I don’t know, you get different vibes in different cities. Not exactly the same thing, but I (a pasty white guy) wear a Brujería hat I bought at a concert around NYC all the time, and the most that will ever happen is somebody asking me if I know what it is/about the band, then telling me how much they like them, or some old religious ladies freaking out about it being the Spanish word for witchcraft. Wearing the same hat in Los Angeles earlier this year, in different subway stations, I had a few cholos just glaring at me the whole time I was there and looking for a fight.

Some cities are a lot more segregated than others to this day, and you get places where you won’t be treated well if you’re not from the right group. Others, people just stick to themselves, for one reason or another. Like, if your car breaks down in Newburgh, NY, or the wrong part of Newark, NJ, you’re probably not getting any help from strangers, and if someone does come to help you, there’s a decent enough chance they’re trying to either rob you or carjack you. In some cities, about the most someone will do to help you out if you’re in trouble is to suggest that you don’t belong where you are, and that you ought to reconsider what you’re doing there.

They aren’t required to fund him, that’s true,

It’s not just about the funding. You also have key figures in the party actively fearmongering against him. A NY senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, did an interview the other day, playing him up as some sort of rabid antisemite and refusing to endorse him. Same with party leadership. If Cuomo or Adams had won, they would have had their endorsements announced and posted everywhere within minutes of the primaries being called, but when a progressive who uses the big, scary s-word wins, they sit on their hands and offer lukewarm statements about how they’ll work with him if he wins the election, but they have reservations and don’t want to commit to endorsing him. When you have Democrat public officials and high ranking figures in the party refusing to endorse “their” candidate, that can do a lot of damage to their chances amongst those who aren’t very politically engaged, or who lack media literacy.

Out of Hochul, Gillibrand, Schumer and Pelosi, I’m not aware of a single one who has actually endorsed him in the race. What happened to the calls for party unity and voting blue no matter who in order to defeat fascism they loved to trot out so much when they recently fielded unpopular, establishment candidates? I guess a little fascism is okay, as long as it’s just one city, now?

These sorts of Dems would rather see Sliwa win and start goose-stepping through the streets of NYC with his brownshirt losers than see Zohran win. They know that Zohran winning and having a successful term would be a damning indictment of their own failure to lead and step up to the moment, and the gears are spinning once again for them to do their best to make sure they don’t have to deal with that.

Edit: misattributed the interview to Hochul, but the point remains with it being Democratic Senator from NY, rather than the governor.

It really depends, there’s just a huge variance in city layout and regional cultures, so going from one to another can completely change things. Someone who likes the way things are in NYC isn’t necessarily going to like living in Orlando, Houston or Los Angeles, and won’t find the same culture. Heck, even within the same state, they can be pretty different.

That’s definitely true for many Republicans, but I think a successful term as mayor for Zohran has potential to really change things for the Democrats. If, after hearing from establishment Democrats for decades that the only way we can change things is so incrementally, not only can we not make progress, but we actually have to accept going backwards pretty often, you have a mayor who delivers some fairly sweeping changes, it could open the eyes of many Democrat voters to the lies that they’ve been fed by party leadership to excuse themselves for sitting on their hands while things fall apart around them.