Two days ago in the city that never sleeps Zoran Mamdani was sworn into office…and Frank Sinatra is turning in his grave.  But let’s be clear: casting a vote for a politician with socialist branding doesn’t mean New Yorkers have suddenly turned against capitalism.  Like most Americans, big-city voters are motivated by something more practical, affordability, safety and a better quality of life.

At the local level, voters don’t choose ideology — they choose competence.  Municipal governments don’t manage national economies; they run schools, police and fire departments, sanitation services, zoning boards — and of course, they levy the taxes that pay for those services.

When voters choose a candidate promising safer subways, affordable rent, better schools, and support for the homeless, they’re prioritizing quality of life.  People want functioning services, not a revolution in the economic system.

New York’s progressive leaders aren’t abolishing private property, although some of the proposed policies I’ve read about are questionable, nor are they centrally planning city’s economy.  If we can believe the promises, the agenda will focus on policies common in blue cities across the nation: rent regulation, expanded social services, stronger unions, and an ever-larger welfare infrastructure.

But intentions are one thing; results are another and it’s hard to ignore the pattern of failure in democrat run cities, e.g.…

• San Francisco — one of the most progressive cities in America — is now home to widespread homelessness, open-air drug markets, and chronic street disorder, driving a steady exodus of businesses and families.
• Los Angeles faces a hollowed-out downtown, persistently failing public schools, a shrinking middle class, soaring homelessness, and housing costs that push residents out of the city. Even its disaster recovery reveals deep dysfunction: nearly ten months after the catastrophic fires, thousands of rebuilding applications remain stalled — and as of this writing, only a single new home, a 630-square-foot ADU, has been completed in the fire zone.
• Chicago — my hometown — continues to struggle with failing schools, crushing debt, some of the highest taxes in the nation, shrinking services, depopulation, and violent crime that ranks among the worst in America.

The challenges facing these cities aren’t partisan talking points, the above are measurable results.  And to put an even finer point on it, these failures are not random, they’re structural.  Whenever these types of governance models have been tried, they’ve resulted in permissive crime environments, policies that attract rather than reduce homelessness, punitive burdens on businesses, zoning rules that choke housing supply, bloated bureaucracies with little accountability, and a romanticized yet ineffective model of welfare.  Compassion shapes the rhetoric — but outcomes tell a different story.

Even cities that appeared to defy this pattern, i.e., Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, flourished because of powerful private-sector engines like technology firms and major universities.  Their prosperity came in spite of progressive governance, not because of it.  And once that governance fully took hold, the cracks emerged: rising disorder, falling affordability, and a slow drift toward decline.

Promises win elections but New Yorkers will soon learn that results are what’s important regardless of the label attached to it.