What Are Zohran Mamdani's Flaws?

Have at it.

https://mamdanitimes.com/

Hasn't become mayor yet.

He gives off a short-guy vibe. But plenty of mayors are short. I think he'll be a good mayor of NYC, and everyone who hates him (thus far) is a gaping asshole. That can't be a coincidence.

sharp knees

Let's save this for when he becomes and Mayor and calls in the cops anyway...

I can’t wait for the titch-off when he meets Sadiq Khan.

NYC mayor's effectiveness, for better or worse, is reversely proportional to their height, so maybe that's for the best.

convinced his mom to not direct a harry potter film, potentially costing her life-changing money.

then again, he was probably playing 4d chess and already thinking about fending off nepo baby allegations

He's never once appeared nude.

November seems like a long ways off, but that isn’t his fault.

OR IS IT

😂

not my husband

Let's save this for when he becomes and Mayor and calls in the cops anyway...

This is the real answer — Mamdani's biggest flaw is that he's running for mayor of a gigantic city, and that job comes with built-in constraints. He will absolutely still use the police for a lot of things, even if he manages to create his Department of Community Safety and disband the protest-response squad (both of which he's promised). A lot of people want the cops to come when they call. You can argue that they shouldn't want that, but a lot of them do.

Also of course NYPD will try to make his life miserable. That's not a flaw, but it's a reality.

Textbook example being the full-fledged riot led by Rudy Giuliani against Dinkins.

Gives off a bit of a Lin Manuel Miranda vibe

too handsome.

max read had a quote in one of his recent newsletters about the police issue from a Matthew Guariglia:

THERE ARE A FEW LESSONS that Mamdani can learn from how the NYPD stymied de Blasio. People on the right are going to blast him for being soft on crime no matter what he does. But Mamdani has the ability to flip the script on them. Advocates of the status quo, unwilling to try innovative methods of community safety and crime prevention, are the ones who permit the persistence of crime. After all, the failed ways of “fighting crime” are about putting people in jail after committing crimes. A new public-safety paradigm centers on preventing it in the first place.
Mamdani can also emphasize officer well-being and workloads by creating agencies willing to take some of the “burden” away by taking on tasks armed police should not be doing in the first place. He can be proactive about copaganda: police will be eager to link crime to a progressive mayor even if they have to manufacture a “crime wave” to do it. The future mayor’s office should be constantly vocal about how low crime is, what the city is doing to make people feel safe and prevent crime, and should not be afraid to say when police are engaged in creating a politically-motivated narrative of fear.
Another lesson is for New Yorkers, not Mamdani. That's to refuse to panic.

I think making it a value proposition for the police is canny, but it's an uphill battle and this analysis is mostly right. It's not that left-wing policies are causing supposed crime waves, it's selective policing done in the purpose of discrediting a mayor that the police union views as their adversary. Maybe getting ahead of that helps, maybe it backfires and the PD demands you kiss the ring and continue giving them unlimited overtime pay. This problem isn't specific to large cities, and I feel like that levy has to break at some point.

if you just execute one cop in front of the rest of them theyll fall in line

They are scavenging his twitter and its truth nukes day and night back in the day.

The West is defined by its most powerful while the rest by our most vulnerable. This shit pisses me off.

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 16, 2014

that's my guy

I want to marry him

will this doom his chances

https://t.co/SWOuKnn88O pic.twitter.com/ad7zvamviE

— Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) July 8, 2025

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kypbxp7rhw7q2dfa4fr7f6i6/bafkreihscsqidkzsbrmzrlx3qpdg5ck2rqmcwyhe42ptxml4phzulzhvky@jpeg

tough out there

So weird!

So basically the problem is that they're are too many rock solid, logical reasons why people should vote for him and not one of the brazenly corrupt assholes that are running against him.

