10 (More) Questions With Zohran Mamdani

When Zohran Mamdani entered the race for mayor of New York City almost a year ago, he was a little-known state assemblyman from Queens.

Now, as the Nov. 4 election nears, Mr. Mamdani is the Democratic nominee and the unquestioned front-runner in the race. Even as his rivals attack him as too far to the left, he has kept his lead in the polls and brought reluctant Democratic leaders into the fold.

Still, he has far less governing experience than former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams, two of his rivals — a potential weakness that they have tried to underscore in their campaign messaging.

The three leading candidates in the mayor’s race recently visited The New York Times for interviews. We plan to publish excerpts from those interviews, and this is the second in the series; the first, with Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, can be found here. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity. Mayor Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent and is fourth in the polls, declined to participate.

We asked Mr. Mamdani, 33, 10 questions on subjects ranging from thorny policy issues to his favorite subway seat, with room for an occasional follow-up.

We’ve written previously about how Mr. Mamdani won the primary and his plans for public safety and universal child care, among other topics. We also asked him 10 questions during the primary campaign.

1. How many police officers should New York City have?

I think we should sustain the number that we have right now, and I think what’s critically important is to ensure that police are actually able to do their jobs. [The department’s current budget allows for 35,000 officers.]

Right now, we are asking the police to respond to nearly every failure of the social safety net. Our vision is one that would create a Department of Community Safety that would prioritize responses to the mental health crisis, to homelessness, and would learn from models that have been successful elsewhere in the country, allowing the police to focus on serious crimes.

2. A new law prevents renters from being forced to pay broker fees. Do you support the law, and do you think it’s working?

I supported that legislation, and I am eager to ensure compliance with that law, and also to see the medium- and long-term impacts of it.

3. If President Trump sends the National Guard to New York City, what are three specific steps you would take in response?

The first is to preemptively hire 200 lawyers to ensure that New York City returns to its prepandemic staffing levels within the Law Department.

The second is to echo the words of my colleagues already in government that have made clear that this is not something that New York City needs. We recently heard Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch speak about the fact that we do not need the National Guard here.

And third is to follow the example that we’ve seen elsewhere of the importance of partnership. In California, we saw the mayor of Los Angeles with the attorney general and the governor come together to respond to the deployment of the National Guard, filing a lawsuit, and a federal judge found that the deployment was illegal.

4. Federal budget cuts could hurt New York City. If local cuts are needed, what’s one program you would cut?

I’ve spoken about my frustration with how the language of efficiency and waste and fraud has become coded in some way as if they are of the right, when they should be at the core of any progressive politics.

One of the key things in ensuring people have faith in local government is that they have faith in the ways in which that budget is being spent.

If you look at the No. 1 agency in terms of spending within city government, it is the Department of Education. Oftentimes that fact is used as a pretext to justify cuts. I use that fact to state the amount of money that is being spent currently on contracts, on consulting, on staff lines that we cannot explain. One of my focuses will be to go line by line and to ensure that every single dollar being spent is one that is going to the benefit of the classroom.

5. If you can’t convince state leaders to raise taxes to pay for your policy proposals, what alternatives would you pursue?

I began this campaign on Oct. 23 with three clear policy proposals: to freeze the rent, to make buses fast and free and to deliver universal child care.

I believe that the most productive ways of raising revenue is through raising the personal income tax for the top 1 percent of New Yorkers by 2 percent, and raising the state’s top corporate tax rate to match that in New Jersey.

But you appreciate the realities of what the state’s leaders are contending with. What is one specific alternative?

There’s two things I would say. The first is that when you look at the budget process, you will find a lot of the ideas that I’ve been sharing over the course of this campaign have precedent. They’ve not had a mayor that has gone to Albany in recent years with that as part of the priority of their agenda.

The second point is that I have sat in meetings year after year where we are told that the revenue assessments are one thing, and then those revenues sometimes tend to come in higher than we expected. I am talking about a state budget of more than $250 billion, a city budget of about $115 billion — there is room within those budgets themselves to also ensure that you are taking steps toward fulfilling this agenda.

6. You said in 2020: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the N.Y.P.D. is racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” Do you think you should apologize to police officers for making those comments?

Those comments are not reflective of not only the campaign that I’ve run, but also my view of public safety and the fact that police will be critical partners in delivering public safety. Beyond every headline and beyond every caricature, what I’ve found is a New Yorker simply trying to do the best that they can. I know that that is the case for N.Y.P.D. officers.

Do you still believe that now?

No. These were comments that I made at the height of frustration in 2020 around the ways in which after the murder of George Floyd, many New Yorkers felt a real betrayal on the promise — to use Eric Adams’s words — of safety and justice being things that could be mutually delivered, as opposed to one at the expense of another.

If those comments are wrong and you don’t believe them now, should you apologize to the officers of the N.Y.P.D.?

Yes.

7. Both political parties are having tense debates over what their messages should be right now. Name three elected officials who you admire or who you are ideologically similar to, beyond Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, is someone that I think has showcased the immense promise and possibilities within municipal government.

I think of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, often in his description of how to use political capital, and the point of political capital is to deliver material benefits to people’s day-to-day lives.

Attorney General Tish James has been someone on the forefront of fighting for the people of this city and this state, and has done so in a manner that’s cleareyed, and has created a broad coalition of support behind her.