Transcript - America This Week, Nov 6, 2025: "Zohran Wins! Has the 'Good Example' Made a Comeback?"

An exciting movement led by toothsome intellectuals takes New York by storm. In a completely unrelated discussion, Walter and Matt finish Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: We had big news this week. Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, and there is a great exaltation in the land. Walter, what was your first reaction to the news?

Walter Kirn: So I decided to test all the good will I’ve gotten by making predictions that come true by making one that was very far-fetched and based on, I’m going to say, faulty polling information. Because from what I gathered on Monday between Sliwa and Cuomo, there were enough votes to beat Mamdani, but it turned out that even combined, their votes didn’t equal his.

Walter Kirn: So anyway, I said I’d eat crow, and here I am doing it. But what did I think, first of all? Well, I thought New York City is, in a way, even deeper in the bubble that it has blown for itself. It’s looked at as a place that is in advance of the rest of the country, that’s somehow ahead of the rest of the country, but for many years now, I felt it was way behind, frankly. And because it has a sealed media environment and listens only to its own radio stations and it reads its local paper and so on, I think it might be one of the least in-touch places in America.

Walter Kirn: So when I saw that Seattle had retained a mayor, it appears, less progressive than Mamdani, a mayor who then fought off for a progressive challenge where I thought, “Wow, New York’s going off into space by itself.” It has the money to do that. It has the geographical isolation and the self-confidence to do that. But that’s basically what I felt like I was doing. I was watching a rocket launch.

Walter Kirn: I was watching a society or a miniature society launch itself into unknown dark space while the rest of the country backed off a little bit and said, “What have we wrought?” So I’ll be interesting to watch, interesting to watch it land on its own planet and carry out its own separate destiny, frankly, because I think it is a parallel universe now, for better or for worse.

Matt Taibbi: Well, the question is, I was at a medic convention here in New Orleans, and a lot of people are asking, is this a burgeoning phenomenon that’s going to spread across the nation, or is this just an isolated thing that’s only going to happen in New York? And I think the answer to that question is that it’s a phenomenon that’s going to spread because a lot of the ideas that Mamdani is propagating are in line with pretty much everything that people are taught in schools.

Matt Taibbi: There are 85,000 DSA chapters across the country. It’s a large number of people, and it has a lot of traction with young people. Can we see the graph on the demographic results for the exit polls? Because this is fascinating, some of the results. So the largest demographic is Gen Z women. And what’s the number there? I can’t even read it on my screen.

Walter Kirn: 84%, it says. 18 to 29 blue.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, yeah. 84% versus 12%.

Walter Kirn: Those are Soviet numbers. 84% of an age cohort and gender cohort for one candidate. My goodness. Because 12% of people are functionally illiterate and don’t know their own names. So that might be everybody actually.

Matt Taibbi: It’s a significant, notable number. We were talking before the show about how you were joking that, and I’ve seen this, people joking about this all over the internet, that if you want to get a date in New York from now on, you’re going to have to know the rap. And I don’t know if that’s reflected in these numbers. The Gen Z numbers for men were 68%, which weren’t that far off from the 30 to 44 group. I guess we call those millennials?

Walter Kirn: Right. I’m losing track of the boundaries between generations and the supposedly stereotypical characteristics of each generation.

Matt Taibbi: Me too.

Walter Kirn: I’m also wondering exactly how these numbers were gathered, but let’s just stipulate that they might be roughly accurate.

Matt Taibbi: Either way though, I think it continues a trend that we’ve seen nationwide, which is that there’s a couple of them. Number one, there’s a huge gender gap in voting. Trump took advantage of it nationally with the gender gap for men. In this race, you see there’s an enormous gender gap when it came to Mamdani versus Cuomo. And also that younger voters versus older voters, the farther you go down the spectrum, the less likely they are to have a firm attachment to one of the two traditional parties. So I think it is a snapshot of things to come, but New York is unique.

Walter Kirn: New York is not only unique, it’s singular in America. Where else do people not have cars? New York City. Where else do people really depend on public transport in a fundamental way to get back and forth to work? There aren’t many cities.

Matt Taibbi: Where else does less than 3% of the population know anything about wrestling?