by JOE ESKENAZI June 30, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
San Franciscans think the world revolves around them. New Yorkers know it does.
They’ve got a point: It’s not in every city that a Democratic primary in a mayoral election can become international news and be hailed as an inflection point in national history.
New York City’s Board of Elections will, on July 1, belatedly run ranked-choice voting permutations from last Tuesday’s contest. But it’s not going to tell you anything you didn’t already know: 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani will handily beat former governor Andrew Cuomo, the scandal-plagued 67-year-old scion of the state’s desiccated Democratic establishment and, every day, more and more of a dead ringer for the Cardassian villains in “Star Trek.”
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For San Franciscans of a certain vintage, the contest rang a distant bell. The notion of a charismatic young leftist firebrand taking on the avatar of the Democratic establishment against great odds and at a financial handicap harked to the epochal Matt Gonzalez vs. Gavin Newsom mayoral contest of 2003. Despite being outspent by an order of magnitude, Gonzalez kept it close: Newsom prevailed by a 53-47 tilt. Like Tyrese Halliburton in this year’s NBA playoffs, Gonzalez will be remembered for a heroic losing effort.
This is how most underdog stories end. But that didn’t happen in New York City.
Regarding progressive politics in San Francisco, Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign feels more than a bit like Hunter S. Thompson’s line about the city in the late 1960s: “With the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” The progressive movement in San Francisco has rolled back. It is, at present, largely devoid of the youth, vigor, multiculturalism and organizational structure that marked Mamdani’s successful primary campaign. Just about the only San Francisco power base remaining to push a citywide progressive campaign is organized labor.
That wasn’t the case in San Francisco in 2003 and it isn’t the case in New York now. Mamdani’s primary victory prompts so many questions, but two loom large — if you’re a San Franciscan: How could Mamdani do what Gonzalez could not? And could a Mamdani-like candidate win here?
Asked the first question, Gonzalez himself notes, correctly, that 2003 was a long time ago. “Imagine the difference between 1981 and 2003. Now it’s 2003 to 2025,” he says. “It doesn’t seem that long ago, but Mamdani was 11 or 12 years old when I ran.”
Well, thanks for making us all feel old, Matt.
He’s right, but there’s no denying that, writ large, both the 2003 and 2025 contests pitted a youthful, photogenic, charismatic leftist who sparked a people-based movement against a far better-funded face of the establishment. And, in both contests, the powers-that-be were terrified that the upstart candidate might win — and pulled out all the stops.
In San Francisco, however, the face was far more appealing — and youthful, photogenic and charismatic. Supervisor Gavin Newsom in 2003 looked like Christian Bale in “American Psycho.” But if you’re going to look like Christian Bale, “American Psycho” Christian Bale is not the worst you could do: Far better than “Machinist” Christian Bale or “Vice” Christian Bale” and certainly preferable to “American Hustle” Christian Bale.
Newsom was young, just 36, and energetic. As was the case with Cuomo, President Bill Clinton himself came in and campaigned for the mainstream candidate in a municipal election. That was probably a better idea 22 years ago — and in support of a candidate who, at that time, did not have any baggage regarding alleged sexual improprieties.
Getting a president to stump for you is a big deal. But Newsom also attempted to run from the establishment while simultaneously embracing the advantages it brought.
“We knew they’d go after him as a feckless, young socialite,” recalled Jim Ross, Newsom’s campaign manager. “We did 25 policy papers. We kind of grounded him. For voters, it loses the contrast.”
That didn’t happen in New York City. Andrew Cuomo in 2021 resigned in disgrace as New York Governor after enough women to take the field for a soccer team filed sexual harassment complaints against him. As governor, he seemed to take particular pleasure in antagonizing the state’s largest city. He focused on TV and media buys, whereas Team Newsom actually spent the bulk of its (considerable) war chest on Get Out the Vote efforts. Cuomo did not walk the streets and mingle with the people, in marked contrast to Mamdani, who probably perspired through enough shirtsleeves and ties to exhaust a Century 21.
