Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Zohran Mandani did not vote for himself on the Democratic Party line on election day.
Politico is reporting that, according to a spokesman, Mamdani voted for himself on a third party ballot line.
118 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Obama endorses de Blasio, with purpose
It was announced in a statement released by the de Blasio campaign (which is, incidentally, studded with former Obama staffers) in which the president cited key de Blasio legislative goals, like universal pre-kindergarten, as a reason he’ll be “a great mayor.”
The wording could give de Blasio a boost as he seeks to rally state lawmakers in support of his school plan, which will require Albany to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it, giving Democratic legislators, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, some cover for going along with it.
And for Obama, there’s no downside. Polls show de Blasio with a solid lead over Republican Joe Lhota, and he had no reason to be late in embracing the man who stands to become the city’s first Democratic mayor in two decades.
Obama’s statement said, in part: “Progressive change is the centerpiece of Bill de Blasio’s vision for New York City, and it’s why he will be a great mayor of America’s largest city. Whether it’s ensuring pre-kindergarten is available for every four-year old, expanding after-school programs for every middle school student who wants and needs them, making affordable housing available for more New York families and preserving community hospitals, Bill’s agenda for New York is marked by bold, courageous ideas that address the great challenges of our time.”
It was announced in a statement released by the de Blasio campaign (which is, incidentally, studded with former Obama staffers) in which the president cited key de Blasio legislative goals, like universal pre-kindergarten, as a reason he’ll be “a great mayor.”
The wording could give de Blasio a boost as he seeks to rally state lawmakers in support of his school plan, which will require Albany to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it, giving Democratic legislators, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, some cover for going along with it.
And for Obama, there’s no downside. Polls show de Blasio with a solid lead over Republican Joe Lhota, and he had no reason to be late in embracing the man who stands to become the city’s first Democratic mayor in two decades.
Obama’s statement said, in part: “Progressive change is the centerpiece of Bill de Blasio’s vision for New York City, and it’s why he will be a great mayor of America’s largest city. Whether it’s ensuring pre-kindergarten is available for every four-year old, expanding after-school programs for every middle school student who wants and needs them, making affordable housing available for more New York families and preserving community hospitals, Bill’s agenda for New York is marked by bold, courageous ideas that address the great challenges of our time.”
https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2013/09/obama-endorses-de-blasio-with-purpose-009000
Was that supposed to be a gotcha?
Guess I should’ve voted Cuomo…
and win the DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S nomination, right? So why the spite? That's some Nina Turner level of hate right there. What good purpose would such a petty act of "defiance" and snubbing the party serve? Can someone help me to understand this man? That's certainly not the type of behavior I'd expect from someone who wants to find strength through unity. It's definitely not a way to help grow the party or to encourage others to support the party. It was a poor decision even before he takes his oath of office. This has echoes of the leave it blank philosophy and contempt for the party.
Does this "help" the NYWFP? Is this one of those situations where if a "third party" candidate (??) gets enough votes on their line, then the party qualifies for matching funds or a guaranteed seat at the debate table, or something like that?
If so, something like that only serves to weaken and dilute the Democratic party's support. I don't understand why he would do that? Can anyone explain?
Last edited Sat Nov 8, 2025, 02:59 PM - Edit history (1)
They nominated a random Republican to run against Democrat Mondaire Jones in the 2024 NY-17 general election.
Republican Mike Lawler wound up retaining his seat.
How embarrassing for a political party to be played like that by Republicans.
The third party WFP had to spend the money its followers donated to run ads against its own candidate. That's incompetence at its most basic level.
Last edited Sat Nov 8, 2025, 03:01 PM - Edit history (1)
I stated facts and made a reasonable inference.
- WPF accidentally nominated a Republican to run in the NY-17 general election for a congressional seat
- WFP spent donor money on attack ads against its own candidate in a mad scramble to undo the damage
Reasonable inference: Accidentally nominating a spoiler candidate and then having to spend donated funds to campaign against the candidate it nominated demonstrates basic incompetence on the part of third party Working Family Party.
After Jones endorsed George Latimar in his primary against Jamaal Bowman, the WFP publicly rescinded its endorsement of and all electoral support for Mondaire Jones in the 2024 NY-17 primary. That left the door wide open for Republicans to game NY's primary system.
So yes, the WFP did actually accidentally nominate a Republican who did run as the candidate on the WFP ballot line in the 2024 NY-17 congressional election.
WFP candidate Republican Anthony Frascone received 2% of the vote in the general election.
I guess we’re back to third party candidates being a_okay again. 
