Let Politicians Be Assholes
A popularist plea
0. Mr. Mayor
I don’t live anywhere near New York City, but I have a crippling addiction to the news, so I’ve been following its mayoral race closely.
The de facto deciding contest is the Democratic Primary, which’ll be held next Tuesday, June 24. Voters will decide between a crowded field of nine (ish) serious candidates, but there are only two with any chance: Zohran Mamdani, a socialist crackpot who wants to make buses and childcare free, build city-run grocery stores, freeze the rent, and raise NYC’s minimum wage to $30/hr in five years—and Andrew Cuomo, a big fat asshole with mostly boring policies that’ll clean up the streets and not drive the city bankrupt.
The Primary will use a ranked-choice voting system (hooray!), so first-place picks are all over the place (Zellnor Myrie’s stolen my heart with his awesome housing plan and objectively-very-cool name, FYI)—but anyone with a brain is ranking Cuomo above Mamdani. Luckily, New York is a city with many brains, and so Cuomo’s sitting at around 85% odds of winning, per Polymarket:
I still wish it was more of a sure thing, and I certainly wouldn’t say the people of New York are totally in the clear, but this is great! I really only have one complaint: every single endorsement of Cuomo over Mamdani is prefaced, “I know he’s an asshole, but…”
And I think this is stupid. There are good reasons to moderately dislike Cuomo on policy—not least of which being the nursing home hullabaloo—but allegations that “he’s kind of a dick” are pretty irrelevant. I think it’s definitively past time for the anti-jerk bias in left-wing American politics to end.
1. “He’s Our Asshole”
In Annie Lowrey’s much-maligned-by-crazy-people Atlantic column about the election, she writes of Cuomo’s supporters:
Their argument for him is practical: He gets things done. He’s realistic. He’s tough. He’d stand up to Donald Trump. He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole. These days, the city might need an asshole running it.
I think the last sentence goes a little too far—no city ever needs an asshole running it; nice-and-well-adjusted-but-still-tough politicians also exist, and they work just fine. But it’s certainly true that some New Yorkers positively like Cuomo’s jerkiness!
Democrats talk a lot nowadays about the need for a Liberal Joe Rogan—someone who’s tough and gritty, who talks and looks like a big-boy-strong-man, who can win back the poor, uneducated, disaffected urban voters who broke massively for Trump in 2024.
I think that, if Cuomo weren’t so old, he’d make a great LJR.
Look at that little beefcake!
Still unconvinced somehow? Fine, here are the numbers, you nerd:
In a recent poll from the Manhattan Institute, Cuomo was the first choice of 39% of black Democratic Primary likely voters—Zohran Mamdani, in second, won just 16%.
In fact, Mamdani’s first-choice voter base is extremely white, Asian, and educated:
Cuomo’s voters, on the other hand, are a broad majority-minority coalition:
And Cuomo’s disaffected swing-voter appeal shows up in scenario polling against the Republican nominee and incumbent Eric Adams, who’s running as an independent. He totally smashes the conservative and the lunatic populist:
But Mamdani has a much tighter margin; he might even be forced to mount a real fight for undecided voters in the general!
None of this should be shocking: Republicans have been successfully running the asshole-in-a-blue-stronghold strategy for years; his name is Chris Christie.
Back in those days, Christie also rode an impressively diverse coalition of lower-class voters to victory. After Mitt Romney won 27% of the Hispanic vote nationwide in 2012, Christie’s 2013 re-election campaign enjoyed majority support from Hispanic voters in New Jersey:
Those same mostly-less-educated minority voters have begun to break for the Republican party everywhere—coinciding with the rise of the biggest asshole in the history of American politics, of course—and so now the onus is on the Democrats to win them back with their own asshole-appeal.
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman was the proof-of-concept, until he went a little loony—hopefully Cuomo can hold up better.
2. “But Assholes Are Bad!”
They’re certainly bad people, sure, but I don’t think this bears so much on how well they govern. Fetterman is sort of an exceptional case, but there are obvious extenuating circumstances: namely, his massive stroke and subsequent slide back into clinical depression.
Historically speaking, governing assholes have mostly held up! Sometimes historians are asked to rank US Presidents, and excepting obviously-virtuous folk like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and James Madison, the top ranks are chock-full of assholes: #2, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a serial adulterer who deceived the public about the extent of his illness for years; #5, Harry Truman, “was frequently suspicious of many of those around him, at times uncaring for loyal helpers, vindictive, seething with unfocused hostility, beset by stress and anxiety;”1 and #9, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was easily the worst of all—his misdeeds are too scandalous to list anywhere but in the footnote.2
Obviously, there are some assholes at the bottom of the list too: Donald Trump (#44), of course, sucks, and Richard Nixon (#36) and Andrew Johnson (#43) sucked too. But decent and mild-mannered presidents fill out plenty of the bottom spots! Warren Harding (#42) was “affable;” even Herbert Hoover (#38; Mr. Great Depression) was just a little shy, at worst.
My point, of course, is: it seems like it really doesn’t matter whether a politician is an asshole or not! There are lots of other, far more relevant facts about a potential-mayor than whether he’s sort of a pig or not.
3. “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?”
Some people have this deranged idea that our leaders and politicians should be Good Role Models. That they only deserve their post if they act in personally virtuous ways; that some sort of spiritual harm is done to our society when assholes win.
But this is total hooey! To paraphrase Chief Wiggum in The Simpsons:
Ladies, please. All our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either [assholes] or on cocaine.
There’s no reason for us to lay these strict, puritanical norms down now! If New York City elects Andrew Cuomo, is there any world in which young men would go out and start harassing women more as a result?
I suppose it’s possible, but it would be a really weird result! Generally speaking, the kind of person who looks up to Andrew Cuomo for his harassment will be the kind of person who was already ok with harassment. In no way do I think we should celebrate assholes: left unchecked, that’ll drive an endless spiral of political-toxification; policy will be infected, and actual on-the-ground worse outcomes will result—this is the Donald Trump story.
Really, I’m not saying anyone should idolize Cuomo for his jerkiness—I even think the Liberal Joe Rogan concept itself is deeply flawed—but it’s probably ok to just ignore it. To just take the win, for once—a politician with sane ideas is about to become the next mayor of New York City. That’s crazy! It hasn’t really happened since the Woke agenda took hold in the early 2010s, and wouldn’t let go.
New York Democrats have a real opportunity to demonstrate that they’ve become the party of sanity—to reject their extremist wing wholeheartedly, and to embrace a smart and popular technocratic agenda.
There’s no reason to let “he’s kind of a dick” sentiment get in the way now.
Hamby, Alonzo L. “An American Democrat: A Reevaluation of the Personality of Harry S. Truman.” Political Science Quarterly 106, no. 1 (1991): 33–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/2152173.
LBJ had a big penis; he was not shy about this fact. He called it “Jumbo” and would take it out during meetings (with journalists, even!) to assert dominance. He also would walk into the bathroom while dictating to his staff; if they didn’t follow him in and continue taking notes, they’d be promptly fired. Also, he literally fixed the 1948 Texas Senate election that first put him in federal government. Not a good dude! Still a pretty good President, apparently.