On Palm Sunday, in the heart of Black, middle-class Queens, Mayor Zohran Mamdani preached the gospel of homeownership to “people that are so often being pushed out.”
What seemed like a throwaway line in a longer address may actually have carried a far more conciliatory purpose. The mayor had angered many Black homeowners by proposing to raise property taxes, and amid the ensuing uproar, Mr. Mamdani all but abandoned the idea.
His speech, at a Black church, seemed designed to make amends.
The moment captured an important element of Mr. Mamdani’s rapid evolution from inexperienced state lawmaker to manager of the nation’s largest city. By necessity, he was learning on the job.
One hundred days into his mayoralty, Mr. Mamdani has hustled up a litany of quick accomplishments. He has reignited projects to improve bus speeds; built a City Hall rest stop for delivery workers; opened a long-delayed new infirmary for Rikers Island detainees; secured state money to fund an incremental expansion of free preschool; and wielded the powers of his office to go after both abusive employers and bad landlords.
But he has also quickly retreated from one campaign promise after another. He once vowed to relinquish unilateral control of public schools in a nod to the teachers’ union; now he supports renewing the law that established it. He had pledged to expand a rental voucher program; now he is trying to limit its growth. Where once he called for reducing class sizes, now he is asking for more time to implement the costly mandate.
The mayor has made no discernible progress toward fulfilling his vow to eliminate a police unit assigned to protests that has been known for heavy-handed tactics. Nor has he followed through on his prior support for legislation to eliminate a police database of people said to be gang members.
Mr. Mamdani has instead been forced to confront an awkward reality, one easily lost in the joy of an insurgent, successful campaign: As New York’s first modern mayor to wholly embrace democratic socialism, Mr. Mamdani has little actual power to impose that ideology on city government.
Instead, Mr. Mamdani must contend with a City Council run by a more moderate speaker whom he campaigned against; a moderate governor he once openly disdained but now supports for re-election; and a Democratic electorate that extends beyond his ardent base into populations that remain wary of him, including business leaders and moderate Jews unnerved by his lifelong, wholesale criticism of Israel.
“I always said when I was a candidate for this office that we would deliver these core, central tenets by the time I was done being the mayor, and that’s what we’re on progress for,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview on Wednesday, when asked whether his core campaign pledges of fast and free buses, universal child care and an income tax hike on the rich would happen this year.
If New York politics are inherently rough waters, they are made only choppier by an uncertain global economy, a flagging New York City job market and a yawning budget gap — all of which threaten Mr. Mamdani’s ability to afford the expansive government programs he ran on, even if Albany lawmakers supported them. (It is not clear that they do.)
And thus far, Mr. Mamdani has neither a job creation plan, nor an economic development chief.
“Campaigning is easy. Governing is tough,” said the New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, a fellow Democrat and the city’s top fiscal officer. “That’s true even in the best of times, and this is a more challenging time.”
That even applies to the weather.
A major storm struck the city then was followed by weeks of below-freezing temperatures that led to at least 20 outdoor deaths. When a blizzard came weeks later, it allowed the mayor to demonstrate his ability to adapt, deploying ambulettes to people living outside, opening emergency shelters beds and keeping overdose prevention centers open overnight.
His learning curve also applied to the city’s budget deficit. His estimates of its size varied, shrinking from $12 billion to $7 billion and then $5.4 billion. He made what appears to have become an idle threat to raise property taxes by 9.5 percent.
Any hopes of immediately funding his affordability agenda — from free buses to a new civilian department intended to handle 911 calls for mentally ill people — were dimmed by the looming deficit.
And by endorsing Gov. Kathy Hochul in February, Mr. Mamdani diminished whatever leverage he had in trying to persuade her to raise taxes on big corporations and wealthy people, as he had vowed to do.
The governor did put $1.2 billion toward expanding child care in New York City, helping the mayor advance one of his campaign vows. Whatever additional aid he extracts from Ms. Hochul this year most likely will go toward plugging the hole and curtailing his own preliminary cuts to popular services like libraries. If he can also replenish the city’s reserves, rather than draining them as he first proposed, he may be able to appease the ratings agencies, which have threatened to lower the city’s debt ratings and make it more expensive for the city to borrow.
