From all appearances, and there have been many, Zohran Mamdani has begun his mayoralty in New York City as though he is still in campaign mode.
There he was, gabbing with the hosts of “The View.” He dropped by a picket line twice to support striking nurses, bringing his good friend Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont with him on one visit.
When the city was hit last weekend with its biggest snowfall in nearly five years, he grabbed a shovel and helped excavate plowed-in cars; popped up on students’ computer screens the next day, after canceling in-person classes; and still found time to make a cameo on “The Tonight Show.”
With Mr. Mamdani concluding his first month as mayor, it seems clear that his team is intent on continuing the campaign’s creative flood-the-zone approach to political messaging.
Nearly every day last month, Mr. Mamdani, speaking to the camera with an ease that befits the son of an Oscar-nominated movie director, released a video on social media. The topics varied from snow to soccer to early education. So did the sets and the carefully embroidered outerwear.
If New Yorkers are going to judge him on appearance, then the mayor has worked hard to shape that appearance, even as he has grappled with a deadly snowstorm, a looming budget deficit and the fallout from the appointment of at least two ideological allies with questionable social media histories.
“It is one thing to inspire hope, but to sustain hope, you have to deliver change,” Mr. Mamdani said in an interview, describing his administration’s push to be seen as acting with a sense of urgency. “There is a small window that you have at the beginning of your administration, when New Yorkers are asking themselves, ‘Was I right to believe?’ This is our window to show them that they were.”
For Mr. Mamdani, it was not enough to take on a landlord with thousands of housing violations; he chose to appear at one of the landlord’s buildings to announce that the city was legally intervening in a tenants’ lawsuit. A few days later, he stood at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge and took shovel to asphalt to help fix a notorious bump that had vexed bicycle riders for years, a bit of stagecraft that his team came up with the day before.
But it can also appear that Mr. Mamdani, who, at 34, is the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century, is still learning as he goes. Even after his grand display of meeting with aggrieved tenants just hours after his inauguration, a judge dismissed the city’s efforts to intervene on their behalf.
On Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani held a theatrical City Hall news conference in which he warned that New York’s budget was in dire straits, potentially complicating his plans to use the budget to achieve his affordability agenda. Yet he declined to address the reasons, aside from casting blame on his predecessors.
He seemed sure-footed in handling the snowstorm, but 14 people have died in the accompanying frigid cold. He appointed various people who shared his democratic socialist views, only to be caught by surprise when some of their social media histories revealed antisemitic and racially antagonistic posts, forcing one to quickly resign. He failed to appoint a Black deputy mayor — the first time a New York mayor had failed to do so in decades — drawing the ire of an important political constituency, some of whom had become skeptical supporters.
Mr. Mamdani did bring aboard Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, to help lead his transition, and managed to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner — a move seen as critical to maintaining the trust of powerful business leaders. Still, he generally has not attracted marquee names to his administration.
In the next few weeks, Mr. Mamdani must release his first executive budget plan in the face of a projected $12.6 billion deficit, and how he proposes to address that gap while meeting his affordability agenda will be another early test. He will also soon travel to Albany to make his pitch for substantial state funds on what is known as Tin Cup Day, hoping to convince his former colleagues of the necessity of raising taxes on the wealthy.
It will be a steep task. But given Mr. Mamdani’s path from obscure backbench lawmaker to mayor of America’s largest city, underestimating him might be unwise.
The reasons for his success have often touched upon his social media skills, his smile and charm, and his affordability message. But underpinning all of that are months of strategic planning, with some of that shaping what New Yorkers saw in his first 31 days as mayor.
The notion to come charging out of the gate was months in the making, and emerged after outreach to local and national Democratic leaders not long after his stunning primary win.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set up a series of meetings for him in Washington, including with Mr. Sanders, whom Mr. Mamdani considers a political mentor.
Mr. Sanders came prepared. He whipped out a notebook in which he had outlined five specific issues. He wanted to know how Mr. Mamdani was planning to address each of them, starting during his first hours in office, and the senator had suggestions.
Mr. Sanders argued that Mr. Mamdani would have to govern in a robust way from Day 1 to show that progressives can deliver results. That meant taking a series of actions using existing laws and executive orders to emphasize that government can do more to help people’s lives.
When Mr. Sanders spoke at a Mamdani rally in October at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, he had more questions, this time peppering Mr. Mamdani’s eventual chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, and Ms. Khan.
That meeting spawned several more sessions, the brainstorms also extending to weekly calls between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Mamdani or his team. Mr. Sanders said that in those conversations he typically emphasized the importance of communicating with the public, having a simple message and being visible.
“You can give great speeches and be a terrible administrator. You could be a great administrator and have no vision at all,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “Democratic leaders need to have both. You have to have a vision.”
Ms. Khan led a working group that scoured city law to come up with executive and regulatory actions that Mr. Mamdani could do quickly and unilaterally to protect workers and promote his affordability agenda.
Over the last month, Mr. Mamdani unveiled plans to target deceptive business practices like junk fees at hotels and gyms, revived the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and promised “rental rip-off” hearings in the first 100 days of his administration.
Those types of initiatives are designed to build mass support that Mr. Mamdani can cite to pressure other leaders to pass and help fund his agenda. Many of Mr. Mamdani’s supporters argue that his is the way of the future, an example that national Democrats should follow as they look to retake the House of Representatives this year, and the presidency in 2028.
“Mayor Mamdani is showing what it means for Democrats to govern assertively rather than timidly,” Ms. Khan said in an interview, adding that the mayor has focused on finding concrete and tangible ways to make life better for New Yorkers by using “the full scope of executive authority” available to him.
If that sounds familiar, it might be because President Trump has carved a similar, if not always legal, path of doing the same. Mr. Mamdani said he had started focusing on affordability after speaking with residents in 2024 near Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens, areas where Mr. Trump made gains that year, who said they would listen to a politician with an economic agenda.
In that sense, Mr. Mamdani has found common ground with Mr. Trump — a feat that likely served him well when he charmed the president during a White House visit in November.
“While Trumpism is at play nationally, you have to show a different form of a government,” said Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders who also met multiple times with Mr. Mamdani’s team.
“It’s the sense that you flood the zone, you show activity. You are on your front foot,” Mr. Shakir said. “You are telling people how to perceive and receive what this government is doing. You are going to be the direct messenger.”
Mr. Mamdani, New York’s first digitally native mayor, has filled that role. In the last week, he has posted social media messages in which he breaks down the city’s budget process and explains how snow is cleared.
But social media can only go so far, said Scott M. Stringer, the former city comptroller who ran against Mr. Mamdani in the Democratic primary.
Blaming former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and former Mayor Eric Adams for the city’s budget deficit before revealing his own plan, seemed, he said, like a step back into campaign mode.
“He actually got up there with a straight face and a great smile,” Mr. Stringer said, “and told half of an inaccurate story.”
Mr. Stringer said it was far too early to judge Mr. Mamdani as mayor, but he made clear that he believed there was room to grow.
“I do think he has not yet transitioned from campaign performative to substantive governing,” he said. “But there’s still time to do that, obviously.”
Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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