“New Yorkers didn’t know who Mamdani was just a few months ago.” We spoke with Eric Lach, who spent yesterday morning with the presumed winner of the mayoral primary, about the election results. Plus:
Erin Neil
Newsletter editor
Just hours after polls closed for New York City’s primary mayoral election, following a day of record-breaking heat, the former governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he had conceded the race to Zohran Mamdani, the previously unknown thirty-three-year-old Democratic Socialist from Queens. “Tonight is his night,” Cuomo said. “He deserved it. He won.” It was a stunning upset in a race that, until election day, seemed to be an easy victory for Cuomo. When the current third-place candidate, Brad Lander, learned that Cuomo was unlikely to prevail, he turned to the crowd at his own election party and said, “Good fucking riddance.” Curious to understand why this race unfolded in such a spectacular way, I called Eric Lach, who writes about New York City politics and has been covering the election for the past few months. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
In your piece today, you admit that you were a “guilty party,” who underestimated Mamdani’s campaign. But you certainly weren’t alone, and, even until polls closed, it seemed like this was Cuomo’s race to lose. What happened?
I think that’s something that’s gonna be worth talking about, beyond just the morning-after takes. The surprise is about the defiance of all these demonstrations of power that Cuomo had—endorsements, fund-raising, and even the polls—combined with the fact that New Yorkers didn’t know who Mamdani was just a few months ago. The idea that voters would get on board with this young, unproven guy pitching a different kind of message is just remarkable. His supporters might suggest that it’s merely a blinkered kind of slowness among people following the race—that they’re just catching up to what was happening.There’s something in that. But, as Mamdani said last night, quoting Nelson Mandela, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Without the results of the vote, it was hard to believe “Yeah, this was gonna be the guy.”
Do you anticipate Mamdani’s upset to change the way the general election unfolds? Will the other mayoral hopefuls campaign differently now?
In the weeks leading up to primary day, it had become apparent that the fall might bring us the first competitive mayoral general election in New York City in a couple of decades. And I still think that that’s possible, given that the current mayor, Eric Adams, intends to run and that Andrew Cuomo, despite losing to Mamdani last night, says he’s thinking about running as an independent. Five months is a long time in politics, and there are still many forces in the city and many powerful stakeholders and political actors who are going to be anywhere from skeptical to downright hostile to Mamdani’s candidacy. We have yet to see how those people arrange themselves in response here.
You and our colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells both reflect, in pieces published today, on the powerful and wealthy people who may have feared Mamdani’s campaign. What does this moment mean for national politics? And for those powerful people invested in certain results?
I’d encourage all readers of this newsletter to read Ben’s piece on this very question. As I say in my piece, before last night it was starting to look to a lot of people like lefty politics in the city had only receded from a high-water mark achieved during the first Trump Administration. Now everybody’s busy revising those conclusions. Possibly there’s another level.
Mamdani is now in a position of great potential, elected not just to office but to high executive office, and how that intersects with the broader left and the broader movements in the Democratic Party nationally is potentially powerful.
Have you seen or heard any reactions to this result that have surprised you?
I mean, surprised isn’t how I would put it, but there has been an online response from prominent conservatives who are trying to make Mamdani into a caricature, projecting all of their discomfort with the fact that he’s Muslim. The level of fearmongering and hysterical attacks on him during the primary was one thing, but now, I imagine, the Islamophobia might ratchet up for the general election.
For more: Read Lach on what exactly Mamdani’s campaign got right.
How Bad Is It?
Generating a hundred words of text using A.I. requires a whole bottle of water. Or at least, that’s the gist of a spate of recent headlines about the hidden environmental impact of this technology. We talked to Kyle Chayka, who writes a weekly column about the people and platforms that are shaping digital culture (today’s installment is about the “cognitive costs” of L.L.M. tools).
How bad is it, really? Should we feel guilty about using ChatGPT?
Chayka: That bottle of water is not abstract. The huge data centers that power A.I. tools literally use water to stay cool and continue functioning. And, as A.I. use becomes more widespread, it becomes a bigger drain on resources. We basically invented a vast new industry that requires water, electricity, and silicon. But the same was true of electric lights, cars, and smartphones. Not long ago, the environmentally conscious pointed fingers at cryptocurrency; now that A.I. is buzzier, it’s taking the blame for sucking up resources.
A.I. could be made less damaging, in theory. Some data-center projects run on geothermal energy, for example, and it would be better if we all used “sustainable A.I.” Yet the scale of new development seems likely to outpace any pivot to sustainability. (OpenAI’s Sam Altman is trying to raise trillions of dollars to build chip factories and data centers.) Ultimately, much like the problem of actual water bottles, your individual choice is going to make a vanishingly small impact when compared to vast governmental and corporate policies. The more immediate damage wrought by A.I. is copyright violation and the wanton theft of content from artists, authors, and publishers. That might weigh more heavily on your mind when you’re generating a slide illustration or bedtime story.
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P.S. The world’s best restaurant has been announced: Maido, in Lima, Peru. If you need even more incentive to visit, check out these images by the photographer Victor Zea, who captured the country’s striking light. ☀️
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.
