Bing Bong

Everybody hates Andrew Cuomo, but everybody loves Brad Lander.

On stage at Zohran Mamdani’s ‘New York is Not For Sale’ rally on Sunday night, headlined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Bernie Sanders, the New York City Comptroller - “otherwise known as your number two choice in the primary” - gets one of the night’s biggest cheers with a message for the former New York governor and almost certainly number two choice for NYC mayor in the general election next week: “Good. Fucking. Riddance!”

Lander is a great character. When he’s not bopping wildly at the end of the chorus line of the “Resistance Revival Choir” (the lead singer has a baby strapped to her back) he is detailing his arrests outside immigration court in lower Manhattan since his first civil disobedience during the primary in June. “I've been back every week since…along with a lot of you.”

This was the final rally ahead of New York City’s mayoral election on 4 November in front of a crowd of approximately 15,000 people stuffed into Forest Hills stadium in Queens.

“We will fight Donald Trump by showing up for our neighbors at 26 Federal Plaza or anywhere else he tries to come for them,” shouts Lander. "We will fight Donald Trump by standing with our attorney general. We will fight Donald Trump by saying good riddance to his puppet Andrew Cuomo.”

Last week, Cuomo posted and quickly deleted some AI slop showing Mamdani eating rice with his hands while his supporters donned kefiyeh to rob convenience stores. 

Over the weekend, US Vice President JD Vance followed up by posting on X after Mamdani broke down discussing Islamophobia after 9/11.  “According to Zohran, the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.” 

“Even though this is a municipal election, we demand the end to the genocide in Gaza,” Lander, a Talmud-quoting Jew who says he has met with “many hostage families”, notes for the biggest applause line of the night.

We just don’t do politics like this in Australia. 300 people in a university lecture theatre for the Fremantle mayoral debate this month doesn’t quite prepare you for 15,000 people in the bleachers at Forest Hills Stadium on a frigid October night in outer borough Queens. Climbing up into the old tennis stadium, kind of a cross between Lords’ Cricket Ground and a renaissance fair amphitheatre, bills for past performances from The National and Future Island line the pickets - appropriate reference points. 

The crowd is, in a word, millennial - SNL comedian Sarah Sherman is MC - and the atmosphere is buoyant as the golden light recedes into gloom. Hasan Piker sits behind me for a few minutes before heading back down to GA where the content creators and TV reporters jostle in the bear pit. Every few minutes another jet banks past as it carves the flight path to JFK nearby.

It’s exceptional political choreography. We sit for four hours on copies of The Communist newspaper we scored in the line to buffer us from the cold metal benches. Slick highlights reels from Mamdani’s social media channels run on two big screens at side-stage - we’re too far back to scan the QR code to sign up to canvas per Sherman’s repeated command. Before Lander and the band lead into the headliners, a line-up of grassroots organisers and state politicians signpost the times. Canvassers warm up the crowd’s call and response: “Freeze the…?” (“RENT!”) “Make buses fast and…?” (“FREE!”)

An emergency room doctor wells up on stage talking about his patients who will die early because of the structural forces outside the hospital walls: “Part and parcel of electing Zohran is to build a city we can all afford to live in.”

Out comes a line-up of Democratic Socialist representatives from city and state government to rattle off their wins. Once it was just Bernie. Tonight they are ascendant in their red shirts. “We are on the verge of electing our Democratic Socialist mayor. We have the people on our side.” It’s true. They do. “DSA, DSA, DSA,” the crowd concurs. 

Zohran is a Democratic Socialist. Cuomo has billionaire backers - he goes on their radio shows and podcasts, they offer inducements to his rivals to drop out. The big names get a good run early: hedge funder Bill Ackman, cosmetics boss Ronald Lauder… Donald Trump. But before he takes on the president, Mamdani looks set to finish off Cuomo, the candidate for the billionaire class. It makes no difference that Cuomo is now running as an Independent - the former Democratic governor could just as easily be a Republican for the people packed in tonight.

And nobody is sure how they feel about Kathy Hochul. Cuomo’s successor as Democratic governor only endorsed Mamdani last month and she barely manages to hold the crowd during her set. Few seem to care that Donald Trump said the shutdown is about killing Democratic priorities. “No, no, this gets bad. This is killing food assistance for babies,” she insists. (“Yeah, really sucks,” she adds in an I Think You Should Leave voice.)

“What are you going to do about it, Kathy?” someone heckles.

She tries to retreat back to a Mamdani policy. “As New York's first mom governor I can tell you, we need more child care.”

“We need a new governor,” someone shouts from the crowd.

A “Tax the Rich” chant starts around the entire stadium and is immediately so loud that Hochul has to stop and wait. The governor has notably refused to support Mamdani’s plan to increase income tax on New York’s millionaires to finance greater affordability initiatives like city-owned grocery stores and free public transit. When I look back at my transcript of her speech, there’s an entire paragraph that is just those three words, so loud the Voice Memos in my pocket clearly picks it up. “I hear you,” Hochul offers, and finally the crowd cheers.

By the end of her slot, Zohran has to come out on stage for the first time, less to acknowledge the Governor’s endorsement than to shepherd Hochul off with an arm round her shoulder to keep the crowd at bay. Phones light up the stands as the real stars of the show start to come out.

When Hochul talks about Donald Trump taking a wrecking ball to the White House, she sounds like she has shares in the real estate. When AOC puts her whole body into it, proclaiming “That house doesn’t belong to him - it belongs to us”, it soars into the night. Unlike Hochul, the New York Congresswoman is drowned out by cheers multiple times but she doesn’t stop speaking.

AOC’s colleagues have not got the memo. Not only is Chuck Schumer not at the rally, he has refused to endorse Mamdani. Ditto fellow New York Democrat Kirsten Gellibrand. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did, but only right as early voting opened.

And yet Mamdani has been up to 20 points clear in the polls, against a former Democratic governor of New York whose father was Democratic governor before him. By the time Zohran got up on stage, his movement had already done the job for him. His theme of freedom for all didn’t quite hit on the night (the former Youtube comedian is at his freshest when he’s doing it “straight off the dome”, as he riffed last night while waiting for the teleprompter to rein him in), but it didn’t matter. The careful campaign staging, and the pitch perfect cost of living messaging, looks very likely to deliver him victory.

And as most speakers in Queens made clear, that carries a lot further than the five boroughs. At times, he seems ahead of his own supporters, who don’t quite go with him as he recounts talking to New York Trump voters in the outer neighbourhoods who “supported Donald Trump because they felt disconnected from a Democratic Party that had grown comfortable with mediocrity and gave its time only to those who gave millions.”

During his speech to the crowd Bernie Sanders insists that Trump “seems to be very, very concerned about who wins this election.” But it’s the Democratic Party for whom the bell was tolling first on Sunday night in Queens.

Earlier in the evening, Sherman put the crowd on notice that the packed schedule wouldn’t flex for speakers going long, teeing up a sound effect taken from the subway to warn them when their time was up.

As New York’s current Democratic governor, first appointed by New York’s previous Democratic governor, ran out of time last night, the tannoy announcement was pre-empted by the socialists in the bleachers.

“Bing bong,” called a voice from the crowd. “Bing bong.”

This piece was co-published with Crikey.