The mayor has been amazingly fortunate so far. The good luck may not last.
For Zohran Mamdani, in the first year of his first term, the stars keep aligning.
The Knicks won their first championship since 1973, putting the city in a giddy, almost dizzy mood. The stock market has been booming, delivering healthy revenues to City coffers. His political faction, the Democratic Socialists of America, has scored decisive victories against mainstream political opponents. And his political party, the Democrats, just won control of both chambers of Congress, including their largest House majority in decades. Brooklynites are now poised to lead the House and Senate, which is likely to spell good fortune for the city in Washington.
Even in Albany, where Mamdani used to serve, it’s bluer than ever: Democrats have won veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers, their largest in history. And though the Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, is not aligned with DSA, she has worked well with Mamdani thus far, delivering cash to balance the budget and partially fund what the mayor hopes, one day, will be a comprehensive universal childcare program. DSA, thanks to Mamdani’s insurgent victory in 2025, is larger than ever, and is prepared to apply greater pressure on the governor.
It’s hard to recall a recent mayor who was blessed with such tailwinds. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.) The last self-identified progressive to govern New York City, Bill de Blasio, was not a preternatural political talent like Mamdani — he made a host of unforced errors — but he grappled with challenges that the globally famous mayor has yet to encounter or may never.
First, the political situation: Though it’s hard to remember now, Republicans sat in the state Senate majority in de Blasio’s first year, and only improved their numbers in his second. While Mamdani had the fortune to arrive in office just as the anti-Donald Trump blue wave began to crash across America, de Blasio’s first midterm, in 2014, took place during the Republican backlash to President Barack Obama.
In de Blasio’s first year, there was still a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. But that would change by 2015, as Mitch McConnell took over for Harry Reid. Obama, too, was a second-term president struggling with declining approval ratings; he had little leverage to help New York City.
When it comes to Albany, where much of city policy is decided, Mamdani has it far easier than de Blasio. A decade ago, many Republican senators concentrated in the suburbs and upstate absolutely resented the new left-leaning mayor who campaigned on hiking taxes on the rich to fund his universal pre-K program. They also strongly backed publicly funded, privately run charter schools, which the mayor hoped to curtail in the five boroughs. The Republicans gained strength in 2014, buoyed by a midterm wave and de Blasio’s failed campaign attempts to get the Democrats back into the majority. Republicans happily made him a bogeyman on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley, and romped to victory. De Blasio, before, had been courting a leader of a centrist breakaway faction of Democrats that governed with the GOP, but the Republican numbers grew large enough that the faction, the Independent Democratic Conference, was no longer required for governance.
The first year, before the November 2014 elections, had already been something of an Albany nightmare for de Blasio. Like his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, he needed approval from the state Legislature and the governor to continue the system of centralized mayoral control of the city’s public schools. Bloomberg, a billionaire Republican donor, had relatively little trouble winning favor with the Republican majority or the governor.
De Blasio’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, made things hard on him again and again. Cuomo might have been a Democrat and de Blasio’s old boss at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but he treated de Blasio as a hostile political actor and delighted in foiling the new mayor’s ambitions, which he seemed to see as a threat to his own reelection chances. De Blasio was forced to accept a new state law that required the City to pay the rent of the private charters or find them free space. The following year, in 2015, Albany would grant de Blasio only a one-year extension of mayoral control. State funding for universal pre-K did arrive, at least, but Cuomo never tired of reminding the mayor that his city was a creature of Albany — and ultimately under the dominion of the governor.
Cuomo disliked coordinating with de Blasio, at one time shutting down the subway during a blizzard with no advance notice to City Hall. Later on, when the State-controlled subway system began to crumble, Cuomo acted like it was simply the mayor’s problem. In the early days of the pandemic, Cuomo blocked de Blasio when he tried to initiate a lockdown, permitting the virus to spread further; the governor resented the mayor acting sooner than he wanted to. Hochul hasn’t enabled Mamdani’s policy objectives in every way — she pushed back on his initial proposed tax hike on the wealthy — but she hasn’t been the gratuitously oppositional force Cuomo was to de Blasio.
