In the glow of Zohran Mamdani’s convincing win in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, a common narrative has emerged to explain his ascendence. He was a master of social media; he was charming, attractive and well spoken; he and his team simply outworked everyone.
But the emphasis on Mr. Mamdani’s style overlooks the substance of his progressive message and how the city’s voters came to embrace it, much as voters did in Boston in 2021 and in Chicago two years later.
Those elections, along with recent polling on issues like rent control, wealth taxes and the burden of child care, suggest that many voters, particularly those in large Democratic-leaning cities, have become more receptive to progressive agendas.
Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, adhered to a simple message in his primary campaign. New York, he said, was in the throes of an affordability crisis, and he had three main proposals to help: make city buses free, expand free child care and freeze the rent for stabilized apartments.
The financial burden of paying for these policies, he suggested, would largely fall on wealthy taxpayers and businesses — a stance that has put Mr. Mamdani at odds with many mainstream Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul. But the size of his victory has forced some in his party to grapple with his ascension and whether to adopt some of his messaging in next year’s critical midterm elections.
“People are hungry for government to work and to get things done that matter and that will make a difference in their lives,” said Mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, who in 2021 became the city’s youngest mayor in a century by pushing a similar slate of proposals.
Ms. Wu had promised to “free the T,” using a nickname for Boston’s transit system. She also called for expanded access to pre-K seats for 3- and 4-year-olds, and for new rent control regulations.
There is a misconception that “if you have the right slogan, somehow it unlocks the election,” Ms. Wu said, adding that her and Mr. Mamdani’s successes can be recreated elsewhere if politicians show they have a vision and are able to affect change.
Eric Garcetti, the former two-term mayor of Los Angeles who cast himself as a pragmatic progressive, embraced tactics similar to Mr. Mamdani’s a decade ago, championing local tax increases to fund housing and public transportation. Voters, he said, “don’t just want a manager.”
“They also want policies that give them some hope of the city moving forward,” he continued.
In Chicago, Brandon Johnson beat an incumbent and several more moderate and older mayoral candidates in 2023 by vowing to provide more services for poor residents and help pay for them by raising taxes on the rich.
There are signs that segments of America seem more willing to embrace progressive views on certain issues.
A recent poll of Boston’s electorate by the Suffolk University Political Research Center found that 65 percent of voters supported “a cap on rents or other forms of rent control.”
David Paleologos, the center’s director, said that Ms. Wu’s and Mr. Mamdani’s spirited focus on affordability showed their empathy and awareness of what voters cared about most.
“Mamdani did not just beam down from some planet and is hypnotizing his voters with bad ideas that they don’t like,” Mr. Paleologos said.
A recent national survey from the Pew Research Center found that about six in 10 adults supported raising taxes on large businesses and households making more than $400,000.
That support has also materialized in voter referendums, even in cities where progressive candidates have stalled.
New Orleans is one of several municipalities to hike property taxes to vastly expand the number of child care slots for lower-income children.
Last year, voters in Sonoma County, Calif., passed a new quarter-cent sales tax that is slated to raise about $30 million annually for child care and mental health services for young children.
In 2018, San Francisco passed a ballot measure that created a tax on companies making more than $50 million to fund more housing and homeless services. Los Angeles passed a tax in 2022 on property sales above about $5 million to build more housing and expand homeless services. Voters in Los Angeles County last year handily approved a measure raising the region’s sales tax to fund more affordable housing, among other priorities.
In New York City, support for higher taxes seems less assured, but Mr. Mamdani is convinced of their necessity and has continued to defend them in meetings with skeptical business leaders since last month’s primary. His campaign commissioned a poll that found that about 60 percent of primary voters deemed “freezing the rent for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments” a high priority.
Surveys of child care providers show that median prices in New York for nearly every type of child care have shot up since 2017. Montessori preschool programs can cost more than $4,000 a month in affluent neighborhoods, and working-class families are stretching their budgets to pay at least $2,000 a month for day care.
The Mamdani campaign estimates that the price tag for universal child care for infants and toddlers until they reach kindergarten age would be between $5 billion and $8 billion. To pay for this, Mr. Mamdani would push the state to increase taxes on residents making more than a $1 million a year and hike taxes on large corporations.
The general resistance in New York to raising taxes, especially in 2026 when Ms. Hochul and state lawmakers are up for re-election, combined with the billions of dollars in federal funding cuts faced by the state will likely make Mr. Mamdani’s efforts to realize his agenda more difficult. That would place him in the company of Ms. Wu and Mr. Johnson, both of whom have struggled to fulfill some campaign promises.
Mr. Johnson, in particular, has seen his popularity plummet in Chicago even as he has expanded access to mental health care and invested in housing. A referendum to create a real estate transfer tax to finance homeless services failed last year.
In Boston, Ms. Wu has not been able to “free the T,” but she has enabled three of the city’s most trafficked bus lines to operate without charging riders. She said in an interview that she believed her messaging had helped to open up a conversation about subsidizing public transit across Massachusetts.
Ms. Wu has nonetheless struggled to get the State Legislature to act on capping rent hikes. Despite some criticism that she has tacked too far to the center on this issue and others, she said the fight had focused people’s attention on affordable housing.
“No one is expecting perfection,” said Ms. Wu, who holds a commanding lead in recent polls in her re-election bid in November.
“Everyone understands that longstanding, entrenched challenges didn’t happen overnight and also won’t get fixed in a day,” she added. “People still need to have a sense of where you are trying to take everyone.”
Even though they broke through with voters, many of Mr. Mamdani’s proposals have been decried as unrealistic or too expensive.
New York City has one of the nation’s highest tax burdens, and many worry that wealthy residents will decamp if levies rise any higher. Business leaders have been exploring how to counter the democratic socialist, but they have not yet come up with a message that resonates with voters.
They have also struggled so far to unite behind former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo or any of the other mayoral candidates, which include Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee; and Jim Walden, an independent.
“Mamdani did not run on Israel or Palestine. He did not run on defund the police, in fact he ran away from it,” Representative Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York, recently told CNN.
“He ran on affordability, which is the winning message,” Mr. Torres, who endorsed Mr. Cuomo in the primary, added. “And even if you disagree with his policy prescriptions, the diagnosis is right.”
Mr. Cuomo, who has hammered Mr. Mamdani on his views of Israel, spent less time in the spring laying out his agenda, which mixed tax cuts and investments to make housing and child care more affordable. Mr. Cuomo said that Mr. Mamdani had pitched himself well to voters; now Mr. Cuomo said his job was to explain to voters how the assemblyman’s proposals would hurt the city.
“Consumers get defrauded every day,” Mr. Cuomo said. “I ran the consumer fraud section as attorney general. People get defrauded every day into buying all sorts of things. This is a fraud.”
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
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