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? To where, Florida?” Residents of the neighborhood synonymous with Gilded Age mansions and tony private schools 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 rape 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 —“It IS racist to just be mad that your new mayor is a Muslim” — 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.” A secondary fight broke out over the many members posting incendiary comments anonymously, which forced the moderators to create an “Anonymous Posting Rules” section over the weekend that read, “You may not attack or threaten other members while anonymous (or ever.)”
Facebook mom groups are notorious hotbeds of drama; a dueling group called UES Mommas has made headlines for explosive infighting over the pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter movements. But one MUES member told me that she thought Mamdani’s election has caused the most heated division in that group. (When I first asked to join, one of its administrators told me she was too overwhelmed by managing “the thousands of posts/comments coming through” to approve new members.)
Robin Reiter, a single mother with a 13-year-old son, didn’t hesitate to jump into the mix in response to a commenter who told angry members to “get your panties out of a crunch and just relax.” “We are literally terrified that a mayor who won’t condemn Hamas and won’t condemn the phrase ‘Globalize the Intifada’ is now running the city with the second largest Jewish population in the world,” the 49-year-old wrote. (In July, Mamdani said he will not use that phrase, and he has called the October 7 attacks a “horrific war crime.”) Reiter, who has appeared on Fox News as a parent concerned about migrant shelters and her son’s screen time, seems to relish in a catty back-and-forth, especially with those MUES members who spew anonymous opinions. “I think people rage bait a lot in that group,” she says. “You can’t come at me or expect me to have any kind of respect for your point of view when you can’t even identify who you are.”
Reiter says she’s now considering a move to Hoboken, New Jersey, as a result of Mamdani’s win. “It feels very immoral to me at this moment to pay tax dollars to a city that just elected someone who would love to see my people murdered,” she told me. “We’re all looking for an out, because I can’t jeopardize the safety of my son.” She’s not the only one looking to flee: There are 360 comments on a post titled, “Where to now?” where members shared real-estate-agent contacts and bragged about their second homes in red states. One recommended Realtor was Elise Macleod, who moved her family from the Upper East Side to Boca Raton during the pandemic. She told me she had a “surge of inquiries” from New York–based families looking for property in Florida since Mamdani’s win.
April, who says she is one of a few Black moms in the Facebook group and asked that I not use her last name, scoffed at those members of the group talking about fleeing New York City. “No, you’re not,” she says. “Just relax.” The fiery debates don’t make her want to leave the group that helped her find the best Montessori school for her son, either. “Motherhood is political,” she says. “Even if the group takes it too far sometimes.” She finds any comparison between Mamdani’s New York and Auschwitz to be ridiculous, and she especially hates when members of the group who voted for Donald Trump say that Mamdani is not qualified to run the city. She vented this frustration on a thread where moms debated the baseless accusation that the mayor-elect plans to implement Sharia law. “It’s always mind-numbing when folks bring up, for instance, Mamdani’s ‘lack of experience’ when the ENTIRETY of this current administration are the least qualified, most WTF choices arguably in American history,” she wrote. “And are the reason Mamdani even stood a chance.”
Not every mom in the group is comfortable jumping into the fray. A woman I’ll call Sarah, a Chinese immigrant who lives east of Central Park, thinks the Facebook page is an “inappropriate” venue for political discourse. That doesn’t mean she lacks an opinion. Sarah describes the UES as a “happy little bubble” where kids can run around the playground without worrying about seeing a “homeless person or walking on a needle.” (Her downtown-dwelling friends told her Washington Square is an “open drug den” these days.) The 38-year-old wants to raise her toddler somewhere with a police officer on every corner and is concerned that Mamdani may pull funding from the NYPD in favor of mental-health-outreach workers. She also doesn’t like his plan to phase out gifted and talented programs for kindergarten students. “That just completely eliminates any ability for me to consider sending my child to a public school,” Sarah told me. “Part of the reason why people pay to live on specific blocks of the Upper East Side is so they can go to PS6.”
Morghan Richardson Valdés wants to engage with members like Sarah, who she thinks have an alarmist take on Mamdani’s win, and correct disinformation she sees in the Facebook group. “I’m trying to listen to why people are afraid,” says the Astoria resident, who used to live on the Upper East Side. The 47-year-old jumped into one thread that was filled with comments mocking Mamdani’s universal child-care proposal to point out that, under such a program, fewer women would have to leave their jobs to become stay-at-home mothers due to high day-care costs. “Too many women lose autonomy after having kids and get stuck in abusive relationships without the means to leave,” she wrote. “Nannies need day care too.” When a commenter responded that free day care will result in dead children, she kept an even tone. “You are trading in a lot of hypotheticals,” Valdés responded, “but today is for hope. Let’s give the man a chance.”
MUES isn’t even the only Facebook group Valdés belongs to that is melting down after the election. She said people in an Astoria-based mommy group dunked on her for saying that she’d gladly go to a neighborhood bar that Mamdani had recently visited: “People were cursing at me and discussing my anatomy, saying, ‘You must have a full bush.’” As a divorce lawyer who is used to people flinging horrible allegations around, the insults don’t faze Valdés, but she hopes that the chatter will simmer down in groups like MUES. “It breaks my heart to see this much division,” she says. “I think everybody does have good intentions when they go into these groups.”
For now, MUES is turning back toward more mundane conversational fare, like calling out negligent nannies and sharing tips on where to find the best tennis bracelets. “Not a post about Mamdani!!!!” read one post this week. “Does anyone know where to get an epic medical-grade pedicure?”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated where Elise Macleod moved during the pandemic. Her family relocated from the Upper East Side to Boca Raton.