Zohran Mamdani’s rise should teach NYC’s non-radicals to invest in the long game

Now that tossing $25 million into last-minute spending to promote Andrew Cuomo failed utterly to stop pro-Intifada, anti-cop socialist Zohran Mamdani from winning the Democratic mayoral primary, perhaps New York business leaders will finally realize that political “investment” requires an eye on the long game, and fostering an entire infrastructure that can produce credible centrists candidates.

“Crying over Mamdani is, as they say, a bit rich when it comes from the rich,” snarked The Post’s Charles Gasparino, since the “city’s business class sat idly by” as the local left grew ever more powerful.

New York magazine’s Errol Louis was even more on-point: “The same people dumping millions into last-minute attack ads should have been investing time and money to recruit, educate, and encourage young leaders.”

Dumping a ton of cash in at the last minute can work when it comes to passing or defeating a single bill, or influencing any particular government decision — but altering the political climate requires steady attention and investment.

“The city’s business community,” writes Gasparino, “is the most politically neutered class of people I have ever met.”

Partly that’s just fear of sticking your neck out; partly that so many think of themselves as “liberal” or “progressive” without ever noticing how drastically the meaning of those labels has shifted; partly the knowledge deep down that they just don’t understand how politics works.

And a “go along to get along” mindset in a Democratic Party-dominated city and state has resulted in very little pushback as the hard left came to dominate that party.

The political-talent pipeline in this town is no longer about community-based clubhouses; it’s about social-service nonprofits and public-sector unions that feed off the taxpayers on a scale that dwarfs Tammany Hall’s wildest dreams.

Each in his own way, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg were political unicorns — Rudy rising to prominence as a federal prosecutor; Mike popping in with a huge fortune that still wouldn’t have won him office except for the crisis atmosphere in the immediate wake of 9/11.

And all through the 20 years of their mayoralties, the left has been creeping up from the bottom of city government, gaining City Council seats once held by moderates, with every successive borough president, comptroller and so on steadily more progressive than the last.

Meanwhile, supposedly “nonpartisan” reforms — taxpayer funding of campaigns; the “ranked choice” voting rules — further added to insiders’ advantages, making it that much harder for fresh faces and voices to break in unless, like Mamdani, they had the support of a political machine like the Working Families “Party” or the Democratic Socialist apparat.

Building such infrastructure takes years; interests that feed off the public put in the time, talent, care and effort to do it.

Hiring an expensive consultant for a single campaign can’t match those results.

Even if the city and the business community somehow dodge the Mamdani bullet this fall, the left will keep coming back, ever stronger, unless and until the folks that get fed off of start doing “political investing” for the long term.

That means finding and fostering young political moderates, supporting institutions (even, yes, the city’s near-extinct Republican Party) that will oppose the left on a million minor battles that never make a single headline — and not thinking you can fix things by paying attention at the last minute.