Picture: Jim Palmer/AP Picture
A telegenic, progressive state legislator was storming metropolis corridor, main a quite unprecedented coalition: the youth, the current transplants, and those that had lengthy been alienated by conventional politics. His high rival, a reactionary from the old-fashioned, had quickly consolidated the assist of town’s enterprise and real-estate elite. One marketing campaign flyer requested whether or not town might “afford” this progressive Democrat who supposedly had the “softest document on crime” and was, by far, “the most important spender” within the legislature. Every candidate spoke of the race in existential phrases; their supporters brazenly reviled each other.
It was, within the phrases of 1 younger Democratic supporter of the progressive, “surprising” to see how “destructive” the marketing campaign had develop into.
The 12 months was 1975, and town was San Francisco. The younger Democrat, reflecting on the race a few years later in Lincoln Mitchell’s glorious new biography, Three Years Our Mayor, was Nancy Pelosi. Then in her 30s, Pelosi was a small a part of an unprecedented marketing campaign that elected George Moscone — an unflinching ally of countercultural San Francisco — as mayor. His slim victory, in a runoff over a conservative Republican named John Barbagelata, is perhaps one of many solely parallels in any metropolis, together with New York, to what’s occurring now: a bitterly polarized conflict between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, one cleaved alongside ideological and generational lines. Each elections even featured an prosperous Jewish center-left technocrat operating in third, unable to overhaul the 2 diametrically opposed rivals on the high.
Moscone, tragically, is finest remembered for a way he died: with Harvey Milk. In 1978, a disgruntled former member of the Board of Supervisors, Dan White, shot and killed Moscone in chilly blood in metropolis corridor earlier than transferring down the corridor to homicide Milk, the primary brazenly homosexual man elected to the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s equal to a metropolis council. The homicide would, in each sense, change the course of historical past. That technocrat who completed third and believed her political profession to be over — Dianne Feinstein — would take over as mayor and ultimately rise to the Senate. Milk, overshadowing Moscone in loss of life, would develop into a worldwide icon within the gay-rights motion, the martyr for a trigger that will show, in time, to be enormously profitable. Moscone, useless at 49, would fade from historical past, although a conference heart he helped construct now bears his title together with a college and a park.
It’s secure to say that there has by no means been a mayoral race remotely like the present one within the historical past of New York. A Muslim socialist has by no means been a top-tier contender for the Democratic nomination, and a former governor who resigned in shame has by no means been the front-runner. The citizens has hardly ever been so polarized by age and beliefs. It’s troublesome, nonetheless, to know precisely what’s going to occur on Tuesday as a result of all of that is so unprecedented. (Disclosure: Mamdani was my marketing campaign supervisor after I ran for state Senate in 2018.)
The comparisons between Cuomo/Mamdani and Barbagelata/Moscone are removed from excellent however are value exploring — if solely as a result of it’s comparatively uncommon for 2 municipal candidates to be so evenly matched whereas additionally being so ideologically divergent. Since San Francisco conducts nonpartisan elections, Democrats and Republicans are tossed in collectively, and it was Barbagelata, the Republican, who reached the runoff with Moscone. Moscone would triumph by lower than 4,400 votes and Barbagelata, Trump-like, would proceed to insist, sans proof, the election had been stolen.
What unites the 1975 mayoral race in San Francisco and the 2025 mayoral race in New York is that every election can be held at a transitional or hinge second in historical past. We can not know what the long run holds, however the truth that Mamdani, a 33-year-old assemblyman and proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is ready to ballot above 40 % is proof that the citizens within the metropolis is quickly evolving. Youthful progressive voters are asserting themselves, a lot in the identical manner they did a half-century in the past in San Francisco. It’s troublesome to conceive now, however San Francisco, effectively into the Nineteen Sixties, was a basically conservative metropolis dominated by working-class Irish and Italian People. The mayors had been both centrist, business-friendly Democrats or center-right Republicans. If San Francisco, even earlier than the arrival of the beatniks and hippies, at all times possessed a radical streak — a famed 1934 waterfront strike turned lethal and led to a common strike all through town — the citizens was largely cautious of political leaders who drifted too far left.
