• Mamdani's Voting Choice: Voted for himself on Working Families Party line, emphasizing loyalty to progressive movement over Democratic establishment.
• WFP Success: All 32 WFP-endorsed candidates won, including key positions like Public Advocate, District Attorneys, Borough Presidents, and City Council members.
• Progressive Influence: WFP and DSA represent rising power, extending to Albany for policy support like tax hikes.
• Establishment Shift: Progressives now form New York's political establishment, predicting decline of moderate elite.
• Election Dynamics: Mamdani secured narrow majority against scandal-plagued opponent Andrew Cuomo, who had low favorability.
• Campaign Tactics: Mamdani's victory driven by effective ground game and turnout of young voters, contrasting Cuomo's weak campaign.
• Progressive Strategy: Opposition to open primaries and election cycle changes preserved influence in Democratic primaries.
• Moderate Response: Centrists urged to build organizations or third party to challenge progressives, drawing from San Francisco model and New York's fusion voting history.

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Courtesy Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.

When Zohran Mamdani, now mayor-elect of New York City, went to the polls last Tuesday, he didn’t vote for himself on the Democratic ballot line he had wrested from Andrew Cuomo five months earlier. Rather, Politico’s Jason Beeferman reported, Mamdani voted for himself on the line controlled by the Working Families Party, a third party that backs progressive challengers to Democrats in an effort to push them to the left. The vote was a nod to Mamdani’s outsider status—at the end of the day, his loyalty is to the union-backed movement the WFP represents, not to the Democratic establishment that preferred Cuomo.

But after Tuesday’s results, it’s not clear that Mamdani and his friends are still “outsiders.” Every single one of the 32 WFP-endorsed candidates won his or her election. These included not just Mamdani, but Public Advocate Jumaane Williams; the Manhattan and Brooklyn District Attorneys; the Manhattan, Bronx, and Brooklyn borough presidents; and 25 members of the 51-member City Council. As Joseph Burns wrote in City Journal following Mamdani’s primary win, the WFP’s influence extends to Albany, where Mamdani will need support to get his promised tax hikes approved. Mamdani’s candidacy also represents the rising power of another progressive org: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the reach of which Mamdani aimed to grow when he first began running.

If anything, these two organizations, and the broader progressive movement, are New York City’s “establishment” now. Indeed, many are predicting the demise of the New York City moderate elite—some gloomily, some gleefully. Is New York fated, by the inalterable logic of history, to a future of “socialism on the Hudson”?

Not necessarily. Mamdani’s victory—and the broader progressive takeover of New York City’s government—isn’t really the result of a socialist revolution in public opinion. Rather, it represents a concerted political effort on the part of the progressives, combined with the complacency of the city’s moderates. The left, through groups like the DSA and WFP, staged an insurgency and won. If the center wants to retake the city, it needs to play the same game—and win.

One way to understand New York’s mayoral election is as a sweeping victory for the city’s progressive faction. But another is that their tribune secured barely a majority of the vote. This, in spite of the fact that his primary opponent had already lost the primary; was 20 points down in favorability in the days before the election; was implicated in multiple major scandals that had driven him from the state’s governorship; and is generally an object of hatred across the entirety of New York State politics. (Even worse: his other opponent was, horror of horrors, a Republican.)

As Jesse Arm recently wrote, the notable thing isn’t that Mamdani won, but rather how far he ran behind moderates and fellow executive candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in their respective races. With a different candidate running against Mamdani—a possibility discussed but never realized after the primary—it’s quite possible the race would have gone the other way.

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Source: New York Times

Within his narrow margin, Mamdani’s success is attributable not so much to the inexorable march of progress as it is to his campaign’s superior tactics. After all, there is little doubt that if Cuomo had won the primary, a Mamdani challenge on the WFP line in the general would have been futile. But Mamdani’s primary success was at least in part about the effectiveness of his turnout machine, which drove tens of thousands of younger New Yorkers to vote for the first time. His ground game—powered by the DSA and WFP—was so effective that it transformed the entire primary electorate, resulting in a shocking polling miss.

Cuomo, by contrast, ran an anemic campaign, defined primarily by out-of-date ads and the occasional presser. Observers were left with the impression that the former Governor, scion of a political dynasty, felt entitled to his comeback. Talk to almost anyone in New York and they’ll tell you they spoke to Mamdani canvassers; no one remembers anyone in a “Hot Girls for Cuomo” shirt knocking on their door.

This inertia, though, is not limited to the mayoral race. Alvin Bragg, the arch-progressive prosecutor in Manhattan, barely faced a primary challenge; Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s DA, didn’t even have to compete in a primary and was uncontested in the general. Infamous progressives on the Council like Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse, Lincoln Restler, and Shanana Hanif faced no or no real primary challenge. All of these people will greenlight Mamdani’s agenda. In the case of radical changes like abolishing the NYPD’s gang database, they will probably be the ones pushing for change.

The progressives, moreover, know how important their ground game is to their success. That’s why the WFP worked to kill an amendment to the City Charter that would have created an open primary system—ensuring that registered WFP voters would be shut out so that they would have an easier time influencing the Democratic primary. And it’s why Mamdani voted no on proposition 6, which would have moved New York City’s local elections to the same cycle as national elections, increasing the size of the electorate and making organizing less effective. In other words, if you doubt that the progressive machine made the difference, recognize that the left sure thinks it did.

On election night, myself and fellow City Journal contributors

Rafael A. Mangual

and

John Ketcham

were joined in conversation by

Pirate Wires

’s Mike Solana. For me at least, the most interesting part of the conversation was Mike’s detailing of how San Francisco elected its current, more moderate leadership. In his telling, decades of dominance by progressives was undermined by concerted action on the part of the city’s more moderate residents, mobilizing around objections to progressive excesses, and focusing on the minutiae that are needed to win elections. To translate: moderates took San Francisco back by actually trying to win.

It would be easy for New York City centrists to throw their hands in the air and insist that Mamdani is the future, which we all had better get used to. But that would avoid the hard truth that this was a winnable race, and that Mamdani’s victory is the culmination of years of progressive insurgency largely unchallenged.

The progressive have won; they are the establishment. Which is why the moderates, rather than giving up, need to start acting like they’re the outsiders. If groups like the DSA and WFP are running the show, then moderates need their own institutions—even their own third party—to hold the new progressive establishment accountable.