In other areas, Mamdani’s luck has also held. Unlike de Blasio, who confronted the high-profile police killing of Eric Garner in the summer of his first year, Mamdani has not grappled with any comparable civil protests or broader unrest. Relations between his administration and the police department have also been relatively calm. At the end of de Blasio’s first year, two police officers were assassinated, members of the NYPD turned their backs on de Blasio at the funerals and protests erupted over a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer who placed Garner in a chokehold. De Blasio’s sympathies for the protests and his decision to invoke his biracial son in the wake of the Staten Island decision enraged his far more conservative police force.
In some ways, de Blasio never fully recovered from these clashes. It’s arguable that Mamdani, here, is also making his own luck. He’s much more charismatic than de Blasio and he has a stronger political base that inoculates him from some attacks from his right flank.
Eric Adams, de Blasio’s successor, did have it better, with a Democratic trifecta in Washington and a governor in Hochul who wanted to be of assistance to him. But he drowned in corruption scandals, never had much of an Albany agenda and clashed with the Biden administration as migrants flooded the city. The migrant crisis is a challenge Mamdani has not needed to confront either, since the border now, under Trump, has been tightened significantly.
This is not to say Mamdani is on some perfect glidepath. He’s made much of his own luck so far, and the road ahead looks challenging.
Events like the Garner killing could occur under Mamdani, and there’s no doubt the conduct of his NYPD could come under greater scrutiny if he decides to keep on, indefinitely, Jessica Tisch, his much more conservative commissioner. A police killing like Garner’s could spark fresh outrage, and challenge Mamdani to side with his department or the many protesters who share his politics.
At the same juncture, he is luckier than de Blasio in one crucial way: The opposition is weaker than it once was. When de Blasio was mayor, the boss of the major police union, the Police Benevolent Association, was Patrick Lynch, a local celebrity in his own right. Lynch was a media darling who claimed de Blasio had blood on his hands after the two officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were assassinated. There’s no equivalent to Lynch in 2026. Hardly any New Yorkers have heard of Patrick Hendry, Lynch’s successor.
New York City’s fiscal situation has been fairly stable so far, with the City coffers enjoying the largesse of a long Wall Street bull market. A downturn, though, might be inevitable, especially if Anthropic’s IPO is shaky and the broader AI market, burning through many billions of dollars, stalls out. Tech stocks have taken a hit of late as congressional Democrats promise more regulation and oppose data center buildouts. At the same time, Mark Levine, the city comptroller, has warned about New York’s sluggish job growth and possible white-collar employment displacement from AI. Mamdani already faces substantial projected budget gaps, and he might have to decide whether to make cuts or find a way to generate fresh revenue (additional taxes) in the event of any Wall Street bloodbath. Belt-tightening could challenge his expansive fiscal vision, especially when he will need to negotiate at least three more budgets with Julie Menin, the City Council speaker who has emerged as his more moderate foil. What happens if the local economy slows and Mamdani is forced to make cuts that his base reviles? Will tough choices undermine him politically?
Other major risks might loom. The Mamdani administration had to confront a horrific cold snap early in the year and multiple snowstorms, and handled the snow relatively well, if controversy arose over the number of New Yorkers who died from cold exposure. The rash of e-bike fires represents another crisis that has been ongoing for several years. If more fatal fires break out like the recent one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (where investigators found a lithium-ion battery, though the cause remained under investigation), Mamdani will face pressing questions over how well he’s safeguarding his constituents. The rate of fires is not sustainable.
And then there is Trump, who is still president for another two years. He’s been less of a threat to New York than anticipated, and the two men with Queens ties have been famously chummy. Still, ICE has swarmed New York, and it’s very possible the incursions only get worse now with Stephen Miller, a furious anti-immigrant hard-liner, elevated to chief of staff. The Mamdani administration had previously worked with Miller’s predecessor, Susie Wiles, to free a select number of New Yorkers who were held in ICE detention. There’s little evidence Miller would grant Mamdani the same courtesy.
Of course, no mayor can truly prepare for the job they’ll face. Rudy Giuliani never fathomed he’d be mayor for 9/11. On Sept. 10, 2001, Michael Bloomberg couldn’t have imagined he’d spend his first term guiding the city through the aftermath of the terrorist attacks — or that, in his third term, he’d need to respond to a disastrous superstorm. In 2014, De Blasio did not dream he’d end up the pandemic mayor. If Mamdani is never tested in such a way, we New Yorkers will be profoundly glad. So far, he has governed through peacetime. It is always easiest that way.
