Tim Miller

So you're in touch with that.

You come from the left wing of the party.

You're not really apologetic about that.

And some of your fellow, you know, in your ideological cohort, if I asked them that question, they would say populist economics, you know, rent freeze, you know, burn, burn.

You know, they would have gone immediately to ideology.

It would be fine if he's comfortable in his own skin and a good speaker and all of that.

But he had Ezra Klein's politics.

It wouldn't have worked.

That's what they would say.

I believe that ideology matters.

You can probably see the Gramsci somewhere on my shelf behind me.

So I do believe that ideology really, really, really matters.

However, really clear that when you're trying to get elected,

in a city where Donald Trump did almost 18 to 20% better in 2024 than he did in 2020.

You have to recognize that the electorate is really complicated, really diverse, has a number of things that it cares like deeply about.

If you look at the Venn diagram of consensus across the board, but you're not going to get universal agreement on all things.

And at a time when we are still kind of recovering from the hangover of the pandemic,

the spiritual malaise that many of our cities still have following the COVID-19 dystopia, that folks actually want to be helped to feel great about the direction that we're on.

And I thought that the leading candidate in the primary and in the general election

Andrew Cuomo had a dystopian view of the city that was not dissimilar to the way Donald Trump describes our urban centers and this notion that I alone can solve it.