The use of third parties for such purposes—buoyed by New York’s unique electoral “fusion” laws—is far from unprecedented. Bill Buckley’s quixotic 1965 campaign for the mayoralty was on a third party line; so was John Lindsay’s reelection bid four years later. Mario Cuomo narrowly lost to Ed Koch on the Liberal Party line in 1977; and Giuliani won on a Republican-Liberal fusion ticket in 1993, with the Liberal-line votes putting him over the top. Mike Bloomberg used the Independence Party line throughout his campaigns, both as a Republican and as a registered Independent. The WFP has not been the only party to try to discipline Democrats by selectively running candidates; the New York Conservative party did so as well, long after Buckley’s campaign was over.

A new moderate party could do the same for the numerous progressives now in charge of New York’s government. It could build enthusiasm for moderate candidates, taking advantage of the generous election laws that the WFP has used so successfully to its advantage. There’s at least one obvious electoral vehicle—the essentially moribund Liberal Party of New York, which endorsed Cuomo in 2025. If the LPNY can’t be wrested from its current controllers, then another party could be stood up easily—imagine a 2029 nominee running on the Prosperity Party line.

Even if a third party isn’t right, moderates need some sort of public-facing organization. The results last Tuesday indicated that a sizable fraction of New Yorkers are skeptical of their new Mayor. They can’t be welcomed into smoke-filled rooms, but they can join clubs, mailing lists, or any other infrastructure that might be on offer.

How could such a group hold New York’s progressive establishment accountable? San Francisco offers a good model: publicize and criticize the sort of excesses that scare off even New York’s left-leaning electorate. As recent MI polling showed, while Mamdani is popular in the city, many of his ideas are not. When progressives—not just Mamdani, but Councillors, borough presidents, and appointed officials—oppose fare enforcement or the city’s gifted and talented program, they’re at odds with a majority of Gothamites. Thus far, they’ve mostly managed to avoid scrutiny for these views; some adept social media wrangling could easily change that.

After all, if moderates are no longer the establishment, then the city’s problems are no longer their fault. There’s nothing quite so liberating as being out of power: you get to make all the criticisms, while your opponent has to take all the blame.

Which doesn’t mean that the city’s moderates need to be knee-jerk critics of everything Mamdani does. Doubtless, some of his initiatives will be popular with the electorate. Conservative talking points—no matter how correct—probably won’t persuade. That’s why the center-left needs to lead this movement—they’re the middle of the city.

But moderates can connect and have connected with New Yorkers before. There’s a reason why, in City Journal’s pre-election focus group, participants remembered the mayoralties of Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani more favorably than that of Bill de Blasio. The former provided safe streets and rising prosperity; the latter offered conflict with the cops and cronyism in city hall.

In four years, New York’s moderates might be mounting a successful campaign to stop a second Mamdani term. (I think their champion is obvious.) But if they do, it’s because they’ll understand that they haven’t failed to control just Gracie Mansion, but the whole of the city’s government. And they’ll try to retake that government from the ground up—after all, that’s how the left did it.

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The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York represents a seismic victory for the Democratic Socialists of America. Yet even as the DSA seems poised for a political breakthrough, it shows signs of unraveling.

Indeed, even before Mamdani’s victory last week, DSA members were intensely divided over whether his election would represent an electoral success or capitulation to the status quo. Some on the party’s radical fringes have argued against a consensus document meant to define DSA’s positions on Mamdani’s campaign. These tensions could shape Mamdani’s mayoralty and the future of socialist politics in America.

The DSA is not a political party. Like a party, however, the DSA has several factions and caucuses that jockey for power. Many of the DSA’s most prominent members belong to the Groundwork caucus, which emphasizes political reform and the need to preserve strong relationships with mainstream progressives and Democrats. These members are typically influential in the group’s politics.

But Groundwork often struggles to corral the DSA’s more radical wings. Groundwork representatives could not, for example, convince the rest of the DSA’s National Political Committee to endorse the No Kings Day protests.

These tensions mounted a week before the October 2025 meeting of New York City DSA, when the city chapter’s steering committee introduced two propositions: “Local Dues Drives Proposal” and “NYC-DSA Goals in Electing a Democratic Socialist Mayor.” While both documents provoked debate, conflicts flared in particular over one line in the second document: “If we succeed in electing Zohran Mamdani, our priorities will be campaigning for a democratic socialist mayor, expanding working-class power, and winning material improvements in the lives of the working class.” (NYC DSA did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Some members of NYC DSA and other chapters across the country feared this language would make Mamdani’s candidacy too central to the organization’s mission. Within days, five DSA factions—Springs of Revolution, Emerge Caucus, Libertarian Socialists, Reform and Revolution, and Marxist Unity Group (MUG)—published a flyer encouraging members to vote “No” on both propositions. They also released a petition demanding that the city chapter hold a “special meeting” in January with “true deliberative spaces, where members can collectively decide our work.”

There’s reason to suspect that one of those factions, MUG, has long been wary of Mamdani’s run for mayor. In August 2024, two months before Mamdani launched his campaign, someone writing under the name “Sid C.”—possibly Sidney Carlson White, a MUG member who now sits on DSA’s National Political Committee—penned a piece in the Socialist Tribune (a MUG-run Substack newsletter) arguing that it was “imperative that Zohran Mamdani . . . NOT run to win.” (a comment request to the newsletter’s email went unanswered.)

Instead, Sid C. argued, Mamdani should run an “agitational campaign” that advances the DSA’s positions on issues ranging from Palestine to police abolition in hopes of “lay[ing] the groundwork for our socialist future.”

Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary sent MUG back to the drawing board. In September, the entire faction published a missive that outlined its strategy for the “Mamdani moment.” The document demanded more “democratic” DSA institutions, with more “transparency and accountability” from the group’s leadership. It also outlined several principles about the DSA’s relationship to Mamdani, including asserting that “Zohran should be accountable to DSA’s democracy.”

The Liberation Caucus also opposed the pro-Mamdani propositions. Calling itself “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” the group formed this year to advocate for more revolutionary politics within the organization. Liberation Caucus recently issued its own response to the propositions, denouncing the NYC DSA for “seek[ing] to turn an ostensibly socialist organization into an electoral cheerleading and fundraising machine.”

“What worker would donate to NYC-DSA,” the group asked, “if all we do is run electoral campaigns?”

Remarkably, some of the Liberation Caucus’s members believe that Mamdani has become too conservative and friendly to Israel. One member called Mamdani “ZIOhran” and accused him of “pivot[ing] further and further to the right.” Another deemed Mamdani a “traitor and an opportunist,” adding, “[I w]ould not vote for him if I [were] a New Yorker.”

