I guess I’m in the mood to talk about elections. Well, it is election season after all.
I talked a little bit about the election happening in Virginia on November 4th last week. There’s another election happening somewhere else in America on November 4th. And it’s happening in our most important city: New York City.
Yes, I’m of course talking about the mayoral election, where New York is potentially going to have its first Muslim mayor. I guess they forgot the last time Muslims had a major impact on New York City.
Anyway, the mayoral election in New York is worth talking about. I know, I’m probably like you and would like to just ignore New York. Let it rot; what do I care? And that’s a fair point of view. It’s mostly been mine with regard to these big cities politically embracing ideological lunacy. And there’s even some evidence that letting these big cities suffer is good for them—Harris did worse in urban areas than Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton (NPR). So, normally, I’d be perfectly happy to let New Yorkers make an incredibly foolish decision and elect Mamdani as mayor, while not caring in the slightest.
But this election isn’t just political. It’s cultural. And, I suppose, so were all the elections consisting of leftist candidates throughout the past several decades, but even so, this election is a different level. It just feels different.
Our most important city—the financial capital of the world, arguably the most iconic city in the world, and the city that is interwoven with being representative of America and our culture more than any other—may have a man as its next mayor who is about as antithetical to American culture and its values as you can get.
Case in point, according to a Newsweek article from earlier this week, Mamdani has around a fifteen-to-twenty point lead in the polls—that lead has apparently been cut by 5-10 points depending on which polling source the New York Post is using from one article to the next—but it’s the specifics of the data that are truly revealing.
In referring to a Patriot Polling poll, the Newsweek article shows that there’s a stark bifurcation between prospective foreign-born voters and prospective American-born voters. Unsurprisingly, Mamdani’s doing quite well in these polls with Muslims, but also with Hindus and atheists, whereas he’s not performing strongly with Catholics—that’s a lot of your Christian population in New York City—and Jews. In short, the people born in America and who adhere to American cultural values—yes, I know Judaism is certainly distinct and different from Christianity, but it’s closer than Islam, Hinduism, or atheism—don’t support the guy; the people not born here and who don’t adhere to American cultural values support the guy.
The Mamdani phenomenon and the data showing the types of people who support him show that it’s time for America to have a long overdue conversation, a conversation about the confluence between our population and our culture.
The idea that we all like to believe in is that America is a melting pot. And we like to believe in that idea because it’s a pleasant one. It’s romantic. Who doesn’t like the idea of people from different places with different backgrounds coming together to form one culture and one nation? And, for the most part, that idea has actually come true in America.
Now, that’s not to say there haven’t been growing pains when the newest different group arrived on these shores; there have been. Everybody knows about slavery; the Chinese and Japanese weren’t exactly treated well at certain points of their being here in America; the Irish and the Italians had a rough go of it for a while, partly on account of their being Catholic; just to name a few examples. But, eventually, we pretty well got through the growing pains, and the different group in question became Americans. Now, “became Americans” is important to focus on here. Becoming an American is not just a legal, political, or, in the case of birth, biological process. It’s a cultural process. It’s a process where, and this is one of the most emblematic examples of American exceptionalism because we do this better than anywhere else in the world, we take the parts of your culture—the parts of where you’re from or who you are—that we like and integrate them into our way of life, our culture. We make it our own. We make it American. For example, using some of the groups I named earlier, black Americans have had a profound impact on our arts, particularly our music—just look at jazz, R&B, soul, blues, early rock and roll, hip-hop, etc. We have Chinatowns in most of our major big cities and Chinese food, albeit a highly Americanized version, which perfectly demonstrates what I’m talking about when I say, “We make it American.” We have Italian food, which, again, is an Americanized version, and the same applies here to what I said after mentioning Chinese food.
But did you notice a common through line between the examples I just gave? None of them have to do with what lies at the foundation of a culture; music and food do not make a culture. A large part of the reason the melting pot idea has worked here in America is because of our sturdy foundation. And that foundation was not laid by a diverse melting pot.
The leftists are not wrong when they say this country was founded by white men. That’s actually not specific enough. This country was predominantly founded by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. In the words of Founding Father John Jay, in Federalist No. 2, “With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” Without this sturdy foundation, the melting pot would have been a multicultural mess.
Furthermore, the melting pot idea was able to work here because we strictly adhered to the idea of assimilation and, more importantly, brought in people whose background was formed in a cultural foundation similar enough to ours to be compatible—which should be our number one priority regarding immigration, by the way. For example, the majority of immigrants arriving to our shores during the Ellis Island phase that you likely learned about at school were white, European, Christians, or, at least, from a country with a Christian foundation (EBSCO).
All of this brings us back to Mamdani and the people these polls show are supporting his candidacy for mayor. Muslims, Hindus, and atheists are all people whose justification for their respective cultural foundations is different from the traditional justification for ours.
Look at it this way: if we had growing pains with many of the groups who arrived on these shores during the Ellis Island period—again, people from cultural foundations similar enough to ours—what type of pains will we have with these other groups—with whom we share little in common on account of a substantially different cultural foundation or lack of a belief in a transcendent higher power—when they achieve a substantial percentage of the population and, more importantly, become increasingly assertive politically and culturally? Will they be growing pains or just pains, pains that last into perpetuity?
Now, that’s not to demonize these groups of people. They’re human beings. And I’m not trying to specifically target these groups, they’re just relevant because of the specific poll. But foundationally different groups of people plus substantial numbers on both sides can be quite the problematic equation. You’re likely to get—well, as history teaches us, oftentimes, you end up having war. You almost certainly get at least some type of tension, strife, or conflict. Just look at Europe right now; it appears to be a powder keg on account of mass immigration of groups of people who aren’t like the Europeans really at all at the core of their identities.
So with all that being said, you should always treat people with kindness and decency—I know that’s clichéd, but it’s also true. But treating people with kindness and decency is not inconsistent with acknowledging reality. You can do both. And we should do both. And the reality in America that we need to acknowledge is that we are increasingly seeing more and more people from cultures with different foundations, who also have no intention of assimilating into becoming Americans, which will only create more problems than we have already, further chip away at our cultural foundation and values, and divide us further than we already are as a country.
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/who-is-winning-new-york-election-mamdani-vs-cuomo-polls-10-days-out-10925325
https://nypost.com/2025/10/27/us-news/andrew-cuomo-narrows-gap-against-zohran-mamdani-in-nyc-mayoral-race-new-poll/
https://nypost.com/2025/10/28/us-news/zohran-mamdani-can-win-mayoral-election-despite-new-yorkers-disagreeing-with-progressive-points-poll/
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5198616/2024-presidential-election-results-republican-shift
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/european-immigration-united-states-1892-1943
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jay/01-04-02-0282