“People voted against Andrew Cuomo, who is reprehensible,” said Eric Jaye, who served as Newsom’s lead consultant in 2003. “He ran a shitty campaign and Mamdani ran a good campaign.”
He also ran a sophisticated campaign that was well beyond what Gonzalez could muster 22 years ago. “Matt was a once-in-a-lifetime political talent,” sums up a contemporary, “but he didn’t have a lot of infrastructure.”
Unlike the outsider’s outsider Gonzalez, who ran as a Green, Mamdani is a Democrat. The democratic socialists do have infrastructure, having previously put members into Congress, the state senate and New York City council. Superior organization and ground game led Mamdani to sprint out to a huge lead in early voting, leaving his opponent to pray for a Hail Mary on election day. That’s the exact opposite of how things went with Gonzalez and Newsom — and if there was ever a chance Cuomo was going to pull it out with election day voters, infernal heat on that day surely didn’t help.
Cuomo was, literally as it turned out, cooked.
Because Gonzalez wasn’t a Democrat, the Democratic party had a free hand to spend gobs of money to boost Newsom under the auspices of “communicating with Democrats.” It did. Labor split in its endorsements, too — though a Gonzalez volunteer remembers a campaign strategist saying, with a straight face, that it was okay that labor wasn’t a key partner, as Larry Harvey would deliver the Burning Man vote.
Turns out that’s not a thing. This kind of magical thinking did not occur on the Mamdani campaign.
New Yorkers this year did not react sharply to highly publicized and gory individual crimes in one of the nation’s safest big cities. Overt drug-use and street chaos is neither tolerated nor prevalent in New York City, but it has been here. San Francisco crime rates have dropped and dropped and dropped some more, but voters, confronted by filth and chaos — and besieged by years of media coverage of filth and chaos — do not feel safe. And, lo, public safety is the No. 1 priority in a city where homicides dropped to levels last seen in the Kennedy administration.
Mamdani, instead, focused on affordability. He pledged to freeze rents. He wants to make buses free. He wants to subsidize childcare and grocery stores. And you know what? He actually can freeze the rent. If all a Mayor Mamdani does is freeze rents, that would set him apart from Mayor Eric Adams and a potential Mayor Cuomo. This would satiate the No. 1 priority of scads of New York City voters — who, like San Franciscans of a generation ago, may place their identities as renters first and foremost.
Mamdani’s likeability and laser-focus on municipal affordability appear to have resonated more than attempts to play on fears of public safety or Mamdani’s views on Israel — in what is, again, a municipal election. Surely his views on international issues were paramount for some voters. But, for others, his local platform, their distaste for Cuomo or both may have simply outweighed them. It’s debatable whether Mamdani’s unapologetically critical views of Israel were an overall political boon — but they certainly weren’t a political third rail. That is no small deal and it bursts all manner of conventional wisdoms. For all the talk about how Democrats need to tack to the center and keep their heads down, Mamdani has shown that there is an alternative to that — an alternative that invigorated many of the demographics Democrats sorely need.
Still, it’s difficult to see his victory as an easily duplicable template. They don’t make politicians like Zohran Mamdani in laboratories; let’s give the man some credit. New York City’s size and demographics are unique — and New York state’s Democratic establishment is uniquely corrupt and ossified, with Cuomo as its avatar. It is also far more affordable for big-money players to flood the political market in San Francisco than in a city state like New York City.
Locally, Rep. Nancy Pelosi is old enough to remember the St. Louis Browns playing in the World Series. But nobody has ever accused her of incompetence or absenteeism — and 73 percent of San Franciscans voted for her in the 2024 primary election and 81 percent in the general. A lot can happen in the next year and change, but she does not seem like a particularly soft target.
Time will tell. In the meantime, voters nationwide appear ready for something different. In New York City, that was a democratic socialist who wants to subsidize groceries, buses and childcare. In San Francisco, it was a scion of great wealth who’d never before held conventional employment; in San Jose it was a little-known former tech executive.
There appears to be a great thirst for change. What that change looks like, however — that’s harder to know.
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JOE ESKENAZI
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.More by Joe Eskenazi
