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from https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/anti-ice-riots-are-completely-unjustified

Anti-ICE Riots Are Completely Unjustified
City Journal Podcast

Podcast
Jun 09 2025

Charles Fain Lehman, Nicole Gelinas, John Ketcham, and Rafael Mangual
discuss the violent protests in Los Angeles, the New York City
Democratic mayoral primary, and the best Broadway musicals.

Audio Transcript
Welcome back to a very special in-person episode of the City Journal
Podcast. I'm your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me today on this
All-New Yorker in New York panel are my colleagues, Nicole Gelinas of Manhattan, John Ketcham of Queens, and Rafael Mangual of Long Island. I
got that all right, right? Yeah.

Rafael Mangual: I’m originally from Brooklyn. Brooklyn. I gave you some
New York red.

Charles Fain Lehman: That's true. He's originally from Brooklyn. Yeah,
so we got three boroughs here.

John Ketcham: We're all New York.

Charles Fain Lehman: Do we have any colleagues from Staten Island? We
need some Staten Island representation at the Manhattan Institute.

Rafael Mangual: We used to have some. Shout out Isaac Gorodetski.

John Ketcham: It might just pervade the Institute.

Charles Fain Lehman: I love Staten Island. It's America's most urban
deep red county and I respect them for that. I want to take us right
into the news of the day.

President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard deployed in Los
Angeles after anti-ICE protests turned into violence, rioting, things
burning, the usual. The protests in turn come after an increase in
immigration enforcement in California. Democrats are charging ICE and
Trump with provoking the protests. Meanwhile, Republicans are saying,
this is yet another example of Democratic lawlessness, so I'm going to
throw it to the whole panel. What do we make of these events? What's
going on in Los Angeles?

Rafael Mangual: It's not Trump who provoked the protests. It's people
like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom who made these spectacular statements
using all kinds of apocalyptic language saying that, you this is a
terror campaign and this is, you know, sowing chaos and they're tearing families apart. That's what prompts people to get angry enough to, you
know, turn out in large numbers and wave foreign flags and set cars on
fire and hurl, you know, large rocks at police cars passing from
overpass. Like, it's, you know, it's infuriating. The idea, it is this
sort of ongoing campaign of gaslighting that the Democrats really
mastered in this kind post-Ferguson era to deal with those protests. And
I don't think people are buying it anymore and I think that's a good
thing, but it is still just no less infuriating when they try to sort of rearrange reality for you before your own eyes.

John Ketcham: You can see where the left is coming from. From their
point of view, President Trump has consistently tried to push the
envelope, especially when it comes to immigration matters, Kilmar Garcia
being one of the examples, right? And so when you have images of
Secretary Noem at CECOT in El Salvador, I think that does raise genuine
fear among some people in some communities. I mean, maybe not everybody
shares it. Maybe it's unreasonable. But those are the images that get
presented to some people. And I just wish that the way immigration
enforcement has been had been carried out from the beginning were a
little different. I wish that, for example, the Helmsley Building, right
next to our office, were full of immigration courts and judges carrying
out the orderly administration of justice and showing everyone that yes, immigration enforcement is being handled in an orderly, appropriate and
serious way, but we didn't really get that, and so I think you are
seeing some of the ramifications.

Rafael Mangual: It's a fair point, but I don't think that the Trump administration would have gotten any credit had they done it that way.

John Ketcham: Fair, absolutely. I agree. I agree.

Rafael Mangual: This is all based on who is doing it, right? We didn't
hear a peep out of the far left of the Democrats, certainly nothing
close to what we're seeing now when Barack Obama was deporting way more
people on a regular basis, when people like Hillary Clinton and Joe
Biden on campaign trails would say things like, “if you want to stay in
this country, we'll give you path to citizenship, but you got to get to
the back of the line and learn English.” I mean, you know, that sounds
like something Donald Trump might say, and nobody said a word about it.
to me, this is really driven by the fact that it's Donald Trump doing
it. They hate him. They won't give him any credit, despite the fact that
the immigration enforcement campaign is the one thing that he's doing
that's incredibly popular. It's the reason that he was elected. Nothing
about what he's done in L.A. is surprising. It shouldn't take anyone by surprise. I mean he said he was going to do it. This is what he ran on.
This is why he was elected, and frankly, you know when I think regular Americans turn on the news and they see a sea of Mexican flags being
waved, and, you know, a large group of people where you know, whose
faces are lit up by fires that were set to cars, I think that only
builds support for that kind of agenda. So, you know, ultimately I think
this backfires on them.

