No, it wasn’t about Israel-Palestine.
In the first general election mayoral debate, one moment was especially revealing about how Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ran his campaign and how he might lead the city. It came after 15 circular minutes about Israel that went nowhere, though it had become a defining issue in the race. The election’s many skirmishes on Gaza, Hamas, Netanyahu, antisemitism and so on largely played out to Mamdani’s advantage, but he avoided the key question of whether or not he’s willing to break the city's own rules (about occupying buildings or blocking transit hubs, for instance) when he’s in sympathy with the rulebreakers, instead fuzzing things up by talking broadly but selectively about the First Amendment.
The big question about how much care the aspiring first-time executive will take to uphold the laws he is charged with executing as mayor crystallized in the exchange that caught my eye and ear — on a completely different topic.
It started with a question from Politico’s Sally Goldenberg, one of the city’s sharpest and fairest political observers, as she pressed Mamdani on his signature rent-freeze promise. The exchange showed at once the potency of his pitch and the problem with his product.
It’s a minute worth going through in full, crosstalk and all.
A New York Post piece from early October, worth reading in full, laid out the issue: Mamdani promised, in advance, to have his Rent Guidelines Board freeze rents every year he remains mayor. But while the mayor-elect will indeed appoint the board’s members, different ones are required by law to represent tenants and landlords, and to take into account specific objective factors.
That doesn’t allow for a political prejudgement that the rent is too damn high, and landlords just have to eat the zeroes. Ignoring the law opens up an obvious space for the courts to get involved and, quite possibly, for this Supreme Court to get around to ultimately demolishing New York City’s stabilization system that Mamdani’s promise depends on.
In September, the New York Editorial Board, on which I sit, put the question to Bill de Blasio (the last mayor to freeze the rent) when Vital City’s Josh Greenman asked him, “Does Mamdani have unilateral authority to preemptively say four years of rent freezes [on rent-stabilized apartments]? And if he does, what if his posture was, we’re going to have four years of 3% increase? Would that be OK?” De Blasio’s answer, more or less, was that a mayor doesn’t have that much power. “New York City is not a police state. The people named have the power to make their own — they have a term, they have the power to make their own decisions.”
Mamdani has insisted he can order up a four-year freeze, full stop, as part of some grand economic reparation for perceived past mistakes. Will that really pass muster in the political process? Will it really be a convincing position in court, when whatever decisions are made are inevitably challenged?
Here’s the full exchange from the debate:
Goldenberg: The costs of maintaining a building change year to year for landlords. The Rent Guidelines Board is legally required to consider those costs when deciding whether to freeze rents. So how can you promise a rent freeze today before ever seeing that data next year?
Mamdani: You know, we’ve seen the data time and again…
Goldenberg: …But not next year’s data…
Mamdani: …It’s been data that’s been overruled by mayors again and again. The last Rent Guidelines Board study showed that profits were up 12% for landlords of those units, and what did they do? They raised the rent, adding to more than 12% under Eric Adams’ administration. What I am speaking about is actually reflecting the needs of these New Yorkers and the state of the market today. These are New Yorkers who have a median household income of $60,000. We do not need to be pushing them further out of the city. We need to keep them in their homes.
Goldenberg: Aren’t you saying in that answer that you’re going to prejudge? You will not have seen the data for next year, and you’re making a determination based on data you haven’t seen.
Mamdani: I’ve seen the data year after year of the fact that salaries are stagnating…
Goldenberg: Based on the current data…
Mamdani: …costs are up. New Yorkers can’t actually afford their apartments, and I will also take action to actually ensure that the landlords of those bills can better handle their costs by taking on their insurance, their property taxes —
Goldenberg: All right, we’re at time. It is based on annual data and you have seen next year’s data yet.
What does it all add up to? Mamdani’s central campaign promise is, in fact, a big maybe, and the question rises as to how much he’ll be guided by evidence and the rules when the apparent imperatives of politics are pulling at his sleeve.
That cuts right to the heart of what Mamdani can deliver, and how outside forces could stymie the biggest parts of his ambitious agenda. Among those outside forces: an economy that’s likely to be cooling, a governor running for reelection, and President Donald Trump’s well-established wrecking-ball approach to governance and blue cities, let alone a Muslim socialist mayor in his hometown.
The job interview isn’t the job, of course. But Mayor-elect Mamdani is now the manager as well as the messenger. He’s going to be judged on how he delivers, not how well he can counter-punch wild swings from the right and the center.
This piece was originally published in October 2025 and has since been updated to reflect the results of New York City’s 2025 general election.