While some in the DSA’s radical fringes think that Mamdani is too mainstream, others see the mayor-elect as a revolutionary. In Partisan, a Communist magazine, someone writing under the name “Landry L.” argued that Mamdani’s mayoral campaign gave socialists an opportunity to “unite new and existing fights under a common banner.”

Mamdani’s campaign presents “a golden chance . . . to build power both inside and outside the state,” Landry L. writes. Invoking historian Noel Ignatiev—known for his calls to abolish “whiteness” and his objections to kosher toasters—Landry L. suggests that DSA and its allies should “actually instigate [a crisis] by deepening the contradictions in the current political order.” Even if Mamdani fails to deliver on his agenda, Landry L. argues, “his position as mayor will open possibilities that are bigger than a single mayoral administration in one city.”

These disputes reveal the extent to which Mamdani’s DSA coalition is fractured. His ideological allies cannot agree on the purpose of his mayoralty, or even whether it’s worthwhile. Is the mayor-elect merely an “organizer in chief,” or does he have the “radical potential” to spark a crisis that ushers in a socialist revolution? As the DSA takes power, New Yorkers should pay close attention to the answers.

Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images

• Company Context: OnePlus faced challenges like canceling the Open 2, no North American OnePlus 13T launch, and ending Hasselblad partnership while adopting in-house imaging.
• Design Shift: OnePlus 15 features a typical 2025 smartphone look with iPhone-like elements, including camera bump and shortcut button, in colors like Sand Storm that feel unfinished.
• Display Specs: 6.78-inch flat panel at 1272p resolution and 165Hz refresh rate offers vibrant colors but no noticeable difference from predecessor's 1440p and 120Hz.
• Software Changes: OxygenOS 16 emphasizes AI tools and iOS-inspired features like app categories and quick settings, resulting in a less original Android experience.
• Performance Details: Powered by Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, it handles tasks efficiently with good haptics and speakers but shows occasional warming and freezing issues.
• Battery Capacity: 7,300mAh silicon-carbon battery provides two-day endurance for most users, enhanced by 80W charging, though lacks Qi2 magnetic support.
• Camera Performance: Main 50MP lens offers accurate but oversaturated colors with oversharpening; ultra-wide and 3.5x telephoto show softness and inconsistencies compared to prior Hasselblad-tuned models.
• Overall Assessment: At $899, it excels in battery life and basics but disappoints in design, software originality, and camera, positioning it as a transitional device amid delayed US launch due to FCC certification postponement.

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No matter how it’s translated into raw sales or market share, OnePlus has been on a tear in the lead-up to the OnePlus 15. The OnePlus Open remains one of my favorite foldables ever, and I continue to hope for an eventual follow-up to compete against Samsung and Google’s efforts in the US. The OnePlus 12 and 13, meanwhile, offered exceptional rivals to the usual suspects lining your carrier’s shelves; this year’s OnePlus 13, in particular, felt like something special.

But this year’s been full of challenges for OnePlus. It wasn’t just the Open 2’s quiet cancellation or the lack of a North American launch for the smaller OnePlus 13T. The dissolution of the company’s partnership with Hasselblad — despite Oppo’s continuation of the same program — seemed to spell big changes on the horizon for the brand, while OxygenOS 16’s initial debut showed off just how far the Apple-flavored inspiration has come.

And now, with the arrival of the OnePlus 15, we can see what a year’s worth of transformation has brought us. In some ways, it’s business as usual for OnePlus, pushing boundaries on battery capacity and launching at an $899 price tag that’s hundreds of dollars cheaper than its main competition. But a closer look reveals the OnePlus 15 is a pretty big step back compared to its direct predecessors in practically every regard. It’s not enough to keep me from enjoying plenty of aspects of this phone, but recommending the OnePlus 15 comes with some big caveats.

Hardware

The last few outings from OnePlus have seen some surprisingly unique designs, especially in an otherwise stagnant mobile arena. After the fairly drab OnePlus 10, the OnePlus 11 in its marquee Emerald Green colorway really wowed me, thanks in large part to its redesigned camera bump. The company continued to iterate on that core design language until eventually ending up with the OnePlus 13 that hit store shelves earlier this year.

While there are certain elements of the OnePlus 13 I don’t like — its metallic, smudge-friendly frame; its flat display that nevertheless hides under curved glass — it was unapologetically original, especially in its faux-leather Midnight Blue shade.

In contrast to the unique spirit that’s shown through the last handful of OnePlus flagships, the OnePlus 15 looks about as typical 2025 smartphone as you could possibly hope to find.

In fact, it goes well beyond that. At times, it was impossible not to feel like the device in my hands was actually one of Apple’s Pro Max-sized iPhones, a comparison made far worse by some of the changes in OxygenOS 16. The camera bump shape and location, the single shortcut button in the upper left-hand section of the frame, the flat matte ceramic edges aiming to one-up Apple’s (no longer employed) use of titanium.

Other times, I felt as though I was holding a reference device, a CAD model brought to life through the magic of 3D printing. Although I’m sure this feeling would stick around in its Infinite Black or Ultra Violet, the Sand Storm shade here just amplifies it to a degree that, frankly, two weeks of serving as my daily driver hasn’t resolved. Sand Storm is, in effect, a warmish-gray tone that leaves the entire device feeling unfinished, as though it’s missing its final paint job out of the box. At least its velvety-smooth finish feels nice in the hand, though I’ve dropped this device more than I’d care to admit.

Thankfully, any qualms I have about the design here don’t carry over to actually using the phone. The 6.78-inch display is a fraction smaller than the one used by its predecessor, but it’s every bit as poppy and vibrant indoors and out. It’s technically lower resolution than last year’s panel — a reduced 1272p compared to the previous true 1440p spec — but I’d be lying if I said I noticed the difference.

Unfortunately, that blade cuts both ways, as the move to 165Hz is similarly lost on me. It’s a buttery smooth display, but I can’t tell you I’m seeing a difference compared to 120Hz. It’s a fully flat panel under a similarly flat piece of glass, though, which certainly feels more comfortable to hold compared to this phone’s not-quite-flat predecessor.

Despite the redesign, OnePlus hasn’t given up on nailing the basics. The stereo speakers, haptics, and buttons all feel top-shelf, though the volume rocker placement continues to be far too high up the right side of the device for my liking. Face unlock works surprisingly well in most cases, while the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor feels as accurate as ever to me. Enthusiast-favorite features — like an IR blaster functioning as a built-in universal remote — also remain present and accounted for.