Nicole Gelinas: Some of this goes back to who controls the narrative of
the summer of 2020, where you had rioting in Minneapolis, you had
rioting in New York City, you had rioting in Seattle and Portland and
other major urban areas, and we had the Democratic narrative saying this happened on Trump's watch, even though states are clearly responsible
for maintaining their own order. So where does the political blame,
blaming Governor Newsom stop, and blaming President Trump for not
maintaining order begin? Because you had the Democrats want it both
ways, that all of this rioting in 2020 was Trump's fault, if it existed
at all, but if he were to attempt to maintain order, that would be unconstitutional.

Now it would, I agree with John, I think it would be better not to start
from here. You don't want the National Guard deployed unless the
governor asks for it. Has this risen to that level? Probably not. If you
look back to Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago, it was the governor of
Louisiana who specifically asked President Bush to deploy the National
Guard. 50,000 troops deployed, the biggest peacetime deployment of the
National Guard on U.S. soil, but that was another instance where it got
so out of control, it would have been better to do it earlier, before
the governor had asked for it. So where is that line where the president
can ignore the governor and send the National Guard in? Maybe not here,
but all of these things have to be considered when thinking about who is
being blamed, how far do you let it get out of control, and so forth.

John Ketcham: We live in a very polarized country. We can recognize that
Donald Trump will probably not get credit where credit would be due in
certain circumstances but doing the right thing in terms of
institutional stability, in terms of the rule of law, is something that
he should pursue anyway. There’s no justification for the type of civil unrest, the burning of vehicles, the violence against law enforcement
that we saw. No excuse or justification for that but we do have to
wonder what might have been if a more measured approach from the
beginning were taken but that one that still has a great deal of
seriousness in that.

Charles Fain Lehman: I mean I think that, you know, the administration's position which I find persuasive is, you know, they have a mandate more
than anything else, right, they had essentially two electoral mandates.
One was to get immigration under control. The other was to deal with the
price level. They've done okay on the latter, up and down, but on the
former like that's the thing, as Ralf alludes to, is their greatest
popular mandate. And so think their argument is like... And you know,
I've argued, Daniel Di Martino and I had a piece about this saying what
they need to do is scale up resources. There's a section in the, the,
uh, One Big Beautiful Bill Act, uh, trying to fund more of this. We'll
see if it gets through. Um, at the same time, I think the argument is
like, we have a mandate to do this. We're going to do this by whatever
means are available to us within the sort of broad constraints of law.
The other thing that I’ll say that I think is important here is the administration's done a very good job picking its enemies. You know,
this is the question to me, this is, like, how deliberate are they being
about this? Like I think about Kilmer Garcia, the guy that we talked
about on the show before, who they accidentally deported to El Salvador,
and then it turned out they're bringing him back for human trafficking
charges. He's been indicted by a grand jury. He beats his wife. And this
is like the people that people were jumping to defend. Ditto these
protesters where, you know, I don't have strong misgiving about
deploying ICE officials to do immigration raids in California, but like
even if I did, I would still rather politically be on that side than on
the side of the people who are burning cars. And I think that the administration comes out stronger because they are positioned against
that population.

Nicole Gelinas: Well, we still haven't settled on a definition of what
is a peaceful protest. Is setting a Waymo on fire peaceful? If half of
the political leadership of the country would not term that a riot, that
causes issues of when would they step in to stop this. And they did not
step in to stop it in 2020. We had, you know, I was in Manhattan all
summer of 2020, never left. It was clearly rioting, massive property destruction all throughout Midtown and lower Manhattan, but yet the
narrative was this is protesting, it is not rioting.

Rafael Mangual: They know the difference. The reason that they're
failing to draw the line is because it's politically inconvenient for
them to draw it where everybody in the world knows it is. No one thinks
that setting someone else's car on fire is peaceful. No one thinks that
that's okay. The only question here is that if it's our side doing it,
we're going to really drag our feet to condemn it because it makes us
look bad. And you see that in some of the responses on X today. I mean
Governor Newsom, you know, “Angelenos, please don't riot. You're falling
into the trap.” No, don't riot because rioting is bad. Don't riot
because you shouldn't set things on fire, not because it gives the other
side some kind of credit. Alex, I can never pronounce his last name. The
guy from Cato who’s like the open borders guy.