*there are

https://archive.ph/sYAOl

New Data for Progress poll:

Mamdani 40
Cuomo 24
Adams 15
Sliwa 14

https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2025/7/dfp_nyc_mayoral_ge_traditional_crosstabs.pdf

Sickos.jpg

Even Trump’s team was smart enough to realize he had to co-opt RFK jr. in order not to split his vote.

not excited to see how low the Democratic Party is willing to go to sideline Mamdani

incredible opportunity to tee off on the very unpopular dem establishment send this nasty old man to hell

Cuomo said he would make affordability a cornerstone of his general-election campaign but would run on the notion that he will actually be able to make the city more affordable while Mamdani will only talk about it. “It’s about not just connecting with the perception of the problem. It’s finding the real solution and then having the ability to do it. You don’t want someone who just connects. That’s step one. What you really want is the problem-solver, and I can actually do that.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/nyc-mayor-race-andrew-cuomo-on-rematch-with-zohran-mamdani.html

No means no, amirite

A "No Means No, Andrew" campaign is a good thought. Instead of engaging with him directly, just brand him as a loser who also happens to be a sex pest.

The ads the Cuomo campaign used to recruit the actors used in the ad are already showing up on social media.

The Democratic Party always reminds me of Brecht’s joke after some East German apparatchik said the government had lost confidence in the people: “we should dissolve the people and elect another, then.”

When I was in Chicago, I tried to do a news story on Scott Waguespack for my school. This would've been my first time writing a political news story and he was running against Theodore Matlak, a complete waste of space hand-picked by Mayor Daley for the 32nd ward. These were both white males, but nonetheless the dynamic had strong similarities to Mamdani vs. Cuomo. A faculty member helping me out showed me how to look up campaign finances, and he immediately said "oh man, this poor guy's going to get creamed" when the data came up because Matlak had an enormous amount of money compared to Waguespack. Matlak was supposed to have a safe seat but this was a year when a lot of people had enough - Waguespack was clearly the grass roots upstart, so Daley's machine quickly put together the kind of campaign you're seeing with Cuomo, albeit circa 2007 (i.e. before technology re-shaped the tactics). I could go more into details but it was a sobering, thorough lesson in how unrepentantly corrupt local politics can be, in the way they operated and the way they campaigned. It wasn't even that sophisticated, so much of it was stupidly and blatantly dishonest, and the attitude was sort of "yeah, it's obvious, but it works." Anyway, I eventually went to Matlak's office, which had some of the nicest and sweetest people working there, all in their early 20's (visually not unlike Obama's campaign which was defined by youthful optimism) and I was naive to think "man, these people may actually believe in this guy and I'm actually working on a story about his blatant dishonesty." The "interview" turned out to be shit - after making cordial, pleasant conversation with the campaign manager, as soon as I started recording, she turned into a fucking robot and would only repeat pre-scripted lines trying to push the same false information they put out in a press release (that Waguespack was under investigation) and completely ignoring any question I asked. When I left, a campaign worked offered to give me a ride, and during our chat, it turned out everyone in that office was hired virtually overnight to work in that office - none of them had any personal connection to Matlak, they were all hired from a firm that just does these things. It was a stark contrast to people I spoke to campaigning for Waguespack who were clearly neighborhood locals who would be directly impacted by the election. The guy who told me this was just really green about what he was doing - he was still figuring out what to do after college and took this job with the firm to make some money in the interim. (FWIW, the investigation scam worked like this: Matlak had strong ties to someone on Berwyn's city council, and Waguepsack had been the city administrator and chief of staff to Berwyn. To open an investigation, or really initiate a process to determine whether an investigation was needed, the council just needs one person to put that motion forward, not vote or explanation needed - you can guess who put that motion forward. When I asked him for more details, he went into ridiculous circles, and I just flat out said, "tbh, it doesn't sound like there's anything going on here" to which he replied with a straight face "that's why we need an investigation!")

The happy ending I didn't expect: Waguespack won, by a measly 121 votes, a reflection of how bad things were for Daley that year, relatively speaking. Waguespack's still there today and still the guy you expect him to be - he was actually one of the very few people who vote against that shitty parking deal that was Daley's parting shot to the city.

