Mark Penn on Mamdani: A Bad Turn For Democratic Party If Something Isn’t Figured Out Before Election Day
Pollster Mark Penn reacts to Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
LAURA INGRAHAM: Mark, let’s start with you. This view that the Democrats are really caught here in a trap of their own making, they really gravitated toward the energy of the squad and they enjoyed that, even though they know their views were too far left, but now the party’s gone left because they didn’t really deliver. What do they do here? MARK PENN, POLLSTER: Well, this is a big problem and there is a lot of panic, I think, in New York generally in terms of what can they do, how can they get someone in the general election. Remember, these primaries were played with. This used to be in September and there would have been a runoff between Zohan and Andrew Cuomo in the old system with much higher turnout. Right now you have a city of 8 million people, 400,000 votes one way or the other is determining an extreme move to the left because with a voting system nobody could figure out, because this has been played with and moved to like the dead of summer when turnout’s going to be low and activists can win the day. So we need to get our election system back and right now I think this is a really bad turn for the Democratic Party if something isn’t figured out here before election day.
