Details
Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory to become New York’s next mayor put one big crack in what the MAGA movement hoped would be their banner year. With the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) and a larger coalition of unions and community organizations, Mamdani turned an inspiring campaign into an historic upset victory. At the heart of his run — as is now well known, a testament to the campaign’s highly-successful communication strategy — were three demands, summarized by a popular call-and-response at rallies and meetings: “Freeze the?” “Rent!” “Deliver universal?” “Child care!” “Make buses fast and?” “Free!”
Neal Meyer works as a project manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York Office.
Up Against the Establishment
The next step, enacting that agenda, comes this year. And while popular in NYC and in the rest of the country, Mamdani’s agenda will face enormous challenges. Freezing the rent threatens the income and interests of New York’s landlord class and the growing number of corporations that are building property empires. Universal child care and free public buses meanwhile are a menace to all of the city’s affluent and big businesses; if enacted, they’ll require higher taxes that will hit these groups most of all. We can expect tough resistance from all three of these forces as a result.
They won’t be fighting Mamdani’s programme alone. They’ll have the city and state’s political establishment by their side. While nominally a deep blue city in a deep blue state, New York’s Democrats — who run the government at both levels — are predominantly members of the party’s centrist, pro-corporate wing. That is certainly true of Governor Kathy Hochul, whose approval will be needed to raise taxes. Hochul has in the recent past adamantly refused to consider doing so (although she now hints that she might consider a tax hike on corporations only). Instead, Hochul has promised since Mamdani’s election to explore other ways of finding revenue for the promised new programs.
But many rightly fear that in looking for alternative funding sources, Hochul will also try to dramatically shrink the ambitiousness of the campaign pledges. Hochul’s calculus here is transparent: she is up for re-election this year and wants to hedge on the big debates roiling the state and her party. If she can fudge just enough, she must be thinking, she can keep the Left at bay and business in her coalition. But no one should be naive about where she actually stands. When closed door negotiations with a new Mamdani administration begin, she won’t be an ally. The same is true for Democratic leaders in the state legislature.
Mamdani and his team will have to pick and choose their battles.
More troubling still is the contest to choose the president of the city council (the city’s 51-member legislature) and what it says about the council’s ideological makeup. The power and influence of the council president is limited, but with a democratic socialist as mayor, an ambitious corporate Democrat in that role could still use the post to put up roadblocks. If a majority congeals on the council to oppose or slow-walk Mamdani’s agenda, that would be even more troublesome.
Unfortunately, it looks like that kind of Democrat will lead the council and that majority bloc is taking shape. In a fast-moving process, the bulk of the council’s Democrats (at least 30 in the last count) have allied with the council’s five Republicans to back councilwoman Julie Menin for president. Menin represents the Upper East Side, one of the city’s wealthiest bastions and the home of many of the country’s oligarchs. The final vote is not until January, but with more than two thirds of the council united behind her, Menin seems like the clear winner.
Four Big Challenges
Put together, that means there will be formidable resistance to Mamdani’s agenda. But the Left in New York will have to rally to push ahead. Given that Mamdani’s three main campaign commitments were so well publicized and widely understood, he has to win the fight for at least one or two of them — or, if he loses, it has to be obvious that his opponents are to blame. Making this happen will require finding good answers to at least four big challenges.
First, Mamdani and his team will have to pick and choose their battles, containing the number of additional fights they take on as they push for the big three reforms. Naturally this will create tensions with members of his coalition who feel that other issues are just as urgent. This problem is at the core of a recent debate over whether or not to remove the billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch as head of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Activists accuse Tisch of being an architect of the city’s surveillance state, of defending police officers accused of brutality and police killings, and of using the NYPD to persecute Palestine solidarity activists. Some activist groups, including a number of DSA’s ideological caucuses, are circulating a petition demanding Tisch’s removal.
In the face of this pressure, protecting Tisch’s job has become an early cause célèbre for many in the political and media establishment looking to set limits on Mamdani’s ability to transform the city. Any move to remove her would likely spark a major confrontation. Those on the Left who believe Mamdani should not remove Tisch at the start of his term argue that doing so will undermine his ability to focus on his top three priorities. Others have also argued that with Tisch as head of the NYPD, it will be harder for Mamdani’s opponents to manufacture a crime wave scare — since blame for any increase in crime will rest in part on Tisch herself. For now, Mamdani remains committed to avoiding this fight and keeping Tisch on.
Second, and most importantly, Mamdani will have to figure out where his leverage comes from to convince hostile Democrats in government to support his program. In the face of Mamdani’s clear victory in the General Election, even many on the right of the party have had to pay lip service to his campaign pledges. However, with the election over — and assuming they have not had a sudden conversion to democratic socialism — they have a strong interest in seeing Mamdani fail. If his agenda dies, they can blame him and the Left and go back to business as usual. If he and the Left succeed, however, it would increase the chance that the city’s Left will grow in size and significance and be in a better position to defeat them in future elections. Given this, the rational strategy for them to pursue is to insist in public that they share the same goal of building a more affordable New York while working behind closed doors to delay and sabotage that agenda.
