Sad Girls for Capitalism

​On Election Night, Danielle Goldman was not 100 percent sure of her plans. Cool Girls for Capitalism, the group the 32-year-old nonprofit executive started with her friend Erica Wenger, a venture capitalist, just ten days earlier to get women to the polls to vote for Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race, was not big enough to have its own watch party. Instead, she told me she might swing by Chinatown, where the Free Press, a right-leaning media company founded by Bari Weiss, was gathering readers to watch the returns come in. “There will be people with all different views there,” she explained, “so we can just see. I might not stay for long.”

Goldman was easy to spot at the Bench, a co-working space no partygoers I spoke with actually belonged to. The matching pink “Cool Girls for Capitalism” hat and T-shirt she was wearing were impossible to miss in a room full of people wearing various shades of khaki. She was chatting up two people about a recent New York Times story on her group: “They made me sound like a ditz,” Goldman said. (And on and off throughout the night, she repeated, “I don’t even like Cuomo.”) She explained that her core group of friends, whom she described as having a “girlboss vibe,” was aligned with her stance on the election. As Jews living in New York City, she said, they worry about their safety under a Zohran Mamdani mayorship.

But she insisted that concern comes second to their worries about what the economy would look like under a democratic socialist. “Growing up, my parents said to me, ‘Do what you want and success will follow,’” she said. “That, in nature, is a capitalist idea: that if you work really hard, you can achieve infinite things. When I learned about the economics that went along with that, it became my priority.”

Hard work deserves a reward, Goldman believes, and she wanted to support a candidate who agrees. When I asked if she thought people wouldn’t work as hard under a Mayor Mamdani, she replied, “100 percent.” “There are a lot of people who wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to,” she said. “We saw that during COVID. There were a ton of people who just didn’t work because they were given those stipends, and they lived pretty happily on unemployment.”

A man soon joined us from across the room, saying he had to come over and talk about Goldman’s “hot girls” hat. “It’s not ‘hot’ girls,” she corrects, “but ‘cool’ girls.” Her outfit was the subject of a couple of dirty looks throughout the night — and one “You’re really wearing that?” said in passing — but mostly people came over to compliment Goldman’s hat. When she asked one man how he was feeling about the election, he responded, “I think my candidate is going to win, so pretty good.” She looked at him in confusion: “So you voted for Mamdani and you like my hat?”

While I spotted a few Mamdani pins scattered around the room, the overwhelming mood of the party was somber, and the Cuomo fans were prepared for the worst. As the election results rolled in, one man looked at me and said, “Let’s watch this city burn.” Once the election was called, a few people in the room cheered for Mamdani but most booed. “Hold on — my mom’s calling me,” a friend of Goldman’s said by way of excusing himself before disappearing into the crowd.

​If Goldman was disappointed in Cuomo’s loss herself, she didn’t show it. Yet another man approached to tell her that while he thought the message on her hat is good, the optics are bad: “The pink … it’s too twee.” I asked how she was feeling and if she was ready to leave. “I’m exhausted,” she said, almost sighing with relief.

“I was expecting this outcome, so I don’t feel shocked — and I don’t even feel wildly emotional,” she continued once we got outside the building. She was already training her marketing brain on the next election and how she could convince people that capitalism isn’t a dirty word; she wants to expand her message to other groups, like “LGBTQ+ and Black Entrepreneurs for Capitalism.” “My biggest regret is I didn’t do this sooner,” she said.

While we waited for Goldman’s Uber — she doesn’t like to take the subway past 10 p.m. — two more men stopped to tell her that they saw her appearance on the YouTube show Channel 5. They all commiserated about Cuomo’s defeat, and one of the men told her that Mamdani’s win might actually be a good thing for Republicans in the long run “because the Democratic Party currently has an identity crisis.” “This is exactly why I’m nervous,” Goldman said. “I’m not a Republican!”