Six months after Zohran Mamdani took office as mayor of New York, he said that New Yorkers no longer had to imagine what life looks like if a socialist wins.
“What we’ve delivered for working people are the very things we were told were impossible,” he declared, noting that his administration had offered free child care to 2-year-olds, given millions of dollars back to tenants with negligent landlords, fixed 165,000 potholes and brought low crime.
“That’s what it looks like to have democratic socialism,” he said.
Many Angelenos are wondering what to expect now Nithya Raman has been elected the first democratic socialist mayor of Los Angeles. She will join a tiny but growing band of socialist city executives from New York to Seattle who are leading experiments to raise taxes on businesses and the richest residents to redistribute wealth and expand public housing, transit and child care.
It will take time to see how this current crop of leaders fare. Most are decidedly pragmatic: one of their top priorities is to demonstrate everyday competence in the essential but mundane tasks of submitting balanced budgets and repaving streets.
“Mamdani doesn’t go around saying, ‘I want to nationalize the investment banks of New York City,’” said John Mollenkopf, professor emeritus of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. “He says, ‘I’m going to fill my 1,000th pothole of the day.’’’
But socialist mayors have also experienced setbacks in enacting some of their more ambitious policies because they have limited power and face budget constraints, legal challenges and opposition from wealthy residents, businesses and even moderate Democrats.
As Raman prepares to govern L.A. — part of a national blue wave that will also see socialists Janeese Lewis George and David Morales lead Washington, D.C, and Providence, R.I., respectively — political scientists say there is much to learn from the socialist mayors who have gone before her.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani promised to provide free child care for every child up to 5 years old, eliminate fares on city buses, freeze rents for rent-stabilized tenants, and set up a network of city-owned grocery stores.
Mamdani, a 35-year-old former state legislator, pledged to fund these programs, in part, with a 2% income tax hike on residents earning over $1 million annually, upping the city’s top corporate tax rate to 11.5% and enacting a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes.
He delivered on his campaign pledge to freeze rent for 2 million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments. He worked with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to secure $1.2 billion in state funding to expand child care — and although he’s fallen short of his initial goal, he’s established a new program for 2-year-olds and expanded an existing preschool program for 3-year-olds.
Mamdani put aside his pledge to raise taxes on corporations and New Yorkers earning more than $1 million due to opposition from Hochul. But he worked with her to roll out the pied-à-terre tax (which was temporarily blocked by the courts and faces ongoing legal complaints), and on Friday, Hochul signaled she might support new taxes to fund free child care.
He has not made all city buses fare-free, a promise that requires state approval. But he has worked with the City Council to expand half-price fares to low-income residents. The first of his grocery stores will not open until next year, but the city has already faced lawsuits from bodega owners as well as criticism that it didn’t properly analyze the impact new stores would have on existing grocers.
One conservative critic dubbed Mamdani’s first six months in office a testament not to socialism, but “the success of capitalism and the regular machinations of municipal government.”
Still, polling showed Mamdani’s favorability rating in the city unusually high in September, at 69%.
“His big accomplishment is he’s changed the mood,” said David Ost, professor emeritus of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. “He’s expanded the idea of what government can and ought to do.”
In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson has had a very different experience.
The 44-year-old former transit activist promised during her campaign to build social housing funded through approved ballot measures and proposed a $1-billion bond for union-built affordable housing, expand protections for renters, build 1,000 new shelter beds annually for the homeless, expand mass transit access and provide universal child care.
She also proposed a string of new taxes, including a local capital gains tax and more progressive property taxes.
Wilson has opened some tiny home communities for the homeless, but she has cut her new shelter bed goal in half through 2027. She has taken some steps to improve bus transit. But she has yet to push for her $1-billion bond for affordable housing or advance any progressive taxation. Two months ago, she astounded many when she presented a balanced budget that proposed no new taxes, nearly $50 million in cuts and an increase of $68 million in police funding.