But OnePlus deserves some shame for replacing its alert slider with a shortcut button — the ‘Plus Key’ — clearly inspired by Apple, while simultaneously failing to improve on the Action Button failings. It’s a serviceable replacement, but like on the iPhone, you can only set it to perform one task. Double or triple-click options remain a pipe dream — or, if we’re lucky, a post-launch software upgrade. And if you think that’s a copy, just wait until you see the software for it.

Software and performance

The Plus Key is the perfect transition to talk about some of the big changes made to OxygenOS this year. It’s remarkable that, in less than a span of 12 months, I can go from celebrating the software that ships on OnePlus devices to actively disliking it — and yet, that’s exactly where we land with OxygenOS 16.

This software upgrade really comes with two main focuses, neither of which I find appealing. The first is an obvious continued reliance on AI toolsets. I’m of the mindset that Google is the only company currently doing anything truly novel in this space; from Samsung to Motorola to, yes, Apple, everyone else seems to be set on replicating the same handful of features again and again. The OnePlus 15 comes preloaded with AI writing tools, AI search tools, AI translation tools, AI recording and transcription tools, and a “Mind Space” application that actually describes itself as “your AI brain.”

Most of these features aren’t new, and what little is new is certainly uninspired. I don’t get the impression OnePlus actually expects most of its fans to use these tools; largely speaking, they’re buried in settings and exist as OEM-specific alternatives to plenty of what we’ve seen Google ship to all Android devices through Gemini. And that’s the other key here — if you really want your smartphone to operate as an AI-centric device, you’re probably going to be relying on Gemini more than anything else.

The other changes on display in OxygenOS 16 are, unfortunately, harder to ignore. This software pulls so hard from iOS, it occasionally verges on embarrassment. The app drawer now has a permanent “Categories” toggle at the top of the page, with the word “Categories” constantly scrolling every other second despite fitting properly in the space provided. Tapping it gives you a direct clone of the App Library on iOS, an objectively worse take on Android’s default app drawer.

This isn’t just cloning a rival’s software experience — it’s also functionally nonsensical. Let’s say you disagree with me and prefer this flavor of Apple’s weird auto-assigned categories. There’s no way to set the Categories view as your default app drawer experience, meaning you need to tap it every single time you open your app list to view it. It’s a secondary step for an unnecessary feature, and aside from visually copying the iPhone, I have no idea why it’s here.

That’s far from the only space where OxygenOS verges heavily into knock-off territory. It’s not a new change, but the default split quick settings view looks right out of modern iOS (though that can graciously be combined back into something more traditionally Android). Global Search looks almost identical to Spotlight on the iPhone, though it appears far less useful for actually pulling up anything outside a Google Search shortcut. The lock screen now supports ultra-tall, frosted digits for its clock — wonder where I’ve seen that before?

And that brings us back to the OnePlus 15’s shortcut Plus Key, the setup process for which is a nearly 1:1 recreation of the exact experience offered up by the iPhone.

Maybe I’m a little too in-the-weeds with this phone to have a clear vision, but combined with the new design here, the entire experience of using this phone just feels cheap. It’s the equivalent of buying a “Gucci” handbag off the street for pennies on the dollar, except in the OnePlus 15’s case, you aren’t actually saving much compared to the product it’s knocking off.

Some of this is easy enough to ignore, and if you primarily use your smartphone as a launching pad for opening apps, this isn’t going to feel much different than any other Android experience you can find on store shelves today. But with Google painting such a unique vision for both itself and other OEMs to follow with Material 3 Expressive, I think it’s worth calling out the aversion to embracing anything outside of the Apple bubble. Recent iOS changes haven’t even been particularly popular among its own fan base, and yet, you won’t find much outside of Apple’s influence shaping OxygenOS 16. It’s a shame.

The company’s software support policy remains unchanged. The OnePlus 15 will see four major OS upgrades alongside six years of bimonthly security patches. It’s far from a dealbreaker, but it’s also far from the seven-year standard set by Google and Samsung, and I’d like to eventually see these ranges improve.

The OnePlus 15 is my first experience with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and so far, I’m as impressed as I tend to be with Qualcomm’s flagship chipsets. If you’re coming from the Snapdragon 8 Elite that directly preceded this chip, or even the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 from 2023 — great job with these names, Qualcomm — I don’t think you’re going to notice much in the way of a performance boost. If you’re coming from a Pixel, well, I don’t know what to tell you. This phone stays cooler under pressure and runs circles around Tensor when it comes to gaming; it’ll feel like a big upgrade for power users.

All that said, I have spotted some odd performance hiccups throughout the couple of weeks I’ve been using this phone. On a couple of occasions, this device got surprisingly warm when on a strong 5G signal, despite operating on relatively low (auto) brightness. I’ve also had the phone outright freeze, requiring a hard reset to get back to the home screen. With any luck, these minor issues can be ironed out within the first couple of patches.

Battery life and charging

You would never know it just by picking it up, but through the use of silicon-carbon technology, OnePlus managed to pack a 7,300mAh battery in this thing. That’s not a typo — 7,300mAh, or, for comparison’s sake, a battery nearly 300mAh larger than the one packed in the Pixel Tablet. If you thought the 6,000mAh cell in the OnePlus 13 outperformed the competition, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Put simply, this is a two-day smartphone for practically everyone. While I’m sure someone out there reading this could figure out the right series of tasks to kill this device before the sun goes down — my money’s on the MiHoYo game of your choice paired with PiP video streaming over 5G, with the display set to full brightness — it’s going to take some pretty abusive treatment to get there.

Those screen-on/off times are just for a single day, not that entire span since its last charge.

For everyone else, how you use your phone is going to be the determining factor in how long it lasts. I’ve tried to replicate a handful of experiences to determine just how long the OnePlus 15 can go between charges. A true mixed bag — think a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular, audio playback over Bluetooth and the on-board speakers, indoor and outdoor usage for various brightness levels, and so on — should deliver a full two days without breaking a sweat. Lighter users, like those of us who practically never leave their home Wi-Fi network, could last well into day three or, in some cases, even day four. Heavier users might need a mid-afternoon top-off on day two.

Either way, I think this is an unabashed win. My Pixel Tablet comparison wasn’t an accident; with this device, we’ve effectively hit tablet-levels of battery life from our smartphones, and that’s in line with what I’ve experienced from the OnePlus 15. This sort of battery life — crossed with the usual 80W SuperVOOC charger offered here in the US — completely revolutionizes how you use your smartphone. Why plug it in at night when any random 20-minute charging session will get you through at least an additional day?

