Zohran Mamdani, like mayors before him, is a vessel of hope and a reaction to his predecessors.
New Yorkers rarely cheer their mayors. It’s a tradition. Moreover, we especially tire of those — even the sainted Fiorello La Guardia — who were unlucky enough to get elected to a third term in the era when they legally could.
In May 1932, the city’s beloved but discredited playboy mayor Jimmy Walker was improbably booed at Yankee Stadium before being rescued when the band struck up the National Anthem. (Walker won the crowd over by declaring that if a public figure “cannot withstand the boos — and I mean boo-s, and not b-o-o-z-e — then he also should not pay attention to praise.”)
This week’s was the 17th municipal election I was assigned to decode as a reporter, columnist, editor or commentator for The New York Times, The Daily News, CUNY-TV, NY1 News and now City Limits. A single thread looped all those election results together. They suggest a commonsensical judgment, comparable to the way jurors reach a verdict: by sifting and often discounting much of the tangible evidence and conflicting expert testimony and going with their gut.
New Yorkers have an uncanny knack of choosing the right candidate at the right time — often in robust and unambiguous reaction to his predecessor. That’s a far cry from saying that the candidate they choose in any given election lives up to his promise or potential, or eventually makes a great mayor. But arguably, the voting public has consistently selected the candidate who made sense for the moment.
In 1961, Robert F. Wagner won re-election by running against his own record in a beat-the-bosses campaign that empowered municipal labor unions and the Liberal Party.
Twelve years of that deliberative mayor were more than enough, as it turned out. In 1965, Wagner was succeeded in an upset by a charismatic Manhattan congressman, John V. Lindsay, whom the columnist Murray Kempton sagely characterized as “fresh when everyone else is tired.” Four years later, Lindsay lost the Republican nomination but was reelected in a record turnout by diverting attention from his own administration’s mistakes and turning the campaign into a referendum on the war in Vietnam.
Two terms of fiscal fakery, which kept the city cool and delivered services that even Lindsay’s critics had sanctioned, left New Yorkers yearning for fiscal stability — and who knew the buck better than Comptroller Abe Beame? Except the voters — and the bankers from whom the city borrowed — discovered that he didn’t.
Beame had, indeed, warned of budget gimmickry under Lindsay. As mayor, he couldn’t even certify how many municipal employees were on the payroll. So, he was more or less sidelined by Governor Hugh Carey and state overseers and defeated after one doleful term by the irrepressible Ed Koch, a legislator with little administrative experience, but who managed to differentiate himself from his rivals with the slogan, “After eight years of charisma [Lindsay] and four years of the clubhouse [Beame], why not try competence?”
During his third term, though, Koch was doomed by a fourth “C” — corruption — and simultaneously became a symbol of racial division. He lost the Democratic primary in 1989 to David Dinkins, a balm-thrower who would become the city’s first Black mayor (he won the primary and nearly lost the general election because he was Black) and tried fuzzily to encapsulate his persona in the mantra, “you don’t have to be loud to be strong.” It turned out you did, though. Which is how, after blaring bloody murder about rising crime and other self-inflicted failings of the Dinkins administration, anti-crime crusader Rudy Giuliani slipped in for two terms beginning in 1993. Giuliani begat Mike Bloomberg, who succeeded him in 2001 thanks to Giuliani’s last-minute endorsement amid the lust for leadership after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Bill de Blasio naturally followed as New York looked to its liberal roots after billionaire Bloomberg had laid out the welcome mat for the fellow billionaires whose taxes disproportionately support city services.
In 2021, as the pandemic compounded the impact (if you could call it that) of a lackadaisical mayoral administration — and with the city destabilized and suddenly feeling more dangerous — voters, in what seemed like a post-racial election, chose a borough president and former cop, Eric Adams. We all know how that turned out.
“While the Presidency can elevate even average people,” Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman wrote decades ago in “Governing New York City,” their seminal study, “the mayoralty is the highly vulnerable symbol of all defects in the city and its government.” Mayors are ultimately measured by the baggage they inherited (like the migrant influx), the challenges they faced and the legacy they left. Self-discipline aside, historians will probably judge Eric Adams more generously on what he accomplished than his contemporaries have.
Now, Mamdani too arrives as a reaction to what came before. Like Lindsay in 1965 — and Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024 — Zohran Mamdani promises something different, if largely untested and ephemeral: an opportunity to repudiate an establishment weary of dreaming impossible dreams and afraid to fail and to validate the evolution of a metropolis founded on immigration and diversity.
By voting for Mandani, a slim majority of New Yorkers invested a great deal of faith in wishful thinking. Skeptics hope that because he is a listener, he will mitigate his seeming intransigence. Supporters hope that he’ll help make the city more affordable, and quick — but they will have to temper their expectations. The good news is that, having mounted a stunning campaign that overpowered the cynicism and polarization that pervades today’s politics and government, he has single-handedly revived civic engagement. His recruitment of city government veterans to his transition team suggests some regard for what he and his idealistic acolytes know that they don’t know. (Don’t forget that the last New York mayor elected when he was 34 years old, John Purroy Mitchel, fell from the cockpit of an airplane because he neglected to buckle his seatbelt.)
Whatever New Yorkers think of Mamdani, the fact that he won says a lot about them, too. Maybe someday, Mamdani — who’s about to confront the challenges of leading a restive city — will achieve the impossible: to make us smile, too, and, ultimately, even to cheer for him.