The Anti-Defamation League Is Not What It Seems
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/emmaia-gelman-anti-defamation-league/
May 23, 2019
snip
The ADL’s persistent power in U.S. politics has been strangely unaffected by its history, probably because that history is so little known. The Ilhan Omar debate should be shaped by at least two aspects of it. The first is that the ADL has consistently sought to undermine the left, leveling a charge akin to dual loyalty: that the American left’s calls for redistribution of power, its solidarity with global movements, and its prioritization of people over states threaten the very concept of the state. Indeed the ADL, in addition to its stated mission of shoring up U.S. support for Israel, is deeply loyal to the U.S. state. The second is that the ADL has waged a long, vigorous, and successful campaign, alongside AIPAC, specifically to characterize Arab American political organizing as dual loyalty.
This history is particularly important because despite losing this particular battle with Omar and identifying more openly with the right (consider, for instance, the ADL’s celebration of Trump’s Jerusalem embassy move), the ADL is experiencing a renaissance in its visibility, influence, and fundraising power among well-meaning liberals. It is fueled by the new national interest in white supremacy, which the ADL has long surveilled and researched, and which the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been charged to ignore in favor of targeting Muslim communities. (The ADL advocated surveilling both.) The ADL’s ubiquity in U.S. discussions of white supremacy is exceeded only by the Klan’s: more than two-thirds of the 46,000 articles on white supremacists or white nationalists posted in the past year have referenced the ADL. That coverage has spiked by 1500 percent in 2019 alone, based on Factiva database searches for terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist.”
Link to tweet
At a time when it should be easier to see the ADL as a conservative knowledge production agency, a resurgence of concern with “hate” has only consolidated its power. The ADL’s power to mobilize against black leadership does not rest on leveraging anxieties about anti-Semitism. It draws instead on the ADL’s much broader authority it has won over anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-queer “hate.” It is a quasi-state role that the ADL developed in just a decade, throughout the 1980s: the period of collective U.S. desperation about white supremacist violence preceding the one we are in.
Like other major Jewish organizations (and unlike the many Jewish leftist organizations that have existed in opposition to it), the ADL has evinced a strong allegiance with the U.S. state. It was committed to its civilizing mission of settlement, and to capitalist individualism as the framework for rights. In addition to keeping watch over threats to the state—Nazism, Communism, or demands for equality that went too far—the ADL sought out or welcomed ways to participate in the administration of the state. It collaborated with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and 1950s; it also tried and largely failed for several decades to interest the FBI in considering it a partner in monitoring threats. (FBI files made public under Freedom of Information Act requests document some of these efforts.) It found an opening in civil rights work where, ten years after the Voting Rights Act, ongoing racial conflict and white supremacist violence produced a new wave of demands for state action.
snip
Last edited Sat Nov 8, 2025, 07:49 PM - Edit history (1)
There are still screen shots of her now-deleted October 8, 2023 celebratory Instagram posts.
The day after the October 7 attack, Gelman published a celebratory post on Instagram that included images of Hamas fighters bulldozing through the Israel-Gaza border. She expressed that she was “[e]xcited for millions of Americans who have nodded along with land acknowledgements to get behind this, and resist cries that actual decolonization (but not Israeli ethnic cleansing) is somehow ‘too much.’” Responding to a reply that, “They murdered 250 kids at a music festival, Emmaia,” she remarked, in part, that “there are very few deaths that I’d celebrate, but many uprisings against terrible, impossible conditions [...] resulted in deaths, including unjust deaths.”
https://www.adl.org/resources/article/institute-critical-study-zionism-five-things-know
===============================
Same screenshots of the same vile terrorist apologist, this time from a left-center source: the ADL.
records show
The unsealed court records also reveal how deeply involved Trump aide Stephen Miller was in the effort to revoke the visas of pro-Palestinian academics.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/09/pro-palestinian-deportation-documents-trial-00445238
As the Trump administration identified pro-Palestinian academics to target for deportation, it relied heavily on an anonymously-run pro-Israel website that has been criticized for doxxing, according to newly unsealed court documents and testimony at an ongoing trial.
To support President Donald Trump’s deportation drive, the Department of Homeland Security assembled a “tiger team” of intelligence analysts who built dossiers on about 100 foreign students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian activity, the records show.
More than 75 of those people were identified by the shadowy website Canary Mission, according to deposition testimony unveiled this week in a case challenging the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian scholars.
