Rafael Mangual, John Ketcham, Isabella Redjai, and Kerry Soropoulos take a look at the high-stakes dynamics of the New York City mayoral race. From candidate strategies and the influence of social media to the surprising role of game theory in political decision-making, they break down how modern campaigns are evolving. They also explore how crime policy is shaping electoral outcomes and how Democrats are responding to public safety concerns. Plus, a timely discussion of how AI is disrupting fashion marketing and what it means for traditional advertising.

Audio Transcript

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Isabella Redjai: Welcome to the City Journal Podcast. I’m Isabella Redjai and this is Kerry Soropoulos and we’re your hosts for today.

Kerry Soropoulos: This is the place where the big ideas meet the moment, where we dig into the policies affecting our cities today.

Isabella Redjai: But before we dive in, be sure to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you don’t miss out on future conversations.

Kerry Soropoulos: And please check out the description for our social media handle so you can follow us to get updates on new episodes, articles, and more.

Isabella Redjai: Today we’re joined by two of City Journal’s sharpest minds. First up we have John Ketcham out in-house expert on cities, local elections, and urban history. Thank you for joining us, John.

John Ketcham: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Kerry Soropoulos: And also joining us is Ralph Mangual, City Journal’s go-to expert on crime and urban policy and a member of the Council on Criminal Justice.

Isabella Redjai: Welcome, gentlemen.

Rafael Mangual: Great to be here.

Isabella Redjai: Let’s dive in.

Rafael Mangual: Let’s do it.

Isabella Redjai: John, you recently published a piece on City Journal about what’s going on in the New York City mayoral election. We’re past Labor Day. We’re in the final stretch, probably the most competitive two months before Election Day. Right now, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani is in the lead. He shocked New York City by winning the Democratic nomination in June. Will he face one challenger or three? You explained that we’re in a bit of a dilemma here. We have former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current mayor Eric Adams, and persistent Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa still in the race. Tell me first what is this prisoner’s dilemma for those that may not be familiar with this framework?

John Ketcham: Sure. Well, it’s crunch time. Right after Labor Day, we’re going to be in a two-month sprint to Election Day. A prisoner’s dilemma is a classic situation in game theory where you have two or more players and they’re rational actors. They would all be better off if they cooperated, but they don’t know if the other player will cooperate. And so they have to make a decision whether to cooperate and try to trust the other to also cooperate or to do the sure thing and try to secure some benefit for themselves, but at the expense of being worse off than they would be if they cooperated. And so this is a situation that the mayoral candidates find themselves in. If they cooperated and had the lower performing candidates drop out, the city would be better off because Mamdani would have lower odds of winning. But if they do not cooperate, they each have a slightly better chance of winning for themselves. And right now the situation is that we see Mayor Adams potentially dropping out in favor of a position at HUD in Washington, D.C.

Isabella Redjai: And that’s a recent update as of the last 24 hours or so, correct?

John Ketcham: Yes.

Isabella Redjai: Now, what does the landscape look like with the election right now? And is there even a viable path forward for any of these candidates?

John Ketcham: Well, if Mayor Adams drops out, Curtis Sliwa is going to be under tremendous pressure to drop out also. And that’s going to basically clear the field for Andrew Cuomo. So it’ll probably wind up being a heads up match between Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo.

I think Andrew Cuomo is viable and some might say, well, he lost the primary. But the primary electorate is very different than the general electorate. So there are about three million Democrats in the primary electorate and only Democrats can participate. There are 1.8 million or so voters who are registered as Republicans or minor party voters or they’re unaffiliated with any party and they can’t vote in the primary but they can vote in the general and most of those voters will probably go not for Mamdani but for his competitor. So Cuomo stands to pick up a lot of that.

Kerry Soropoulos: And some recent polling has showed Cuomo beating Mamdani in a head-to-head race. Last week he had an 11-point lead out of one poll in a head-to-head match. So do you think those numbers are potentially real?

John Ketcham: That’s right. Well, the big question, starting from the beginning of Mamdani’s rise, was where’s the ceiling? How much more upside does he have? You know he’s going to get the far-left base of young voters. You know he’s going to get South Asian voters, especially those that he signed up. He had an impressive voter registration drive. The last two weeks before the primary deadline for voter registration, saw 37,000 new voters. That’s 12 times more than the comparable period in 2021.

Rafael Mangual: Let me just say too, mean, yes, the polling does show that Cuomo would have a lead in the one-on-one, but let’s not forget that the polling showed Cuomo had a massive lead in the Democratic primary up until basically crunch time in that race. I think a lot of New Yorkers are going to be somewhat skeptical and probably take those polling numbers with a bit of a grain of salt. And I think the other candidates in the race will too.

