For over four months, New York City’s donor class and power brokers troubled by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power have been mulling how to take him on.
Some of them have now joined forces to formalize their angst through a campaign to work against him. The group formed NYC Common Sense, a nonprofit that was registered in Delaware and has already raised more than $1 million, according to a founding member and political consultant, Phil Singer.
The group is being chaired by Jim Walden, a lawyer who ran an unsuccessful bid as an independent for mayor last year and criticized Mr. Mamdani through the general election in November.
Late Tuesday evening, in a post he pinned on his X profile, Mr. Walden said of Mr. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor: “A terrorist attack in NYC would be a complicated problem for the Mayor because he’d be rooting for the terrorists.”
He was responding to a post from Mr. Mamdani’s spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, who earlier on Tuesday had criticized an article that quoted a professor as saying that a potential terror attack would pose a “huge liability” for the mayor, given his Muslim faith.
Mr. Walden was tapped by Mr. Singer, founder and chief executive of Marathon Strategies, a political consulting firm that worked on a $30 million super PAC to assist former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the same mayoral race.
Mr. Singer would not divulge the names of any individual donors. But there is no shortage of wealthy people who tried unsuccessfully to defeat Mr. Mamdani and continued to oppose him.
The group will run digital ads highlighting what it perceives as his missteps, will issue policy papers about what it views as Mr. Mamdani’s most troubling agenda items, and will file lawsuits against his administration accordingly.
This entity is the first organized effort to go after Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist who emerged from relative anonymity to topple a Democratic Party institution, Mr. Cuomo, on his path to victory last year.
In an interview, Mr. Walden and Mr. Singer ticked off a litany of concerns with Mr. Mamdani’s performance as mayor. They range from what they saw as a problematic shift related to traffic enforcement and homelessness to his decision not to expand a rental assistance voucher program as a cost-cutting measure.
Though Mr. Walden raised an issue that many of Mr. Mamdani’s politically connected opponents have seized on — his support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel — he said that it would not be central to the group’s efforts.
“It’s early in his tenure, but I haven’t seen anything other than what I saw on the campaign, which was an incredibly ideological person who has programs and policies he might be able to justify with a single study from a city that is nothing like New York, and then try and implement that as policy in a way that is fiscally undisciplined,” Mr. Walden said in a recent interview.
He insisted that, despite criticizing Mr. Mamdani early and continually, he has “given him a fair shake,” and said that he would be sure to point out the mayor’s successes as well.
“But there is so much from his administration that I’m seeing that is either a broken promise or dangerous,” Mr. Walden added.
In response to news of the group’s formation, Mr. Mamdani’s spokesman, Joe Calvello, listed some of the mayor’s accomplishments since taking office on Jan. 1. He also took a swipe at Mr. Walden, who dropped out of the mayor’s race in September but remained on the ballot two months later as an independent.
“Mayor Mamdani closed New York City’s largest fiscal deficit since the Great Recession, made sweeping progress toward universal child care, and took decisive action to confront New York City’s housing crisis and hold landlords accountable,” Mr. Calvello said. “We do however welcome those who received less than 1 percent of the vote for mayor, to continue to share their unique perspective on New York City.”
Mr. Walden, a former prosecutor, said he expected to file a lawsuit against the administration by the beginning of June. He would not divulge the details of the likely legal action.
He did, however, home in on a few specific critiques, including Mr. Mamdani’s decision in March to end criminal enforcement against e-bike riders and cyclists for low-level traffic violations. In announcing the change, City Hall officials had blamed companies running food delivery apps for creating an incentive for speeding and unsafe cycling.
Mr. Walden, in the interview, said the riders were “blowing through crosswalks” and cited recent reporting on people filling Bellevue Hospital’s emergency room with serious injuries from electric vehicles.
“So if you’re going to have unregistered drivers and you’re not going to give them criminal summonses, that’s a very bad development for elderly people, for disabled people, for young mothers with strollers and for pedestrians in general,” he said.
He and Mr. Singer also criticized the city’s housing shortage and uptick in homeless people, both problems that predate Mr. Mamdani but have continued under his tenure.
And Mr. Walden repeatedly went after Mr. Mamdani on defunding the New York Police Department, though the mayor has not actually done that. When pressed on that point, Mr. Walden said he was referring to the mayor’s decision not to hire more police officers and to create an Office of Community Safety, which would divert some calls to 911 to clinicians.
Both Mr. Walden and Mr. Singer said their group had no connection to Mr. Cuomo, who has also remained public in his criticism of Mr. Mamdani.
Pointing out problems with any mayor is easy; creating an environment for him to lose re-election, while not the stated mission of this group, is much harder — especially given Mr. Mamdani’s overall popularity.
A recent Marist Institute for Public Opinion survey found 48 percent of New Yorkers approve of his job performance and even more believed the city was headed in the right direction under his leadership.
Mr. Singer nonetheless cited public polling as a reason to believe the mayor is vulnerable.
“There was a lot of unrest and you see that. Public polling has shown a slow but steady correction,” he said. “The honeymoon ended and people are starting to say what now? What’s going to happen?”
Sally Goldenberg is a Times reporter covering New York City politics and government.
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