Will Democrats Find Their Way?

Tomorrow, voters decide their political fates: In New York City, voters will choose between democratic socialist up-and-comer Zohran Mamdani, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and Democrat—but technically independent, because he lost the primary to Mamdani—Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor amid scandals in 2021. Mamdani is expected to win, and then fresh hell will be unleashed.

In New Jersey, U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, has a slight lead in the race for governor. She is a mother, former naval officer, and former federal prosecutor, and she has promised to declare a Day 1 emergency to address rising utility costs in the state (which has become a rather important issue in that race). Her Republican opponent is Jack Ciattarelli. Jersey tends to do a lot of political party flip-flopping based off of who is in the White House; if Sherrill wins, “it would be the first time the state’s voters have elected governors from the same party for three consecutive terms since the 1960s,” reports The New York Times. To put the race in simplest possible terms: Both candidates have been rather focused on cost of living issues, and Ciattarelli has been trying to build off national Republicans’ recent successes with black and Latino voters. It will be interesting to see who wins out.

Then down in Virginia, you have a showdown between Democrat Abigail Spanberger, former member of Congress and CIA operations officer, and Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears; Spanberger holds a pretty consistent and sizable lead over Earle-Sears. Virginia’s House of Delegates is also up for reelection this year, so it’s possible that Democrats will win control of that and the governor’s mansion—especially wild given the scandal plaguing the Virginia Democrats’ candidate for attorney general race, who fantasized via text message about killing a former political rival and his kids.

Supreme Court retention elections in Pennsylvania—a major swing state—may end up actually mattering a fair bit: “In recent years, the court has played a significant role in national politics because it hears cases involving challenges to election law as well as partisan redistricting,” notes The New York Times. “In 2018, all three Democratic justices up for retention voted to knock down the state’s congressional map as an unconstitutional gerrymander. In 2020, the Democratic justices ruled that ballot dropboxes were permitted in the state. And in 2022, the justices upheld the state’s mail-in voting law.”

“These three liberal justices have spent years advancing the left’s agenda from the bench, and their defeat would spur a seismic momentum shift in Pennsylvania that would create an opening for more conservative policy victories in the state,” a Republican State Leadership Committee official told the Times, making clear why such money has poured into this race (as with Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race earlier this year).

It’s possible that Sherrill and Spanberger—much more moderate Democrats who really aren’t culture-war candidates at all—will prevail, that Mamdani will as well, and that Democrats will try to construct a narrative that ties together these different threads: that running on cost-of-living issues, not culture war, is the path to success. This would be a good takeaway for them, and it probably holds true for the New Jersey and Virginia races, but—as I wrote Friday—I’d caution against that interpretation of a Mamdani victory.

Scenes from New York: “Crime in New York is very low actually” discourse feels very naive and incomplete. Consider the many degrading experiences that don’t quite rise to the level of “crime that the police arrest for” to which New Yorkers must grow accustomed. Consider the amount of crime that goes unreported because we know it won’t be solved, or the crimes that are reported where nothing happens to punish the offender. Consider the fact that your experience of crime, as Rafael Mangual points out below, might be very different depending on where you live, and that some neighborhoods (and even subway lines) are largely insulated from it. But also, consider the fact that people don’t like being proximate to crime, and that we really don’t have to live this way; these are, to some degree, policy choices.

This reflects a very upper-middle-class perspective. NYC is also home to block clusters with crime levels that are very high, objectively. That the city’s aggregate crime rate (watered down by very low-crime, super-dense, enclaves like UES, SoHo, etc.) is “low” (though not as low… https://t.co/RAx7oKekXq

— Rafael A. Mangual (@Rafa_Mangual) November 3, 2025

Also, this factors in:

NYC has a crime rate that is 30 percent higher than 2019, objectively. A reversal of 30 years of progress. So most people in the city have experienced an abrupt and sustained dislocation in both the reality and perception of public safety for the first time in their lives. https://t.co/WfG3WdLCoO

— Nicole (@nicolegelinas) November 3, 2025

QUICK HITS

• “Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a socialist or an Islamist sympathizer. The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third-Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-twentieth century that recast politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony,” writes Zineb Riboua. Mamdani’s “convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity.”
• “Two federal judges on Friday said the Trump administration must use emergency funds to keep paying federal food assistance benefits, a day before they were set to be suspended because of the government shutdown,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order during a hearing directing the U.S. Agriculture Department to use contingency funds to make payments under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. ‘There is no doubt and it is beyond argument that irreparable harm will begin to occur if it hasn’t already occurred,’ said McConnell, an Obama appointee. In a related case, Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts on Friday said the move to suspend SNAP benefits was likely unlawful and that the government was required to use emergency funds as needed to make payments.” SNAP payments generally cost the government $8 billion per month to dole out, and federal coffers have some $6 billion in contingency funds on hand.
• Inside the rise of adjustable-rate mortgages.
• Curfews hit D.C. again:

We are declaring a limited juvenile curfew in Washington, DC.

Effective immediately, all juveniles under the age of 18 are subject to a curfew from 11PM until 6AM, which will extend through 11/5.

This is in response to several weeks of disorderly juvenile behavior which…

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) November 1, 2025

“Are Maduro’s days as President numbered?”@POTUS: “I would say yeah, I think so — yeah.” pic.twitter.com/xUcu9C3FCM

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) November 3, 2025

• I’m sorry, but this piece—”An abortion ban pushed me toward abortion” in The Argument—doesn’t really make any sense to me. The writer wanted the baby, but was worried about receiving medical care in a state that has a 6-week abortion ban, because she didn’t think the full range of options would be on the table for her in the event of complications? It’s a rather convoluted argument.