11/20/2025
After the New York City mayoral race was called for Zohran Mamdani the night of November 4, the mothers of the Upper East Side began to panic.
“Shocked,” one Facebook user wrote anonymously in the Moms of the Upper East Side (MUES) group, which has 35,000 members. “With all my love for NYC I can’t believe 50% +- of the city voted for this joker. Wondering who’s actually leaving?” Residents of the neighborhood had voted for Andrew Cuomo, a staunch supporter of Israel who campaigned on a tough-on-crime agenda, by a 24-point margin. The more-than-300 comments responding to that anonymous post are full of mothers looking for property in New Jersey or Florida, predicting that Mamdani’s promise to make buses free will lead criminals to r**e and kill innocent passengers, and airing their worries that New York City is on its way to becoming 1930s Germany.
A vocal minority of the group’s members jumped in to debate these reactions and point out the Islamaphobic subtext of the anti-Mamdani mania which only led to further fighting in the comments. As more combative threads cropped up over the next 24 hours, some users pleaded for each other to “get a collective grip.” Others posted that they were quitting the group they’d come to for swapping advice on strollers and nannies. “Not fleeing the city,” one wrote. “Fleeing this group. Bye MUES.”
Read about the heated division playing out in the neighborhood's Facebook mom group: https://nymag.visitlink.me/NzkMM9