I Would Prefer Not To

Why I am leaning toward "none of the above" in the NYC mayoral race

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to look at voting: as an exercise in self-government and as an exercise in political expression.

Most of the time, I view voting the first way—and I think it’s quite important for the health of democracy that voters in general view voting that way, and that one driver of the decline of self-government in America is our increasing preference for viewing voting as an expressive matter rather than a serious responsibility for the general welfare. So there are plenty of times in my life that I’ve held my nose and voted for someone who I didn’t think would be particularly good at their job or who had beliefs or plans that I strongly disagreed with simply because I thought the alternative was worse. Moreover, I can’t recall a time that I have declined to vote in an election where the outcome was actually in doubt, or where I have voted for someone certain to lose because I couldn’t stomach voting for any of the credible candidates.

But this year, in the New York mayoral race, I think that’s just what I’m going to do. I simply can’t bring myself to vote for any of the three candidates. I’m not sure I even want to figure out who is the least-objectionable of the three. I don’t want any of these guys to be the next mayor, and I feel too appalled that this is my choice to participate in the process. I recognize that I’m abdicating my civic responsibility for an expressive purpose, and my disappointment at myself for doing so hasn’t yet moved the needle.

Why can’t I vote for Zohran Mamdani? I’ve written before about his astonishing level of inexperience and his far-left instincts and platform. Of course I would prefer someone more moderate and more qualified—that’s why I didn’t vote for him in the primary. But, as noted, I’ve voted before for candidates who struck me as inexperienced or with views I didn’t agree with, because they still struck me as better than the alternatives on offer. I watched the last mayoral debate, however, and there was a moment that crystallized for me why I simply cannot vote for Mamdani. It was during one of the “lightning” rounds, when the various candidates were asked their views on the various ballot measures being presented to the voters at the same time as the mayoral election. Several of these measures relate to housing—the central question with respect to affordability in the city, which in turn is the entire basis of Mamdani’s campaign. Andrew Cuomo said that he supported the measures; Curtis Sliwa said that he opposed the measures. And Mamdani said . . . that he hadn’t taken a position yet.

I doubt that the moment meant anything to most viewers, but I almost fell of my chair. These aren’t measures that might come up for a vote in the future. If they were, I could imagine political rationales for not taking a position—if, say, they were popular but Mamdani thought they were bad ideas on the merits, or if they were unpopular but important to moving forward his agenda, then Mamdani might not want to take either a popular stand that he disagrees with substantively or an unpopular stand that could hurt him electorally, but would rather win the mayoralty first and get the measures quietly blocked (or passed, as the case may be) after the election. But that’s not an option here; these proposals are on the ballot now. If Mamdani needs them for his agenda, then he needs to campaign for them and sweep them into office with him; if he opposes them, he needs to explain why (particularly since they seem on face to be aligned with his agenda of building more affordable housing). Instead, based on his answer, Mamdani is planning not to vote either way, and is advertising that fact to the electorate as part of his campaign. Why, if that is the case, should I take my civic responsibility more seriously than he does his, and vote for mayor?

Obviously I’m not refusing to vote for Mamdani just because of that one moment. But for me, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It struck me as contemptible, and I can’t vote for someone whom I hold in contempt.

Why can’t I vote for Andrew Cuomo? In those same two posts linked above, I think I explained adequately why I find voting for Cuomo an absolutely loathsome prospect. He is, as I said, the walking embodiment of everything wrong with the Democratic establishment. But, if Mamdani is so clearly unworthy of my vote, doesn’t that mean that however bad Cuomo is, he’s nonetheless the lesser of two evils? Well, I’m not sure it does. The very reasons why I suggested that Mamdani doesn’t deserve my vote strike me as reasons to expect him to be a singularly ineffectual mayor—which, while it doesn’t exactly limit the damage he might do, does circumscribe the kind of damage he’s likely to do. But Cuomo, with his detailed understanding of government and his penchant for seeking vengeance, could be far more effective than Mamdani at doing all kinds of damage, albeit not of the same kind. Moreover, if Mamdani is an obvious failure, it’s easy for me to see him being tossed out after one term and replaced with someone more like San Francisco’s Mayor Lurie. Cuomo, if he wins, will probably be much harder to dislodge.

But there’s another reason I can’t bring myself to vote for Cuomo, and it relates to the way that the organized Jewish community has come out in force to declare Mamdani a threat to Jewish lives and well-being. As I have said before, I don’t think Mamdani has handled legitimate Jewish concerns in this election particularly well. But Jewish organizations have responded to progressive efforts to make anti-Israel views a litmus test for support by declaring anti-Israel views to be simply illegitimate. Indeed, they’ve come pretty close to saying that mainstream Muslim opinion is antisemitic as such. I think that’s a catastrophic choice for inter-communal relations even if they believe it to be true. And the only effective way I can express my strong objection to that tactic is by refusing to vote for the candidate in whose service it has been deployed.

That leaves Curtis Sliwa, whom I haven’t written about until now, because I never took him seriously. I will admit, between his principled stance in favor of parades and his colorful evisceration of Bill Ackman, there have been a couple of moments where I actually considered voting for him. Sliwa is a real New York character; he’s been around forever, and I understand why he has garnered real affection over the years. And in the context of this campaign, his voice can feel like a breath of fresh air. But that feeling evaporated as soon as I examined his actual platform, which is exemplified by his housing proposals, which describe restoring local control and preserving neighborhood character as affordability measures whereas, in fact, they would reliably make building more difficult and thereby drive rents even higher. Either Sliwa has no idea what he’s talking about, or he doesn’t care, and neither is an acceptable stance for a prospective mayor to take.

Sliwa is exactly the kind of candidate that populism usually throws up: a folksy character with no experience running on nostalgia rather than plausible solutions to problems. He could be as disastrous, in his own way, as Mamdani could be. And, while Sliwa is a lot more personally appealing than the more globally-prominent right-wing populists (like our current president, with whom Sliwa, to his credit, has done little or nothing to curry favor), I have no desire to contribute to the larger political tendency of which he is a part.

Speaking of President Trump, I’ll note that some people I know are basing their vote for Mamdani for mayor largely on him, whether because they don’t want to reward Cuomo for taking the support of Trump-aligned donors like Ackman (and, indeed, the rhetorical support of the president himself), or because they see Mamdani as the candidate most determined to resist Trump by any means necessary. I think this is extremely foolish thinking; in an actual confrontation, the president has far more valuable cards to play than the mayor does, and even on the level of symbolism it’s not at all clear that a Mayor Mamdani would be more potently deployed by Democrats than by Republicans. (Indeed, I think it’s obvious that the Republicans are salivating at the prospect of being able to run against him in 2026.) But I don’t think that the contrary view has much merit either; claiming Mamdani’s scalp would also be galvanizing to Republicans (and they would definitely take credit for a Cuomo win, even if Cuomo tried to deny it). Either way, picking a mayor to give a middle finger to the president is the height of expressive rather than responsible voting.

I would normally be wagging my finger at these people and telling them to take the election more seriously. But it looks like I won’t be able to do that this year, because right now I think I’ll be joining them in voting expressively, by refusing to vote at all.

(I will, of course, show up to vote—if nothing else, I have to take a position on the ballot initiatives that the likely next mayor has hasn’t.)