I, for one, don't particularly want him to win - although I wouldn't particularly want either Adams or Cuomo to win, either. I think many of Mamdani's topline proposals are pretty lousy and/or are promises he has no ability to keep. Free buses are a terrible idea from a basic transit perspective, state-run groceries are a terrible idea even from the perspective of the people he's putatively trying to help, and rent control has a pretty poor track record of delivering affordable housing to more people. I don't think he's got the resources to deliver on his public housing promises, and he is unlikely to get Hochul to provide him either with the resources or the higher taxes that he would need in order to pull that off.

You don't "particularly want ... Adams or Cuomo either", but given the challenge Mamdani presents to the billionaire backers of the Clintonite wing of the democratic party you pretty much have to hope one of those two clowns win. As for Mamdani's policies, putting them on the agenda is a victory in itself. Hegemony is the power to determine the possible and impossible. Of course the capitalist class, and the clowns who apologize for them, have no answers for the poverty and inequality they thrive on, and of course they think the ideas of a socialist are impossible. The idea of public investment in public goods, like transit, makes no sense to capitalists who intend to profit from the private for profit provision of transportation as a private good. Tesla agrees with you, free public transit is a terrible idea from a basic capitalist perspective on transit. No private profit to be made from such a public good, and no way to make it work without forcibly investing the private capital of billionaires in public goods. Even if the idea seems absurd, discussing it publicly challenges capitalist hegemony in our political discourse. If fascism can be made palatable for contemporary political discourse, why not socialist ideas as well. The discussion shouldn't start with the impossibility of these ideas but rather it should start with what is necessary to make them work.

Not Trump can no longer be the mantra of the democratic party.