Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, made a pitch toward voters skeptical of his youth and inexperience on Monday night in an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.”
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who are skeptical” Mr. Mamdani, 34, said on the show, which was taped on Thursday before airing at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
“I will freeze the rent,” he said. “I won’t defund the police. I will make buses fast and free. I won’t decriminalize misdemeanors. I will deliver universal child care. I won’t require everyone to eat halal food.”
Mr. Mamdani’s 21-minute interview on “The Daily Show,” coming in the closing phase of a bitterly fought general election contest, was friendly territory.
A comedian who has repeatedly emphasized that he is not a journalist, Mr. Stewart expressed support for Mr. Mamdani and at one point mocked recent attacks on the state assemblyman, who is Muslim. Mr. Stewart called those attacks Islamophobic.
“You are clearly right now in the front-running position,” Mr. Stewart said at one point. “I can tell, because they’ve gone 9/11 on you. So that’s clearly a sign of—”
“A closing argument,” Mr. Mamdani replied.
Mr. Stewart, 62, also occasionally leaned into the role of a grizzled New Yorker, drawing on his decades in the city as he asked Mr. Mamdani if he was ready to run the nation’s largest city and if his agenda was feasible.
At one point, Mr. Stewart also offered a kind of warning. “I lived in this city for a very long time, and I can tell you, livability is — if you can run this place, you will earn a great deal of leeway to do all kinds of innovative things,” Mr. Stewart said. “But if people feel disorder? Man, you won’t be able to do — and I’ve lived through the eras of New York where it was disorder, and it does make it — people feel it.”
Mr. Mamdani said that public safety was a critical concern of his, then linked it to his affordability-centered campaign messaging. Safety, he said, “is also something that you deliver by ensuring that there are actually jobs that can pay people enough to stay in the city.”
And, as he faces questions about his experience, Mr. Mamdani told Mr. Stewart that his leadership style included knowing that he did not have all the answers. “You actually create a team around you, and they’re not all going to be 34,” he said.
Mr. Stewart did not press Mr. Mamdani particularly hard. At one point, he asked Mr. Mamdani how he might be able to turn some of his loftier goals into reality, especially given Gov. Kathy Hochul’s rejection of his calls to raise taxes on the rich.
Mr. Mamdani insisted that his plans would come to fruition “as a result of the political coalition” that he was building, then pointed to voters’ support for some of his tax proposals.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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