I offer some thoughts outside the box on the ‘super Tuesday’ election in the US.

1. Mamdani’s victory is stunning, but it wouldn’t have been possible elsewhere.
   Nowhere else could the defeated candidate in the Democratic primary have run without consequences for the ‘official’ candidate. The two registered candidates of the Democratic Party (Cuomo and Mamdani) together garnered 90 per cent of the vote, bringing the turnout to an all-time high for New York City.
   
2. As for everyone who promised a revolution, problems are just to begin.
   Will it manage to administer without disappointing expectations?
   Will it live up to the hopes it has raised?
   The bar is very high.
   I wish Mamdani, but above all the New Yorkers, that the new mayor will be able to surpass it. In particular, it will be interesting to see how he will solve the problem of resources to finance his agenda: he will raise taxes as he has promised, but it is not certain that sufficient revenue will come from taxes, as anyone who has tried to finance increased spending in this way knows (especially since local governments have far less chance of getting into debt than national ones).
   
3. Yesterday the Democrats won at least three other important votes.
   New Jersey and Virginia will have a female governor for the first time in their history. In both states, in a much less favourable environment for the Democrats, the women winners took a higher percentage than Mamdani in New York City, surpassing -this is the most significant political data in perspective- even Kamala Harris’s in the presidential elections.
   And these are two women with a far from radical agenda and profile.
   Then there was the referendum to redraw the electoral college in California, rebalancing what was done by the Trumpians in Texas. Above all, its success has been the success of Governor Gavin Newsom, who since the beginning of this year has been gaining headlines thanks to his more muscular approach towards Trump, to whom he has responded blow by blow with an aggressiveness hitherto unknown to the ‘institutional’ left.

All this leads me to say what?
Nothing more than what I have written, except to warn against simplifications and Italic provincialism, which often leads commentators (and socialites in their wake) to use our country as a yardstick for judging events happening in the world.

This was well argued by Prof. Castellani, interviewed by Simone Spetia on Radio 24 on Wednesday morning: before making comparisons one must take the context into account.