Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy has become a litmus test for the Democratic Party, particularly its broad center-left.
Mamdani friendlies see him as representing youthfulness, hope, energy and a shrewd response to the discontents over the cost of living that sent Donald Trump back to the White House. For the Mamdani fearful, he is a dangerous socialist whose victory would lead New York City to ruin, drive away businesses and wealthy people, and allow Republicans to brand Democrats everywhere with the scarlet letter of his radicalism.
As the campaign enters its final weeks, Mr. Mamdani is winning this argument, and only in part because of what even his critics concede is an exceptional level of charm and intelligence. He’s making clear that he is far more interested in the practical task of being a successful mayor than in the impossible dream of turning a single city into a socialist paradise — or, as his critics would see it, a nightmare.
The way to advance his worldview, he argues, is to show that it works. As he told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in a recent interview, “The most important thing is delivering.”
It’s worth noticing that Mr. Mamdani’s critics are focused largely on the past: the 33-year old’s most incendiary statements, and the most extreme components of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization to which he proudly belongs and that initially powered his political career.
Those on the moderate left who see Mr. Mamdani’s upside look instead to the present and the future. They notice how he’s distanced himself from his more controversial statements (particularly about the police and the Middle East), insisted that he’s not running on the D.S.A.’s national agenda, and painted himself as a realistic visionary trying to solve the city’s current problems.
Mr. Mamdani has called attention to his own transformation. “The good thing about my youth is that I grow older every day,” Mr. Mamdani, with his emblematic smile, told The New Yorker. He added, “The other part of youth is growth.” You might translate that word “growth” into “not scary.”
Mr. Mamdani’s core promises — “fast and free” buses, universal child care, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, five experimental publicly owned grocery stores — are certainly progressive, but none are radical or loony. Each has been tried in one form or another elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul — nobody’s idea of a left-winger — pledged to work with Mr. Mamdani to deliver on his most expensive promise, universal child care.
Beyond the specifics, history teaches that progressive mayors prosper when they understand why voters put them in office. Sheri Berman, a Barnard College political scientist and a widely respected scholar of social democracy, offers a brisk two-part formula. “Successful left-wing mayors,” she told me, “focused on (a.) problems in their cities, and (b.) problems where they had the power to do something.”
For history buffs, Mr. Mamdani has done the service of rekindling an interest in a largely forgotten American tradition, the “sewer socialists” who ran a significant list of cities in the last century. The most durable among them was Daniel Hoan, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. You don’t get re-elected that often by being a failure.
Many socialist mayors did not mind being associated with repairing the grubbiest of urban amenities because doing so underscored their aim of running corruption-free governments that did whatever they could to improve the lives of working-class people in their jurisdictions. When lousy (or nonexistent) sewer systems led to illness and death in low-income and immigrant neighborhoods, said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, building and fixing sewers became a powerful example of what “common good’ governance could accomplish.
Mr. Mamdani knows sewer socialism’s history and has no qualms about identifying with it.
“To fight for working people must also mean to fight for their quality of life,” he said in an interview with The Nation in August. “Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. That means improving the services and social goods that working people experience each and every day.”
Mr. Mamdani sent a similar message when he was asked, in a preprimary debate, who was the nation’s most effective Democrat. His answer: Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu.
It’s no accident that he picked a progressive role model who is pragmatic and successful enough to be running unopposed for re-election this November. (Ms. Wu so overwhelmed her leading opponent in the preliminary round of voting that he dropped out.)
When I asked Ms. Wu earlier this month what she was proudest of in her first term, the catalog she ticked off rapid-fire sounded like — well, to quote a certain mayoral candidate, improvements in those “services and social goods that working people experience each and every day.”
She started with the city’s successes against crime. The murder rate in Boston is down to 1957 levels, and she won the endorsement of the city’s largest police union. Fighting crime, effectively and justly, has become a plank of the New Urban Progressivism.
Her list also included expanded pre-K, early education and child care programs, more affordable housing and a big increase in the number of first-time home buyers. Like many big city mayors, she sees housing as “the greatest stressor on our families for well over a decade.”
Ms. Wu has not gone as far as Mr. Mamdani in promising free buses across the board, but she did champion the creation of free bus routes. She also points to small but measurable new services that can improve the lives of working-class youngsters, including free swimming and bike lessons.
With President Trump claiming that cities run by liberal Democrats are “hellholes,” progressives are touting the prospect of Ms. Wu and Mr. Mamdani leading a new generation of mayors determined to show what successful local, progressive governance looks like.
For voters still wary of his youth, his executive inexperience and his ideology, Mr. Mamdani signals that he’ll look to highly competent — and noncorrupt — officials to run the city’s departments and services.
He has done nothing to discourage talk that New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, would play a major role in a Mamdani government, or that he would keep the city’s popular police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. For all of their differences and the controversies around their legacies, the city’s most recent mayors — Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams — left behind a significant pool of talented urban managers for a new mayor to draw on.
The politics of the Middle East are part of New York City’s electoral landscape and the latest developments there threaten to complicate Mr. Mamdani’s dual task of mobilizing younger progressives who share his highly critical view of Israel and winning over center-left voters who still feel sympathy for the Jewish state.
So it’s not surprising that former governor Andrew Cuomo, his leading opponent, criticized Mr. Mamdani for taking hours to comment on the cease-fire and hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas — “His silence speaks volumes,” Mr. Cuomo said on X. When Mr. Mamdani did issue a statement, it balanced, somewhat awkwardly, warm words about “profoundly moving” scenes of freed hostages and returning Palestinians with renewed attacks on Israeli “genocide” and “apartheid.”
Yet even in New York, local politics is still local and Mr. Mamdani will keep linking aspirational rhetoric with down-to-earth problem solving. Since “sewer socialism” is largely buried in our nation’s past, Mr. Mamdani likes to offer a more recent standard for local socialist governance. In September, he released a video of his conversation at a diner with the most famous mayor that Burlington, Vt., ever had: Senator Bernie Sanders, who was in City Hall there for eight years in the 1980s and who drew Mr. Mamdani to democratic socialism in the first place.
Mr. Sanders didn’t extol revolution or Marxist theory. He highlighted the most basic of city services he sought to distribute more fairly. “In Vermont, we get a lot of snow,” Mr. Sanders explained, “so we made sure that snow removal took place in low-income, working-class neighborhoods.”
Think of “snow socialism” as a frosty version of “sewer socialism.” Sure, New York is a more complicated place than Burlington. But last I checked, Burlington is still thriving.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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