Charles Fain Lehman: Oh, Nowrasteh.

Rafael Mangual: Alex Nowrasteh posted on X this morning or last night, I
can't remember. Same thing. “They want chaos. You're giving them what
they want. This is only going to increase support.” It's like, no, this
is bad because it's bad. It's objectively bad. The only reason that they
are kind of dragging their feet here is because they don't want to admit
that it's their side doing it because they realize that they have a real political problem with violence. That's part of the Democrats' identity.
I've been saying it on the show for a long time.

And it's hard for them to walk away from it. You have the summer of
2020. You have all of the stuff that's happened since October 7th, the
shooting of two Israeli embassy employees. You have the guys set on fire
out in Colorado. That was a peaceful protest. And who made it
unpeaceful? The guy with the Molotov cocktails, obviously, right? You
have what's been going on on college campuses. There is just a sort of never-ending series of violence following left-wing causes wherever they
go, and people are noticing.

John Ketcham: See, my worry is that this is emblematic of deeper
political failures, right? And I worry about the institutional failures
and the instability that breaking customs and norms causes. And, you
know, we seem to be accelerating in that regard, both in terms of the willingness to break laws and to engage in these riotous acts, but also
to meet that with a robust response. In this case, it remains to be seen whether the President will invoke the Insurrection Act, for example, but
if that happens, that's a major escalation. I would hope that it doesn't
come to that.

Charles Fain Lehman: I've been thinking, I'm going to take us out after
this, because I want to make sure we have plenty of time for our second
topic. But I've been thinking a lot about late City Journal contributor
Fred Siegel's concept of the riot ideology, which he wrote about both
for CJ and elsewhere, which is, you know, in the 1960s, leading liberal political figures responded to the riots of late 60s by saying, you
know, this is downstream of legitimate concerns about structural racism.
This is about, you know, lack of access. This is about poverty.

And you see similar language: “Well, this is really a legitimate
response or a predictable response to what the administration is doing.”
And Siegel's point was like, what you are doing—this is a classic like neoconservative insight—what you are doing when you make those arguments
is creating an incentive. You're saying, we are going to… We are willing
to affect political change in response to these riots, which is a great
reason to do more rioting. And, you know, I think somebody said, I
forget who, at the start of Trump Two, we've seen much less popular
protest. And the argument was like, well, we're just going to see much
more direct violent action. Cause it's like the protests don't seem to
work. A majority of the public, at least then was on his side and ran to
the side on certain issues. We got to do something more drastic to try
and affect our political goals. I think it started what we're seeing.

That, hopefully, is a good segue into our exit, which is, I want to ask everybody. I was just talking to Brian Anderson, the Editor in Chief of
City Journal, and he said we should make sure we're doing a lot of
coverage on this and related topics because he thinks it's just going to
get worse over the course of the summer. So do people think this is
going to be another summer of 2020? Are you worried about, on a scale of
1 to 10, how concerned are you about continued rioting over the next
couple of months? I'll throw it to Nicole first.

Nicole Gelinas: One thing that the summer of 2020 taught me was how
quickly things can change and get out of control and escalate. I mean, I remember sitting in the backyard and it's like there's helicopters and
they're boarding up the windows and it's kind of like, well, yesterday
we would not have thought that this could happen. And today it is
happening and seems normal. So I am much more wary than I would have
been five years ago that right now things seem fine. The city seems
under control, things are going well, but that can change very quickly,
and do we have city and state leadership in place to recognize when that
is changing and to step in before it gets out of control?

John Ketcham: Right. I also fear the tit for tat escalation here, and
that is just going to be even more destabilizing for the country. I
agree with Nicole. I've been here in New York City throughout the
entirety of the 2020 summer. The fireworks that were going off, the
riots in the streets, it was just real mayhem. it's something we, think,
as Americans should come together as and say, you know, this is just not acceptable. We do have a political mechanism to adjudicate our
differences, and we should respect that.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, look, I think the lesson of 2020 was that we
created a permission structure for this kind of violent behavior. If you
look at just the year after George Floyd was killed, there was something
like 130 criminal justice reforms enacted across like 40 states in a
very short period of time, all following months of riots. What that
tells the left, I think, was that this is a way for you to get what you
want. And if that was a lesson that they drew from that, then I do think
that we'll see more of this.

