Gregory P. Mango
A construction worker, a fisherman and a woman walking by the United Nations were knifed to death in Manhattan Monday in separate, random attacks allegedly by Ramon Rivera, a blood-covered lunatic with a long rap sheet who should not have been loose on the streets.
Three lives lost.
Three more reasons to rid this city of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Pundits say Bragg — the soft-on-crime lefty significantly responsible for the mayhem on New York City’s streets — will likely coast to re-election next year.
That would disgrace New York City.
But it’s not a fait accompli.
True, no Democrat has emerged yet to challenge Bragg in the upcoming June 25 primary.
But data from the recent presidential election suggests that defeating Bragg is possible.
On Nov. 5, 120,916 fewer Manhattanites cast ballots for Harris than voted for Biden in 2020.
Trump gained 18,000 of them — but the lion’s share of the shortfall were disaffected voters who chose to stay home rather than vote for Harris’ uber-left agenda.
Call them Manhattan’s vanishing voters.
They number as many as 103,000 — though probably slightly fewer, because Harris’s poorer showing is also in part the result of the borough’s loss of population since 2020.
Even so, these 2024 non-voters are equivalent to 70% of the total Manhattan turnout (143,572) in November 2023, when the current City Council was elected, and roughly 40% of the Manhattan turnout in the 2021 primary, when all top city officials were chosen.
This potential voting bloc of Manhattan Democrats fed up with left-wing extremism could help elect a law-and-order DA to replace Bragg.
If there’s a candidate.
Now that the numbers show a sizable shift in Manhattan voting, it’s the duty of the city’s political decision-makers to back a candidate who will give the criminal-coddling Bragg a run for his money.
The same seismic shift in urban voting attitudes is occurring across the nation.
Urban Democrats are fed up with the crime, mayhem, homeless encampments, drug use and squalor that progressive policies have wreaked on their cities.
On Nov. 5, voters in the bluest areas of California rebelled, dethroning Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, Alameda County DA Pamela Price, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Los Angeles’ Soros-backed DA, George Gascón.
Blue California overall backed Proposition 36 to strengthen drug and shoplifting penalties.
Manhattan Democrats will have an opportunity to oust Bragg in just seven months. The shift in voter sentiment suggests it’s time to seize it.
Citywide election results offered even more hope for rational change.
Trump gained voters in all five boroughs, but a far larger number of disaffected Democrats — that growing reservoir of persuadable purple voters — stayed home rather than vote for the progressive policies that have doomed their neighborhoods.
Citywide, 573,618 fewer New York City voters cast their ballots for Harris than for Biden in 2020.
Trump gained 94,611 of them, but most of the rest sat out the election.
Again, the citywide drop in population likely had some impact. But even so, hundreds of thousands of Democrat-inclined voters refused to follow their party’s leftward lurch.
That’s a hefty number, considering only half a million people total (578,877) turned out for the November 2023 municipal election to elect the entire City Council.
These disaffected Democrats are numerous enough to decide New York City’s next election.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams blames the fall-off in votes for Harris on “anti-Blackness and misogyny.”
That’s far-left delirium.
Republican Party State Chairman Ed Cox said voters are fed up with the “ideological experiments” coming out of Washington, DC — and Democrat Mike Gianaris, deputy leader of the state Senate, tacitly agreed when he observed that “Democrats who voted for Biden didn’t vote” this time around.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein pointed to “the rage I just hear from people in New York . . . the sense of disorder rising, not just crime, but homeless encampments, trash on the streets, people jumping turnstiles in subways, crazy people on the streets. You just talk to people and they’re mad about it.”
That anger isn’t going away now that the presidential election is over.
New York’s unhappy Democrats should be wooed to support a common-sense mayoral candidate and reject the progressive lunacy of Williams, super-woke Comptroller Brad Lander, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani and others vying to move the city leftward.
In Manhattan, those Democrats are numerous enough to wage a formidable campaign against DA Bragg.
There’s no better cause.
Bragg prosecutes Daniel Penny, but allows deranged fiends — walking time bombs with long rap sheets — to go free, causing the rest of us to live in fear of random violence.
Time to seize this chance to oust him.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.