I was jealous of my New York City friends and family who are able to vote for Zohran Mamdani for mayor.

I’ll get back to that point in a bit. But first, let’s discuss Election Day 2025.

It doesn’t garner near the attention that Election Day 2024 did or even Election Day 2026 will. That’s understandable to an extent. The people on the ballot in a presidential, gubernatorial or congressional race get lots of attention on TV or online.

But this year’s elections – if there is, in fact, an election where you live – are generally local. You might know the town supervisor as the guy who lives a couple of blocks away or the woman whose kid goes to the same school as yours. But they’re not generally prominent figures – people who show up on a screen in your home.

Until they are. Local governments are like farm teams in baseball. Most of the people involved never make it to the big leagues – but generally you become a national or state political figure after winning some smaller race in a community.

For example, I just saw a social media post from U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Cory Booker. His first election was to a municipal council in Newark, New Jersey, in 1997. Mitch McConnell, the venerable Kentucky senator and former party leader, first won a county executive race in 1977.

And even if these people up for election next week don’t become national names, they potentially affect your life in many ways. 

Councils appropriate money and help determine who gets taxed and by how much. Judges preside over criminal and civil cases or even that speeding ticket you want to fight. Town clerks collect your property tax money and send you the receipts that you need for your IRS filing. The highway superintendent makes assignments for clearing your street after a storm.

So the people who say something like “Well, nobody’s up this year, why do I need to vote?” don’t really understand how our system works. That what happens at the local level is just as important as what happens nationally.

The most prominent races this year are for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Incumbents are term-limited in both states – a Democrat in New Jersey, a Republican in Virginia. 

The Democratic candidates in both states – Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger – are ahead in pre-election polls, but are hardly shoo-ins. And even if they were, it’s important to send a message to Trump and his ilk that their conduct is unacceptable.

We should be trying to beat him bigly.

There are also mayoral races in many of the nation’s big cities. Including, of course, New York – the race which has dominated political coverage for months.

The leading candidate, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, may be running the best campaign I have seen in my lifetime – and I’ve been a political junkie since I was 5 years old. It is not, as fear-mongering detractors argue, that he is converting gullible millennials into socialist zombies.

What Mamdani does so well is listen. He spent the first part of his campaign figuring out what New Yorkers want – to afford living within in the five boroughs. His proposals, which are more detailed than any I’ve seen in a campaign, get at how he will address costs. Nobody is complaining that he is not specific.

Friends outside New York ask if Mamdani translates to their part of the nation. The answer is not that Georgia or Illinois or Virginia need necessarily embrace his democratic socialism. The answer is that Democrats need to hear what their potential constituents are saying about their problems, then propose solutions that people believe could work.  

It’s a trial-and-error process, not a Mount Olympus process. Making people feel as though they’re invested in their community’s success is how Democrats will re-emerge as the dominant political party – and, in the process, save the United States from the Republican-spearheaded drive toward totalitarianism.

Where I live, northwest of the city in Rockland County, politics are a little bleaker – and very weird.

Rank-and-file Democrats can’t stand the county executive, a former New York City cop named Ed Day. He always seems to run on fear of the city, that we in Rockland don’t ‘share the values” of the Gotham menace.

Which is shorthand for “we don’t have a lot of people of color up here” and we don’t want any more.

For example, Day’s campaign literature – a waste of money, as you’ll see in a bit – talks about how he managed to fight New York City’s effort to ship 400 undocumented immigrants to hotels in the county.

What Day doesn’t say is that those immigrants were shipped to Manhattan by Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas, used as political pawns to make some stupid point. If those clucks wanted to maybe help alleviate a problem of getting overwhelmed by migrants, maybe they would have worked with neighboring areas to relocate the, you know, human beings. 

But expecting DeSantis or Abbott to act in a way consistent with the Christian teachings they boast of heeding is folly. And you can count Ed Day with them.

The biggest problem with Rockland, as I alluded to last week in my post on the No King’s Day event in Nanuet, is that there are few young people here. Young professionals do not want to live in a place where people are looking to ban books in schools and where the only jobs being created are low-wage ones in warehouses.

But the Republicans in Rockland, who attained dominance only within the last decade or so, have figured out how to maintain power. They’ve basically co-opted the Democratic party organization – so much so that there is no Democrat running against Day. (Which makes you wonder why he wasted any money on campaign literature). There is an independent who qualified for the ballot.

I voted for him when I cast my early vote this week. I voted for whatever Democrats were on the ballot for town and county offices – unless they were cross-endorsed by Republicans.

There were three other races in which no Democrat was on the ballot. For highway commissioner, I wrote in my son, who at least has some experience working for the town. For a judgeship, I wrote in a friend who lives in the county (and usually reads this blog). 

When it came to a town judgeship, I was hard pressed to come up with anyone else to write in.

And that’s when I remembered how jealous I was that New York City folk have Mamdani to rally around.

So I wrote him in. 

There are those of you who think that I wasted my vote. You’re entitled to that opinion – let’s face it, he’s not going to beat the Republican woman running unopposed.

But, first, she ain’t going to be elected unanimously. I took care of that.

And, second, I wanted to send a message that I want to see candidates like Mamdani in Rockland who are more receptive to the real needs of the community and less interested in scaring us with New York City bogeymen.

So, back to the first sentence of this: I was jealous. I’m not any more.

Make yourself feel better and do good by your community. Vote in this election and make your voice heard. Even if you write-in Zohran Mamdani.