Comparing Mamdani in New York and Wilson in Seattle, “we can see that a lot depends not on the mayor and their political orientation, but what the political ecosystem around them looks like,” said Patrick Schoettmer, a political science professor at Seattle University.
While Mamdani benefited from a supportive City Council and an enthusiastic democratic socialist base, he said, Wilson’s agenda was constrained by a more moderate City Council and faced sharp criticism from her supposed ideological bedfellows.
Unlike Mamdani, Wilson is not a member of her local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, the nation’s largest socialist organization with more than 100,000 members. Though she describes herself as a socialist, she ran for office without DSA endorsement.
Less than a month after Wilson took office, after the city conducted a series of sweeps of homeless encampments, Seattle DSA issued a statement accusing her of betraying the will of voters.
A socialist mayor’s struggle to transform an American city is not new.
In 1899, when John C. Chase, a trade union activist, took office in Haverhill, Mass., as the first socialist mayor of an American city, he called for a minimum wage for street employees and public works jobs for unemployed workers.
But he also hinted that there were limits to his ability, as mayor, to achieve radical goals. “Every atom of power possessed by the mayor should be exercised in the defense and support of the principles of socialism,” he said, “insofar as they may be applicable to a municipality.”
Between 1910 and 1960, a trio of socialist mayors in Milwaukee embarked on a bigger experiment with pragmatic socialist governance, focusing on delivering efficient public infrastructure, even building the first modern sewage treatment plant in a major U.S. city. Their movement was given a dubious moniker: “sewer socialism.”
When Time magazine ran a cover story on Milwaukee in 1936, it noted that under a socialist mayor, the city had become “perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.” But it also asked: “Is it Socialism?”
Nearly a century later, most voters in the nation’s biggest cities do not consider themselves socialists.
The median Mamdani voter’s ideology, Mollenkopf said, leaned more social democratic (wanting to keep a capitalist economy while strongly regulating it) than democratic socialist (seeking to replace capitalism with public- or worker-owned industries).
But many are fed up with the status quo. And as residents of New York and L.A. criticize mainstream Democrats’ performance on basic services such as sweeping streets and fixing potholes, some democratic socialist theorists argue that socialist mayors can win people over with good governance.
“Those sort of banal things are really important,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin, an American socialist magazine, and former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. “Fundamentally, what I’m looking for from DSAers who are elected at the municipal level … is competence that yields more fairness, more distribution, more efficiency in the welfare state, but also delivers stability.”
Sunkara, co-author or “The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World,” said socialist mayors have to compromise and signal to businesses that they can invest. And Mamdani offered socialist mayors a model, he said, for how to talk to business owners about cutting red tape and housing developers about building more homes.
“We actually want to fast-track processes to make it easier for you to build homes,” Sunkara said, “but we also have this vision of housing that involves public housing and affordability and some level of controls and stabilizations.”
Ultimately, the socialist vision of more investment in public housing and greater regulation of private housing can be compatible with developers building more private housing, Sunkara argued.
But as socialist mayors try to convince people that democratic socialism can be an effective governing philosophy, they face criticism from some on the left that they are not radical enough.
One of the sharpest divides within the DSA movement is electoral strategy — not just whether socialists should work inside or outside the Democratic Party, but whether they should reject the ballot box altogether.
Socialist mayors will also probably face challenges as they face heightened budget pressures, negotiations with public-sector unions and opposition to raising tax revenue to fund public services.
Mamdani has benefited from his city and state’s strong financial position that created room to fund programs, Mollenkopf said, but a recession could force him to make painful decisions and budget cuts.
Housing, most experts agree, will be the ultimate test for socialist mayors — not just in New York City but in Los Angeles.
In many blue cities, Schoettmer noted, many DSA activists advocate for building more city-owned affordable homes while more moderate Democrats push for cutting regulations on developers.
“That’s going to be where we see the movement mature, and the tension within the Democratic Party play out at the local level,” Schoettmer said. “Even within the socialist movement, you have the more ideological versus the more pragmatic approach — and that will be part of the story as well.”
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