But even this category isn’t a slam dunk for OnePlus. While I’ll give the company some respect for having admitted directly to reviewers that this device doesn’t support Qi2 — no “Qi2 Ready” nonsense here — this is yet another generation that completely ignores the demand for magnetic accessories. 7,300mAh is nice, but I think I would’ve rather taken something in the 6,000mAh-range in exchange for built-in magnets. At the very least, OnePlus does offer magnet-equipped cases as an optional purchase.

Camera

For as many qualms as I may have about photos from Samsung, Motorola, or even Google, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so frustrated by a relatively good camera lineup than the performance seen out of the OnePlus 15. For every good thing I have to say about these lenses and the underlying processing power, an equally-notable shortcoming rears its ugly head — and it all starts with a company that isn’t even part of the equation this year.

Yes, as we’ve known for a few months now, OnePlus opted to dissolve its partnership with Hasselblad after several generations of fairly wide-ranging success. Although the two companies started off relatively quiet in the smartphone game, by the time the OnePlus 13 arrived in North America at the start of 2025, I was absolutely smitten with the images produced by these devices. Unfortunately, despite some lofty promises from OnePlus on the capabilities of its in-house imaging engine, I just can’t say I’m all that impressed with what’s on display here.

That’s not to say the OnePlus 15 is an outright camera disaster — rather, it’s just a pretty big stepback compared to its predecessor. As usual, you’ll get your best shots with the main f/1.8 lens 50MP. Color reproduction is actually fairly accurate, if on the oversaturated side. It’s a compromise I’ll take compared to the washed-out, HDR-addled look delivered by Pixel and its main competitors, but it comes at a cost: oversharpening.

For whatever reason, the new imaging engine OnePlus developed for this device loves to oversharpen. You can watch it happen in real-time after tapping the shutter button; a perfectly respectable image will suddenly indent itself with deeper, heavier outlines surrounding practically every object in a frame. Sometimes, like when taking photos of my cats, this effect can be ignored entirely, written off as an artifact of your pet’s fur. Other times, like when capturing trees and grass, it leaves an otherwise fine photo looking like a bad Photoshop experiment.

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It’s a problem that only gets worse when you swap to other lenses. My experience with the ultra-wide sensor here primarily comes from macro images — again, snapping images of my cats or of my dinner out. In less-than-perfect light, shooting in macro caused some particularly blurry images, and I can’t tell how much of that was a fault in my hand movements versus some particularly slow processing. I nearly always got a better shot by disabling macro and backing up from my subject.

The 3.5x telephoto lens didn’t fare much better; it’s surprisingly soft in practice, while simultaneously oversharpening whatever it determines to be the main focus point of an image.

You can get good shots from this camera, but it’s far more hit or miss than last year’s outing, and the misses here in particular occur much more often than before. Hasselblad’s partnership with OnePlus started off similarly rocky in its earliest of days, so it’s possible a future device — or, if we’re especially lucky, a future software update — can replicate its success while this company ventures out on a solo quest. That doesn’t change the fact that, at launch, the OnePlus 15’s camera just doesn’t hold up to its predecessor.

Final thoughts

The OnePlus 15 isn’t a bad phone, but it is an inherently frustrating one. There’s still plenty of OnePlus magic under the hood here — an ultra-fast chipset, a camera unafraid of colors and life-like saturation, and the largest battery I’ve ever used in a smartphone by a longshot. Simultaneously, though, I just can’t say this phone captured my heart the way the last couple of this company’s flagship releases did. Combining a disappointing redesign with less impressive camera performance and a UI overhaul dramatically hoping you’ll recognize iOS in every nook and cranny just doesn’t feel like a path to success.

And yet, there’s plenty to like about the OnePlus 15. It’s comfortable to hold, it nails all the basics — particularly its display and its overall performance — and, to really drive the point home, the battery life here really does change how you use your phone. And for less than $1,000, it remains a bargain compared to big-screen competitors from Google, Samsung, and Apple, even if you can feel out those cut corners a little more than usual.

OnePlus is no stranger to setbacks in its overall vision — the OnePlus 8 and 9, in particular, stood out as disappointing releases from the company. In that sense, the OnePlus 15 feels like another step towards something greater, potentially something that once again takes the Pixel out of its usual spot in my pocket. For now, though, I’m not sure this device is much more than a transitional device, albeit one with class-leading battery life.

The OnePlus 15 was meant to go on sale in the US today, November 13th. However, due to the government shutdown, this device was unable to finish formal certification by the FCC. Below is an official statement from OnePlus:

As is the case with every smartphone manufacturer, the United States’ Federal Communications Commission certifies OnePlus devices before they are sold in the U.S. As a result of the government shutdown, device certifications have been delayed. Subsequently, U.S. sales for the OnePlus 15 will be postponed until they have been secured. The OnePlus 15 has already finished all the required tests from the FCC’s recognized labs and the certification application has been formally submitted. We are hopeful that approvals can be generated quickly and as a result, we can bring the OnePlus 15 to our customers in the U.S. expeditiously.

• Sign up to be notified of OnePlus 15 availability here

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Is Donald Trump a Trumpist? Or is he really an unacknowledged heir from Queens of the Bush dynasty? Is the 45th and 47th president of the United States a Russian matryoshka doll, whose well-coiffed head can be lifted off to reveal a figurine of Bush 43, which in turn contains Bush 41?

Americans on the Right have reasons to wonder. Recently a number of self-styled spokespersons for MAGA have claimed that the president has betrayed his populist base on issues ranging from foreign policy (with his bombing of Iran and threats of war against Venezuela), to higher education (with his insistence on admitting Chinese students to US universities to maintain university enrollments and budgets). At the same time, old-fashioned conservatives complain that Trump has betrayed the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes with his stances on trade and immigration. 

Both sides are half-right — and thus half-wrong. Just as he demolished the East Wing of the White House to add a new ballroom, while leaving the rest of the structure intact, so Trump, instead of completely replacing the older version of conservatism, has added a new populist wing based on trade and labor protectionism.

Pre-Trump “fusionist conservatism,” forged by the likes of William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer in the last century, is often compared to a stool with three legs: a hawkish foreign policy, free-market libertarianism in economics, and social conservatism. Trump himself never fit that model. During his 2016 campaign, he described the Iraq War as a “disaster” and vowed not to cut Social Security or Medicare. And while George W. Bush is a born-again Christian, Trump is a thrice-married playboy who told evangelicals at Liberty University that his favorite book in the Bible is “Two Corinthians.”