The federal judge currently overseeing a trial in the case unsealed the deposition transcripts, which contain hundreds of pages of sworn testimony by administration officials about the campus deportation effort. Some of the details in the transcripts were fleshed out in open court Wednesday as administration officials began to be called to the witness stand.
snip
The unsealed court records also reveal how deeply involved Trump aide Stephen Miller was in the effort to revoke the visas of pro-Palestinian academics.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/09/pro-palestinian-deportation-documents-trial-00445238
As the Trump administration identified pro-Palestinian academics to target for deportation, it relied heavily on an anonymously-run pro-Israel website that has been criticized for doxxing, according to newly unsealed court documents and testimony at an ongoing trial.
To support President Donald Trump’s deportation drive, the Department of Homeland Security assembled a “tiger team” of intelligence analysts who built dossiers on about 100 foreign students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian activity, the records show.
More than 75 of those people were identified by the shadowy website Canary Mission, according to deposition testimony unveiled this week in a case challenging the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian scholars.
The federal judge currently overseeing a trial in the case unsealed the deposition transcripts, which contain hundreds of pages of sworn testimony by administration officials about the campus deportation effort. Some of the details in the transcripts were fleshed out in open court Wednesday as administration officials began to be called to the witness stand.
snip
Canary Mission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_Mission
Canary Mission is an anonymously run doxing[1][2] website established in 2014 that smears[2] and publishes the personal information of students, professors, and organizations that it describes as anti-Israel or antisemitic, focusing primarily on people at North American universities.[3][4][5] Critics have described it as weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism in order to silence critique of Israel.[1]
Canary Mission's published materials have been described as a blacklist.[6][7] Profiles are publicly-available online and intended for wide use, and Canary Mission may actively send them to employers.[8] Known users of the profiles include Israeli intelligence organizations Ministry of Strategic Affairs[1][9][10] and Shin Bet,[1] which interrogate and deny entry to American citizens.[10][11][12] In March 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other US federal agents detained and attempted to deport multiple international students with Canary Mission profiles.[13] Canary Mission's work is controversial.[6][14][7] Its tactics have been compared to McCarthyism[15][5] and the makeup and reliability of its profiles have been questioned.
Collaboration with government authorities
Allegations have been made that Israeli intelligence organizations, such as the Shin Bet, use Canary Mission profiles.[1] The Ministry of Strategic Affairs[1][16][10] used a Canary Mission profile during the attempted deportation proceedings against Lara Alqasem.[17] The Israeli government has been accused of using Canary Mission data at border control.[18][10][19][12] In March 2025, multiple foreign students with Canary Mission profiles were detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement for allegations of supporting terror.[13] Canary Mission has also been accused of working with the FBI.[20]
2025 federal trial admission
In July 2025, a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified in a federal trial that his team used Canary Mission as a source to investigate a number of student protesters that were foreign nationals.[21] Court records from a federal lawsuit revealed that senior Trump administration officials relied heavily on Canary Mission, in order to identify foreign students and academics who violated the terms of their visa.[22][23][24]
snip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_Mission
Canary Mission is an anonymously run doxing[1][2] website established in 2014 that smears[2] and publishes the personal information of students, professors, and organizations that it describes as anti-Israel or antisemitic, focusing primarily on people at North American universities.[3][4][5] Critics have described it as weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism in order to silence critique of Israel.[1]
Canary Mission's published materials have been described as a blacklist.[6][7] Profiles are publicly-available online and intended for wide use, and Canary Mission may actively send them to employers.[8] Known users of the profiles include Israeli intelligence organizations Ministry of Strategic Affairs[1][9][10] and Shin Bet,[1] which interrogate and deny entry to American citizens.[10][11][12] In March 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other US federal agents detained and attempted to deport multiple international students with Canary Mission profiles.[13] Canary Mission's work is controversial.[6][14][7] Its tactics have been compared to McCarthyism[15][5] and the makeup and reliability of its profiles have been questioned.
Collaboration with government authorities
Allegations have been made that Israeli intelligence organizations, such as the Shin Bet, use Canary Mission profiles.[1] The Ministry of Strategic Affairs[1][16][10] used a Canary Mission profile during the attempted deportation proceedings against Lara Alqasem.[17] The Israeli government has been accused of using Canary Mission data at border control.[18][10][19][12] In March 2025, multiple foreign students with Canary Mission profiles were detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement for allegations of supporting terror.[13] Canary Mission has also been accused of working with the FBI.[20]
2025 federal trial admission
In July 2025, a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified in a federal trial that his team used Canary Mission as a source to investigate a number of student protesters that were foreign nationals.[21] Court records from a federal lawsuit revealed that senior Trump administration officials relied heavily on Canary Mission, in order to identify foreign students and academics who violated the terms of their visa.[22][23][24]
snip
Dear Legal Community,
It is my goal that Berkeley Law be an environment where all ideas and views can be expressed. This includes speech on controversial issues and even expression that might offend others. I want to do all I can to facilitate and protect that speech. I therefore have been very upset to see that some of our students have been threatened and harassed because they chose to exercise their First Amendment rights.
