that are so error prone, and so untrustworthy, don’t suffer for their repeated failings.

The answer begins with understanding the nature of their power. In a society with a useful class of elites, their legitimating authority would be bound to the national interest and derive from the benefits they produce for the larger society. Likewise, in a functioning technocratic establishment the value of expertise would be a function of how accurately it can assess complex events, explain reality and forecast outcomes. But that is not what we have. For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals. The mantra of this cohort, “believe science,” says it all. It’s an incantation in a cheap magic act, one that has nothing to do with science.

If you still think science is above this kind of thing, too important to be compromised by ideology and self-interest, just look at the US military. The military has transformed into an institution in which the highest level of leadership is so estranged from its fundamental purpose — to win wars and secure peace at home — it responds to losing wars by absorbing the logic of defeat into its essential operations. The fact of America’s failure in Afghanistan becomes the reason to stay.

The iron law of the American elite is that as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards. Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures. This is why the loss in authority that manifests in the “crisis of experts”, while real, doesn’t diminish their power. But it’s also why the regime has to become more ideological and nakedly coercive — for a kingdom of experts without reliable expertise falls back on propaganda and state power.

“Live from the Court of the Mad King!” is how the former Bush speechwriter David Frum introduces his tweets on presidential press conferences. Others are less kind. The word ‘deranged’ is used frequently by opponents. Some Americans have moved beyond political distaste. They are simply frightened by what they are witnessing: Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair spoke for many after one recent presidential performance:

This is the first time I am genuinely scared. I must have been in denial before. But that presser changed everything.

— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) March 24, 2020

Indeed: the President, with what his own chief scientific advisors seem to regard as a reckless desire to keep the economy safe, appears willing to sign the death warrants of a large number of American citizens. This is not normal. This is — politically speaking and putting it very mildly — an opportunity for the opposition party.

Step forward, Joe Biden. Fill the space. Calm the nerves. Unite those Americans who still accept science: unite them around some basic facts. Do it fast. Do it daily. Build something of substance.

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That is the challenge. As I say, a low bar to be cleared, by a man or woman of any age.

But he cannot do it. And the nation increasingly has two worries: two lacunae where previously a Reagan, an FDR, even an LBJ would have trod. Hell, Jimmy Carter could have given it a shot. Now, though, a President apparently trying to fight a virus with words faces an opponent who is struggling with an autocue.

Yes, seriously. There is a good deal of nonsense talked about Joe Biden by the more extreme elements of the Republican party. For instance: did he forget the name of Barack Obama when he mentioned him — or tried to — in a recent speech? In fact, Mr Biden has a stammer and seemed to be finding a way of getting round a phrase he was going to find difficult. It was an uncomfortable moment but well short of dementia and, for plenty of Americans, well short of the daily performance of the man actually in the Oval Office.

Fair enough.

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But nothing can hide the fact that Joe Biden is struggling and struggling badly. First, he went missing. He did not appear at an hour of need. The famous and hugely repeated Sunday morning political shows would all have had him on at the beginning of the week but he appeared nowhere. #whereisjoe started trending on Twitter. So he announced an address to the nation. “Biden seeks to offer a possible presidency preview,” is how ABC News, ever hopeful, trailed the 15 minute address streamed from his home in Delaware.

It was painful to watch. They had assembled a lectern with a BIDEN sign, as if he were on the campaign trail in Boise. It was ill-lit. At one point he said:

“And uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that we, uh, are in a position, that we are, we. Let me go to the second thing.”

As he was saying those words he was motioning with a hand — flapping it, apparently to suggest that the teleprompter had broken. It was amateurish. It was, given the ease of the task, jaw dropping that the former Vice President and his team could not have managed better.

But even when he’s responding to questions, Mr Biden often seems at sea. A round of patsy interviews with friendly interviewers yielded little in the way of firmer grip. At one stage in a CNN spot, Mr Biden coughed into his hand. The interviewer had to remind him that was no longer done.

As they say in top level sport: get the basics right.