*no vote or explanation needed

Should add one important detail: I never got the story published because I couldn't get an interview with Waguespack's campaign, even though the story was clearly in their favor. I'm guessing it was because they had a small operation that was stretched very thin (again, they had very little money compared to Matlak's campaign) and granting an interview with a school newspaper wasn't considered a good use of their time, but it was frustrating as hell. They kept referring to a statement they already put out a week prior, thinking that was enough - I think I got only 2, maybe 3 emails from them and they amounted to one sentence each - but I kept explaining it wasn't.

Reminds me of the infamous phrase "We don't want nobody nobody sent".

incredible opportunity to tee off on the very unpopular dem establishment send this nasty old man to hell

Cuomo said he would make affordability a cornerstone of his general-election campaign but would run on the notion that he will actually be able to make the city more affordable while Mamdani will only talk about it. “It’s about not just connecting with the perception of the problem. It’s finding the real solution and then having the ability to do it. You don’t want someone who just connects. That’s step one. What you really want is the problem-solver, and I can actually do that.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/nyc-mayor-race-andrew-cuomo-on-rematch-with-zohran-mamdani.html🕸

realized i omitted the punchline

So what would he do on housing affordability? “There is no real answer,” he said.

A Reformer with Results

....bad ones!

our lad is on it have no fear

https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3ltz2bot2pc2u

My brother's union endorsed him today.

If you have IG, you can see him in this story with the hat and orange glasses.

https://www.instagram.com/stories/dc37nyc/3677482450139167667

https://i.imgur.com/DyxcBqQ.png

By the time I saw that, the parenthetical had been changed to "if You Want a Foil for Republicans." And I was like, "sure, sounds good!" Had to read the article to see that Stephens thought it was a bad thing.

if you wanna help Republicans
gotta hang with Zohran
make it last forever
friendship never ends

Yeah I think it’s well accepted that cats are less domesticated than dogs, because they have made far fewer physical and behavioral modifications than dogs have. That said, indoor-only cats are forced into a lot of non-wild behaviors. (One reason I’m strongly on the let-them-out side, while recognizing that they obviously have some ecosystem impacts and that e.g. urban apartment living doesn’t lend itself to that.)

Didn't the Russians at one point try to domesticate foxes?

Succeeded!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

Bcz foxes aren't pack animals they end up less socially locked in to humans than dogs iirc. Like cat-dogs.

This thread has entered Clusterfuck hall of fame status.

Also the Thread Drift Hall of Fame.

^ username

btw i just read that entire wikipedia page and am happier for it though i now have a long list of questions i want answered

foxes as cat os in dog hardware seems close

No, that’s whippets (and most other sighthounds). Evidence: mine catches mice.

Neighbours have a Shiba Inu who I finally met tonight, because Widget and this girl HATE one another for no good reason we’ve been keeping distance if we meet with our respective dogs. We discussed the Shiba being so much like a fox, they must have fox DNA.

foxes even have vertical cat pupils. only canines as have em.

https://postimg.cc/MfDVTX8t/e8c1483d

This guy was king of the cemetery at a funeral I went to a few weeks ago. What’s the second thing you notice about him?

watched a movie called “left handed girl” last night and the family had a pet meerkat. all sorts of reasons why that might be a bad idea, one of which comes to pass in the film, but they seem like fun little guys

the Russian fox experiment is so cool, so much to learn from. the change to spots as a response to domestication!

I feel like we need to get Mamdani's thoughts on foxes now

https://postimg.cc/MfDVTX8t/e8c1483d🕸

This guy was king of the cemetery at a funeral I went to a few weeks ago. What’s the second thing you notice about him?

that’s a fat fox?

Urban raccoons are self domesticating by getting cuter and friendlier. Anyway usually hate policing threads but this is one time I’d like to suggest taking it to a dog park.

yeah this thread has been off-leash for a bit too long

When people are eventually really mad at Mamdani we will long for the innocence of this diversion.

