Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
196 comments
·November 5, 2025michaelbarton
nialv7
I kinda feel Obama is more of a Trojan horse. It was not he tried and failed to get what he campaigned for implemented, it was more like he did a U turn after he got elected. e.g. he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical".
I hope the same doesn't happen with Zohran. If he was going to fail after all, I wish that will at least be after he had fought as hard as he can.
JumpCrisscross
> he called for universal health care but once he was elected he started saying it was "too radical"
ACA was the most radical package that could have passed, and it still cost Democrats the Congress.
This line of argument reminds of the folks who complained about Sinema and Manchin. You know what we’d have with a few more Sinemas and Manchins in the party right now? A majority.
The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
dralley
Manchin and Sinema shouldn't be mentioned together in the same sentence.
Manchin was genuinely the best Democrats could hope for from West Virginia. Sinema was absolutely not the best Democrats could hope for from Arizona. Manchin was also, while not perfect, more honest in many of his counterarguments than Sinema was.
parineum
> The bill that passes is better than the ideal that doesn’t.
For your resume, sure.
Sometimes reform only works when you fully commit and if half the country isn't on board, it's not better to pass some mutilated and watered down version.
Tiktaalik
Run from the Left, govern from the Right. A pretty classic political electoral strategy of centrist liberals.
NewJazz
Sometimes I think about what we could have had.
js2
And 15 years before that was Hillarycare (1993):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
(Fuck you Bill Kristol.)
There's a long, sad, littered history of attempts at universal care in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_...
edbaskerville
Bill Kristol has come a long way! He would vote for Mamdani...over Cuomo and Sliwa anyway.
https://www.cmcforum.com/post/bill-kristol-says-he-would-vot...
You can hear him discussing it here:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bill-kristol-fake-news-on-60-mi...
I'm also reminded of the time Jon Stewart got Bill Kristol to admit that a government-run health care system (the VA) was good:
762236
His policy proposals have been repeatedly disproven throughout recent history. Thank you for your attention in this matter.
treetalker
It's propitiously on the same day as the announcement that WMD liar, war criminal, torture advocate, and domestic-surveillance mastermind Dick Cheney died.
NedF
[dead]
burnt-resistor
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross
> who concealed that he was a warmongering, neoliberal hack
Obama pitched himself as a pragmatist. He governed as a pragmatist. It honestly looks like Mamdani has the sense to do the same.
burnt-resistor
Apples and oranges. Pragmatism without principles is still no principles. Mamdani has principles.
skunix
That's one way to say Mamdani is also a plant, just like AOC imo.
codeddesign
[flagged]
lateforwork
> Nobody’s health insurance is better or cheaper than before.
Speak for yourself. Before Obamacare if you had a pre-existing condition you couldn't switch jobs. There were lots of lower-priced health insurance... but had low life-time maximums (like $50K) which means it was useful only for doctor visits.
nostrebored
Yes, the mechanism of this is a wealth transfer from people who likely don’t have health conditions to people who do. This hurts young people. With the added benefit of having for profit institutions as a middleman.
The distortions caused by ACA will be papers in 20 years. It is so much worse than single payer or the previous corporatist insurance oligopoly.
sethherr
I got to stay on my parents health care for additional years because of Obamacare - as have millions of others. That gave me flexibility to experiment and during that time I learned to program.
techblueberry
The people who have healthcare and didn’t before think it’s better.
koolba
For the small minority that get fully subsidized plans of course it’s great. Free stuff is always great for the receiver.
But that’s only 5M people. For everybody else it just made healthcare more expensive.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the ACA brought down costs. And hiding it behind ever increasing subsidies eventually comes to a breaking point.
Spooky23
He’ll have a hard time getting most of his stuff through. Rent regulation and busses are controlled by authorities that work for the governor, and she is facing an election against Sara Huckabee Part 2 - Elise Stefanik. The MAGAs will dump lots of cash into that race, and there’s plenty of dudes who will vote for her.
You’re mostly wrong on healthcare. The increased state costs are people who didn’t know they were Medicaid eligible who are now enrolled. The biggest failure imo of Obamacare is that it encouraged consolidation and creation of regional health networks, which have increased prices.
Group_B
It still did a lot of good, but didn’t solve the root causes of our terrible healthcare system. It’s more of bandage on the system we have.
lotsofpulp
Dems had 6 months of 2009 to fix healthcare, with only 59 votes + Leiberman. Given the circumstances, we’re lucky to even have had ACA.
actsasbuffoon
Before the ACA, insurance companies were allowed to have these things called “lifetime limits.”
Basically, once your healthcare got expensive, they could just cut you off and say they wouldn’t cover you any further. And because of pre-existing conditions (which the ACA also eliminated), you couldn’t get new health insurance. You were basically fucked.
