Zohran Mamdani in the Balance

Eric Adams won’t go down without a fight, but Democratic Socialist Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is the odds-on favorite to be New York’s next mayor.

In recent years far-left progressive mayors in major cities offer a tale of two outcomes. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson has proven ideological and beholden to public sector unions, becoming deeply unpopular in the process. But Boston’s Michelle Wu was also caricatured as dangerously progressive before winning office. As The New York Times noted in 2021, “Ms. Wu had time to pivot toward the center, but she did not” — her campaign championed fare-free transit, climate action and rent control right through election day. Wu has governed well: Crime is down, affordable housing is getting built, pre-K is expanding and the economy is relatively healthy.

Which model would New York get with Zohran Mamdani?

The prospect of a Mayor Mamdani has triggered preemptive panic among many New Yorkers, especially people who focus most on the city’s economy, its public safety and its quality of life. Progressives dismiss this as typical establishment hysteria from Cassandras, or Cassandrews. Critics once predicted Bill de Blasio’s stop-and-frisk rollback and tax hikes would destroy the city. I parodied the histrionics at the time. Instead, de Blasio’s first six years brought crime lows, shrinking jail populations, economic growth and universal pre-K. The city thrived, at least until COVID.

If Mamdani becomes mayor, will we get a de Blasio sequel, a Johnson replay or a record more like Wu? 

Public Safety

De Blasio signaled balance immediately, appointing Bill Bratton — architect of “broken windows” policing and CompStat — as police commissioner. Bratton ended discriminatory stop-and-frisk while strengthening proactive, community-based policing.

Mamdani charts a different course entirely. In the past, he’s advocated for deep police cuts, voted against tougher gun trafficking penalties, tweeted support for defunding the NYPD and called for police-free crisis response. While well-intentioned, these policies risk reducing safety in neighborhoods already suffering from slow response times.

Mamdani may envision refocusing cops on major crimes while delegating smaller issues elsewhere. But those “smaller” crimes — misdemeanor assault, menacing, shoplifting, noise violations, subway infractions — shape daily life. Cops remain best equipped to handle most of them, especially when seconds count.

He’s particularly naive about street homelessness, where severe mental illness and addiction are common. Compassion matters, but dismissing current proposals to engage in more involuntary treatment — even when people pose clear dangers to themselves and others — abandons the most vulnerable while surrendering public spaces to the few rather than improving them for everyone. Social workers pair with police officers precisely because any given situation can go sideways in an instant.

He’s not being straight about the jail predicament either. Closing Rikers Island by 2027, as required by local law, means building and opening four borough jails holding 3,300-3,900 people total. Those facilities are hopelessly behind schedule. Today’s jail population routinely exceeds 6,000, with thousands of those incarcerated people facing violent felony charges. Mamdani hasn’t been honest enough about how he’d solve this math problem. Part of the answer is processing cases more efficiently, and part of it may well be maintaining more jail beds. Will he bend?

Budget

New York’s finances walk a tightrope. Federal COVID aid is ending, recession threatens and the city faces multi-billion-dollar deficits. Mamdani proposes billions in new spending without credible funding. Governing this city demands brutal tradeoffs. Mamdani talks as if there are none.

His money would come from tax increases requiring Albany’s blessing — raising corporate rates to 11.5% and adding 2% on incomes over $1 million. In a gubernatorial election year, this won’t happen. State lawmakers know our tax rates, raised this year, already concern businesses. When tax plans fail, Mamdani will face a stark choice: abandoning his campaign promises or engaging in dangerous fiscal irresponsibility.

A mayor openly hostile to corporations and wealth could trigger an exodus of the city’s golden geese. We’ve heard this threat before, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t finally happen. That would devastate the budget — including the social services Mamdani champions.

New York City’s mayor has to worry every day about who will fund the shelters where 100,000 people sleep nightly, the housing vouchers that prevent evictions, the transit that moves millions to work, the schools spending $36,000 per pupil and more.

Schools

About schools. For decades, New York has tried pursuing both equity and excellence — lifting struggling students while challenging high achievers. This balancing act is one of government’s toughest challenges. Tip too far toward equity, abandoning excellence, and our system resembles other big cities hollowed out by middle-class flight.