Yeah I feel like this thread is gonna shit on the rug pretty soon

I feel like this thread is gonna maul the toddler pretty soon

this thread is gonna get wacked on the nose with the newspaper and show me respect

This thread is going to die on the way back to its home planet

We told you when we got you this thread that it would be your responsibility

I used to work this Marsden psycho of the moors guy who was known as Dangerous Dave. He was a dry-stone waller/generalist builder by trade but also had lots of guns and in his own words "he liked to go out at night and kill things". He kept a photographic record of everything he shot and he told me he'd a get a payment from the National Trust for every confirmed fox he killed on their turf.

He showed me pic of an unbelievably gigantic fox he had shot. For scale he had draped the creature's corpse over the bonnet of his land rover and it was indeed unbelievably fucking huge, it was gigantic even by Alsatian proportions. He also went deer hunting in Scotland and showed me his *hilarious* Christmas meme with him a pic of him psychotically grinning holding a severed Deer's head with a caption about how Santa might be running later than usual tonight. #onethread

Nice.

A few days after Zohran announced the Rental Ripoff hearings, they repainted my whole building lmfao

— Cait🧃 (@caitcamelia) January 16, 2026

But will he condemn/praise Hamas?

This thread has veered strangely offtopic now.

watched a movie called “left handed girl” last night and the family had a pet meerkat. all sorts of reasons why that might be a bad idea, one of which comes to pass in the film, but they seem like fun little guys

― comrade jhøsh (k3vin k.), Monday, 19 January 2026

Siberian foxes and some raccoons being the exception, it’s generally just not a good idea to keep wild animals as domestic pets. We have animals that are domesticated and most wild animals just aren’t suited to that lifestyle.

The raccoons I’ve encountered were anything but cute and friendly. They were massive, aggressive and traveling in a large pack (or whatever the raccoon-appropriate term is). This was right outside my apartment building near Lake Merritt in Oakland.

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills but I find that dubious.

They were massive, aggressive and traveling in a large pack

Ban raccoons!

They found and shot a mountain lion in the middle of the city here back in 2008. It had reportedly wandered all the way down from South Dakota, 800 miles away.

https://barnraisingmedia.com/mapping-a-mountain-lions-ghost-midwest/

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills but I find that dubious.

There are mountain lions all over California. Didn't you watch 24?

Mamdani called for the abolition of ICE on The View this morning. He got applause.

Mamdani called for the abolition of ICE on The View this morning. He got applause.

just saw this!! love it

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mcumsgqw5k2a

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills but I find that dubious.

A couple years ago, a young male lion was killed on the Hwy 13 off ramp right near the Mormon Temple

But yes, this thread has gone off the rails

(^^^^ I see your point, I'm not sure she saw any mountain lions, as they're notoriously elusive.. but that doesn't mean they're not there)

Mamdani otm

TS: mountain lion vs pit bull

POX Urban Predators

Claws Vs. Flaws: How Mamdani is once again failing New York's raccoons

POX Urban Predators

We have grizzly bears where I live. A camper got eaten within the last three years, while I've been living here.

1. ICE
2. Grizzlies

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills but I find that dubious.

I saw a mountain lion in the Marin Headlands just across the GG Bridge from SF when I was biking on trails there with a friend some years ago. And another friend saw one out his bedroom window waking up one morning in the Sonoma hills. They are present in the Bay Area

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills but I find that dubious.

Best line from Talking Heads' Fear of Music.

https://kgnu.org/a-cpw-spokesperson-and-an-animal-rights-activist-weigh-in-on-recent-fatal-mountain-lion-attack/

new yrs day person killing near boulder by puma

What Are Zohran Mamdani's Claws?

