Mamdani’s Surprisingly Moderate Start

David Freedlander

On the last Wednesday in January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood at a lectern in City Hall’s Blue Room and announced the city was facing a dire crisis: a $12 billion budget gap, larger than the deficit during the Great Recession or COVID. “It means,” he said, “that the time has come to tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.”

It was a gauntlet laid at the feet of Governor Kathy Hochul, who sought to align with the new mayor even as his supporters hounded her with chants of “Tax the rich.” But Hochul has insisted she won’t. “I don’t believe in taxing for the sake of taxing. Never have, never will,” she said in response to Mamdani’s budget address.

The political play for a mayor in such moments is fairly straightforward: Rally your troops and run a campaign aimed at the governor’s promise to hold the line, run ads if necessary, and get legislators on your side to squeeze the person who holds the purse strings.

Instead, the mayor took a different tack. A week after calling on the governor to raise taxes, he endorsed her bid for reelection, even as she was fending off a challenge from Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who promised to raise taxes on the rich. Then the Mamdani team went further by lobbying the left-wing Working Families Party to not back Delgado, despite the fact the WFP has been pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations for years, believing that the newly emboldened left should start winning power and stop wasting resources on send-a-message-type candidates like Delgado. The party ended up making no endorsement, and a few days later, Delgado dropped his bid. A “Tax the Rich” rally, hosted not just by the WFP but by Our Time, an outfit made up of former Mamdani volunteers to harness the grassroots energy of his campaign, is scheduled for the end of February. Mamdani had signaled he wouldn’t attend, according to the New York Times.

“We all feel that the mayor can’t move forward with his affordability agenda without taxing the rich,” says Divya Sundaram, deputy director of Our Time. “Zohran has always been extremely consistent on this.”

But the 3-D chess game of pushing Hochul on taxes while endorsing her reelection bid seems to be working out fine for the mayor; Hochul hasn’t budged on taxes but did provide Mamdani with an extra $1.5 billion to help close the city’s budget gap. “We’ve seen a lot of mayors who just take an antagonistic approach to the governor,” says one person close to Mamdani. “How well has that worked out?”

It has been not quite two months since Mamdani was sworn in, pledging to bring the “warmth of collectivism” to a city that had been too often a haven for rugged individualism. The haggling over the city budget has proved to be a helpful lens into what kind of mayor he is shaping up to be—one keeping his base on boil by gesturing at long-standing left-wing priorities while working within the existing political system to nudge his agenda along.

It’s true that Mayor Mamdani can sound like the Marxist his opponents said he would be, pushing for tax increases and appointing a deputy mayor for economic justice instead of one for economic development. In his first weeks in office, his administration issued a report accusing delivery apps like Uber and DoorDash of siphoning off more than half a billion dollars in tips meant for delivery workers, and Mamdani has warned they will be shut down if they don’t abide by new worker-protection laws. He’s scheduled a series of “rental ripoff hearings” to allow tenants to hold landlords who have let their properties fall into disrepair to account.

But observe the day-to-day running of municipal government, and Mamdani looks far more like the kind of traditional big-city liberal New York has known since La Guardia. He’s stocked his administration with veterans of city government with an appreciation for the limits of what can be accomplished within the system. He’s resumed sweeps of homeless encampments but turned away from a pledge to consistently pay union members prevailing wages to build affordable housing, and his proposal for a citywide free bus network has, so far, become only a pilot program he’s hoping to roll out during the World Cup later this year. He’s reneged on his plan to expand the housing-voucher program for the low-income and unhoused and on his pledge to end mayoral control of schools.

In the meantime, he’s teamed up with Hochul to expand free child care and streamline environmental reviews of new housing, a major priority of the real-estate industry. He’s proved to be a mayor, then, who may sound like Bernie Sanders but is governing more like Bill de Blasio. Unlike de Blasio, however, he is careful not to antagonize the powers that can make his job harder. De Blasio’s implementation of universal pre-K remains a signature achievement of his tenure, and he won it after a monthslong public campaign that set him against Governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani, by contrast, won his child-care expansion in his first week on the job after Hochul agreed to a much smaller program than proposed. In the end, it may make for a less acrimonious relationship between the governor and the mayor, but it also denied Mamdani the kind of flag-planting victory that a long and drawn-out struggle affords a conquering politician.

If Mamdani isn’t delivering his DSA flank all the sweeping policy wins it sought, he is managing to keep it engaged in what he is doing. The mayor appears to be everywhere all at once. City cell-phone kiosks now feature him urging parents to apply for free child-care slots, and on 1010 WINS he gives weather updates. By doing so, Mamdani is borrowing a page from the Donald Trump playbook in the belief that he has a star power beyond his policy prescriptions. Plus the more the mayor clogs up the airwaves and social-media feeds, the less space it gives his opponents to define him as a radical, while reminding his supporters of what he’s managing to accomplish even as the big-ticket promises are put on hold. It seems to be working: Conversations with leftist allies of the mayor reveal some frustration with how hard he has been willing to push Hochul, but few in the democratic-socialist universe are willing to speak out publicly against a mayor whose success many regard as central to their long-term political project.

Mamdani seems to understand where to push and pull — that choosing a few hard pivots to the center will better allow him to pursue his audacious long-term play to put his ideological allies in higher office. It may fail spectacularly; weeks after his Blue Room conference, he said the budget gap was only about half of what he’d said it was earlier, then said that if Hochul didn’t raise income taxes, he’d be forced to raise property taxes, a suggestion that seemed to please no one. Still, on a recent Sunday morning, throngs of former Mamdani volunteers gathered in Bushwick to knock doors on behalf of Claire Valdez, a state lawmaker running for Congress with Mamdani’s backing. Since then, he’s maneuvered one ally into his old State Assembly seat and another into position for a State Senate seat that opened up in his old Assembly district. Even before being sworn in, Mamdani endorsed Brad Lander in his primary against incumbent representative Dan Goldman, angering members of the Democratic Establishment who would rather see the party focus on beating Republicans. His aides say more endorsements are coming. All of those races involve candidates backed by senior party leaders who are solid progressives, but Mamdani has made clear that even being a down-the-line liberal isn’t enough as he attempts to remake the Democratic Party from within.

“We are trying to build a powerful, labor-oriented, and populist Democratic Party,” says political adviser Andrew Bard Epstein. “With the goal of winning the working class of this country, if not to socialism, then certainly to social democracy.”