"The people vacuuming trading floors & stocking your pantry voted Mamdani"
I'm a portfolio manager in a New York hedge fund, and my job is to understand what's really going on in the world. When I see people in financial services freaking out about Zohran Mamdani, I have one thing to say: you have not been paying attention.
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New York is not just Manhattan. If you're paying $900 for your Sushi at Bar Masa and you're shocked that a socialist has been voted in, get out of your bubble. Go to Queens, go to the Bronx, to Brooklyn, to Staten Island.
Look out there, across the water. That's where the people stocking your pantry, vacuuming your trading floor and fixing your Range Rover live. These are also the people who voted for Zohran Mamdani.
I didn't. I vote Republican. But I respect democracy and I understand why this has happened. My daughter plays a lot of soccer, and we get out of Manhattan every weekend. I see the other kids, whose parents are driving 20 year-old Toyotas and working three jobs to make ends meet.
This has happened because the ladders that hold society together have disappeared. My grandfather came to New York as a poor immigrant and pulled himself up. I attended an Ivy League University and became a managing director (MD) in a major bank before moving to the buy-side. This path isn't available any more.
When you kick away that ladders that create the connections between social classes so that people have no hope of mobility, no matter how hard they work, this is what happens. This is why you had people coming to America on the Mayflower in the first place. It's obvious, but people go crazy when you mention this.
New York will survive socialism. It survived September 11th, it survived 2008, and it survived COVID and this is simply a necessary corrective. No one is going to move out. Who would live in Long Island when you're hours away from the office and your kids are at home? Who would move to Miami when there are no private school places available. We're all here in New York. We need to live with it.
Lucas Fernandino is a pseudonym
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