I met a woman who claimed she saw mountain lions in the Oakland hills, and her hair was perfect.

thinking back on the controversy over zohran stopping chi osse from challenging hakeem jefferies, and how given the current battle in congress over ICE, its funding etc that the idea of primarying jefferies, overthrowing the dem leadership and all that feels as pertinent as ever. on the other hand, because chi clearly does not see zohran as an ally anymore and probably personally dislikes him, he has emerged as the most public thorn in his side from the local government's left. it hasn't yet bubbled up in a big way but last week chi was on social media calling out zohran's office for its response to the snowstorm (there has been an unfixed power outage in chi's district that has left people incl seniors w/o heat). chi later publicly followed up to say that the mayor's office was helpful to his request, but, w/o checking on all of our local politicians, i'd have to imagine he was the elected official on the left being the loudest about the fact that the city government's handling of the snowstorm has been pretty poor (prob not that directly attributable to zohran's administration given the timing of everything, nonetheless he is running the city)

originally when this topic came up i made the point that as a resident of the city and of chi's district i was more excited by the idea of what chi and zohran could achieve together than i was by chi challenging jefferies; i think it seems clear now that chi and zohran probably won't be working together all that much. however it means that chi may actually be in an even more crucial position, which is being a local elected official with a visible social media platform and, through the help of zohran himself, real credibility among zohran's constituency, who seems intent, whether it's bcuz of personal animus or otherwise, on holding zohran accountable from the DSA wing of the city

another unrelated zohran thought i've been having recently is that new york, despite being held up by the GOP broadly as the dirty dangerous liberal hell hole of america, has so far been spared the worst of ICE's brutality. there is evil stuff happening here -- people being disappeared from routine immigration hearings -- and we have had some public altercations between politicians and ICE (incl zohran) etc so i don't want to minimize that reality. however i have found it hard to ignore that we -- so far! -- have not experienced what was rolled out in LA, chicago, and now obviously minneapolis, which is ICE militias patrolling the streets and openly snatching, terrorizing, beating, shooting etc people. i don't exactly know why this is -- perhaps it's trump's own affinity for new york, though he tried to get into a big battle over congestion pricing recently, or maybe it's the fact that schumer and jefferies are from here, and the trump administration feels like they can continue to get those two to bend the knee so long as they don't bring ICE into NYC in that way. maybe they're just scared of the press attention that ICE beating people up in manhattan would receive. but i also do wonder about zohran's own relationship w/ trump, the fact that trump still praises him in the press, and how that all is factoring into this -- i personally think that zohran wants to be close to trump mostly because he is ambitious and likes attention, but there is also a possibility that a side effect of all that is that zohran is helping keep the worst of trump's thuggery at bay, which in this case is sort of a life and death scenario for a lot of people here. if i was going to read all this generously in zohran's favor, anyway, that's how i might look at it. i guess we'll see how it all plays out in the end

A lot of parallels to SF. A lot of wealthy people here would see the violence and potentially be vulnerable to backlash, both personally and through their businesses. Both have mayors who said nice things to Agent Orange, and it wouldn't surprise me if some other wealthy NYers said some things too, similarly to how Hwang and Benioff politely said "please don't".

It was my experience prior to the mayoral primaries & elex that commentators (news personalities like Christina Grier & the folks at FAQ NYC and others) were very concerned about whether it would smart for NYC to elect a mayor that would likely be at odds with Trump and bring down extra penalties on NYC either through loss of resources or more directly violent means, or would a progressive mayor who was already in Trump's sights as an opponent just be a liability. I think a lot of people might feel that it's Zohran's JOB to be on Trump's good side as much as possible in various ethical/legal contexts.

gotta remember the only actual smile dipshit has had in the last 15 years is when he was standing next to ZM in the WH (because dipshit loves being around Celebrity) and that ZM apparently texts dipshit often, and who doesn't like to be texted by famous people

There are multiple incentives for Mamdani to play nice where he can, both in terms of protecting the city and advancing his own prospects. It's hard to believe that won't be tested — maybe Trump will go to war with him over a wealth tax, e.g. Or maybe more directly with an ICE invasion, although it seems like a lot of Trump's New York friends might not want marauding agents rounding up their nannies or setting off tear gas downtown.

https://futurism.com/future-society/mamdani-nyc-delivery-apps

By contrast our PM has run over a delivery driver #ukpol