With the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming their mayor, the plutocrats are panicking
August in the Hamptons: Ocean breezes. Oversubscribed Tracy Anderson classes. Parking woes.
And this year, with a New York City mayoral election looming in the fall, a freakout that the most sumptuous of summer staples hasn’t soothed.
“Even overpriced lobster salad can’t seem to make people out here feel better,” said Robert Zimmerman, a veteran political fund-raiser who has yet to back anyone in the race.
“Everyone’s talking about it all the time,” said the writer and pundit Molly Jong-Fast, a New York City voter who has a home in Sag Harbor.
What they are talking about, for the most part, is whether anyone — specifically former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo or Mayor Eric Adams — can beat the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Mr. Mamdani is the 33-year-old Democratic nominee who prevailed over Mr. Cuomo in the primary and is comfortably ahead in the polls. In June, he dared to say on “Meet the Press”: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”
Which, in running to lead a city that has more Forbes billionaires than any place on earth, has led to a certain amount of grousing.
Greg Kraut, the chief executive of KPG Funds, a real estate investment firm, has called Mr. Mamdani’s supporters “moron millennials.” Bill Ackman, the hedge fund titan, has said a Mamdani era would be “disastrous” for the city, and would cause billionaires “to leave.”
The agita is on full blast out east, where the price for one home last year ran as high as $88.5 million and so many 0.1 percenters congregate in August. (Presuming they don’t have a yacht.)
“The Hamptons is basically in group therapy about the mayoral race,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “What they’re discussing is not just Mamdani and his policies, but Cuomo and Adams and whether anyone can beat him.”
Holly Peterson, a Park Avenue and Southampton based novelist who, as she put it, owes her career to being able to skewer the “selfishness” of high society types, said she can barely find anyone on the East End who is over 40, works in finance and is “pro-Mamdani.”
In other words, the plutocrats are panicking.
Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Adams, who are running as independents, have been taking advantage of that as they put on polo shirts and visit shingled Hamptons estates to partake in a campaign tradition: Meeting, greeting and asking for money. [Continue reading…]