DAVID MARCUS: NJ's World Cup transit crisis betrays Democrats' utter incompetence
With less than two months to go before the kickoff of the 2026 World Cup, Democratic leaders in New Jersey and New York are scrambling to figure out how to get fans to MetLife Stadium. The results would be hilarious if they did not betray such utter incompetence.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has astoundingly announced that a train ride to the eight games at the Meadowlands facility, which usually costs $12.90, will cost $150 for footy fans. That has FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, pulling out a red card.
FIFA claims that its original agreement stated the locales in which the games take place will pay for transportation, but Sherill claims that agreement was made by the prior, also Democratic, administration in Trenton, and, for some reason, does not apply now.
The bottom line is that the Democrats, who have all but hegemonic control of the New York City metro area, have had years to figure out the transportation for the World Cup and have done nothing.
There is no possible excuse for this, as a matter of logistics. We aren’t talking about the D-Day landing here. It's a few soccer games. This should not flummox state leaders.
Gotham’s communist mayor, Zohran "Madman" Mamdani, ran ads last year promising cheap World Cup tickets for working-class New Yorkers. Now, the Democrats in charge can’t even get fans to the stadium.
It makes no sense. MetLife Stadium hosts almost 20 NFL games a year. It has hosted the Super Bowl, and Taylor Swift did a three-night gig there that brought out 217,000 Swifties. How many people are we expecting for Ghana vs. Uruguay, or whatever?
DEMS WHO RAN ON AFFORDABILITY NOW FACE BACKLASH AS COSTS CLIMB IN NY, VIRGINIA
We see it all over the country, wherever Democrats are in charge.
Take Maryland, where the rebuilding of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, destroyed by a ship two years ago, was originally slated at $2 billion and set to open in 2028, but now is estimated at $5 billion and won’t carry a car until 2030.
Likewise in California, billions are spent by Gov. Gavin Newsom on high-speed rail, animal refuge overpasses and battling homelessness, but there is no train, the wildlife bridge is unfinished and homelessness has never been worse in the Golden State.
When I first moved to West Virginia from Brooklyn, there was work being done on an important local bridge. It was a real inconvenience. Then one day, on my car radio, I heard the bridge would be finished a week early and under budget.
Amazed, I called a friend who was a New York City councilman at the time and said, "Hey Joe, there’s this bridge construction down here, they say it's going to be done early and under budget. Do you know what that means?"
To which Joe replied, "No, I’ve never heard those words before." We were joking, but barely.
NEWSOM STILL BACKING $114M 'BRIDGE TO NOWHERE' FOR MOUNTAIN LIONS AND BUTTERFLIES
It really does feel like the Democrats in our urban areas just throw money around at things like feasibility studies that tend to come back saying that whatever it is, it is not feasible, but might eventually be with more funding for additional studies.
But through some magical sorcery of governance, in our rural areas, officials are actually capable of just, you know, fixing stuff.
The amount of complete incompetence that urban voters accept from Democrats is truly bizarre. Just look at the rampant fraud in Minnesota’s Somali "Quality Learing Centers," or California’s fraud-laden hospices where, miraculously, almost every patient recovers.
And now, in New York and New Jersey, Democratic leaders are treating the simple and normal task of getting fans across the East River like Moses parting the Red Sea, when this is the very simple kind of thing that city officials could have easily pulled off a century ago.
Say what you will about the old-school Democratic Party machines that ruled places like New York and Philly in the past. They were corrupt as all get out, but they could also get things done. For example, none of this transit nonsense occurred when Giants Stadium hosted the World Cup in 1994.
The sad state of affairs, all over our great nation, from blue city to blue city is that the only thing Democrats seem capable of is spending money, often your money, to manage our urban decline.
Maybe one day, citizens of our cities will give Republicans a chance, if Republicans even try. But until then, good luck getting to the soccer game.