New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is on the edge of being competitive in the Democratic Mayoral Primary. He trails former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign in 2021 for being unable to keep his hands off of women, not his wife, and harassing others.
His 10-point margin over Mamdani is substantial but not insurmountable, given New York City's strong interest in ranked-choice voting. If enough people choose Mamdani as a second choice, he may win.
This would be catastrophic for the city of New York. Several prominent businessmen told The Free Press that they plan to exit the city with their businesses if Mamdani wins.
Mamdani is running on the fusion ticket of the Democratic and Democratic Socialists of America. The Muslim lawmaker has been endorsed by all the best Democratic Socialists, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Billionaire John Catsimatidis, the head of a Manhattan-based grocery chain, said he'd seriously consider moving out if the Democratic Socialist wins.
“We may consider closing our supermarkets and selling the business,” the 76-year-old entrepreneur told The Free Press. “We have other businesses. Thank God, we have other businesses.”
Catsimatidis, president of the Red Apple Group conglomerate, could move the whole kit and kaboodle across the river.
“There’s the possibility we’d move our corporate offices to New Jersey. Why not?” he said. “Then you’d have four years of peace.”
Catsimatidis is not alone. Several prominent, rich business owners are weighing their options if the Democratic Socialist wins the mayor's office.
Their fear isn’t just higher taxes or stricter regulations—it’s that a democratic socialist with a history of railing against Wall Street could bring an adversarial ethos into City Hall, targeting the very class that powers the city’s economy.
Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, predicted that if Mamdani enters Gracie Mansion the exodus that began during Covid would spike again.
“This would absolutely be a tipping point for a lot of companies and individuals,” he said, adding that most of his peers would flee to the same place: Florida, where he said the wealthy are “welcomed as opposed to viewed as the enemy.”
The Atlantic's Michael Powell writes that "Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts." And yes, disconnected from reality.
Indeed, talk about giveaways! Freeze rents. Free buses. Free daycare for all New Yorkers aged six weeks to five years.
How does this "miracle" come about? Tax the rich. Tax the corporations. And then pray not many of them decide to leave town while they still have a shirt on their backs.
“We need more democratic socialists who can do what Mamdani can do,” writes author Bhaskar Sunkara in the radical left publication In These Times. “Communicate complex ideas clearly, relate to ordinary people without pandering, and present a vision that feels achievable rather than utopian.”
"Free, free, free" feels achievable? Maybe on Sunkara's planet, but not on the good Earth.
“Zohran and his advisers don’t know history and don’t have the slightest grasp of the numbers,” a former top city housing official told Powell. Socialists don't care about numbers, as we all know. Numbers are inconvenient little critters that get in the way of spending other people's money.
Meanwhile, Mamdani’s proposal to freeze rent in rent-stabilized units ignores fundamental problems: Landlords of much of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock—including a number of respected nonprofit groups—cannot afford maintenance costs and debt service, the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission wrote recently. Because expenses are growing faster than rents in older buildings, many are “teetering on the edge of a ‘death spiral.’”
"Teetering on the edge of a death spiral" sounds an awful lot like what's happening in another blue city.
“We’re one election away from becoming San Francisco," said Neil Blumenthal, the co-founder and co-chief executive of Warby Parker eyeglass company.
Former left-wing Governor David Paterson had perhaps the most telling observation about Mamdani. “You understand exactly what he’s saying,” Paterson told Politico last month. “The problem is: Nobody told him there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”
When a former leftist governor says you're a kook, lie down.
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