My mom got cancer a few years before the ACA passed. So far as I’m concerned, the old insurance system killed my mom when she was only 40 years old. I lost my only surviving parent, and my little brother lost his mom when he was only 10 years old. So forgive the utterly flabbergasted look on my face as I read your comment.
myko
This is fantasy. Obamacare slowed the rising cost of healthcare, fullstop. It helped people get coverage who could not before. It was kneecapped and could have been better, but acting like it wasn't an improvement is so far from reality it is ridiculous.
Yes, a single payer system would be better, but this was better than doing nothing.
lotsofpulp
> Nobody’s health insurance is better or cheaper than before.
It’s far better than before. You can’t be denied for pre existing conditions, there is no benefit limit, and a lot of preventative care is included.
>(before someone argues this, be aware that your state (taxes) heavily subsidizes this)
No, state taxes have nothing to do with ACA. The biggest subsidy is from young people due to the age rating factor capping highest premiums at 3x the lowest premiums. The second biggest subsidy is healthy to sick people, since pre existing conditions aren’t a factor in premium. And the federal government is what subsidized the premium tax credits for people with lower income.
bdangubic
Obamacare being what it was is 1,000,000% Obama’s failure - he’ll tell you this same thing over coffee too. Just outmost disaster through and through how it was implemented.
Zohran can easily fund which is why every single GOP Senator and Congresman went publicly against him. Can’t have people get any crazy ideas that they could actually have nice things. WTF does Congresman from a some shithole county in Alabama give a fuck about who Mayor of NYC is? but GOP is a well-oiled machine so it was all-hands-on-deck to prevent these ideas from infecting the nation…
even though this seems like a victory, starting in about 10 minutes the entire GOP message for 2026 is going to be “Zohran is Democratic Party now” and it just might work
cryzinger
Zohran is the Democratic party now? Thank god, it's about time! :P
bdangubic
works in NYC but in swing states “zohran is a commie” will hum along nicely enough…
doubletwoyou
got any tips on what to look for on how obama bumbled obamacare? not too familiar on the subject myself
cdf
Despite his public persona, I read recently Obama is actually quite aloof and didnt have the patience to charm the politicians in person.
Spooky23
Obama took a mea culpa on parts of implementation, namely the federal marketplace website (they weren’t expected as many states to opt out of the marketplace) and the “keep your plan” narrative.
It was a compromise law that was in alignment with Bush era mainstream conservatives. The fatal flaw of Obama and Biden is they underestimated the power of the nutcase wing of the Republican Party. (Along with the institutional GOP folks)
octaane
You guys have it all wrong. There was only one candidate for the dem party, Here's the list:
1) Cuomo. Sexpest who has been accused by many women of some pretty shitty stuff. Also a member of a multi-generational dynasty, which is not good.
2) Mayor Adams. Federally indicted by the Feds. They have a 99% conviction rate. Not because they're corrupt, but because they only go after people who have dome some really egregious, illegal shit.
3) Mamdani. Millennial candidate. No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young, his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
Gee, who should I choose? [[said all of NYC today]]
BobaFloutist
From a distance it looks like Cuomo is also a generational talent when it comes to being a lazy, unmotivated campaigner.
GenerWork
>his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road.
Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
bix6
$30 min wage sounds doable? CA took fast food min wage up to $20 and it’s been fine.
noobermin
He has moderated on the police funding issue, and the rent freeze is for already rent controlled apartments.
JumpCrisscross
The fact that I was seeing Sliwa favourably speaks to the candidate quality in this race.
> No dirt. Other that some stupid stuff he said while he was young
Stupid stuff he credibly disavowed.
I’m still blown away that after De Blasio he was the only one, when asked a foreign policy question, who said he’d put city priorities first.
chasil
It is unfortunate that, after the Spanish Inquisition, Jewish refugees were welcome in Istanbul, but the current receptivity is so much colder.
This is exactly the point where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed, but common ground in so many contexts is absent.
I hope that we can put ourselves back together. We've seen the consequences this year of its lack.
JumpCrisscross
> where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed
Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.
parineum
> his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road, and are aimed at leveling the playing field.
That's not true at all. He is not even "middle of the road" in the Democratic party.
brandonagr2
Government run grocery stores are middle of the road? What would progressive ideas look like on that spectrum?
nialv7
well 40% still voted for Cuomo.
jen729w
That 40% would have voted for a potato if it'd been wearing a red tie.
aidenn0
...Said less than 51% of voters
JumpCrisscross
We can call winners this early. We can’t yet call margins.
aidenn0
Good point; still mathematically less than 60% if you trust AP's estimated remaining vote count.
blitz_skull
I would choose any other breathing human on the ballot who was not Muslim and was not Communist.
That’s not a hard choice at all and New York failed the test. It’s almost like we haven’t learned from however many years California is in free fall.
