There are any number of personal qualities that make New York mayoral front-runner Zohran Kwame Mamdani's political prominence seem improbable: his youth, his inexperience, his socialism, his terrible rapping, his statements of anti-Israel animus in the world's second-largest Jewish city. But the unlikeliest aspect to the State Assembly member's meteoric rise may be that an electoral pulse-quickener got anywhere near a position of prominence in a one-party polity.

The default Democrat in jurisdictions where Republicans are rare (they're outnumbered six to one in NYC) isn't a social-mediagenic semi-outsider; it's a dull-as-a-doorknob survivor of internal party jockeying. Think Bill de Blasio (not the Long Island one), or former California attorney general (and, gobsmackingly, secretary of

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