Mamdani too tightly embraces a misguided law to reduce class sizes across the board; it gives schools no flexibility, forcing them to spend billions to get far too little educational bang for the buck. He’d weaken mayoral control, a bad idea. He’s signaled broad-based hostility to achievement-based tracking and programs placing high-performers in rigorous environments. 

Mamdani previously supported abolishing the Specialized High School Admissions Test — the sole factor determining whether students will be admitted to the city’s competitive high schools serving mostly working-class families. He’s since moderated this position. (It’s reasonable to want to keep the SHSAT and add in other admissions measures.)

Continue this path, and thousands of families valuing academic rigor could flee the system — and the city.

Housing

Housing costs top New Yorkers’ concerns. While other Democratic candidates proposed ambitious housing goals, Mamdani’s are far less workable than others. He's flirted with the YIMBY movement — even going on Derek Thompson’s podcast to speak positively about abundance — but for now remains committed to building housing in one of the costliest ways possible. 

Namely, he wants government to build 200,000 units over 10 years, without relaxing any of the very costly requirements that make affordable housing more expensive to build than market-rate housing is. Even if you believe this is a good use of government money and energy, the math doesn’t work. The city is just $30 billion below its debt limit; Mamdani needs Albany to raise it to $100 billion. That’s almost certainly impossible, with no Plan B.

Meanwhile, he’d freeze rent-stabilized rents for four years regardless of economic conditions. This will devastate some struggling building owners, risking widespread disinvestment, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

What’s promising

All this having been said, and it’s a lot, the anti-Mamdani brigades overreach by insisting he’ll be a disaster across the board. Some of what they grouse about doesn’t matter, and some of what he offers is actually, well, exciting.

Mamdani’s foreign policy views aren’t a real problem. Yes, his support for a single democratic Israeli-Palestinian state troubles many Jewish New Yorkers, but he’s not running for president. (Cuomo recently wouldn’t endorse a two-state solution either.) When asked about whether he cares about protecting Jewish New Yorkers on Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” Mamdani gave a genuinely rousing answer.

His public grocery idea — which critics call Trader Joe Stalin’s — doesn’t scare me either. The government providing us with free books (aka “libraries”) coexists easily with capitalism — why can’t public grocery stores? While government groceries are hard to launch (Chicago’s Johnson struggled mightily), a few won’t doom the republic. Besides, Mamdani has made clear that if the proposal doesn’t pan out, he’ll just scrap it and move on. That’s a rare, welcome admission. 

Free buses may be fiscally silly given MTA shortfalls, but the idea has merit for improving speed and convenience. Anyone who has waited for what seems like hours on brutally hot days only to watch a series of bunched buses arrive will not be entirely hostile to this idea. Even Mike Bloomberg considered free crosstown buses.

I don’t expect Mamdani to be a managerial disaster on day-to-day delivery of public services either. Yes, Mamdani told the New York Editorial Board that “a mayor is a messenger, a delegate, a liaison.” When I noted he omitted “manager,” he admitted that matters too. Duh.

Past that rhetorical flub, the key piece of the abundance agenda Mamdani endorses is that American public services are too bureaucratic and unresponsive, needing to work better, cheaper and faster. Because most big unions were with Cuomo, he arguably has a good deal of freedom to push for crucial flexibility, efficiency and cost-savings. 

He’s said that unlike Eric Adams, who stocked his early administration with corrupt flunkies — and unlike de Blasio, who was an infamous micromanager — he intends to hire capable agency heads and give them flexibility to run their departments. Easy to say, harder to do — but I believe he wants to try, and there are many committed public servants eager to join an administration that is directionally appealing and not corrupt.

It’s important to step back and look at the man himself, and this one is clearly a very quick study. His age, while a legitimate worry, is also an asset; he’s reading, listening, learning and growing all the time. His campaign has been a thing to behold, and I’m not just talking about the social media videos. He’s out in the streets walking the length of Manhattan. He’s on podcasts with ideological opponents. He’s mixing it up with New Yorkers, including those who don’t care for him. As even a Cuomo adviser observed, he has impressive emotional intelligence. That’s a winning way to lead people in the most diverse city on the planet.

If Mamdani wins the general election, he just could govern better than many of his critics anticipate. But to do that, he’ll probably have to abandon some of his unwise ideological commitments. Can he? I’ve got a thimble of hope — and a barrel of concern.