Zohran Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign for New York City mayor that inspired a huge turnout, especially among young voters. The 33-year-old Mamdani, a state Assembly member from Queens and a democratic socialist, defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary on June 24. The scion of a political dynasty, and long considered the front-runner, Cuomo won only 36.4 percent of first-round votes in the city's ranked-choice system, compared to Mamdani's 43.5 percent. City Comptroller Brad Lander came in third with 11.3 percent of the votes. As the two left-most candidates in a very crowded field, Mamdani and Lander's 54.8 percent of the first-round votes reflect a significant victory for progressives.
Mamdani was helped by endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. His campaign was also bolstered by a cross-endorsement with Lander, including joint appearances in YouTube ads and on Stephen Colbert's late-night show. Together, they demonstrated how a Jew and a Muslim could join forces to stop Cuomo from becoming the next mayor and advance a progressive vision for New York City.
Cuomo initially benefited from much higher name recognition plus about $25 million in donations from finance and real estate billionaires. But Cuomo – who was forced to resign as governor in the wake of widespread scandals, including accusations of sexual harassment and lies about his efforts to contain the COVID pandemic – ran a lackluster campaign that failed to inspire voters. In contrast, Mamdani had many more individual donors, with over 20,000 people giving an average of $62 each as of June 16. Mamdani rallied more than 40,000 volunteers to door-knock and phone-bank. His boisterous campaign promoted a progressive platform augmented by a large social media presence of clever ads. A charismatic speaker, he campaigned everywhere, including precincts where he didn't expect to win many votes, but wanted to demonstrate his commitment to being mayor for the entire city.
Despite the celebration of his victory in the Democratic primary, Mamdani has one more big hurdle to overcome – a general election in November. The Wall Street banks and private equity firms, and the city's powerful real estate industry (perhaps with support from their counterparts around the country), as well as some other business sectors, will try to defeat Mamdani by uniting behind another candidate. The scandal-plagued incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, did not run in the Democratic primary, but will run as an independent. He cut a deal with Trump to drop federal corruption charges in exchange for embracing the president's crusade against immigrants. Trump may even endorse him, although that could backfire. A few days after the election, Cuomo announced that he, too, will run as an independent. So Cuomo and Adams will be competing for business money and anti-Mamdani voters, which will help Mamdani. So, too, will the presence of Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. He won't get many votes but whatever he gets he'll take away from Adams and Cuomo.
A year ago, political observers predicted that most liberals and progressives would unite behind Lander. No one has more experience than him when it comes to knowing New York's municipal government inside out. He has been the steadiest progressive voice in NYC politics for over a decade, as a community organizer, affordable housing developer, City Council member (and cofounder of its Progressive Caucus), and comptroller (and thus incredibly knowledgeable about city finances). Lander has been outspoken against Trump's ICE raids and has been escorting immigrants out of the courthouse to make sure they are not kidnapped by ICE. He was recently assaulted, handcuffed, and arrested for doing this.
But it was Mamdani's campaign that caught fire with young, progressive voters of all races. Although most unions backed Cuomo, believing his was a shoo-in, rank-and-file union members were less enthusiastic, and enough unions, as well as New York's Working Families Party, endorsed Mamdani to provide him with volunteers. Labor groups are likely to get fully behind Mamdani in the general election. Mamdani also gained the endorsement of New York's Democratic Socialists of America, whose volunteers proved critical in the campaign's day-to-day operation.
Pulling together a successful electoral coalition is difficult, but forging a governing coalition to run the city is even harder. As mayor, Mamdani will face major challenges. Here is some unsolicited advice for the next mayor of America's largest city.
FIRST, he'll have to deal with opposition from Wall Street, the real estate industry, and the high-tech industry, among other business sectors. Mamdani’s platform included both very pragmatic ideas and some visionary ideas that will take time to gestate and gain wider public support. He called for a freeze on rents in rent-stabilized units (in which 2.4 million New Yorkers live), free buses, municipally-owned grocery stores, and higher taxes on wealthy residents and corporations as well as closing streets to cars, lowering speed limits, and bringing back year-round outdoor dining. Some business leaders have already accused him of being “anti-business” and some have even threatened to leave New York City.
Whenever reformers promote ideas to limit business’s untrammeled power, their lobby groups warn that companies will lay off workers or exit the city entirely. To carry out his progressive ideas, Mamdani will need to hire people with substantive economic expertise to help him evaluate when business’s threats are real and when they are bluffing..
Fiorello La Guardia provides a model for Mamdani. In his three terms (1933–1945) as mayor, during the Depression and World War II, La Guardia ran an honest, efficient, and progressive administration that helped lift the spirit and improve the conditions of New York's polyglot working class. As mayor, La Guardia earned a national reputation as a nonpartisan reformer dedicated to civic improvement.