In contrast to their leader, the priorities of most congressional Republicans in Trump’s second term, as in his first, have been Bush-like: to expand the deficit with tax cuts for the rich, or to attempt to cut or destroy ObamaCare without offering any replacement other than a few half-baked ideas. Little seems to have changed with the GOP caucus since the days when Paul Ryan was House speaker (Ryan himself, feeling betrayed as a “true” conservative refused to vote for Trump in 2024 and said: “I’m going to write in a Republican”). 

Yet the betrayal charges — from MAGA populists and doctrinaire Reaganites alike — misunderstand something fundamental about Trump. 

Far from breaking completely with Republican anti-statism, he began his second term by assigning Elon Musk, a libertarian tycoon, and Russell Vought, a veteran of pre-Trump conservatism, with the task of firing as many civil servants as possible and wrecking as many agencies as they could, often in blatant violation of statutory law and the Constitution. 

In foreign policy, it’s true that Trump in his first term was cautious compared to his predecessors. He didn’t start any new wars, unlike George W. Bush, who launched an unnecessary “forever war” in Iraq alongside the one in Afghanistan; and Barack Obama, who presided over a needless war of choice against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and who fueled an insurgency in Syria that empowered an Al Qaeda warlord, now donning ill-fitting suits.

In the first year of his second term, however, Trump has called for the annexation of Greenland and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” He has bombed Iran, something the two Bushes refused to do. In recent days, he has threatened to invade Nigeria in response to the Islamist persecution of Nigerian Christians, and appears to be making preparations for war with the Maduro dictatorship in Caracas.

Venezuela happens to be No. 1 among the countries in proven crude oil reserves, surpassing Saudi Arabia, and No. 8 in gas reserves. Iran is No. 4 in crude oil reserves and No. 2 in gas reserves. Nigeria is No. 10 in oil reserves and No. 9 in gas reserves. Wars or threats of wars of regime change against an axis of oil-rich countries bring to mind those two Texan oil men, George W. Bush and the late Dick Cheney, and appealing to evangelical voters (as the Nigeria initiative does) in the service of Petropolitik is very Bushian.

Trump, then, hasn’t broken with the legacy Reagan-Bush consensus on all issues. But on two issues — trade protectionism and labor market protectionism through immigration enforcement and restriction — he has departed radically from the older conservative agenda. Trump has won the presidency twice because he has added to the inherited GOP base a bloc of non-college-educated working-class voters — mostly, but not exclusively, white — who were alienated by the support for free trade and mass immigration of the Bush Republicans in the 1990s and aughts. In other words: He has united Reagan-Bush voters with the kind of voters who in the 1990s voted for H. Ross Perot.

Despite his successes in foreign policy, including the prosecution of the Gulf War and negotiations to end the Cold War, George H. W. Bush, who promoted economic austerity and free trade, repelled many white working-class voters who had been “Nixon Democrats” and later “Reagan Democrats.”

Many of these voters were drawn to the folksy Texan billionaire Ross Perot and his personal presidential vehicle, the Reform Party. Perot garnered 19% of ballots in the 1992 election, more than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as the nominee of the Progressive Party against his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Perot’s strongest supporters included many high-school-educated white men and women and union members in the industrial states — the kind who later put Trump in the White House twice. 

Of Perot’s two main issues, economic nationalism and the budget deficit, the former was critical to his working-class support. NAFTA was negotiated under George H. W. Bush and later pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton in 1993 with only Republican votes. In the House, most Democrats voted against NAFTA, 156 to 102, while Republican support was overwhelming, 132 to 43. GOP senators voted for NAFTA 34 to 10, while Democrats opposed the treaty by 28 to 27.

Perot was ridiculed when he claimed that the passage of NAFTA would result in a “giant sucking sound” of factories and jobs offshored to Mexico. But he was right. Thanks to offshoring by US companies and investment by European and Asian auto makers exploiting low Mexican wages and access to the American market, Mexico today is the third-largest automotive exporter in the world, above the United States and Japan and below only China and the European Union, while Detroit, the former “Motor City,” is a desolate wasteland.  

With the transfer of production to Mexico and the anti-union American South, the wages of formerly well-paid auto workers, adjusted for inflation, declined by more than 17% from 1990 to December 2018, falling below the private-sector average in general.

In his two terms, George W. Bush compounded the damage done by NAFTA to America’s working class by complacently presiding over the offshoring of much of American manufacturing to Communist China as well as to Mexico and other low-wage nations.  Meanwhile, his administration, on behalf of cheap-labor employers, turned a blind eye to massive illegal immigration from Mexico and elsewhere. “Protectionist” became an epithet in the Bush-era GOP.

In 1999, after Perot indicated he wouldn’t run a third time, Trump ran for the presidential nomination of Perot’s Reform Party but dropped out. The nomination went instead to the paleoconservative firebrand Patrick Buchanan, whom Trump denounced as an “anti-Semite” and “Hitler lover.” In 2015, Trump chose to run for the presidential nomination of one of the two major parties, instead of a third party, and unlike Perot, he became president — twice. 

While most of the pre-Trump Republican coalition of hawks, social conservatives, and free-market libertarians remains, Trump has won back many of the working-class voters of the kind who were drawn to Nixon and Reagan but driven away by the two Bushes. Trump doesn’t owe his success to the “culture war,” which was a specialty of the Bushes, as they tried to divert attention from their country-club economic agenda by waving the flag and thumping the Bible.  Trump won because, like Perot, he made protection central to his agenda — the protection of American industries from foreign competition, and the protection of American workers from immigrant competition. 

In his first term, he rewarded these voters with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA, and in his second term, he has cracked down against illegal immigration, including not only criminal migrants, but also unauthorized workers used as pawns by scofflaw employers to lower wages and evade workplace laws.

But in domestic policy, Republicans remain mostly hostile to organized labor and regulation of any kind, and Trump has gone along with the old anti-government Right in backing Vought and Musk and DOGE. The result under Trump is a hybrid — a synthesis of economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy with old-fashioned anti-government conservatism inside America’s borders.

Is tariff-fenced free-market conservatism in one country a stable policy? It worked for the Republicans for more than half a century between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when most of the GOP combined support for protective tariffs with opposition to organized labor and costly government. In his second Inaugural Address, Trump declared that President William McKinley, known in his time as “the Napoleon of Protection,” “made our country very rich through tariffs.”

