No, it wasn’t about Israel-Palestine.
If you missed Thursday’s two-hour mayoral debate, you didn’t miss much. That made it a fitting beginning of the end of a mayoral race that’s hardly moved since young Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani crushed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June’s primary. The Democratic nominee seems to be running away with this, with his two opponents splitting the opposition and time awfully short for a big event to shake up that so-far steady dynamic. Incumbent Eric Adams’ exit changed things a little, but nowhere near enough.
Mamdani’s durable lead doesn’t mean that a city whose voters elected an ex-cop and ex-Republican in Adams just four years ago has now embraced Mamdani’s brand of Democratic Socialism per se. The city’s absurdly over-complicated means of choosing leaders makes it very hard to discern the true significance of each decision.
The system includes ranked-choice, fairly low turnout closed partisan primaries in June followed by a long pause — then a flood of late advertising before a standard, whoever-gets-the-most-votes-wins contest in November, which is also low-turnout because elections happen in off years. Because Democrats have such an overwhelming voter registration edge here, their primaries tend to decide effectively who holds office, making general elections typically an afterthought.
This year added another weird dynamic, with Adams swearing up and down he was in the primary before dropping out, then doing the same in the general election.
Whoever wins the city’s election game, of course, is sure to present its outcome as a sweeping and inevitable mandate, one that a national political press starved for horserace stories draws overbroad lessons from. Just ask “Biden of Brooklyn” Eric Adams, who claimed that dubious crown after crushing Sliwa in the general election four years ago.
Back to the debate, in which one particular moment was especially revealing to me, though I doubt it changed a single vote.
It came after 15 circular minutes about Israel that went nowhere, in a race where that’s become a defining issue. Though the verdict is still out, I think the election’s many skirmishes on Gaza, Hamas, Netanyahu, antisemitism and so on have largely played out to Mamdani’s advantage. That said, Jewish voters are still split roughly two-to-one against him — and Mamdani has 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, and fuzzing that up by talking broadly but selectively about the First Amendment.
That big question about how much care the aspiring first-time executive would take to uphold the laws he would be charged with executing as mayor was 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 — something that won’t matter until next year — the problem with his product.
It’s a minute worth going through in full, crosstalk and all.
A New York Post piece last week, worth reading in full, laid out the issue: Mamdani is promising, in advance, to have his Rent Guidelines Board freeze rents every year he’s mayor. But while the mayor indeed appoints 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 pre-judgement 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.
Last month, 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 insists 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 pre-judge? 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: Alright 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 becomes 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 it sure looks like he’ll be on the job soon, becoming the manager as well as the messenger. And at that point 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.