Kerry Soropoulos: But that polling did come after Mamdani famously covered the New York Post failed to bench 135 or maybe even less than that. that could be a spoiler in the race. We don’t know the impact of New Yorkers seeing their preferred candidate fail to push the bar.

John Ketcham: But Mamdani, back to the fundamental question, he’s got to figure out where is he going to get to 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup, right? So he’s got his base, he’s got the South Asian vote, and who else is going to come out, right? Seems that the vast majority of his general election support is going to mirror his primary electorate support. And that’s where Cuomo has an opportunity to make up a slight majority of voters who are concerned about Mamdani’s inexperience and his prospect to not accomplish his own agenda, even if people agree with the agenda. They may have reservations about Mamdani’s ability to accomplish it. And they also have concerns about Mamdani’s divisiveness and the prospect of him being a target for President Trump. President Trump might just look at him as too juicy of a target to resist leveraging the prospect of socialist extremism in next year’s midterm races.

Isabella Redjai: And President Donald Trump did post a truth social actually that he holds the cards to Zohran Mamdani. So it’s going to be interesting to see what part he plays, whether it’s scooping some of these people into the administration or energizing perhaps certain voting blocks. I’m curious, Ralph, you’re a lifelong New Yorker. What are you hearing from people that you know? What makes the most sense to them? Do they think everyone’s going to stay in the race? Who’s going to drop out? I want to hear what you’re hearing on the streets of New York.

Rafael Mangual: I mean, my sense of things as of right now is that Curtis Sliwa was not going to go anywhere. He’s a very stubborn candidate and I think he truly believes that he has a path to victory based largely on the share of the vote in the last mayoral election that he was able to get. In his mind if one of the other candidates drops out he can keep his original share and absorb their votes and maybe he’s right, maybe he’s not. My sense is that he’s probably not. I don’t see New Yorkers electing a Republican candidate, putting him in Gracie Mansion anytime soon.

Isabella Redjai: When was the last time something like that has happened?

Rafael Mangual: Giuliani, really.

Isabella Redjai: Oh, right.

John Ketcham: Bloomberg also ran as a Republican.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, switched to an independent afterwards. I think he was kind of riding Giuliani’s coattails in that first race. But yeah, I mean Giuliani was really the last time that New Yorkers were fed up enough. And as bad as things are and have gotten in New York, they’re nowhere near as bad as they were in 1993 when Rudy Giuliani was able to ultimately get that. And by the way, he won by the skin of his teeth in that race, despite the fact that New York was seeing 2,000 murders a year and the subways were exponentially more atrocious than they are now. But I don’t know, I just find it fascinating that Cuomo has sort of continued to be the viable alternative in a race where Zohran Mamdani’s sort of most vulnerable point is crime. Cuomo is also most vulnerable on the crime issue. He’s the guy that gave us all the things that New Yorkers worried about public safety, complaining about the last couple years. Bail reform, discovery reform, raise the age, closing prisons.

Isabella Redjai: But his YouTube adds that he was going to put the subway.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right, that’s right. Except when they arrest people, they’re going to get right back out on the street thanks to laws that he passed and has yet to distance himself from in any real way. And so, I don’t know. New York’s a weird, weird electoral scene. I’ll never claim to understand it.

John Ketcham: Don’t you think if he puts 5,000 cops on the street and if he retains Jessica Tisch, let’s say, they’ll be making more arrests. There’s a harm-on-harm provision of bail reform that allows perpetrators to be taken in. You’ve seen an uptick in the Rikers population now up to what? 7,600 or so. That will count for something relative to the alternative of not hiring any more cops as Ramdani is proposing.

Rafael Mangual: I think that’s absolutely right. Although, you know, the Rikers population increase is only going to last but for so long, right? Rikers Island is set to close in August of 2027. It’s going to be replaced by a jail system that’s going to have a maximum capacity that’s about half of the current population. Cuomo has not really come forward with a plan on how he’s going to double that capacity, if not triple it, which is really what it should be so that we make sure that we never have to triage who goes to jail and who doesn’t. I would note that in 2017 when New York City was at its safest, we had about 10,000 people on Rikers Island on a given day. We’re still about 3,000 below that, and we’re still seeing more homicides. So, or actually this year might be the first time that we’re back down to the previous levels. But yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I think Cuomo is just a strange candidate in this particular race. I would have expected the crime issue to predominate a lot more given, I mean, how much effort Mamdani himself has put into sort of distancing himself from his anti-police past, right? I mean, he’s been pushing back on saying that the DSA platform is not his platform. He no longer believes in defunding the police. He now believes that there’s a prominent place for policing in the public.I mean, that’s really the issue to hit him on. To my mind, I mean, Cuomo would have been the last guy I would have thought of to be front and center in that conversation. You know, I think John’s exactly right. I mean, if we’re talking about a game of alternatives, I mean, he’s clearly the better one.