He also echoed President Calvin Coolidge, who on Labor Day in 1924, told a group of union leaders that high wages for American workers depended upon immigration restriction and protectionism in trade policy. A “tremendous influx” of immigrants would be followed by “an almost certain reduction of wages.” He continued: “Under free trade, the only way we could meet European competition would be by approaching the European standard of wages. I want to see the American standard of living maintained. We shall not be misled by any appeal for cheap goods, if we remember that this was completely answered by President McKinley when he stated that cheap goods make cheap men. By restrictive immigration, by adequate protection, I want to prevent America from producing cheap men.”

Such hybridity is a feature of American party politics. Party realignments in the United States never involve the complete replacement of an old party with a new party that differs on every issue. American political parties are Frankenstein’s monsters that are altered with the amputation of some limbs and the addition of pieces of  dismembered parties.

Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party stitched former Jacksonian Democrats opposed to secession and slavery, and single-issue abolitionists to the remnants of the moribund Whig Party.  Franklin D. Roosevelt sewed formerly Republican progressives, black voters, and white-ethnic urban immigrant groups that had been divided among the parties onto the Southern core of the older Democrats. 

In 1968, the American Party candidacy of George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Georgia, split the Democratic coalition, allowing Richard Nixon to defeat Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee. Four years later, Nixon managed to weld many former Wallace populist voters to the Republican Party, creating a presidential majority coalition that Reagan inherited.

Like Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan, Trump has brought about a genuine realignment, recruiting formerly disaffected voters by adding a fourth leg to the conservative tripod, providing two economic legs, as it were — protectionism and immigration restriction in external economic affairs and free-market libertarianism at home. But his voters, again like Perot’s, are swing voters, not part of the Republican base. 

As Trump himself has pointed out, other Republican office-seekers do best in election years when he is on the ticket. And like their predecessors, they can be driven away from the GOP by too much militarism on the part of the hawks, too much anti-government fervor on part of the free-marketeers, and the kind of religious rhetoric that appeals to the dwindling number of evangelicals in America but repels most other voters.

For all his flaws, Trump saved the GOP from dwindling into a permanent minority party of bellicose hawks, evangelicals, and libertarian opponents of the New Deal. Whether the Trump coalition survives Trump’s departure from office may depend on whether the GOP swaps out the old three-legged stool for Trump’s four-legged stool.

 

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• Investor Concerns on AI Bubble: Investors worry about rising tech stock values and private AI company valuations, as explained by WSJ charts; focus on Big Tech earnings from AI suppliers amid startup losses in recent quarters on Wall Street.
• Big Tech Profits: Quarterly profits increased at Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft from AI revenue, with cash flows directed toward data centers; Meta's profits offset by taxes.
• AI Startup Losses: Generative AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic incur massive losses from chip and data center spending, funded by raising capital despite plans for continued deficits.
• Key AI Players: OpenAI with ChatGPT led by Sam Altman and Anthropic with Claude led by Dario Amodei drive AI development, becoming prominent while absorbing significant investments.
• Conditions for Sustainability: Success requires innovative products to offset costs and ongoing investor funding for losses estimated over $150 billion by OpenAI alone.
• Challenges in AI Models: Current chatbots exhibit errors, security vulnerabilities, and hallucinations, hindering widespread adoption until resolved.
• Projected Profitability: OpenAI aims for profitability in 2030, Anthropic in 2028; recent OpenAI losses exceeded $12 billion in Q3, comparable to major corporate write-downs but likely cash-based.
• Spending and Forecasts: OpenAI's commitments include $250 billion with Microsoft, $300 billion with Oracle, and others; revenue projected to double yearly to $120 billion by 2027, but costs rise faster with losses tripling to over $40 billion.

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Investors have grown more concerned over the run-up in tech stocks and valuations of private AI companies, stoking fears of a bubble. WSJ’s Hannah Erin Lang uses three charts to explain what’s behind Wall Street’s jitters. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Investors take a lot of comfort from the solidity of Big Tech earnings as worries grow about artificial intelligence overinflating valuations. But those earnings have an ugly underbelly: ever-bigger losses at the generative AI startups that spend big on chips and data centers supplied by the profitable public companies.

Quarterly profits soared at Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft as AI-related revenue poured in (Meta’s were wiped out by tax). Cash flows are mostly fine, albeit a lot is now going into building new data centers. Some of the money comes from actually selling AI services to businesses, particularly at Alphabet and Microsoft.

But much of the AI-related profits come from being a supplier to, or investor in, the private companies building the large language models behind AI chatbots—and they’re losing money as fast as they can raise it, and plan to keep on doing so for years.

OpenAI and Anthropic are the two largest suppliers of generative AI with their chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, respectively, and founders Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have become tech celebrities.

What’s only starting to become clear is that the companies are also sinkholes for AI losses that are the flip side of chunks of the public-company profits.

Both, along with plenty of other startups, are raising big money and committing to future spending that will require them to raise a lot more. As they spend it on chips and renting cloud computing, sellers of chips and cloud services are the winners and are spending heavily to expand.

For this to continue, two things have to happen. First, the AI developers need to come up with winning products to cover their massive research and computing costs. Second, investors need to stump up enough to finance the losses—which OpenAI alone estimated at more than $150 billion—until then.

It might all work out. The chatbots are near-magical experiences until they make a basic error like thinking 5.11 is bigger than 5.9, a problem even the latest versions still suffer from sometimes.

Fix these, fix the gaping security holes and stop them “hallucinating,” or making up their own facts, and many more businesses and individuals will be willing to pay. New products based on the same underlying technology could become ubiquitous, and eventually transform society.

But even their creators expect to lose money for a long time. OpenAI hopes to turn profitable only in 2030, while Anthropic is targeting 2028.

Meanwhile, the amounts of money being lost are extraordinary.

Microsoft’s share of OpenAI’s loss in the three months to Sept. 30 implies the startup lost more than $12 billion in the quarter. We don’t know for sure since it doesn’t publish its financial statements, but there were no obvious one-off events that would have led to enormous noncash write-downs.

Among companies that have reported so far for the quarter, OpenAI’s loss matches the world’s biggest, that of satellite communications company EchoStar, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. But Echostar’s giant loss was due to a noncash charge of $16.5 billion to write off parts of its 5G cellphone network. OpenAI’s was most likely real money.

It’s impossible to quantify how much cash flowed from OpenAI to big tech companies. But OpenAI’s loss in the quarter equates to 65% of the rise in underlying earnings—before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization—of Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta together. That ignores Anthropic, from which Amazon recorded a profit of $9.5 billion from its holding in the loss making company in the quarter.

