On the campaign trail, Mamdani liked to remind his audience that New York was the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world and that his government could do more for the people who live here. While his opponents described New York as broken, dysfunctional, and crime-ridden, Mamdani spoke of the city as a beautiful if chaotic place—full of turmoil and injustice, yes, but also of life and opportunity. Mamdani's cinematic universe is a place where you can take the subway to the city clerk's office to marry the girl you met on Hingja, where you can take tai chi and salsa dance with old men on the Lower East Side, where you can take a polar plunge off Coney Island on New Year's Day and walk the length of Manhattan on a hot summer night.
The feel-good content complemented his harsh politics. Mamdani's most distinctive Cuomo quality is the obvious pleasure he takes in public political battles…”Habibi“Publish your client list,” he taunted the former governor about the arcane legal advice practice that brought him nearly $5 million last year. When forced to moderate his criticism of Israel, Mamdani barely flinched. These qualities have convinced many young voters in particular that he has what it takes to deliver on his promises. They voted for him because they could imagine city with free buses; because that's what they thought rent freeze idea there were about a million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, which sounded fair even if they didn't live in rent-stabilized apartments themselves; and because they liked the idea of New York becoming a place offering universal child care for children as young as six weeks old. The alternative that Cuomo offered (thoughts and prayers for high rents, new games and opaque city hall shenanigans, Democratic officials sidestepping the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip) was simply too grim.
After the primary, senior members of New York's Democratic establishment continued to keep Mamdani at bay. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed supporting him for so long that he embarrassed himself. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (the latter of whom was forced to apologize after saying on public radio that Mamdani supported “global jihad”) never showed up. But former President Barack Obama saw something in Mamdani – he was called to visit the young man twice since June – as did moderate New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. At a rally in the final days of the campaign at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Hochul warmed up the crowd in support of Mamdani—or tried to. “Tax the rich!” the crowd mocked her. Shy and tax-averse, the governor struggled to maintain her composure. “I hear you!” she said. Mamdani appeared on stage, walked up to Khochul and raised one hand up. The screams grew into roars of approval.
When I first spoke with Mamdani two years ago, he was an Albany lawmaker with few allies in the Legislature. He called me a few days after October 7, concerned about the Islamophobic reaction in the city. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested during a ceasefire protest outside Schumer's home. At that point, he was about as far from power as an elected official could be. In the past few months, Mamdani has looked more comfortable navigating the compromises and contradictions he will have to impose as mayor. He expressed newfound appreciation for the role of private real estate development and vowed to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a favorite of the city's wealthy establishment, to remain in his administration. “If he becomes mayor, so be it,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said recently. Mamdani is untested, his network of longtime allies is small, and he lacks the connections and history within the city's power structure that even an ambitious progressive like Bill de Blasio relied on to get things done. But that's the point. New Yorkers don't need an insider with years of experience. They needed Zoran Mamdani.
“Do we Americans really want good government?” garbage collector Lincoln Steffens wrote in McClure magazine in 1903. “Will we know it when we see it?” Steffens spent months investigating the peculiar restrictions and arbitrariness of the New York bureaucracy during the Tammany Hall era. It's not that New Yorkers didn't know the machine was corrupt; the fact is that they only rarely cared about it. “Tammany is corruption by consent,” Steffens wrote. “This is a bad government based on the suffrage of the people.” From time to time, when the excesses of the machine became “uncontrollable”, the people were forced to throw out the bosses. An outside mayoral candidate would launch his candidacy, promising to carry out a “clean sweep,” organize the city's various political opposition factions, and energize the city with a “hot campaign.” But it never ended well. The bosses inevitably returned to power. Steffens called this disappointing model “the standard course of municipal reform.”
With the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, every liberal, reform-minded mayor since the late nineteenth century has faced some grim version of the “standard course.” Seth Lowe, the bumbling former president of Columbia University who was mayor when Steffens wrote this article, was denied a second term by George B. McClellan Jr., a favorite of Tammany boss Richard Crocker. John Lindsay rose to power in the sixties on a wave of charisma and good feeling and left behind disappointments and a disastrous town book when he left eight years later. David Dinkins, the city's first black mayor (and also the first mayor to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America), saw his administration collapse over racial violence and concerns about crime, and was beaten by Rudy Giuliani when he ran for reelection. De Blasio, whom Mamdani considers the best mayor of his life, has completed most of his agenda, which he implemented in 2013, but New Yorkers are still fed up with him. “The good mayor turns out to be weak, stupid or 'not so good,'” Steffens wrote. “Or people will become disgusted.”
