We are only days away from the mayoral election in New York City, and I have honestly never seen a candidate take this many hits down the home stretch as has Zohran Mamdani, and that is saying something after watching three Donald Trump elections.
Videos are popping up, former interviews, detrimental statements from his mother, and now, suggestions of possible criminal charges have emerged involving the candidate.
It was just reported that criminal referrals have been made against Mamdani for alleged foreign contributions to his campaign.
I am not even going to bother getting into the actual election polling because it is all over the place at this point, ranging between a 20-point lead and a lead that is now down to 10 points.
The key to the final outcome is the undecided voters, of which there are still many. And if Mamdani continues to take these hits, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo could make this race very interesting.
The polling I want to look at now deals with the voters’ feelings about how a Mamdani win will impact the city.
A whopping 39% of those surveyed believe that terrorism will increase in New York City, with only 18% saying it would decrease. That, to me, is a staggering number. Additionally, 47% believe that crime would spike under Mamdani, and 45% say that antisemitism will rise if he wins this election.
It is not hard to understand why people feel this way when you start digging into Mamdani’s past, and that is what people are doing right now.
For instance, a video of Mamdani taken only months before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel has resurfaced, showing the candidate giving a pro-Palestine speech and raging about “Israeli settler violence.”
After leading a chant of “not on our dime,” he told the crowd, “That’s what we’re calling for. We are calling for it because we know that the days of inconsistency, the days of drawing the lines in Palestine, those days are over.”
There is nothing pro-Israel or even remotely Israel-friendly that I have seen in Mamdani’s past, so I can see why serious concerns are now coming from within the Jewish community.
On top of all these hits, Mamdani now has to deal with possible criminal referrals being leveled against his campaign.
Dan Backer, a national campaign finance expert and president of the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, claims there was “a sustained pattern of foreign money flowing into a New York City mayoral race, which is a clear violation of both federal law and New York City campaign finance rules.” He insisted, “These are not isolated incidents or clerical errors.”
According to an earlier report, there is roughly $13,000 in question, coming from at least 170 donors. Now, I have seen reports that the campaign returned some of those donations, but that report accounted for less than half of the money in question.
Mamdani, of course, claims he has done nothing wrong, saying that his campaign has already returned 139 of the potentially dubious contributions, with the remaining donations in question having been made by verified U.S. citizens.