John Ketcham: That’s the thing. It’s not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. It’s all relative between two. And Mamdani is just so far to the left of everybody when it comes to policing public safety matters that people are probably willing to give Cuomo a second look. We saw that in the results of our focus group from a few weeks ago.

Jesse Arm wrote it up for City Journal and it showed that soft Mamdani supporters are really concerned about the prospect of a Mamdani mayoralty on things like public safety and on his divisiveness and his ability to get his economic agenda done. He’s just inexperienced and he’s a lawmaker. He’s got five years of legislative experience, not much in the way of accomplishments. So what’s there to show for it to give voters confidence that he can actually achieve his agenda?

Cuomo, by contrast, does have a record to run on. It’s a checkered record, but it’s one in which he was able to point to some real improvements, things like the Tappan Zee Bridge now, the Mario Cuomo Bridge.

Rafael Mangual: I was going to say, what’s it called?

John Ketcham: So, I’m just going to stay your hand.

Isabella Redjai: Though I’m not quite sure the people who are voting for Mamdani, public safety is the first thing on their mind it seems like they’re way more you how he’s campaigning using social media he’s a he’s a pretty relatable guy means thirty-three years old. He’s going to bodega is he’s going to the chicken and rice trucks and i think people are feeling like a card to get into the cool kids club wearing Hot Girls for Mamdani t-shirts, all that. How has Mamdani changed, I think, campaigning in a way, marketing of oneself. Is this something that we’re going to see a lot more often, this younger approach to the Gen Zs and the millennials of the world. Or is this just like a one-off, you know, black swan event of some sort?

John Ketcham: I think this is here to stay.

Rafael Mangual: And you’re seeing it already influence how the other candidates are approaching the rest of the campaign. You’ve got, you know, both Cuomo and Adams doing these kind of man on the street walking and talking, you know, promo videos. And I think it’s just a function of demographics, right? The electorate’s gotten younger in New York. You have to talk to them on their terms and in the places where they’re spending time. You know, the one place that our eyes are almost always glued is our phone screen. And being able to catch that scrolling through your regular day process on social media, I think, is kind of at the core of the brilliance of the campaign that Mamdani’s won. And as much as I disagree with his ideas, mean, his strategy’s been very clearly effective. So I think this is just a, there’s more of this to come. This is not a one-off, I mean, I don’t know that I would credit him with changing things. I would certainly credit him with being one of the early adopters of what is obviously the more effective strategy.

Isabella Redjai: I would say AOC honestly might have been the original and they’ve clearly been campaigning together you know in the outer boroughs. What’s your take John?

John Ketcham: Mamdani is 2.0, right? And the very interesting aspect of his primary win was how much he was outspent and yet he still clobbered all of the competition. So he had about $8 million or so between the campaign and various PACs. Cuomo between the campaign and Fix the City had about $25 million. In the amount that they raised, they spent about $22 million of it. So for convenience, let’s say three to one, and yet not enough. And the tactics that the Cuomo campaign used were something out of the early 2000s. It was direct mail. It was a lot of TV. And that’s just not where people’s eyeballs are now. As Ralph says, it’s all about the digital media environment.

And Mamdani was able to leverage his amiability and his sense of genuineness to produce this content that people immediately connected with. Jumping into the Coney Island waters with a full suit on and still able to explain something. That’s…

Rafael Mangual: And not catching hepatitis.

Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah.

Isabella Redjai: Yeah.

John Ketcham: It’s a real talent, and it’s going to be something that candidates need to hone, especially if they’re not naturals at that kind of thing.

Isabella Redjai: And it looks like Cuomo and Adams are both trying the Mamdani formula. Do you think it’s working for them? John, do you want to go first?

John Ketcham: Yeah, but in different ways I think it is resonating with some Adam supporters, but not enough to really move the needle on the polls.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that I think that’s right look whether something’s going to work for someone has, I think, less to do with the thing itself and more to do with how natural that thing is to the person. Mamdani is of that age. He can pull it off. Cuomo Adams can’t really pull it off. It’s just not their world. So it seems unnatural, doesn’t land as well. It’s kind of awkward. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that they can do to be stronger. Yeah, I think it would be a mistake for them to try and play that same game in the same way.

John Ketcham: Cuomo’s natural habitat is behind a big table with some flags behind him, like he was in the COVID press conferences that he put on every single day. People who participated in our focus group said that they liked that. They reassured them. They felt that there was someone competent at the helm directing things as appropriate.

