What the Democratic nominee promises may be less important than what these groups do.
In most elections, voters and political observers pay too little attention to what candidates actually say they will do. Contrary to the eye-rolling conventional wisdom, campaign rhetoric is actually quite predictive of what candidates wind up doing in office in most contexts.
But while we should pay attention to what candidates promise, it is not the only thing we should pay attention to, particularly in local elections like this year’s mayoral contest. Even though New York City has a “strong mayor” system, mayors are not all-powerful. Formally speaking, cities are creations of state law, and mayors need help from the state legislature to achieve their goals. Both capital and people can move in and out of cities. What happens in Washington directly affects their budgets and more. And cities have internal forces — public employees, media and political groups — that can frustrate mayoral agendas. When we think about a candidate’s pledges, we need to put them in context alongside these sometimes countervailing forces and constraints.
Polls say that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is very likely to be the next mayor. What that means for the city will be, in part, down to his agenda. But how others react to him being mayor will also be important, maybe even more important.
Here are some of the forces and groups that will determine, in large part, what effects a Mamdani mayoralty will have on the city.
The state legislature and governor. Many of Mamdani’s policy proposals require state permission. His proposed tax increases need state legislative authorization. So do his proposals for the MTA, including his plan for free city buses. So does his plan to borrow an additional $70 billion to build 200,000 units of affordable housing. As a state legislator with some Democratic Socialists of America allies in the Assembly and Senate, Mamdani is well situated to get some support, but also some strong opposition. Gov. Kathy Hochul has already come out against local tax increases — a stance reminiscent of Gov. Cuomo’s opposition to a tax increase on the wealthy when Bill de Blasio was newly elected mayor. We should remember: The current mayor, Eric Adams, is himself a former legislator with a number of legislative allies, proof that one’s history in the Assembly or Senate is no guarantee of results in Albany.
Wealthy residents and businesses. Mamdani has proposed two big tax increases, one an income tax rate surcharge for those making more than a million dollars and the other to the state’s corporate tax rate. The worries with tax increases are twofold. The first being that, like a tax increase at any level of government, they will depress economic activity. The second, that it may generate exit, or people leaving the city or state — particularly the very high-income residents who fund a highly disproportionate share of New York’s generous social programs.
The economy is already shaky, so the direct harms from tax increases — money out of the pockets of local firms and residents — could be substantial.
The worries about exit are real, if debatable. Research suggests that wealthy individuals do not leave at high rates in response to income tax increases. But that research predates the Zoom era, which has already seen increased movement to suburbs. Because the City and State budgets overwhelmingly rely on revenue from an increasingly small number of very highly paid taxpayers — as of 2019, those earning $1 million or more annually were paying 37% of income-tax revenue — and because New York City already has the highest combined income-tax rates in America, it doesn’t take many people leaving to create negative effects on the economy and to limit the revenue gains from tax increases. And unlike in some cases, the services the increased taxes are supposed to pay for are not aimed at the people paying more — this is intended to be a progressive policy. Even so, risks of tax increases generating exit are just that, risks.
The same thing is true about the state corporate tax increase. Mamdani argues that there will be no risk of businesses leaving, since the corporate tax applies any time entities do business in New York — not only to those with offices, employees or headquarters here. Even so, corporate tax increases may yet discourage local investment by businesses. Corporations that sell goods and services to New York firms and customers pay corporate taxes. As a result, firms might have an incentive to locate offices and employees in other states to reduce the taxes paid by the businesses that sell them things (and thereby get lower prices). Many big firms have already moved back-office operations out of the city to cheaper locations; one worry is that the tax increase will speed this trend up. Again, these are risks, not certainties.
The question of exit is as much social as it is purely economic. If business leaders and/or the local rich feel like things are getting worse (or are going to get worse in the future), or even that they are not receiving sufficient respect, they may leave or not invest, no matter what actual policies are enacted. But the opposite is also true: People may not leave if they are confident in the city’s direction, even if taxes go up.
Mamdani is clearly aware of the risk and seeking to contain it. When he does things like visit with the Partnership for New York City, the alliance of the city’s top employers, he is in part trying to convince them to support him, or at least not oppose him so vigorously, in the election. But perhaps more importantly, he’s trying to convince them to stay in the city if and when he gets elected.
The budget (and the supporters of current priorities). One of the ironies of the debate over Mamdani’s tax proposals is that almost everyone who knows anything about city budgets thinks that the city is going to have to raise taxes in the next few years in one way or another, no matter what. The city has to balance its budget annually, but the cost of providing services and paying public employee salaries is increasing more than revenue is. The result is a huge structural budget deficit — about $3.6 billion this year, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, projected to rise as high as $10 billion in out years (the size of the overall budget is $112 billion), with expenses going up and a huge city workforce that is getting raises. And that’s not counting federal and state cuts to come (see below). That’s in comparison to the roughly $9 billion annually Mamdani’s tax proposals are supposed to raise.