What's different here is that this is a federal issue, immigration,
right? So I'm not sure that we're going to see a ton more protests on
this because what are they going to get out of it, right? The Trump administration's not going to give them a win. At least, I don't think
so. So, you know, if the question is restricted to immigration, I don't
think we're going to see a ton of these. But I do think that the left
has sort of very problematically embraced violence as a means to an end.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, I this gets to sort of the core
question for me that decides this, which is like, you know, can the sort
of center left walk the walk in addition to the sort of moderating
talking that it has done thus far? We've talked about big city figures,
Daniel Lurie, Eric Adams, we’ll segue into the New York City mayoralty
in a second. Gavin Newsom, 2028 hopefuls who want to run away from
Defund the Police and run away from the summer of 2020, and also want to
run away from Donald Trump. And the question is like, can they walk that tightrope? And the only way to do that is to be dispositively in favor
of law and order in such a way that Trump can't sort of take advantage
of the situation for his own political purposes. It's like if Gavin
Newsom was focused on fully suppressing the violence in LA, if the LAPD
and LA civilian leadership were putting out press releases being like,
this was mostly peaceful protest, it's fine, then Donald Trump would
have no opening. And can they resist the urge to fight with him over
dealing with the actual riots in their streets is the core question to me.

Nicole Gelinas: Yes, I mean Trump is always a response to Democratic
failure. We saw that in 2016. We've seen it's been 10 years, but yet
they never learn the lesson that you neutralize Trump by just being
competent. Can Gavin Newsom competently control his own rioters? If he
can, that neutralizes Trump's role here.

Rafael Mangual: I think the answer is no, because he needs them.

Charles Fain Lehman: All right. All right. I want to take advantage of…
I want to make sure you have plenty of time for talking about the next
topic. So we'll go from local leaders to local leaders. Listeners know
that we're very invested in the outcome of the New York City Democratic
mayoral primary. We all have been following with interest. Last week,
the mayoral, the first mayoral debate happened. The next one is this
week. We're in between. Last week we saw nine people on stage. This week
it's supposed to be seven. One of the two who's been excluded from the
debate, Jessica Ramos, just shockingly endorsed Andrew Cuomo after
spending like a decade decrying him as Satan. So what were people's
impressions of the mayoral debate? Where are we in the race and I wanted
to make sure we hit this in this you know very special New York episode
but I'll throw it to the panel.

Rafael Mangual: It's depressing. It's depressing. This is the best that
the best city in the world can do. And especially coming off of 2020,
and all of the things that the city has experienced in the way of
population loss and crime increases and disorder increases and people
like Zohran Mamdani are skyrocketing in the polls.

Charles Fain Lehman: Friend of the pod.

Rafael Mangual: You know, and it was just, it was... It was empty. It
was poorly performed.

Nicole Gelinas: But why do you think Mamdani is rising?

Rafael Mangual: Because I think he's run an incredibly effective
campaign that creates the impression that he is popular and that his
ideas are popular. Just look at his social media feed. He has hundreds,
if not thousands, of followers who are just religiously reposting and
making sure that every one of his videos and posts is optimally ratioed
and you know that and just well done, and the aesthetic is there, and I
think it creates the impression that, hey this is New York, he's a young
guy, and he's got you know a t-shirt with a blazer on and he's cool and
blah blah blah, right? But it's like you know, he's actually dangerous.
His ideas are dangerous. The sort of people that he associates with are dangerous. His followers are exactly the kind of people that would set
cars on fire and that have shut down Grand Central Station. And then you
see someone like Whitney Tilson, for example, sits there and makes sense
and says things that are both vanilla but also speak to core
competencies of local government. And he's what, like at 1 percent? like awesome, you know?

John Ketcham: The million-dollar question is where is Zohran Mamdani's
ceiling? I mean the conventional wisdom from several months ago would
have said maybe 20 percent, 25 percent. Clearly he's got some higher
upside there and it's because he's got, as Ralph says, this very well calibrated machine. Many, many door knockers. They are canvassing as
many Democrats as they can.