And he’s done some of these press conference-style campaign events, harkening back to that era.

Kerry Soropoulos: But he’s just not the governor anymore and there’s no COVID crisis so not everyone is turning on the television to watch Candidate Cuomo from there behind the big table.

John Ketcham: It’s a whole lot different.

Rafael Mangual: Candidate Cuomo just seems less enthusiastic. I mean you know it’s really a demotion for him in every way and I think that’s kind of come through and how he’s run his campaign. has never sort of seemed anywhere near as excited or even just displayed any real amount of desire to take this job. It’s like I think he feels like his hand is forced, he wants to stay relevant, maybe this is a path to higher office at some point in the future. But I don’t think anyone’s really buying the idea that he wants to be mayor.

Isabella Redjai: Do you think that, he can reverse the clock in any way at this point?

John Ketcham: Well losing the unions means that he loses the prospect of a ground game but they didn’t really show up for him in big numbers in the primary right? Now that he’s likely going to consolidate the opposition to Mamdani behind him, I think you’ll start to see big, big money come into the race. How they mobilize those dollars is going to be incredibly important but if they can figure out a social media strategy better than the primary one and just whip up as many voters as possible in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, in black neighborhoods, in lower income neighborhoods, I think he really does have a chance to get his numbers up to a place that surpasses Mamdani’s ceiling.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think Mamdani is basically at his ceiling. I mean, at this point in the race, I anyone who’s considering voting for Mamdani is already on his side. If anything, there are more sort of on-the-fence Mamdani voters who might go to one of the opponents than there are people who are on the fence about Adams or Cuomo. I mean, if you’re considering Adams, Cuomo, or Sliwa, it’s because Mamdani is just a no-deal for you.

Kerry Soropoulos: And just finally, just tying this back to your piece, John, about the prisoner’s dilemma, perhaps you could connect the recent news about Adams, the potential consolidation to your idea of the prisoner’s dilemma of the game theory. We both took it at the great Fordham University. That’s where my knowledge comes from. And a lot of games coalesce around an equilibrium. It seems like maybe we’re escaping the equilibrium that this race has been in. So maybe kind of explain how the Adams news is threatening to upset, turn over the chessboard as it were.

John Ketcham: Sure. So Adams is basically being offered an inducement to cooperate. And making it more likely to do so means that you will probably get to the optimal outcome for the non-Mamdani candidates, right? Again, if they cooperate, they’re all better off if their goal is to defeat Mamdani, because he now is vulnerable in a consolidated head-to-head matchup, whereas in a split field, you have the spoiler effect operating in a non-ranked choice election. So the idea that Adams might go to HUD will basically mean a cooperative game at Mamdani’s expense.

Kerry Soropoulos: Thanks for joining us for today’s discussion. you haven’t already, please remember to click that subscribe button. Helps us to reach more people and grow the show. The bigger the audience, the bigger the conversation we can have. So thank you.

Moving on a little bit further afield from New York City, President Trump recently sent deployed National Guard in Washington D.C. and has threatened or promised to expand that approach in cities across the country, including Chicago, Oakland, other parts of California. Democratic leaders, including governor of California Gavin Newsom, governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker, and mayor of Brandon Johnson have sought to deflect from this issue by making hay of crime in red states, arguing that the president is ignoring real crime hotspots in red states and placing the focus on places in their jurisdictions. So let’s just start off. What’s the accuracy of these claims? Ralph?

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those instances in which you can lie by telling the truth. And that’s exactly what Pritzker and Newsom and Johnson are doing. And this is actually something that’s from an old playbook. So before the last election, they tried this, they tried this before the last midterm election. The idea here is basically that because at the state level red states have higher murder rates than blue states, it’s really Republicans that have the crime problem. The problem with that is that if you actually dig into those red states what you find is that the crime rate is mostly driven by the very blue cities within those red states, right?

So take Louisiana for example. If you were to take New Orleans, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge out of the equation, all of those are very blue cities, right? Louisiana’s homicide rate declines by about 30 percent. If you took Jackson, which is a very blue enclave in Mississippi, out of that state’s murder rate, that would drop by about 20 percent, 18 to 20 percent. So it kind of ignores the real problem and kind of repackages it in this Democratic talking point that doesn’t actually work because it can’t withstand scrutiny, which is why it didn’t work the last time. So I’m actually surprised that they’re trying this again.

But yeah, I mean when you actually look into whether or not, for example, blue cities tend to have higher murder rates than red cities, what you find is that the murder rate in blue cities is about 50 percent higher than it is in red cities. Once they start playing this game, they invite exactly these kinds of retorts and put themselves immediately back on the defensive. Ultimately anyone who’s been to the south or west side of Chicago or who’s walked through Oakland and some parts of downtown LA understand why it is that people regularly refer to those cities as being out of control. You’re just not going to convince them otherwise.