Even so, business groups constantly attacked him as an impractical leftist. When La Guardia was president of the City Council (then called the Board of Aldermen) he wanted the city to purchase snow-removal equipment in advance of winter storms. Comptroller Charles Craig said it was “the wildest kind of radical, socialistic” idea. LaGuardia – a Republican who worked closely with Democrats – went on to become New York's greatest mayor, but conservatives continued to attack his bold but pragmatic proposals.
He once told the New York Times, "The worst part of the entire matter is that when anyone raises a question about the existing order, he is called either a reformer or a radical. It has been my lot to be called the latter. Why? Only because I have consistently objected to things which I believe unjust and dangerous." He didn't back down. “If fighting against existing evils is radical,” he said, “I am content with the name."
In 2012, when unions and low-wage workers pushed to raise the city's minimum wage from $9 to $15 over three years, business lobby groups warned that it would destroy New York's economy. Now we know, in retrospect, that they were crying wolf. New Yorkers spent their higher incomes in the local economy, boosting businesses. The current wage is $16.50, lower than a number of other major cities. Mamdani has called for increasing it incrementally to $30 by 2030.
Mamdani's slogan – “a city that everyone can afford” – and his laser focus on inequality and the cost of living resonated with New York voters. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers increased their share of the city's total income from 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022, according to an analysis by The New School's James Parrott. The median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New York is now $5,500.
Mamdani will come up against many implacable figures within New York’s business elite. Can he persuade some segment of them that the current level of inequity is unsustainable? He may be able to win some over by speaking language they can understand — like “shared prosperity,” which is good for the city because it puts money in the hands of workers and consumers, and which is preferable to growing inequality and rampant gentrification. He should redefine a “healthy business climate” as not just more profits for business but one where prosperity is widely shared, lifting families out of poverty and precarity, and rebuilding the city’s middle class. That means having affordable housing, health care, food, child care, and public transportation for all.
He should find enlightened business leaders – there are more than one might think – who share his concerns over widening inequality and who agree that stronger regulations, higher taxes, and more affordable housing are needed for a healthy city. He could start by getting some of the city's major business leaders to jointly push back against Trump's use of federal stormtroopers to kidnap immigrants, who are the lifeblood of much of NYC's economy, including tourism, health care, construction, and domestic services. He should ask key businesspeople to join him in opposing Trump’s tariffs, which are already damaging the city’s core private industries.
SECOND, he should embrace “good government.” America's cities were the cradle of progressivism from the late 1800s through the New Deal and beyond. In response to the growing influence of robber barons and corporations in the Gilded Age, activists forged a coalition of immigrants, unionists, upper-class philanthropists and middle-class reformers (journalists, settlement house workers, clergy and academics among them) to improve living and working conditions in the burgeoning cities.
The leaders elected by this coalition – such as Mayors Tom Johnson of Cleveland (1901–09) and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones of Toledo (1897–1904) – worked to make factories and tenements safer; improve public health and transportation; expand parks and playgrounds; put limits on electricity and water rates and create municipal utilities; enact taxes on wealthy property owners; and give working people a greater voice in their society. Later progressive mayors–including La Guardia, Milwaukee's Daniel Hoan (1916–40), Bridgeport's Jasper McLevy (1933–57), Chicago's Harold Washington (1983–87) and Boston's Ray Flynn (1984–93)–sided with workers in labor battles and with communities in struggles against business interests and developers.
Mamdani knows this history. Last year he spoke to WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer about the many successes of the socialists who governed in Milwaukee and elsewhere. (In 1912, about 1,200 socialists held public office in 340 cities). As he noted, they were often called "sewer socialists" because they built parks, housing, schools, a municipal waste facility, and other infrastructure that working class voters needed and appreciated, and who kept re-electing the socialists from 1910 until 1960. They also ran a "clean" government that wasn't saddled with corruption.
Like the Milwaukee socialists and La Guardia, Mamdani needs to demonstrate that he can run a highly competent administration. His most important task will be to make sure that he takes care of the "civic housekeeping" functions of local government. As La Guardia once said, “There is no Republican, no Democratic, no socialist way to clean a street or build a sewer, but merely a right way and a wrong way.”
Make sure that potholes and playground equipment get fixed, parks are clean, and police and fire department response times are fast. At the first sign of a major snowstorm, he should get on top of a plow. He should make sure the buses and subways run on time and that riders feel safe. If he can accomplish that, New Yorkers will give him the room to address the social justice issues that he ran on.
To show his commitment to good government, he should be transparent about his major goals and quantify them whenever possible. Issue regular reports on the progress (or lack thereof) that the city is making on such issues as crime trends, housing starts, potholes and police response times. He should explain to New Yorkers which goals will be the most difficult to achieve and why–whether it's due to business opposition or lack of resources–and ask voters to help overcome these obstacles. He should also identify a few things he wants to accomplish each year for his first four-year term.