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What on earth are the Democrats going to do?

First: not panic.

The reasoning here: it is genuinely difficult for the Biden team to break through because their man holds no elected office and thus no obvious platform — and he cannot hold mass rallies because of the risk from the coronavirus, hence the basement teleprompter. He is not even the nominee: Bernie Sanders is still in the race, though he cannot win.

Also: yes, there was a poll suggesting that 60% of Americans backed Mr Trump’s handling of the crisis and yes, that does seem quite a thing. But as the veteran pollster Stan Greenberg pointed out, the “fatalistic chatter” in the wake of the poll was well wide off the mark. In fact, in swing states that Biden must win in November, he is well ahead. He is on course to install his wonky teleprompter in the White House.

Second, though: panic.

The crisis has exposed, for many Democrats, the horrible deficiencies of the contest they have just held. Mr Biden is no Obama. His only genuinely enthusiastic supporters tend to be black voters in the south, many of whom like him because he took instructions — gladly and faithfully — from a black man. But is that enough?

He says he will appoint a woman as his vice presidential pick. But why? Possession of a vagina might have seemed vital in the far-off days when identity politics were a thing and coronavirus mentioned at the end of the news. But now? How about possession of a medical qualification? Or a proven ability to run something. There are women who fit the bill of course, but they made no headway during the campaign. This person needs to be ready to run the country: how odd for a centrist to limit the choice to make a woke point that no longer needs making.

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And Mr Biden himself? He has never in his life run anything. Not a town. Not a state. Not even a collapsing and obscurely leveraged casino chain. And here some panicky Democrats are shifting their gaze to the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has become the anti-Trump star of the coronavirus outbreak with a constant daily outpouring of executive decisions and an equally high-profile string of barbs aimed at the White House.

Some Democrats are swooning. Could Mr Cuomo not be drafted in at the last minute? “America’s Governor” in the same way Rudy Giuliani became (briefly) “America’s mayor.” His father Mario was the great hope who never actually ran for president. Might history come calling on the Cuomos?

I doubt it. The practicalities are too tricky. But the very fact that the question is being asked is a measure of how uncharted these waters really are.

There is another worry for the Democrats’ panicky brigade. What if the President is just a little bit right? Right enough to harvest a political boost just as the autumn comes?

Frankly it does not seem likely. But this is a president entirely comfortable with spending borrowed money. This is a president entirely at ease with unorthodoxy. A healthcare election might force Trump (finally) to come up with the healthcare reforms he promised before 2016.

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And before that? Well, this is a president who in some respects is voicing the worries of millions of Americans for whom the crisis seems still distant.

America is a huge nation. But also — because of its size — a small one. Many Americans live isolated lives, particularly Republicans who inhabit the great rural expanses rather than the big cities. A catastrophe in New York is an event on the news, little more. Put crudely: this pandemic is affecting urban Democrats more than rural Republicans.

America is also — sad to say — a nation in which reported facts are distrusted to an unnerving extent, with consequences that are not always predictable. An example from my life: a good friend was coming to London from San Francisco recently and asked if we might meet.

“Coronavirus?,” I emailed. “Are you really coming?”

His response: “we can have a good discussion about Media Induced Hysteria.”

Here is the point: he is a Democrat. A Left-wing Democrat. And one of the cleverest people I know. I assume he saw the coronavirus reporting on the media he watches and reads, but did not believe it because he knows that the reporters (like him) cannot stand Trump. The media landscape in the US today is Putin-like: flooded with nonsense nobody believes to the extent that even reliable reports are discounted. There is no impartiality. No truth.

Into this world, a strong communicator with a steely focus on healthcare and a bag full of ideas could make quite a splash. Is Joe Biden that person? It may not matter. A disaster might be about to engulf America.

But if disaster is averted, the Democrats could be left with a broken teleprompter in a Delaware basement as the metaphor for this presidential campaign, and the world will be open-mouthed at the mess they have made of finding a treatment for Donald Trump.