Isabella Redjai: So the best counter argument is red cities in blue states. what you’re telling me.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. Red cities in blue states are doing much better than the blue cities in red states, that’s for sure.

John Ketcham: And those are places where pigs fly and unicorns roll in the streets.

Isabella Redjai: Where I reigned from Orange County, California.

Rafael Mangual: Well, it’s actually, funny. There was some videos that went viral earlier this year where people were getting arrested in Orange County, California for retail theft. And they were, you know, they would be confronted by the cops and say, okay, I’m giving you my ticket. And they were like, no, no, this is Orange County. You go to jail here. And they, you know, there were all these body cam footages, footage clips of like people in the back of police cars saying, wait, I didn’t know we were in Orange County, we’re going to go to jail. The know us. So, you know, that’s a, it’s a perfect example of why those policy choices matter.

John Ketcham: Red cities tend to be smaller in population. So It’s a different type of approach to policing when you’re dealing with a smaller population and it’s less dense, right? You need really effective policing in dense places because crime is a potential downside of higher density. You have more people in frequent contact with one another. And that’s really… If you have a geographically compact city like New York, that concentration could be very helpful because you can use fewer police resources in a smaller geographic area, given the concentration of crime, to really maximize the effectiveness of those resources.

Kerry Soropoulos: And not just concentrated crime at the city level, but specific blocks within the city level, which you have written a lot about,

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, people don’t know this, but like crime is very, very ridiculously hyper-concentrated. In New York City, about three and a half percent of the street segments, a street segment would be corner to corner, full sidewalks, right? About three to four percent of the street segments see about half of all the violence. And that’s been the case for as long as we’ve been keeping track.

So, yeah, that’s true outside of New York, not just across the country, but in cities across the world, in suburbs even, you know, it’s basically a hard and fast rule of modern criminology.

But just to kind go back to the sort red state-blue city comparison thing, no criminologist would say that like this is a viable way of sort of assessing, you know, the policies of Republicans or Democrats on crime. It’s kind of a silly comparison, which is why, you know, I really kind of hate the framework, although, you know, I’m perfectly happy to play that game, you know, for argument’s sake if Democrats want to. But, you know, in reality, the question comes down to what are the policies of the modern left on crime? For the last 20 years, it’s been decarceration, de-policing, de-emphasizing public order. These are things that the vast majority of Americans are not only displeased with, but have seen demonstrably don’t work. When you allow people to repeatedly offend and find their way back on the street, eventually they’re going to do something terrible because their behavior is going to escalate. We see that all the time. There are countless examples of people who should have been in jail or prison but weren’t and were out on the street and did something terrible, right? When you allow public order to fester. You get Skid Row, you get, you know, the parts of Oakland that we’ve seen where like, you know, piles of burning tires and tent cities under bridges. You get the Mission District in San Francisco. No one wants that. No one likes living in a city where human feces has become such a problem that there’s an app tracking it in sheer tonnage, right?

I mean, so, you know, ultimately this is what Democrats like Newsom and Johnson and Pritzker have to deal with. I mean, you know, if they don’t like the scrutiny that the Trump administration is kind of bringing to their jurisdictions, well, then do better. Right? I mean, Governor Pritzker is a perfect example. This is a man who is perfectly willing, apparently, to allow, along with Mayor Brandon Johnson, people stuck living on the south and west sides Chicago to live in functional war zones. I mean, like this is not hyperbole. The studies have been done. There are parts of the city of Chicago where young men face the same risk of firearm death as our like forward deployed Marines at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Like, the math has been done. That’s a massive problem. Sure, it may have gotten better in the last couple years, but no one thinks that these are safe parts of those cities. They would be much better off, and they would come off much better if they just acknowledge that this is a problem and even invited the federal government to cooperate to solve it in some way. And I think that would actually do a lot more to diffuse the political benefit that someone like Donald Trump gains from their kind of intransigence on this.

Kerry Soropoulos: Which was a point Joe Scarborough actually made the other day that...

Rafael Mangual: Oh, did he? Well, he says something smart every once in a while.

Kerry Soropoulos: Once in a while. That Pritzker should call up Trump and try and find a way to cooperate. And it does seem, to your point, that Pritzker and others are kind of talking out of both sides of the mouths. They’re pointing to crime levels in Republican states while Pritzker was doing an interview the other day walking by the lake and someone pointed out, you know, eight murders in the previous however many hours, and he said well you know it’s a big city, we have crime and refusing to kind of acknowledge that issue.

