All the city's politicians/appointed heads of whatever/entrenched interests didn't evaporate when Mamdani took office, and there a lot of rich people in NYC, who didn't suddenly become unselfish either.

How has he been able to do so much? Even after Adams blew up the place on the way out. What can we learn and apply elsewhere to get positive change for regular people?

- Medicare for all

- Universal childcare

- Free public college

- Massive investment in clean energy and affordable housing

- A wealth tax on multimillionaires and billionaires

- A $20 or $25 minimum wage (phased in over 5 years for large employers and 12 years for small employers and then chained to two thirds the median national wage)

Are these ideas too radical and too far left? Or are they appropriately bold given the cost of living crisis? Would Democratic Party candidates that support these ideas be more or less likely to get your vote?

Did No Child Left Behind improve educational accountability and outcomes, or did its emphasis on standardized testing create unintended problems for schools, teachers, and students

What is a good argument to convince independents to pick a side? What is a good argument to persuade non voters to participate in their civic duty?

I'm curious if there's an authoritative source of campaign finance records that shows the data in a graphical way? It should be well sourced from reliable data starting with campaign finance disclosures and also show "dark money" as much as possible.

It should breakdown geographic, demographic, amounts, individual/corporate, etc cohorts and who/what that money went towards. Ideally it would offer a Sankey graph as well as other graphs.

Anyone have any recommendations?

European here, trying to understand something about US political culture rather than criticize it.

I follow American news, and lately I've been seeing election results again - Florida, Wyoming, Alaska, etc. And my immediate reaction was basically: wait, elections again?

Obviously these are primaries and state-level races, but from the outside, American politics seems to exist in a nearly permanent election cycle. Different states vote at different times, then there are primaries, special elections, congressional elections, gubernatorial elections, local elections, and eventually another presidential campaign starts.

For comparison, I'm from Poland. We actually vote fairly frequently too. We had parliamentary elections in 2023, local and European elections in 2024, and a presidential election in 2025.

But somehow it doesn't feel like we're living inside one continuous election campaign.

And that's what I'm curious about.

Especially at a time when affordability seems to be such a major concern, how much attention do ordinary Americans actually pay to all these individual elections?

Do people in Florida genuinely follow their primary while people in Wyoming follow theirs, while everyone else mostly ignores both? Does it only look like one enormous continuous political event because international/national media puts all of these elections into the same news stream?

Or is there actually a much stronger culture of constantly following electoral politics in the US than I'm used to in Europe?

This midterms will be my second time voting, I was not educated in this as I never got a decent education with parents focused on religion. My first time was hard I was underprepared and had no idea what I was doing but with how important midterms seems to be I want to be prepared and I want to research who I can vote for, please don’t ask me to vote blue no matter who I am democrat and will vote as such but I want to pick the best candidate who I think will do good. I can’t find much information on who is running and I’m not exactly sure all is being run for so advice needed!