Zohran Mamdani says voters gave him a mandate to move ahead on his democratic socialist agenda when he becomes mayor of New York. But in tying his success to a specific list of proposals, Mr. Mamdani may have set himself a political trap. He has given Gov. Kathy Hochul an opening to resist plans, even popular ones, that risk harming the state’s economy and budget.
He needs approval from the State Legislature for most of what he has promised to do, and Ms. Hochul is already making clear that Mr. Mamdani cannot pre-empt the state’s sovereign powers over New York City. If she remains firm, she can demonstrate how Democrats wary of Mr. Mamdani’s populist brand of socialism can push back against it.
Few of Mr. Mamdani’s major campaign pledges can be fulfilled by municipal government alone. One is opening city-run grocery stores. But an independent city board will determine whether he can make good on his vow to freeze the rent on the city’s nearly one million regulated apartments for the four years of his term.
Similarly, Mr. Mamdani has no power to carry out his proposal to raise $9 billion annually by increasing taxes on corporations and the rich to finance universal child care and other programs, nor to make all city buses free. The governor and the Legislature, as well as the independent board that governs the state-funded transit authority, determine such policies. Ms. Hochul has said since the election that she is disinclined to raise taxes on the rich or to eliminate bus fares.
Mr. Mamdani seems to think the historic nature of his victory allows him to steamroll state government. But he will face political and legal barriers if he tries to treat Albany as a mere inconvenience.
Mr. Mamdani’s election majority was slim. With 93 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Mamdani won 50.4 percent. The historically high turnout included a million votes against him.
And Ms. Hochul represents the whole state, not just New York City. Mr. Mamdani’s proposed tax increases would fall only on city residents, yes, but there is a good reason the state’s Constitution restricts cities’ power to tax themselves.
Mr. Mamdani’s proposed 50 percent increase in the city’s marginal income tax rate for people earning above $1 million annually would mean a nearly 17 percent combined state-city income tax — at a time when that burden is already the highest in the nation. That could accelerate the decline in the state’s share of the country’s millionaires, who pay a hugely disproportionate percentage of city and state taxes in New York. For instance, in 2022, the last year for which full data are available, the top 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers paid nearly 46 percent of state income taxes, money that funds spending across New York, including regions poorer than New York City.
And with New York City already lagging behind the nation as a whole in job growth, the higher business taxes he proposes could make it more likely that some of the hundreds of thousands of commuters who come to the city each day could lose their jobs.
Free buses, too, would have implications beyond the five boroughs. To replace the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lost revenue from city bus fares, the State Legislature would have to come up with at least $700 million a year. And lawmakers could then demand state-financed fare reductions on suburban trains and upstate buses in their districts.
That’s not to say that Ms. Hochul can’t find areas of agreement with Mr. Mamdani. He has irresponsibly raised expectations by promising things he can’t deliver. But he taps into real frustrations, particularly about the lack of reliable, inexpensive child care, a statewide issue.
Rather than embrace Mr. Mamdani’s proposal for universal care for children aged 6 weeks and up, the details of which he has not yet laid out, the governor could work with the mayor-elect to put state and local savings from declining school enrollment toward funding seats for 3-year-olds.
And before expanding the program to serve toddlers and babies, Ms. Hochul could make clear that Mr. Mamdani’s plan to pay all child care workers at parity with public-school teachers — the median is about $100,000 annually, not including benefits — is not necessary because such young children do not yet require classroom-style education conducted by highly qualified and thus well-paid educators. (She could also require households above a certain income to pay fees on a sliding scale.)
On transit, the governor can aid Mr. Mamdani’s goal to make buses faster and more affordable. The city has full authority to create more dedicated bus lanes free of cars. In tandem, the state could expand reduced-fare programs to working adults above the current $48,000 cutoff for a family of four. Perhaps, too, the M.T.A. should contemplate a cheaper fare for buses relative to subways.
But Ms. Hochul should consider such compromises only after she makes clear to Mr. Mamdani that his victory does not mean he can slice through the state’s carefully constructed system of governance, designed to prevent New York City from gathering too much political power due to its wealth and population concentration.
In protecting the state’s system of checks and balances against an eager mayor claiming a mandate, the governor can look to a predecessor. In 2014, the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, demanded that Gov. Andrew Cuomo raise income taxes on the wealthy — by hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions — to pay for universal prekindergarten. Mr. Cuomo rejected the tax increase, but provided money for a statewide pre-K program.
And in protecting New York’s priorities against a populist politician, this governor already has experience. This year, President Trump aimed to kill New York’s fledgling congestion-pricing program, a simplistic grasp at affordability. Yet Ms. Hochul has held firm, defending congestion pricing as approved by the State Legislature and improving Manhattan’s quality of life.
State government often gets lost in the mix of intensely fought local politics and similarly intense attention to national elections. But Albany and its sometimes byzantine-seeming processes are a buffer against both a populist president and a populist mayor-elect.
Ms. Hochul can make this case as governor and in her primary and general-election challenges next year: Rather than pitch simplistic solutions, like Mr. Mamdani’s or Mr. Trump’s, Democrats can offer practical improvements, rather than the radicalism of the left or right.
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