Rafael Mangual: I noticed that he was walking by the lake he wasn’t walking you know correct in the Austin neighborhood or you know down in Englewood, by O’Block, you know. He… This is why I think it’s so… it’s such a bad play for them. It never lands because even the people who are lucky enough to live by the lake in Chicago know where not to go.

John Ketcham: And people are voting with their feet. They’re leaving Illinois and interestingly, they’re leaving Illinois for reasons different than let’s say New Yorkers. New Yorkers are leaving primarily because the cost of living is just too high. It’s still a great place in many respects to live but it’s too expensive relative to their income. In Chicago, it’s different. Housing is a lot more affordable in Chicago and yet people are still leaving Illinois. Why? Well their tax burden is very high and the services that they get from their city including you know on public safety just aren’t making the cut and they’re deciding to leave even though you could get a very nice apartment for a fraction of the cost in a genuine urban setting in Chicago relative to a place like New York.

Kerry Soropoulos: Ralph, I want to… You said that this is a bad argument that these governors and Mayor Johnson and others, Muriel Bowser, are making. And I agree it’s a bad argument, but I want to push back a little bit. Is there a kernel of truth to saying that red states have higher crime? Yes, because of blue cities. But is there an argument that they’re in red states? That state governments should take more action if blue cities are going to be ineffective on crime, that red states’ state government should step in and maybe instead of sending their national guards abroad should look within and do more to solve the issue.

Rafael Mangual: Jackson, Mississippi is a place that you’ve seen some of this where the state police have been deployed to do more than what you know local officials are apparently willing to do. And you’ve seen states like Tennessee take real steps on the legislative front to really harden their criminal justice systems. Tennessee has adopted a new truth-in-sentencing regime in the last couple years. They just voted to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot for next year that would eliminate the right to have bail set in your case, which is a right that currently everyone in Tennessee enjoys, which I think would do a lot to help on the public safety front.

But again, crime is just a hyper-local issue. By and large, it’s how you do on the crime measure is going to be a function of how you police your jurisdiction and that’s something that the local mayor and police chief have a most exclusive jurisdiction over. It’s going to be a function of how and how vigorously you prosecute crime. In a lot of places, prosecutors are separately elected officials at the local level. So in a state like Tennessee, even though the state is doing as much as it can, or maybe it could do more like deploying the state police into these places. It’s still possible for someone like Steve Mulroy to be elected DA in a city like Memphis and counteract that effort. And localism is just part of the American DNA. It’s sort of what makes our country great and it creates these little laboratories of democracy, which is why so many people are voting with their feet to leave these cities. And it should be noted that not just Chicago and New York, but big cities throughout America, especially in the coastal areas, have seen depopulation over the last five years. And where are they going? They’re going to the Sun Belt. They’re going to some parts of the Midwest, and they’re going to the suburbs. And I think crime has a lot to do with that.

Kerry Soropoulos: And your point on localism is well taken, but if state governments can not only use their existing powers to say deploy state police but as Texas has done, preempt city laws that are very anti-crime policies in Missouri they… not nationalized or federalized…The state took over the St. Louis police department. What is that? Does that present an alternative for these red states looking to intervene?

John Ketcham: States have an acute interest in maintaining their tax base. The tax base is predominantly found in and around big cities. Seventy percent of New York state revenues come from the downstate region. So insofar as local decision making is contributing to statewide declines in things like tax revenues and economic competitiveness and quality of life, leading to out-migration in considerable numbers from the state, I think it’s reasonable and appropriate for the state to intervene. And that is part of federalism. Federalism isn’t just the idea of pushing everything down as far as possible. It’s also having a corrective mechanism at the state level in order to check the failures within this political community that we call a state.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And so whether that takes the form of deploying state police, recalling certain DAs where that option is available, as we saw in Florida, although at least one of those DAs was re-elected after that.

Kerry Soropoulos: Attempted in Philadelphia, right? They attempted to impeach Krasner.

Rafael Mangual: Yes, I mean you have recalls, have the governor sometimes in certain states has the ability to pull and undo basically a DA’s election. You have legislative options and you know, some states are being more vigorous than others in terms of you know what they do. Some states are kind of hamstrung by their own state constitutional limits on state power over local governments. But yeah, I mean, I think it’s a completely fair critique to say that some of these states should absolutely be doing more. Now, Democrats would say like they should be doing more on the gun front. I mean, that’s kind of really the subtext of that red state murder problem meme, right? What they want to do is sort of shift the conversation to a strong point for them, which is, we’re the party of gun control. Republicans are never willing to kind of, you know…

Kerry Soropoulos: Point-of-sale, point-of-sale gun control, they’re the party of, or part of using that control, this is, you would say is the more effective…