And basically, he's able to mobilize better than all the others, I
think, including Andrew Cuomo on the ground game. Now, where Jessica
Ramos' endorsement of Cuomo is very important, I took that as being more important than AOC's endorsement of Mamdani. And why? Well, because
Ramos was the only Hispanic in the race, so she brings some Hispanic
votes to Cuomo. She has a lot of credibility and support with labor
unions. She's a champion of unions and will allow the unions that backed
her to go with Cuomo and buck the Working Families Party. And so
basically provides a shield for them allowing them to go to the more
moderate candidate. And then she does have a bit of a ground game
because on the more progressive side I think that she will bring some of
her supporters and volunteers to go and help Andrew Cuomo. whereas by
contrast the AOC endorsement is anyone who really loves AOC is going to
be voting for Mamdani anyway and ranking Mamdani first.

Nicole Gelinas: I think what’s interesting that we saw in the debate
that it's a strange election and that the incumbent is waiting until the general election, but candidates can run against Cuomo as the incumbent
and it leaves him vulnerable in more than just all of the baggage that
he brings with the sexual harassment allegations and the nursing homes
and the whole litany of things that people already know about. you know, Cuomo's ceiling is how many people dislike him, but that is compounded
by the fact that if you're just vaguely unhappy and you don't know why
you're unhappy, Mamdani, as the emerging leading opponent here, can say,
if you are unhappy it is this guy's fault and point to Cuomo correctly
or incorrectly so he faces the vulnerability of being an incumbent even
though he's been out of office for four years and he because of that
Cuomo benefits from low turnout. Mamdani benefits from and massive get
out to vote operation where all of these enthusiastic people that
registered to vote against Trump, do they come out or not? If they do,
that's bad for Cuomo. If they don't and you just get your union members
and your older homeowner voters and your super prime voters who vote in
every election in a low turnout race, that benefits Cuomo. But after all
of this and we go through June 24th, we basically have the same race
over again, which is really strange. You just lose all the little
candidates like Tilson who aren't getting any attention anyway. You're
still in the general election you still have Cuomo, Mamdani,

Charles Fain Lehman: You think Mamdani is going to run?

Rafael Mangual: He has a Working Families

Nicole Gelinas: So you have a rerun of the Cuomo versus Mamdani race but
with Adams as a wild card in the mix for November.

John Ketcham: Which has not happened in a multi-way general election
that's competitive since 1969.

Charles Fain Lehman: this is the re-elect, right? The liberal line.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, this is why I don't think Mamdani ceiling in the
primary is all that important because for the first time in my living
memory This race is really going to come down to the general right in
New York We're so used to the race kind of being decided by the outcome
of the Democratic primary because in the city this blue the Republican
almost never wins, right?

John Ketcham: We should just note that New York City is a closed closed
primary system So in order to participate in the Democratic primary you
have to be a registered Democrat and most of the time that means that
the winner of that Democratic primary goes on to an easy general
election win, given the overwhelming registration advantage that
Democrats have.

Rafael Mangual: even if Mamdani loses the primary, he still runs into
the Working Families Party. He's got, you'll have name recognition by
that point. And so his ceiling, it's less important in isolation and it
becomes important with respect to the potential floors of the other
likely three candidates that are going to be in the race competing for
the same vote.

Charles Fain Lehman: You do the math. You do the math. If Mamdani's
getting 45 percent, that's the poll number, if Mamdani's getting 45
percent of Democrats, Democrats are about two thirds of the you know
rounding or you say Montana gets 30 percent in the general that leaves
70 percent Something like 20 percent will vote for Curtis Lee wa so that
leaves 50 and you know If it goes if half of that 50 goes each to Cuomo
and Adams the Mamdani wins So I think there is there is a path there
which is Alarming to me.

John Ketcham: Well, the primary is ranked choice, but the general
election is not right and so you do have the ability for vote splitting
and plurality winner in the general election right to Charles's point
that is

Charles Fain Lehman: That is my concern. Was there anyone else, I mean
this may be, you know, a non-starter question, but was there anyone else
who stuck out in the Democratic in the in the primary debate? I thought
there were a couple of people who were… I mean nobody was nobody was
perfect, and I'm curious what people make of the other of the other
candidates. Tilsen was great. Whitney Tilsen, who is really an MI
Democrat, I guess.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I thought he was great, and I thought everyone
else on stage was just completely unimpressive. Even Mamdani, who has
sort of built, I actually thought the debate was probably one of the
worst moments of his campaign because it's such a sharp contrast between
the character that we saw on stage and the character that's been
promoted on social media that seems put together and quick on his feet.
He was just...

John Ketcham: He didn't bring the charisma.

