Such visions play a role in any administration, but there is also the work of real city government. When Mamdani and Bloomberg met in September for a conversation that longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson called “definitely cordial,” they as reported talked about recruiting and retaining talent. Mamdani, like Bloomberg before him, comes to City Hall relatively unencumbered by the tangle of obligations and relationships accumulated over a long career in public service. Like Bloomberg, he is willing to hire staff with responsibilities that go beyond political trading. “Mike was talent, talent, talent“,” Bradley Tusk, who served in the Bloomberg administration and ran his campaign in 2009, told me. “What he did best was convince a lot of talented people to come work in city government.” Mamdani's appointment to his transition team of former FTC chief Lina Khan, a bogeyman among the business elite, suggests a talent for attracting attractive national figures (even if what role such a figure might play in his actual administration remains uncertain). At the end of November, Mamdani's team reported that more than seventy thousand people had applied online to work in his administration; its first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has expressed interest in improving the city's civil service hiring process.
Bloomberg had a reputation for giving its appointees a surprising amount of independence: when Elizabeth Colbert profiled the then-mayor for the magazine, in 2002One committee member told her that Bloomberg's instructions when giving him the office were: “It's your agency—don't screw it up.” It is possible that Mamdani's apparent need for expertise and his electoral discipline in debating only a handful of select policy proposals could lead him to grant his own administrators significant autonomy. What does it really take to make city buses fast and free? What are your plans for schools? “Someone described Zohran to me as a socialist technocrat,” recalls Tusk, adding that when it comes to city government, he doesn’t see much difference between a capitalist technocrat and a socialist one. “If he's a technocrat like Mike was, he'll be a good mayor.” Of course, not everyone at Bloomberg agrees. “The key to Mike’s success as mayor was world-class management,” Wolfson told me. “He knew how to attract and retain talent and how to drive the bottom line because he had been doing it for many years. I'm not sure what comparison would be appropriate.”
The 2025 mayoral race has been, among other things, a battle between money and attention. Cuomo received $28.4 million from Super. PACIn a general election, “the largest amount of money ever spent supporting a single candidate in a New York Super PAC,” the good government group Citizens Union wrote in a report last month. “Really,” they added, “the only comparison we can make is to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed and bankrupt campaigns in the 2000s.” Money has been Bloomberg's defining characteristic throughout his public life: money made him mayor, money shaped his mayoralty, and money continues to express his political will. But if Bloomberg drives capital, Mamdani – with his eleven million Instagram followers and reliable virality – attracts attention, the kind of capital whose political power Donald Trump has proven over the past decade. And in this mayoral election, attention emerged as the clear winner.
After Mamdani's success, it sometimes seemed like the only lesson to be learned was that more candidates needed to learn how to make short videos better. But this understates Mamdani's achievements and the qualities that made it possible, including an ability to communicate that seems far more natural and less provocative than what is often considered personal attractiveness among politicians. Bloomberg's model for working closely with the city was to count the trash outside the window of his driver's car. So far, Mamdani has cultivated a more practical ideal of participation for both himself and his supporters. After all, attention is not just a matter of passive digital consumption; it can also be actively used. Mamdani's volunteer experience attracted young New Yorkers looking for connections, one of whom told Time“The people I go to dinner with, the people I go to concerts with—my daily life is organized around Mamdani.”