Rafael Mangual: This is exactly what the right response is. I mean I was just, John was there, did a debate a couple weeks ago against a woman from the Vera Institute and you she kind of made this point predictably about you know well the Republicans are going to have a gun problem. Why don’t you want to do anything about it if you care so much about crime? It’s like, well, you know, at the end of the day, that argument is completely incompatible with the rest of the Democratic Party platform on crime. I mean, you take a guy like Mamdani or Brandon Johnson, who want to take police out of traffic enforcement. Well, how do you think they get guns off the street? I mean, in New York City, 42 percent of all gun arrests begin as traffic stops. If you take police out of traffic enforcement, how do you get those guns? This is why I think the Democrats are so weak on this issue is because once they invite the more practical elements of the argument to take place, they lose. And they lose because they haven’t really thought through the nitty gritty policy positions that they’ve taken. It’s all been based on what sounds good and what feels good. And these are people that need help and resources. It’s like, no, they don’t. Okay, I maybe they do. But that’s separate and apart from the crime problem. We went from 2,200 plus murders a year in New York City to fewer than 300. We didn’t solve poverty. We didn’t fix the education system. We didn’t, you know, strengthen the social safety net. I mean, there’s no sort of public welfare spending story of New York’s crime decline. There is a policing and incarceration story of New York’s crime decline. And that’s where Democrats don’t want to go.

John Ketcham: We should remove the guns from the street before they’re fired.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. Ideally.

Isabella Redjai: A lot of these cities where you see the crime spiking were the same cities that wanted to defund the police back in 2020. How does that square?

John Ketcham: It doesn’t have to make sense. There’s always a narrative. And progressive politics is not necessarily the most, let’s say, attuned to practical results. They’re ideologically committed to a certain worldview, and objective metrics don’t necessarily play as effectively or as relevantly in that world.

Kerry Soropoulos: So just wrapping this up, Ralph, tying it back to the original position that the president has of wanting to deploy the federal government to solve crime in cities. What are some actions that the federal government can take, if not just sending boots on the ground, National Guard troops, to solve the issue of crime in our great cities?

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I mean, look, they can do what they did in D.C., which has obviously been effective, at least in the short term. We’ll see what benefits hold for the longer term. I mean, the federal government, the DOJ, has a lot of prosecutorial resources that can be brought to bear on local crime problems. There’s a lot of overlap in terms of jurisdiction between things like illegal gun possession, for example, the whole drug trade. Right? I mean, federal prosecutors have jurisdiction over that. What the federal government can do is tell the DOJ, hey, we want you to focus more on these sort bread-and-butter street crime issues in these particular blue cities. So that’s one option.

Another option is that Congress can actually wake up and legislate and do things like create a funding pool for the hiring of more police officers, create a funding pool and a grant program to give police departments more access to technology like drones and license plate readers and all the other things that we know will sort of be force multipliers. So yeah, I mean, all that to say is that there’s a lot more that can be done. I suspect that the Trump administration is going to start pulling those levers as well.

John Ketcham: Better data sharing too between state, local, federal. Absolutely.

Isabella Redjai: I think that’s a great place to end that topic. Let’s pivot a bit to something a bit lighter. The beloved brand J. Crew recently collaborated with Vans, which also reigns from Orange County, my home area. Shout out.

Kerry Soropoulos: The only non-New Yorker in this.

Isabella Redjai: I have to represent the West Coast as much as I possibly can here. But they seem to be using AI instead of traditional models to promote their products. Some people caught on to this. They also caught on to a little credit that said “digital art.” I think that’s a way to soften the blow. What do you guys think about AI? It’s taking over everything, but now taking over the fashion world. Let’s start with you, John. You’re very well-dressed man. I feel like you have a lot of thoughts on this.

John Ketcham: Well, I look at this as, thank you, I look at this as Photoshop 2.0, right? In the beginning, Photoshop was foreign to many people, this ability to basically modify images to an unprecedented degree at the time. And there was a lot of controversy around things like airbrushing and making unrealistic images of the female body, for example. And there were some downsides to that for sure. I think it did have some negative consequences on girls’ mental health, for example. But that is behind us in a sense, and we’ve accepted that Photoshop digital imaging software is going to be part of the toolkit that media professionals have.

Rafael Mangual: Not to mention surgical augmentation. Botox and tummy tucks and facelifts. We haven’t been looking at real models in catalogs for a long time. I think this is, as John said, this is something that we have kind of accepted, right? Everyone’s on TRT or GLP1s and getting work done if they can afford it and getting photographers or airbrushing. It’s been that way for a long time. I think this is just the next step in what is really just a natural progression.

