Nicholas Fandos

So glad to be here.

Yeah, an incredible couple of weeks.

The Knicks are NBA championships.

The World Cup, his beloved sporting event, is taking place just across the river in New Jersey.

And this week, the mayor made a pretty audacious political gamble in a series of important congressional races in New York City, and he won every single one of them.

So on Tuesday night, voters across New York City went to the polls in a series of very competitive congressional primaries.

Now, in New York, a very democratic city, the primaries actually are the elections that end up deciding who is going to fill these seats.

And Mayor Mamdani did something unusual in these elections.

Where his predecessors have tended to try and stay out of local politics, of the kind of bitter inner party fights that could divide their coalition or zap their political capital, he decided he was going to put all of his on the line for a series of candidates from the left, many of them Democratic Socialists, who share his vision for the city and he thought could win these seats in Congress for their movement.

This is a pretty extraordinary gamble just six months into his term.

If he succeeded, it would give him a foothold in Congress where he could inject the economic populist ideas from the left, his views on Israel and other issues into the national conversation that Democrats are having right now about their identity.

But if he lost, he'd be squandering a lot of his own political capital.

He'd be empowering people who are trying to stand in his way.

And frankly, I think he'd make even some of his allies think, this guy's not as strong as we thought.

Maybe we don't need to go along with what he's talking about.

So to answer this, I want to go back all the way to last year's mayoral campaign.

Great.

Mamdani was a little-known state lawmaker.

He was a Democratic socialist.

He was the kind of guy that when he got into the race for mayor, nobody thought he could win.