The rise of the counterculture meant not solely free love, acid, and rock and roll however a brand new era of San Franciscans tuning into politics. The homosexual neighborhood, concentrated within the Castro, exploded, and Latinos and Black individuals battled for illustration in authorities. Moscone, the son of a working-class Italian American family, didn’t appear, at first, like an apparent tribune of the brand new San Francisco. A high-school basketball star born earlier than the Nice Melancholy, he later grew to become an lawyer and state senator, however not like an excessive amount of older (and whiter) San Franciscans he was a proud supporter of civil rights and homosexual rights. As different Italian People drifted to the correct, Moscone planted his flag firmly within the left.
By the Seventies, San Francisco, like different main metropolitan areas, was grappling with deindustrialization and rising crime. Summer season of Love gave option to the Zodiac Killer, the Zebra murders, and the Symbionese Liberation Military. (Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, then in style within the metropolis’s Black neighborhood, was a powerful backer of the Moscone mayoral marketing campaign.) Police stations had been bombed, as was the house of Mayor Joseph Alioto. Barbagelata, like Moscone, was a straight male Italian American, however he spoke for a unique San Francisco: older, whiter, and one which strained to show again the clock on what they noticed because the counterculture insanity. The place Moscone was pro-tenant, Barbagelata was a defender of huge landlords and companies, and he sought to painting Moscone as anti-police. He was additionally loudly vital of Moscone’s unabashed embrace of homosexual rights.
At present’s New York shouldn’t be practically as unstable and harmful as Seventies San Francisco, however the shadow of the COVID crime spike nonetheless looms and houselessness — together with random, brazen crime — remains to be a high concern. Cuomo, along with his vows to aggressively fund the police and convey order to town and beat again, above all, the progressive left shouldn’t be so completely different, in rhetoric and bearing, than Barbagelata. The dismissiveness Cuomo’s supporters harbor for Mamdani’s base can be not too dissimilar both. Left-leaning, gentrifying neighborhoods of western Queens and northern Brooklyn are considered warily by the older, extra conservative New York. Newer arrivals to San Francisco had been a key part of Moscone’s profitable coalition: If you happen to had been below 40, had handed by means of the Haight or joined up in an antiwar march, you had been undoubtedly for Moscone. And Moscone, like Mamdani, possessed real star energy. Nonetheless dashing in his 40s, he was fawned over by ladies and was identified (not like Mamdani) to hold out his share of extramarital affairs.
There are, after all, essential variations between Moscone and Mamdani that transcend age, race, or private ethics — and a few of these communicate to the political weaknesses of the younger socialist heading into the ultimate livid days of the first. Whereas Mamdani is the son of a famed movie director and Columbia professor, Moscone had far humbler origins. Moscone, too, was not merely a state legislator however the state Senate majority chief, and he was a political insider who had loads of chits to money in. He had a lot stronger relationships with organized labor and he was intently aligned with the highly effective Burton political machine. Cuomo, on this race, is the foremost labor candidate and the ally of the fading political machines. And although Mamdani, in accordance with recent polling, is making actual inroads with Latinos and South Asian voters, Black New York remains to be with Cuomo. Moscone, in Seventies San Francisco, was very fashionable within the Black neighborhood, and he solid a good alliance with Willie Brown, who would find yourself Speaker of the Meeting after which mayor within the ’90s. Moscone had additionally drawn near Jews, championing Israel at a time when many liberals had been drawn to the Jewish state. Mamdani has recognized as an anti-Zionist, which excites younger leftists however alienates extra reasonable Jews.
Versus Moscone as San Francisco’s energy elite might have been, Mamdani is encountering much more ferocity in New York. Cuomo’s super-PAC, bolstered by Michael Bloomberg and a number of other different billionaires, has raised north of $20 million and is deluging the airwaves and mailboxes. It’s practically unattainable to keep away from anti-Mamdani advertisements. There was nothing equal, 50 years in the past, in San Francisco. Barbagelata himself was an outsider, a Realtor who solely had a brief stint on the Board of Supervisors. Cuomo is far more formidable.
Whether or not Mamdani wins or loses, New York’s citizens could also be completely realigning. The Barbagelata coalition would by no means be as potent because it was in 1975 San Francisco, and the Cuomo coalition of 2025 — outer borough Black moderates, Orthodox Jews, the ultrawealthy, and arranged labor — might solely exert much less affect, no more, within the coming years. We can not know but who owns the long run, nevertheless it wouldn’t be sensible to wager in opposition to the marketing campaign of a rising 33-year-old.