John Ketcham: ChatGPT is going to, is making AI ubiquitous in so many different ways. We’re going to see a new wave of AI software in imaging as well. And it’s going to be ubiquitous very soon. It seems to me that this is some complaints about something new but that will soon not be so new and people will just accept it and you know doesn’t mean that it’s beyond criticism of course if they’re running a bad AI driven campaign you can take them to task for that you don’t have to buy their stuff you can go on X and criticize and make suggestions and so forth.

Kerry Soropoulos: And I will. I don’t want to see somebody with their foot on backwards in a J.Crew ad, okay? Which was real. That’s how people could tell, you know? I don’t want to see models, you know, even if they’re on a Ozempic, you know, that’s better than having people with their feet on backwards and six fingers on each hand. And no offense to real life people with backwards feet and six fingers.

Rafael Mangual: I get the same feeling if I’m watching a show like Downton Abbey or something, you see like a Poland spring water bottle in background, that it just kind of messes up the aesthetic. But look, at the end of the day, if you are a fashion consumer, what you’re looking for from these kinds of images is just a sense of what the look is and whether or not it can work for you. I think you could probably get that with an AI-generated image just as effectively as you would with a real model. I think, ultimately, we have an opportunity for some natural experiments, right? Let’s see which ads do better, which lines get more loyalty. I suspect it’s not really going to…

Kerry Soropoulos: Maybe I watch too much Mad Men. But I just can’t get there. I think there is an art aspect to marketing. And J. Crew is a kind of classic American brand. The people’s Ralph Lauren.

Rafael Mangual: I’m J. Crew’d out today.

Kerry Soropoulos: Ralph is J. Crew’d out today representing.

Isabella Redjai: Ralph has got the whole fit.  

Kerry Soropoulos: If you’re looking for sponsorship opportunities.

John Ketcham: A snazzy guy.

Kerry Soropoulos: A snazzy guy. But it’s an American brand. the ads, they weren’t just any ads. They were playing on kind of classic J. Crew ads capturing an American aesthetic, golden retrievers, people on boats, and I think the fact that they had to go to AI and failed to actually kind of create an ad that could really connect with people is maybe a sign of the decline of cultural capital that brands can draw on, but I don’t like it. I’ll be the resident Luddite on the panel. I’m not happy, Bob.

Isabella Redjai: Well, for me, as a woman living in New York City, shopping and fashion are my hobbies. So this is a very important thing to me. I see the angle of wanting to perhaps save money on traditional photo shoots, you have to hire people, photographers, rent out a venue. But there’s been a lot of backlash on TikTok with influencers pointing it out. Do you think that that could ding J.Crew and even reverse any money that they saved on doing this with AI instead of putting costs into a real photo shoot?

John Ketcham: This is the market working. Yeah. And it’s a healthy phenomenon. Look at what happened with American Eagle. A backlash against Sidney Sweeney seems to, the backlash has not been effective. The stock is up 30 percent today. They’ve got immense sales growth because of that ad campaign.

Rafael Mangual: In other words, the backlash probably wasn’t as big as it seemed. Right? I mean, I think that’s a great...

Isabella Redjai: Well and a lot of other brands took suit actually after American Eagle. Lucky Brand, a few others started doing, you know, jeans, jeans ads that happened to be very successful. so clearly something worked.

Kerry Soropoulos: But that stimulated a positive reaction too, right? The backlash to Sydney Sweeney brought out legions of Sydney Sweeney supporters. I don’t know who’s coming out to fight for the AI ads. I think it’s slop. Yeah, I think it’s shlocky. And that’s…

Rafael Mangual: I don’t think anyone’s fighting for them. But I also don’t think anyone would have batted an eye had the foot been on right. ultimately, I think the critique here is just about sloppy marketing, not necessarily about AI marketing.

John Ketcham: I’ll be waiting for the hordes of J. Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren decked opponents of this and we’ll see them come out as a mass force.

Isabella Redjai: You’re going to be seeing a lot more ads with backwards feet and this type of attention.

Kerry Soropoulos: If makes people dress better, That’s right. You wouldn’t believe the things I see on airplanes. I would….

John Ketcham:  We’ve lost that fight a long time ago.

Isabella Redjai: Well with that, thank you gentlemen, John Ketcham and Ralph Manguel for joining us here on the City Journal Podcast.

Kerry Soropoulos: And thanks for tuning in. Please hit that subscribe button so you never, ever, ever miss an episode. Like and comment below. We’d love to hear your feedback.

Isabella Redjai: Thank you for tuning in and we hope you’ll join us again soon.

Photos: Spencer Platt/Getty Images (left) / Roy Rochlin/Getty Images (center) / Alex Kent/Getty Images (right)