TheAceOfHearts
I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful. It's apparent that many people are fed up with the status quo so they're pushing towards more experimental candidates.
If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think.
Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other political forces? I read some commentary that a few of his policy ideas are unfeasible without support from Albany, and I'm not sure how to evaluate that relationship.
Many online figures have become heavily invested on this mayoral election despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away, and I think that speaks to a real hunger for greater political experimentation.
As an aside, how do you evaluate the lessons that you learn or derive from what others are doing? Generalization sure is a tricky thing.
julianozen
Hi
I don’t think I like several of his ideas or think he will get most of them passed. In fact I think a few like “freezing the rent” are actively bad
But I’m happy to finally have a politician who lives in and loves New York and is earnestly trying to my the city better. If he tries and fails, it will be better than our other politicians that have stopped trying
nostrebored
Strong agree. I think his policies are absurd but hope that more invested young people who aren’t career politicians can start trying a platform that isn’t party line and resonates with residents.
voidhorse
The biggest takeaway to me is how ridiculous it is that the US considers Mamdani somehow "experimental" or even radical.
His campaign revolves around three policies:
1. Universal Child Care 2. Fast and Free Busses 3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units
In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization of childcare, housing, and transportation would support, yet somehow in the USA this is "radical". Somehow a candidate finally proposing positive policies that directly benefit citizens is a radical socialist who needs to be stopped and we all need to vote for the disgraced former governor who resigned after killing seniors during covid and groping his employees. Even here on HN where people are generally well educated you have people arguing. that Mamdani will somehow be the ruin of new york.
Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.
sershe
Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration"
As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
voidhorse
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself.
> are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away.
This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.
sfpotter
Nice to see someone young, charismatic, and highly energized breathing life into the decrepit democratic party. Hopefully he can accomplish a ton and repudiate the DNC.
LarsDu88
I found out his mom directed the movies "Monsoon Wedding" and "Mississipi Masala" with Denzel Washington.
Allegedly she was tapped to direct "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", but her then 14 year old son talked her out of it to do "The Namesake" instead
null3cksor
TIL he is Mira Nair's son!. The namesake has a special place in my heart.
lateforwork
She is known for movies like Monsoon Wedding... but also Kama Sutra.
testfoobar
Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...
https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform
Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."
JumpCrisscross
> Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls
Mamdani isn’t pitching widespread price controls, but rent control over a small section of New York housing twinned with abundance-style new development.
“In a 2022 paper, the political scientists Anselm Hager, Hanno Hilbig, and Robert Vief used the introduction of a 2019 rent-control law in Berlin to study how access to rent-controlled apartments influenced local attitudes toward housing development. The fact that the new law included an arbitrary cutoff date (it applied only to buildings constructed before January 1, 2014) allowed the authors to create a natural experiment, comparing otherwise-similar tenants in otherwise-similar buildings.
Heading into the experiment, the authors hypothesized that having access to a rent-controlled apartment would keep tenants in their existing units longer and therefore make them more resistant to neighborhood change. Instead, they found the opposite: Residents who lived in rent-controlled apartments were 37 percent more likely to support new local-housing construction than those living in noncontrolled units” [1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
testfoobar
My understanding is that he is proposing a 4 year freeze on about 1 million units.
https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q
"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"
I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...
BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.
JumpCrisscross
> 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units
Out of 3.7mm [1].
> not directly familiar with Berlin
Not comparable. Berlin froze rents “on more than 1.5 million” apartments in 2020 [2] out of about 2mm. 25% versus 75%.
Also, Berlin’s politicians didn’t propose a construction agenda. Mamdani has. (“New York City voters on Tuesday delivered a strong message in support of building more housing, passing three proposals that pitted City Hall against the City Council in an effort to rewrite decades-old development rules” [4].)
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/content/tenantprotection/pages/fast-fact...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/world/europe/berlin-gentr...
[3] https://www.berlin.de/en/news/8283996-5559700-housing-stock-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/nyregion/nyc-ballot-measu...
_coveredInBees
The Atlantic had a good article on this and how it isn't the doom and gloom you lay out above:
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/11/mamdani-...
As some of the replies note, it has been rather successful and popular in other cities like Berlin.
testfoobar
Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.
An alternative is Austin:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.
Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.
The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."
budududuroiu
Do those case studies include the case for expropriating landlords that don’t keep their buildings to code?
Massive building sprees don’t bring prices down, they bring favelisation.
If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble, and there’s potentially more housing stock on the market for people to buy (and no incentive for buying to let since rent freezes makes it unprofitable), this seems like a good effect
JumpCrisscross
> If the effect of this policies is that housing prices tumble
The near-term effect will be a spike in market rates. If Mamdani delivers on new supply, rents should broadly flatten in real terms.
ecshafer
Oh have we thought about just seizing property at gunpoint to solve the housing prices. The Kulaks deserve it anyways.
budududuroiu
Keeping a building rentable is a pretty reasonable criteria for… renting.