A hefty part of the spending that generated OpenAI’s loss goes to highly paid engineers, but a lot goes into renting Nvidia chips from Microsoft’s cloud service—with much more to come. OpenAI committed to spend $250 billion more on Microsoft’s cloud and has signed a $300 billion deal with Oracle, $22 billion with CoreWeave and $38 billion with Amazon, which is a big investor in rival Anthropic.

This demand for computing capacity is a big part of why data-center construction is in overdrive.

But, to put it mildly, OpenAI doesn’t have the income to cover its costs. It expects revenue of $13 billion this year to more than double to $30 billion next year, then to double again in 2027, according to figures provided to shareholders. 

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Costs are expected to rise even faster, and losses are predicted to roughly triple to more than $40 billion by 2027. Things don’t come back into balance even in OpenAI’s own forecasts until total computing costs finally level off in 2029, allowing it to scrape into profit in 2030.

These forecasts should be taken with a few server racks loaded with salt. OpenAI has only just settled on a corporate structure, its products are still in development, potential customers are still figuring out how, if at all, to use them, eventual pricing isn’t even at the guesswork stage, the competition is evolving rapidly and, well, nobody really knows how any of this will turn out.

In the frenzy, investors have forgotten the old saying: Revenue is vanity, profits are sanity, cash is reality. If investors stop being so excited about AI, if OpenAI struggles to generate sales, or if fundraising becomes difficult for other reasons such as a recession, investors might switch back from the vanity of revenue to focus on the insane losses. 

At that point, the reality that the flow of cash from OpenAI and its rivals is bolstering big tech earnings will become painfully clear.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News

Write to James Mackintosh at james.mackintosh@wsj.com

• Affordability crisis and council priorities: New York City faces high costs and elevated crime, yet the council prioritizes mandating tipping options in digital food orders.
• Bill requirements: The legislation demands tipping prompts in online systems, including preset options with at least one at 20 percent of the total.
• Potential effects on diners: The mandate could heighten tipping fatigue among customers placing food orders.
• Link to delivery wage policy: Follows 2023 expansion of minimum wage to app-based drivers, prompting companies to adjust tipping prompts post-delivery.
• Prior legislation on deliveries: Recent rules require tipping prompts in delivery apps to maintain visibility.
• Evidence on prompts: Studies indicate prompts with suggested amounts, including high defaults, increase tips through anchoring effects.
• Tipping fatigue impacts: Surveys reveal growing customer annoyance, potentially reducing orders and overall spending on food.
• Policy contradictions: Conflicts with efforts to eliminate tipped minimum wages, which have reduced tips in places like D.C., affecting worker earnings.

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Courtesy MainlyTwelve/Wikimedia Commons

Amid a historic affordability crisis, and with many types of crime still elevated above pre-pandemic levels, the New York City council is focusing on the important things: making sure New Yorkers tip.

A recent bill would mandate that restaurants and other food-service establishments in the city build tipping options—known as “tipping prompts”—into their digital systems for orders. The proposal would also require that customers be provided with preset suggested tipping amounts as options, including at least one option that is 20 percent of the total amount paid by the customer.

The proposal may seem like small change. But if passed, it not only is likely to increase tipping fatigue among diners. It will also run counter to other efforts by progressive politicians in New York that actively undermine tips for food-industry workers. In this regard, it’s just the latest in the Council’s micromanagement of food—and a microcosm of how big-city leaders misunderstand markets.

The legislation is downstream of the Council’s decision to expand minimum wage laws to app-based restaurant delivery drivers in 2023. In reaction to that decision, companies like DoorDash moved tipping prompts in their apps, shifting them from before the delivery was complete to after. This led to allegations of trying to undermine driver tips.

The Council mandated tipping prompts in delivery apps in recently-passed legislation; this latest move would ensure tipping prompts remain prominent in all online food orders, app or otherwise. But it’s far from clear that the mandate will even help workers—let alone consumers, who stand to lose the most from such a change.

The NYC proposal draws upon evidence suggesting that tipping prompts—especially with pre-suggested amounts—can increase the amount a customer tips. Specifically, including a high default option as a suggestion, even if it’s one option among several, can have a so-called “anchoring effect.” That accustoms consumers to tipping a set amount of, say, 20 percent, rather than a lower number or a default of zero.

These sophisticated tactics may push consumers to cough up higher tips, but they’re also helping to drive what experts have labeled “tipping fatigue.” Surveys show that increasing numbers of Americans are reporting their annoyance and frustration with tip creep in our modern economy, including with setups like pre-entered tip amounts on touch screens.

One of the key issues with the fatigue is that it deters customers. Restaurants that aggressively push tipping can increase per-order tips but also may dissuade would-be customers from ordering in the first place. As one researcher recently explained:

Our research shows suggesting tip amounts is indeed effective at increasing tip amounts. But this comes at a cost when consumers feel manipulated into forking over more money before their pizza or coffee has even arrived. Our survey showed that this may lead people to avoid ordering from a given restaurant in the future.

There’s also evidence that consumers, in reaction to higher costs, are spending less overall when they dine out or order food. Aggressive tip prompts can make already high food prices feel even higher, which means such prompts could further deflate overall take-home tip amounts if they push diners to spend less.

But the biggest absurdity of the Council’s plan is that it directly contradicts the other, anti-tipping policies being pushed by progressive politicians across New York and the nation.

The new plan is in tension with the City Council’s minimum wage mandate for food delivery drivers. That policy sent tip levels for deliverers plummeting. In some cases, some workers could earn less as a result of tax-free tips being eroded while the taxable minimum wages increase.

But it’s also in tension with the push by progressive state legislators, along with dedicated advocacy groups, to eliminate the tipped minimum wage, known as the tip credit system in New York. The tipped minimum wage is what allows restaurants to pay workers below minimum wage so long as their tips make up the difference.

Prominent liberal cities like D.C. have already eliminated their own tip credit systems. That’s led to such disastrous results that D.C.’s city council recently voted to partially overturn its tip credit elimination. The evidence from D.C. and elsewhere makes one thing clear: Eliminating the tipped minimum wage reduces the tipping levels of tipped employees.

In other words: at the same time that progressive New York government officials are positioning themselves as champions of worker tips by advocating for tip prompts, they’re simultaneously pushing policies that erode tipping culture and reduce worker tips. If they get their way, Gotham consumers may end up with a giant helping of tip fatigue—and workers with little more in the way of take-home pay.

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