Rafael Mangual: I mean it was actually really interesting to see. I
wonder if other voters, you know, picked up on it. But yeah, I mean the takeaway for me was the complete lack of anything impressive. And just
in the way of things being said, of just presentation styles, charisma,
you know, New Yorkers deserve better.

Nicole Gelinas: The structural difficulty is Cuomo is really vulnerable
from the center and being the architect of the move toward criminal
justice leniency between 2017 and 2019.

Charles Fain Lehman: Which he doesn't want to tell anyone.

Nicole Gelinas: He doesn't want to talk about it. I mean, someone asked
him about it at the debate and he spent that time criticizing Brad
Lander's wife. And he did that on purpose because he was deflecting the question. But no one consistently on the stage criticizes Cuomo from the
center because they've come up in their careers in low turn

low-attention elections so they can pander to the left and not get a lot
of attention for that. It's hard for them to walk back that once they're
in a higher-attention, broader race. And ironically, Cuomo, he's not embarrassed to just completely do a U-turn on what he did and said
before because he just sort of has that hutzpah to go out and do that,
he's beating them just on sheer force of personality.

John Ketcham: We were discussing this a few days ago. Andrew Cuomo is
almost like the embodiment of all of humanity's contradictions. All of
us are in some way a tangle of contradictions and adept politicians can capitalize on that to remake themselves at will. Donald Trump does this
pretty well too.

Rafael Mangual: That and he’s a compulsive liar.

John Ketcham: Different angles on the same thing

Charles Fain Lehman: Potato, potato

John Ketcham: I found it interesting that very few candidates really
except Whitney criticized Mamdani. Yeah, and this is a dynamic. Yeah, I
think brought about by ranked choice voting because they are afraid to
have Mamdani voters not rank them somewhere, but to me that's a bit
misplaced because if Mamdani is ranked first, which I believe he will be
on the vast majority of his supporters, anything ranked under him is
just never going to count because Mamdani will wind up in the last
round. So for someone like Brad Lander or Scott Stringer, I would think
the approach is tell Mamdani voters, me before Mamdani, and try to rack
up as much first rankings as possible. I don't know whether that's going
to be viable, but at the same time, it seems to me a more plausible
winning strategy than to simply avoid attacking Mamdani and thereby
facilitate his rise indirectly.

Nicole Gelinas: And how much do people's contradictions show up on their ballots? I mean, it's very unpredictable. How many people who rank
Mamdani also rank Cuomo fifth?

Charles Fain Lehman: But there will be some of those right? Right. This
is like, right, this is like the Trump, I think the Post had coverage of somebody who's a Trump-AOC voter who's now a Trump-Mamdani voter.

Rafael Mangual: Oh yeah, I saw that piece. That's strange.

Charles Fain Lehman: Similar, similar, similar population.

John Ketcham: There are a lot of low turnout, low information voters
and, yeah, I mean, it's, it's just hard. And in the Democratic primary,
you don't see any other information about the candidates on the ballot,
right? If you don't do your homework and many, many voters do not do
their homework, it's just the nature of the election, and just for
context, when we say low turnout election the last one in 2021 was 26.5
percent and that was the first one—

Charles Fain Lehman: Of Democrats

John Ketcham: Of eligible Democrats, and you know there was the first
one without an incumbent in a long time, and the first one using ranked
choice voting too, so we're not going to be…

Charles Fain Lehman: Do you think it's going to higher this time?

John Ketcham: I think a bit probably

Charles Fain Lehman: Because of the Mamdani turnout effort?

John Ketcham: Mamdani and, you know, it is a really contentious race.
It's chaotic in a way that the other, I mean the other one was, but we
had COVID and other things. But I wouldn't expect to break 30 percent
though.

Charles Fain Lehman: So let me take us out. We're talking about Jessica
Ramos dropping out. I suspect that there is some kind of deal that
happened there. We may see Ramos in a position of influence in a future
Cuomo administration. Who knows? Great questions.

Nicole Gelinas: She has at City Hall before, so I think we can assume
she would want a labor negotiation or another major job in City Hall.

Charles Fain Lehman: But people are definitely starting to do the
political math of if I endorse what happens. So here's my question.
Who's next and who are they endorsing for? Who's the next person to drop
out? Or is it nobody?

John Ketcham: Ranked choice voting disincentivizes dropouts, but I think
what we're seeing is a recognition that ranked choice voting is really
hard to coordinate. I know an abacus is a really powerful addition, you
know, device. I don't know how to use one, right? And so I really

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