Some of our students, particularly those supporting the Law Students for Justice in Palestine, have been targeted by Canary Mission. Canary Mission is an extremist website that declares that its purpose is to document “people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.” The website does this by publicizing the names, pictures, social media accounts, and other personal information of those whose views it disagrees with it. It says that its intent is keeping “today’s radicals from becoming tomorrow’s employees.”
I condemn this targeting of particular students because of their speech with the goal of harming their employment opportunities. It has caused great injury to our students and our community. This targeting of students because of their views undermines our desire to be a place where difficult issues can be debated and where students feel comfortable taking political positions. Students have reported removing particular experiences from their resumes and refusing to participate in groups and/or events that they would otherwise be interested in because of Canary Mission’s targeted attempt to affect their employment outcomes.
Although I may disagree with some of my students’ views on specific issues, it is my firm belief that the Canary Mission website should not be used as a resource to evaluate students’ qualifications for hiring. If Berkeley Law students are barred from employment opportunities for exercising their First Amendment rights, it will have the grave effect of chilling speech and stifling the exchange of ideas on campus.
Sincerely,
Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Berkeley School of Law
Jewish students: A blacklist of BDS supporters is hurting our efforts to defend Israel on campus
Canary Mission is making it easier for BDS-affiliated legislation to pass, write student activists from across the country.
https://www.jta.org/2018/04/23/ideas/jewish-students-blacklist-bds-supporters-hurting-efforts-defend-israel-campus
(JTA) — We are Jewish and pro-Israel students who are active within our Jewish communities on college campuses across North America. Many of us have helped organize against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-affiliated movements throughout our time on campus.
Over the course of our time fighting BDS campaigns, Canary Mission was brought to our attention repeatedly. Canary Mission is an anonymous site that blacklists individuals and professors across the country for their support of the BDS movement, presumed anti-Semitic remarks and hateful rhetoric against Israel and the United States.
As a group of conscientious students on the front lines fighting BDS on our campuses, we are compelled to speak out against this website because it uses intimidation tactics, is antithetical to our democratic and Jewish values, is counterproductive to our efforts and is morally reprehensible.
snip
However, we believe that promoting a negative perception of Muslims, particularly Muslim students on our campuses, as Canary Mission does, is similarly hateful. As students on the front lines, we hope that Jewish and pro-Israel communal organizations will trust us and work more collaboratively with us to handle this fight in a credible, respectful and moral manner among our student communities. We believe that Canary Mission is antithetical and destructive to our shared cause of supporting Israel and eliminating anti-Semitism on campus. Instead, we expect credible Jewish and pro-Israel communal organizations to help us combat anti-Semitism on college campuses, and around the world, in a diplomatic manner that seeks to protect our community rather than shaming the other side anonymously, as Canary Mission does.
snip
in real time. The terrorist-adjacent coward scrubbed her social media posts and made her accounts private., but the screen grabs live on.
Little wonder she's no longer teaching. She's disgusting beyond words.
How does fusion voting work?
If a candidate receives more than one party nomination, voters must choose not only the candidate they prefer but also the party they want those votes to count for.
In the 2025 mayoral election, both Mamdani and one of his opponents, Sliwa, secured nominations of two parties, so they are listed twice on the ballot.
Mamdani won nominations from the Democratic Party and the left-wing Working Families Party. (On Election Day, Mamdani said he voted for himself on the Working Families Party line.)
Sliwa won the nomination of the Republican Party and a party he created called the Protect Animals Party. (Sliwa has attracted notice for having 16 cats in his 320-square-foot studio apartment, and he’s made animal welfare a key campaign issue.)
If a candidate receives more than one party nomination, voters must choose not only the candidate they prefer but also the party they want those votes to count for.
In the 2025 mayoral election, both Mamdani and one of his opponents, Sliwa, secured nominations of two parties, so they are listed twice on the ballot.
Mamdani won nominations from the Democratic Party and the left-wing Working Families Party. (On Election Day, Mamdani said he voted for himself on the Working Families Party line.)
Sliwa won the nomination of the Republican Party and a party he created called the Protect Animals Party. (Sliwa has attracted notice for having 16 cats in his 320-square-foot studio apartment, and he’s made animal welfare a key campaign issue.)
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/nov/04/elon-musk/new-york-city-mayor-election-ballot-fusion/
=====================================