So how can Mamdani convince or compel corporate Democrats to back his program? Here, too, there are diverging views on the Left. For one wing of DSA and other progressives, the thorny nature of this problem underscores the need for Mamdani to treat the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in the same way that mainstream Democrats treat Republicans. That means negotiating, but focusing much more on public pressure and never assuming that they will come along willingly. In other words, if Mamdani has any hope of winning, he will have to lean much more on the stick to get his way. In part, that will mean backing high-profile challenges to corporate Democrats in the near future — including potentially a challenger against Hochul, who may be vulnerable in her reflection fight if Mamdani throws his considerable weight behind another candidate. It will also mean preparing a slate of candidates for the next city elections to turn up the heat on hostile city councillors. (The challenge here is that NYC will not have another city council election until 2029.)
Others on the Left and in DSA, however, see the problem differently. For them, the urgency to enact the campaign’s big three demands means that Mamdani must negotiate with his opponents in his party on friendly terms, trying to persuade rather than force. A more combative approach risks alienating centrist Democrats and turning them into resolute opponents.
If successful, Mamdani and team will greatly strengthen the left flank of the anti-MAGA movement and potentially the fortunes of that bloc overall.
The dividing line between these two perspectives comes down to a wager. Is it likely that the bulk of corporate Democrats can be persuaded that they also will benefit from Mamdani’s agenda being passed? Or is it more likely that they will decide that the bigger payoff for them lies in killing Mamdani’s agenda behind closed doors, through dragging out negotiations or forcing him to radically undercut the ambitiousness of the original proposals? There could of course be a productive tension between these two perspectives. Any successful strategy, regardless of which it emphasizes, will obviously rely both on persuasion and making credible electoral threats. But a friendly approach to negotiations will be undermined by an aggressive public campaign, and vice versa. Mamdani and NYC-DSA will therefore have to choose sooner or later to lean in one direction or the other, or to part ways in order to play very different roles (a “good cop, bad cop” routine).
Third is the problem of timing. Mamdani will lead New York City at a moment when public confidence in government and the ability of politicians to deliver is at a very low point. If Mamdani’s agenda gets bogged down in endless negotiations and he has nothing to show for his first year, it’s hard to imagine that the public’s patience will last long. This of course is an added reason why Mamdani and his allies, if they choose the path of persuasion and friendly negotiation at first, will have to quickly make a call whether that tactic is working or not. If it isn’t working, they will have to go on the offensive publicly, putting intense pressure on corporate Democrats to bend. Only that route can ensure that if the agenda is defeated, there will be a fighting chance that the public will blame the political establishment and not Mamdani. And only that route can serve as a spring board for a new campaign seeking a bigger electoral mandate for Mamdani and his allies.
Finally, the wild card in the coming year will be Donald Trump. Trump has the power — through funding, legal, and even military means — to completely derail Mamdani’s first year in office. Trying to head off this possibility must have been a major reason for Mamdani’s surreal meeting with Trump at the end of November. Trump desperately tried to use the public press conference after their gathering to catch some of Mamdani’s magic. The tête-à-tête was criticized by some on the Left who saw it as an unacceptable meeting with a fascist, creating the false impression that Trump can be reasoned and negotiated with. For others the meeting was a necessary evil: defeating Trump and Trumpism demands that the Left build a real alternative, and with Mamdani at the head of the highest profile attempt to build that alternative, his success or failure is critical. If meeting with an increasingly unpopular president is the only hope of keeping him from upending the plans for Mamdani’s first year in office, then that’s a price worth paying.
All Eyes on Mamdani
All eyes this year will be on the start of Mamdani’s administration, and on whether or not he, his team, and the Left in NYC can deliver. The challenges ahead are not new ones for the Left. How to implement a left-wing reform agenda in a capitalist society where business and the wealthy hold the upper hand is an ever-present question for new left-wing governments. The Left in NYC is now embarking on the latest such experiment.
It is not an exaggeration to say that how Mamdani and the Left perform will have a significant role to play in shaping the end of the Trump era. If they fail badly, they will demoralize the Left and give credence to the idea that only MAGA (Trump’s “Make America Great Again”) offers an alternative to the failed economic and social policies of the last 50 years. That could even breathe new life into the far right at just the time it is losing its leading strongman.
But if successful, Mamdani and team will greatly strengthen the left flank of the anti-MAGA movement and potentially the fortunes of that bloc overall. More and more people will come to believe that a real alternative to Trumpism exists. That’s big stakes in the Big Apple.
