When tragedy gives way to triumph, it can be a beautiful thing—not unlike a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. That indeed was the vibe as New York City model and step-daughter of failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris marched to the polls in the Big Apple on Tuesday.
“Feeling so many emotions right now,” Ella Emhoff shared, explaining “It was a little traumatic walking to the same voting place that I did in November. But I feel so much hope for New York and what @zohrankmamdani will bring.”
For some, trauma can mean losing both legs to a landmine in combat, being chained to a post in a dank basement for years on end before finally being rescued by a postman, or running away from abusive parent who’d given you a fifty cent piece to keep your mouth shut in the emergency room.
But for Emhoff, the trauma is altogether more newsworthy. Last fall she went and voted for her stepmother to be president of the United States, but, on account of America being a sexist, racist country, Kamala Harris did not win. Ella voted, and didn’t get the outcome she both wanted and expected. That was traumatic, especially when you’re used to getting your way.
People joke about nepo babies, but they just don’t understand how hard it can be.
To better appreciate what happened in America’s largest city, we all need to work harder at listening to folks like Ella.
In a fascinating analysis of socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win, Reihan Salam writes in the Free Press of “elite overproduction” which, particularly in New York City, is really a thing.
“There can be only so many tenured professors at Yale Law School, editors of The Paris Review, partners at Cravath, or product managers at Google. If you want to find someone in a revolutionary mood, look to the recent college grad with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and no solid job prospects, the 35-year-old creative professional who is spending a third of her low six-figure income on rent, or the 40-year-old Ivy-educated adjunct professor living with roommates who never, ever do the dishes.”
Or, you expected to be the country’s First Daughter and you was robbed.
Interestingly, the same article points out, voter analysis shows that Mamdani fared best among those with income between $75,000 to $200,000, but was crushed by Andrew Cuomo in lower income neighborhoods.
These little people will soon come to realize how mistaken they were when Mamdani makes good on his promise to open city-run grocery stores.
Emhoff wasn’t the only nepo baby to champion Mamdani. There was also former president John F. Kennedy grandson Jack Schlossberg, who assured the city’s Jews that if they thought Mamdani didn’t like them, they had been brainwashed. This from the same young man who demanded that FOX host Megyn Kelly show him her genitals.
Together, the two scions of Democrat family legacies make an important point: those who are brought up with privilege (in both cases, curiously, being of the white variety even if Ella’s is partially derivative of a Black woman) are often misled into believing whatever they say is important.
This presumption – rooted in, however hard they deny it, the fact that who they are trumps what they are – liberates them from the heavy responsibility that falls on the shoulders of the rest of us: thinking about what we say, that is, before we say it.
Thank you, Ella, for this useful reminder.
