What Zohran Mamdani and Michael Bloomberg Have in Common

Such visions play a role in any administration, but there is also the work of real municipal governance. When Mamdani and Bloomberg met in September, in a conversation that longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson called “completely cordial,” they reportedly talked about recruiting and retaining talent. Mamdani, like Bloomberg before him, comes to City Hall relatively free from the tangle of obligations and relationships that accumulate over a long career in public service. Like Bloomberg, he is willing to hire with commitments that go beyond political favors. “Mike was talent, talent, talent“Bradley Tusk, who served in Bloomberg’s administration and managed his 2009 campaign, told me. “What he did by far best was convince a lot of talented people to come work in city government. Mamdani’s appointment to his transition team of former Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan, a bête noire of business elites, suggests a knack for attracting eye-catching national figures (although the role such a figure might play in his current administration remains undetermined). In late November, Mamdani’s team reported that more than seventy thousand people had submitted online applications for jobs in his administration; his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has expressed interest in improving the city’s civil service recruitment process.

Bloomberg had a reputation for endowing appointees with remarkable independence: When Elizabeth Kolbert profiled the then-mayor for this magazine in 2002, a commissioner told her that Bloomberg’s instructions in giving him the job amounted to “It’s your agency, don’t screw it up.” » It is not impossible to imagine that Mamdani’s obvious need for expertise and his campaign discipline of discussing only a handful of policy proposals could lead him to give his own administrators significant autonomy. What will it really take to make these city buses fast and free? And what is the plan for schools? “Someone described Zohran to me as a socialist technocrat,” Tusk recalled, adding that when it came to municipal government, he didn’t see much difference between a capitalist technocrat and a socialist technocrat. “If he’s a technocrat like Mike, he’ll be a good mayor.” Of course, not all Bloomberg associates agree. “The key to Mike’s success as mayor was world-class management,” Wolfson told me. “He knew how to attract and retain talent and how to achieve a bottom line, because he had been doing these things for years. I’m not sure what the appropriate comparison would be here.”

The 2025 mayoral race was, among other things, a battle between money and attention. Cuomo received $28.4 million from Super CAPs in the general election — “the most money ever spent supporting a single candidate in New York by Super PACs,” as the good-government group Citizens Union wrote in a report last month. “In fact,” they added, “the only comparison we can make is to Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed, low-cost municipal campaigns in the 2000s.” Money has been Bloomberg’s defining characteristic for as long as he has been in public life: Money made him a mayor, money shaped his mayoralty, and money continues to announce his political will. But if Bloomberg controls capital, Mamdani – with his eleven million Instagram followers and reliable virality – commands attention, a variety of capital whose political power Donald Trump has proven over the past decade. And in this mayoral election, the focus has shifted from the clear winner.

In the wake of Mamdani’s success, it sometimes seemed like the only lesson to be learned was that more contestants should get better at making short-form videos. But that underestimates Mamdani’s achievement and the qualities that made it possible, including a capacity for connection that seems far more natural and less tiring than what often passes for personal appeal among politicians. The Bloomberg model of intimate engagement with the city was counting trash outside the window of one’s chauffeur-driven car. Until now, Mamdani has cultivated a more concrete ideal of participation, both for himself and for his supporters. After all, attention isn’t strictly a matter of passive digital consumption; it can also be actively deployed. The experience of volunteering for Mamdani attracted young New Yorkers looking for connection, one of whom told the Times“The people I go to dinner with, the people I go to concerts with, my daily life is organized around Mamdani.”