As for his threatened 9.5 percent property tax hike, Mr. Mamdani made clear in the interview that he is unlikely to enact it, saying he is “continuing to work every day to ensure that it’s off the table.”
There have been other reversals.
The mayor has weakened some of his positions on policing, ceding significant authority to his more moderate police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, as crime continues to fall. In addition to stalling on disbanding the unit that polices protests, Ms. Tisch is still proudly using the Police Department’s gang database.
Mr. Mamdani, who campaigned almost singularly on a pledge to make the city more affordable, is also backtracking on a vow to expand a rental voucher program in keeping with local law. His about-face prompted dismay from supporters who say the assistance provides homes to people who would otherwise end up in expensive city-run shelters.
“It was very disappointing that he has walked this back,” said Twyla Carter, chief executive of the Legal Aid Society. “The question isn’t whether we can afford to expand it — it’s really whether we can afford not to.”
But in the universe of things that he can do quickly, and do alone, Mr. Mamdani has taken action.
He has cast klieg lights on the work of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, a small agency that pursues corporate abuse of low-wage workers and has served as fodder for at least eight news conferences. Since Jan. 1, the department has gotten more than $9.3 million in restitution and filed four major lawsuits, a spokeswoman said. (Mr. Mamdani has yet, however, to follow through on his pledge to double the department’s budget.)
“I really want the biggest companies in the world who may be ripping off New Yorkers to be thinking about us when they’re designing their systems, when they’re evaluating their compliance,” Sam Levine, commissioner of that agency, said in an interview.
Mr. Mamdani’s tireless messaging, even his detractors acknowledge, is further evidence of the mayor’s uncommon talents as a communicator. And after the topsy-turvy, cronyistic tenure of his predecessor, Eric Adams, both supporters and critics say he has brought a breath of fresh air into City Hall.
“It’s very easy to be an armchair radical and talk about all of the things you should or should not be doing,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. “I think he has brought a note of optimism and hope, not only to the people of New York, but people throughout this country and in fact, by the way, in many parts of the world as well.”
Mr. Mamdani has, in fact, become a global political celebrity, nurturing his stature with deft management of the influencer class, an unusual aptitude for communicating directly to the public and an eagerness to highlight communities that rarely get the spotlight. During Ramadan, Mr. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, attended more than a dozen iftars with taxi drivers, municipal workers and a New York Knicks player.
Not everyone has been won over. Many of his foes during last year’s campaign have dug in, with some actively debating how to mobilize against him. Some are planning a rally on Friday to denounce portions of his record.
James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said that Mr. Mamdani was “probably the best communicator in that office since Koch.” But he added that the communication did not typically extend to Mr. Whelan’s colleagues.
“There’s no one in place that the business community can speak to,” he said.
Perhaps the most intractable challenge for Mr. Mamdani remains his desire to hold true to his pro-Palestinian political roots while also governing the largest population of Jews outside of Israel.
Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian activist who was recently the intended victim of an alleged pro-Israel terrorist plot that was foiled before it could be carried out, praised his willingness to call out, by name, the radical Jewish group accused of being behind the plot.
But Ms. Kiswani took issue with what she perceives as Mr. Mamdani’s drift center-ward on the Israel-Gaza issue.
“Some people like to frame him as a Palestinian activist,” Ms. Kiswani said. “That’s not the hat that I see him as having on now at all. I feel like he is taking on the hat of being a mayor more than anything.”
That view is not widely shared by many Jewish leaders. Time and again, Mr. Mamdani’s close allies have sparked consternation among some Jewish New Yorkers for their willingness to tolerate rhetoric that others find antisemitic.
Early last month, Mr. Mamdani and his senior staff attended the annual gala for the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group whose board reads like a who’s who of New York City business.
When Peter Orszag, the chief executive of Lazard, rose to speak, he acknowledged his wife, who had recently written a book about antisemitism. “I’m only sorry the mayor departed before I was able to give him his copy,” Mr. Orszag said.
But Asad Dandia, a political ally who considers the mayor a friend, said that Mr. Mamdani is giving much-needed air to voices that have long been ignored.
“Many in the pro-Palestine movement feel that at least in New York City, the Jewish, Zionist perspective is already well represented, that people understand it, and that not enough people know about the Palestinian perspective,” Mr. Dandia said.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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