What Zohran Mamdani Is Up Against
According to the New York City Department of Archives and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s one hundred and eleventh mayor, as many thought. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently discovered references to an unrecorded mayoralty held in 1674, by a certain Matthias Nicolls. Therefore, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and takes the oath of office at City Hall, he will become our one hundred and twelfth mayor – or perhaps even our one hundred and thirty-third, according to the department’s best estimates. “The numbering of New York City ‘mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official revealed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other mayors missing.”
New York City has already had young mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, aka the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, aka Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), demanding mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little or no voting experience (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported democratic socialists of America. (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or bad mayor, he won’t be alone in either arena. However, he will be the first Muslim mayor of the city and the first to have family roots in Asia. He is as openly left-wing as any mayor in the city’s history. And the speed of his rise to power is the fastest anyone in town can remember.
Since defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the general election, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of government: appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. In trying to preserve the movement energy he harnessed during the campaign, he also strove to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to mainstream attention. Last Sunday, for example, he sat in a room at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s abandoning to move into Gracie Mansion) for twelve hours, meeting with New Yorkers for three minutes at a time. It was a gesture to show that he could look his voters in the eye and that he could listen to them.
Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign and he led a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled off other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and they surprised everyone by having a seemingly productive meeting. (Trump gleefully told Mamdani that it was OK to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young DSA city council member, Chi Ossé, from mounting a primary challenge next year to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — a magnanimous decision, given Jeffries’ continuing coldness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and others filled with donors, he tried to convince the skeptics of New York’s elite. (“They find themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” says the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when it asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, an Adams appointee, to stay on. Last week, when old anti-Semitic tweets from a senior official surfaced, Mamdani accepted his resignation within hours.
After climbing in a few months from one percent in the polls to that of mayor, Mamdani seems at ease facing his skeptics. But what he faces cannot be overstated. It has been an open question for centuries whether New York is “governable” in the municipal, positive, top-down sense. For a long time, city government here was seen as nothing more than a hollow for Tammany Hall. In the last century, the city proved that it could (more or less) collect its own trash, keep crime under control, and run large school and hospital systems, if sometimes just barely. Of course, it can do more than that, but can it make life in New York sustainably better, not just more tolerable, for the majority of its residents? In his efforts to answer in the affirmative, Mamdani will have to resolve management, budget and bureaucratic problems within City Hall, but also with Trump (does anyone think their friendship will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires, public impatience in the face of slippages or inconsistencies, and the blows of fate and nature. The exodus of billionaires predicted during his campaign has shown no signs of coming to fruition, but a severe snowstorm in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months.