Mamdani has pledged to spend the money from his proposed new taxes on new programs — a huge public housing boom, child care for all, paying the MTA to provide free buses and so on. But even if he gets tax increases, he may have to devote the revenue to existing programs just to keep the lights on.
He could try to do more with less. New York governments spend much more to get the same services (or worse) as most other cities. But making city programs more efficient will require challenging political powerful groups — unions, contractors — including those that are part of Mamdani’s coalition. Unless he can convince these groups to support reform, any new revenue will be eaten by old promises.
The bond market. When the City nearly went broke in 1975, the precipitating event was major banks refusing to underwrite the city’s short-term debt. We’re a long way off from 1975 — the City doesn’t rely on short-term debt for operations, and uses honest accounting rules. But that doesn’t mean that a mayor and his budget director can ignore the investor class. If the bond purchasers become skeptical of Mamdani’s many promises, particularly in light of pending federal spending cuts, interest rates could rise, making efforts to build infrastructure or housing prohibitively expensive — or, I should say, more prohibitively expensive, given that the cost of building in New York is already so high.
The police. The NYPD have been willing to criticize mayors, often harshly, when they aren’t happy. When cops were upset with Bill de Blasio, they famously turned their backs on him at a police funeral. Mamdani has tried to distance himself from his past comments casting aspersions at cops and in support of defunding the police department, but it may be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. We have seen instances around the country of police pulling back from enforcement in response to public criticism, leading to crime spikes. Crime rates are key to mayoral popularity. How the police react to Mamdani will be key to the success of his mayoralty.
The left. Mamdani is a part of the city’s left, and would surely be considered its new leader. But it’s a famously fragmented group that doesn’t just fall in line. For Mamdani to succeed as mayor, he will need the continued support of his passionate base, but he also might need or want to make compromises that, to some of his most passionate supporters, look like selling out.
For instance, there would be clear political benefits from trying to keep popular Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Not only would it help address Mamdani’s potential problems with the police, it would keep a potential future political rival on his side. But parts of the local left have already made arguments that Mamdani should abandon Tisch because of her support for “regressive police policies.”
Will the local left give Mamdani grace when and if he does things that they don’t support? Relatedly, will campus groups take Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian politics as a reason to rally on campus, hoping he’ll order the police not to help college administrators who have cracked down in recent months?
Donald Trump and Congress: The federal budget is going to be brutal on state and city budgets. This would be true no matter who the mayor is, but Republican hostility toward New York will likely grow especially intense if the city is led by a man who’s perceived as hostile to capitalism and cops. How big the cuts are will determine whether the state is willing to allow the city to pass local tax increases for new programs, or whether it will try to keep any new revenue for itself (and whether it will cut aid for city programs). And it will determine whether the city can afford new programs even if it gets new taxing authority.
President Trump is almost surely looking forward to having Mamdani as a foil, and the feeling is mutual. What the president will do is unclear, but there’s lots he can do to make life difficult for Mamdani and city residents, from increased ICE activity to sending in the National Guard to limiting federal funds.
The Press: Mamdani has dominated new media, but the old media is not on board. The New York Post loves to hate Mamdani. The New York Times editorial page is skeptical too. Mayors can certainly succeed without love from the papers, whose influence is a shadow of what it once was — de Blasio was reelected despite substantial skepticism in the press — but the press can make an uphill climb even steeper. Mamdani is unlikely to ever get the Post to stop attacking him, but a hostile reception from other outlets will be costly.
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What does all this add up to?
The challenge facing Mamdani is not only proposing policies that will work, but convincing many groups, to the extent possible, to row in the same direction — or at least not actively undermine his policy agenda. That’s very tricky when groups are pre-wired to react differently to the same stimuli. Mollifying the cops may enrage the local left; getting the budget balanced and the bond market happy may involve revenue increases that the local rich do not like. The City could try to try to stem exit by reducing housing costs — an even bigger part of personal budgets than taxes — by rezoning areas for more housing, but doing so without including set-asides for labor and subsidized housing would enrage all sorts of groups, from construction unions to NIMBYs. And so on.
When voters go to the polls on November 4th, and when they try to figure out what the result means for their lives the day after, they should not only focus on what the candidates say, but also on what the rest of the power structure of the city, state and country will feel and do about the election result. The actions of these groups will shape the next four years as much as any campaign promise.