DannyBee
Also quoting Paul Krugman -
"“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
So you know, take what he says with a grain of salt, as with all economists, who pretend to be rigorous when in fact they are anything but.
Spooky23
Fascinating, yet rents have increased faster than inflation even as rent control has waned in NYC.
The problem with citing studies from 1992 is that you’re missing the last 25 years of war inflation hidden through various schemes of quantitative easing and capitalization. We’ve made capital so easy to get everything is fungible and inflates as everyone from families to foreign rich people looking to exfiltrate cash from their country pumps dollars into real estate.
My parents recently passed and we sold their house in Queens for a ridiculous sum - representing a 8% CAGR. Most of that increase in value has been since 2000, and that’s driven by a surplus of capital looking for a return.
testfoobar
The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.
Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.
raincom
Democrats want higher wages for workers instead of reducing the cost of living (rent, insurance, etc).
asdaqopqkq
How does he explain Tokyo then ?
nostrebored
The city with declining population growth, aggressive rezoning to create supply, that still has 30 yr high rents in 2025?
Dracophoenix
Lax zoning regulations, relatively cheap labor, low cost of materials, and depreciating home values incentivize building new real estate. That is what separates Tokyo from New York City.
donohoe
Or any of these:
- Vienna, Austria: About 60% of residents live in city-subsidized or cooperatively owned housing
- Berlin, Germany: Rent control has been mixed, varies by neighborhood, but seen as working
- Singapore: Not rent control in the classic sense, but government-built housing
- Montreal, Canada: Rent control applies mainly to existing tenant
Not all perfect. There are others. It can work.
jandrewrogers
The housing situation in Vienna has benefited significantly from massive population decline. As much as the population has grown in recent years, it is only now approaching the population it had a century ago.
Some genuinely lovely so-called “rust-belt” cities in the US have enjoyed a cheap housing renaissance on the back of historical population decline that is driving population increase now.
tsvetkov
Have you lived in one of those rent controlled “paradises”? In Europe, yes, there are sizeable populations living in subsidized housing, and often there are restrictions on rent increases, but new tenants pay way higher prices and have to compete for every available unit with dozens of other potential tenants. New tenants frantically overbidding each other, while old tenants pay pennies compared to today’s market prices, mmm, what a life.
“it can work” in some way of course. People are surprisingly adaptable to living in semi-dysfunctional environments. But it reality the only thing that truly works is building a lot of housing.
dyauspitr
30% of housing in places like Hong Kong are rent controlled. The other 70% or so are strictly not so there’s plenty of incentive for the free market.
Braxton1980
One of the pieces of evidence you provided is a poll about what people thought the effects were and not the actual effects.
Isn't that odd?
forthwall
Exciting times in New York City, I wish them the best, it probably will become a uphill battle now to do anything without media on every single thing out the wazooo
koolba
I’m a big believer that the people elect the government they deserve. Let’s see how this plays out.
sfpotter
Honest, hardworking people deserve honest, hardworking government.
SanjayMehta
[flagged]
seydor
The fact that people in here (who are richer than average) disagree with his policies makes his election more hopeful
drannex
Agreed. Thank you for pointing that out.
drannex
The DSA is finally having a moment - may they grow by the day.
sciencesama
Need to see how stocks will react tomorrow!! Nyc mayor mamdani ! Crash at Louisville airport and judgement on trump tariffs !! 1 billion Bitcoin liquidation!
nemo44x
Republicans have completely given up on cities and without being able to even field a worthy candidate it’s the sign of a dying party longer term. You simply have to have some influence in cities. But they had none after a 20 year run where they remade NYC after decades of failure. Bloomberg went independent but he got in as a Republican after a successful Giuliani admin (yes he’s tarnished that).
But what happened? Why can’t they field a competitive candidate in cities like NYC or SF or LA or Chicago after failed admin after failed admin? Why have they given up?
You need to control cities to have any future. They need to recommit to fighting for them.
TimorousBestie
> You need to control cities to have any future.
It seems like the strategy is to control state legislatures through extensive gerrymandering, then use state sovereignty to control the cities from without. Blue cities in otherwise red states are not able to experiment with local policies anymore, much to everyone’s detriment.
darkwizard42
The current Republican playbook seems to be heavily gerrymander a couple of states to dilute the city population impact. See: Texas
I hope this win signals (to both parties) that voters are receptive and will get engaged when a clear message is presented about cost of living and quality of life issues. Some of which are taken for granted in most other western countries.
I’m no political wonk, and I’m curious what others with more insight might say about his ability to fund and implement his polices.
I’m reminided of Obama and his hopeful message but he was mostly stymied on policy goals. Specifically Obamacare as an example ended up being watered down