Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing daydream of a New York City mayoral candidate. He’s young—33—and proudly socialist. His campaign ads call to mind a mashup of TikTok clips and hip-hop videos. The graphics look like something from the zany 1960s Batman TV series. He is a character in these ads, walking into the picture at odd angles on street corners and shawarma stands, and popping up to chat with taxi drivers.
You’d need to have a crabbed spirit not to admire Mamdani’s inventiveness, charisma, and championing of working-class New Yorkers. A two-term state assemblyman of no great accomplishment, he has upended the field in the June 24 Democratic Party primary, leaving better-credentialed opponents behind. He now runs a vigorous second in independent polls behind former Governor Andrew Cuomo and has formed alliances with lower-ranking rivals that benefit him most of all. But Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts. His promises are grand: Freeze rents. Free municipal buses. Free day care for all New Yorkers ages six weeks to 5 years.
And, my personal favorite: cheap groceries.
How would he pay for his most ambitious plans? Tax the rich and major corporations.
Writing in In These Times, the author Bhaskar Sunkara sounded enraptured: “We need more democratic socialists who can do what Mamdani can do,” Sunkara wrote. “Communicate complex ideas clearly, relate to ordinary people without pandering and present a vision that feels achievable rather than utopian.”
Reading this, I rolled my eyes. Mamdani is a clever politician who can wink at his base—a new Marist poll of likely primary voters shows him a strong favorite among those under 45 and those who are “very liberal”—even as he flirts with less ideologically driven followers. Who, after all, objects to frozen rents and free buses? He grasps that New York City, like so many of this nation’s big Democratic-run cities, has grown oppressively expensive, culturally liberal, and economically royalist. Two-bedroom apartments rent for $6,000 a month in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, while one-bedroom apartments in what used to be working-class areas go for $3,500. The top 1 or 2 percent rule while the majority of New Yorkers scramble.
But few of Mamdani’s policy and funding proposals weather scrutiny. And that calls into question what might happen to his socialist political project should he end up overseeing a $112 billion city government with about 306,000 employees, and dealing with a president who would revel in using a left-wing New York mayor as a piñata. Perhaps Mamdani would be forced to moderate—and quickly—in office. He has promised to hire very smart people; that could help, although very smart, alas, is not universally synonymous with competent.
And his very smart aides might struggle, for instance, to make his housing proposals work. Mamdani has promised to create 200,000 units of new publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized housing and to fast-track projects consisting entirely of below-market-rate units. His campaign website claims that previous administrations relied “almost entirely” on the zoning code to encourage affordable housing. This is not so. For 40 years, New York has run the nation’s most ambitious and successful affordable-housing program, which rebuilt great swaths of the city using billions of dollars in municipal investment. Zoning changes to allow more housing construction are of recent vintage.
“Zohran and his advisers don’t know history and don’t have the slightest grasp of the numbers,” a former top city housing official told me. (He asked not to be identified because he still works with the city on affordable-housing projects.) Mamdani himself has proposed to triple the amount of money spent on housing in the city’s capital plan, pushing overall costs toward $100 billion over 10 years, which overshadows the estimated cost of his rivals’ plans. And he proposes to accomplish this with union labor, which the city’s Independent Budget Office found would add 23 percent to overall costs.
Meanwhile, Mamdani’s proposal to freeze rent in rent-stabilized units ignores fundamental problems: Landlords of much of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock—including a number of respected nonprofit groups—cannot afford maintenance costs and debt service, the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission wrote recently. Because expenses are growing faster than rents in older buildings, many are “teetering on the edge of a ‘death spiral.’”
I reached out to Mamdani’s campaign for comment on these issues and have not yet heard back. His supporters seem unbothered by the obvious holes in his proposals. His tax increases sound righteous, a socialist holding the wealthy to account. But the state legislature and governor would have to sign off, and that is a very distant possibility.
Former Governor David Paterson once represented Harlem in the state assembly, and he opposed neither higher taxes nor social spending. But Paterson recognizes the line between ambition and fantasy. Mamdani doesn’t. “You understand exactly what he’s saying,” Paterson told Politico last month. “The problem is: Nobody told him there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”
Mamdani has gained traction in no small part because the front-runner in this primary race is Cuomo, a double-espresso politician whose rivals on the left attack him as corrupt and in the thrall of conservative real-estate and financial lobbies. That caricature ignores that Cuomo was a successful and liberal governor. He rebuilt bridges and roads and subway tunnels, and gave a makeover to LaGuardia Airport, previously a dump. He turned the dream of gay marriage into law, championed abortion rights, and banned fracking. Under pressure from then–Mayor Bill de Blasio, he brought expanded prekindergarten to many corners of the state. He made state-university tuition free for full-time students from families with incomes of less than $125,000, passed legislation that protected tenants against large rent increases, and raised the minimum wage.
My accounting here will set some liberal friends to shuddering, so let me add caveats: Cuomo can be devious and vindictive as a matter of blood sport; as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he reportedly passed out copies of Machiavelli’s The Prince to aides. In Albany, he cut deals with political bosses and wreaked vengeance on opponents. He made a grievous error in the desperate early days of the pandemic. At that time hospitals were overwhelmed by the sheer number of COVID patients, and Cuomo required nursing homes to readmit medically stable elderly patients who had tested positive. The health-news site STAT News reported that these transfers were not the primary driver of nursing-home COVID deaths. But certainly some nursing-home residents got infected and died as a result—and Cuomo’s administration hid the data. “Ethicists said that Cuomo’s conduct stands out not because the policy he put in place was especially egregious, but because he obscured public health data for political gain,” STAT News reported.
Cuomo stepped down as governor after being accused of multiple cases of sexual harassment—allegations that he largely denies today. And he has dodged and weaved to avoid the press and its questions during this campaign.
From Cuomo’s history, some conclude that he’s interested only in power and preserving the status quo—in contrast with Mamdani, who has framed himself as a tribune of the forgotten and the poor. The latest Marist poll showed Mamdani gaining among Latinos in particular; until recently, his support was strongest among white Democrats. But polls continue to point to an unsettling irony for the left: Mamdani outperforms with men and college-educated voters, while Cuomo finds his deepest well of support among Black and low-income voters. Cuomo draws 49 percent of the vote from New Yorkers making $50,000 or less; Mamdani draws 14 percent.
Although Mamdani still trails Cuomo by 10 points in Marist’s estimate of the final vote count, he has surged since the pollster’s previous report in mid-May. He is now marching about the city in the company of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed him. So has Senator Bernie Sanders. But transmuting socialist dreams into electoral victory is a tricky business, and governing by those principles could prove trickier still.
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