Mamdani clearly recognizes the importance of hiring top advisors and department heads with experience in city government, state government (to help with inter-governmental relations with Albany), business, unions, and community organizing and nonprofit work. Like Lincoln and FDR, he'll need top advisors with diverse views to help sort out what paths to take to achieve his progressive goals. Many New Yorkers hope he will appoint Lander as First Deputy Mayor and draw upon his policy expertise, financial acumen, ties to community activists, and knowledge of city government. Given how closely the two of them campaigned together, this seems likely.
One of his most important decisions will be whether to reappoint Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to address New Yorkers' concerns about both public safety in their neighborhoods and racial profiling and excessive use of force by police. He has called for a new Department of Community Safety, separate from the Police Department, to respond to people having mental health crises and to free up “police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes.” He called for a new agency to focus on hate crimes. Unless he can develop a working relationship with the police and their union, they could try to thwart his plans.
THIRD, Mamdani will have to deal with NYC's fiscal challenges and its reliance on New York State for much of its funding (including the subway) as well as legislative authority (such as rent control and taxes). He'll need to work closely with the Democrats in the state legislature and with Gov. Kathy Hochul, a liberal but not a progressive. Solving the city's fiscal needs will be particularly problematic if Trump and the Republicans in Congress pass some version of the so-called "big beautiful bill" that will slash federal funding for many essential services in order to give tax cuts to the super-rich.
So it will be important for Mamdani to consistently explain to voters that there are some things cities can't do on their own because they require state or federal permission or funds.
Mamdani will need to build political bridges to the suburbs and New York State's other major cities. Many New York City suburbs are really cities with similar problems. He can forge coalitions around a state-level legislative agenda on taxes and funding for essential services, housing, and child care.
He can also use his national platform as mayor of America's largest city to build coalitions with other urban mayors around a federal agenda that lays the groundwork for a post-Trump era and a revitalization of an urban or metropolitan policy agenda. Through the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities, America's mayors can demand that Congress provide more funds for housing and job-creating infrastructure, strengthen regulations against predatory banks, adopt a federal law mandating paid sick days, expand federal funding for child care and schools, and enlist mayors to adopt a truce to end the “bidding wars” that use scarce subsidies and local tax breaks to pit cities and states against each other to attract business investment, as Amazon did with New York a few years ago.
FOURTH, Although Mamdani will be the mayor, he will need to think like an organizer. Each major policy issue requires a campaign–with a core base, allies and opposition targets (such as rent-gouging landlords and predatory banks). He can't win these fights without grassroots support and mobilization.
He should embrace the “inside/outside” tension that comes from being a progressive in City Hall. Encourage grassroots groups to lobby and protest when necessary to push major banks, employers, hospitals, nursing homes, landlords, developers and others to act responsibly. Occasionally, he'll be the target of protest. He'll need to develop a thick skin.
He can encourage progressives and liberals to find common ground around a four- and eight-year issue agenda so that different constituencies aren't constantly competing to make their particular issue his top priority. Hopefully the progressive members of the NY City Council will do the same to help Mamdani be a successful mayor.
Toward that goal, he should urge the big New York-based foundations to expand their funding and nurture a community-oriented infrastructure that can fight for a progressive agenda around housing, education, immigrant rights, and environmental and economic justice issues.
He will have to figure out how to work with the city's sometimes fractious progressive movement that includes many organizations and leaders, all with their own agendas. The public and private sectors unions, the community organizing groups, environmental activists, tenants' rights advocates, nonprofit housing developers, school reformers, civil rights and civil liberties groups, and others will also have to learn how to play the "inside/outside" game at a time when the stakes couldn't be higher. They will of course want to hold Mamdani accountable for the things he promised, but they need to have the patience and strategic understanding that significant policy changes take time, have to be prioritized, and often require compromise. They need to recognize that “compromise” is not the same thing as “selling out.” Compromises are good when they lead to stepping-stone reforms that push things in the right direction and lay the foundation for further change.
This is particularly important for Democratic Socialists of America, a small but active part of Mamdani's base. DSA's national leadership, and some of its chapters, have been justifiably criticized for their ultra-leftism and indifference to practical politics. But many rank-and-file DSA chapters, including New York City, have learned to operate in coalitions with a variety of community organizing, labor, and environmental groups and to work within the Democratic Party to elect progressive candidates, including those who don't call themselves socialists. As they demonstrated in AOC's Congressional campaigns, New York DSAers working for Mamdani were well-organized, disciplined, and strategic. Now they need discipline and strategic smarts to avoid publicly criticizing him every time he has to make compromises (including with the City Council or state legislature) in order to get things accomplished to improve daily life in New York City.
In these difficult times, it is uplifting to have a major progressive victory that can inspire people with hope and help build the movement both against Trump and for a progressive future. Like Sanders and AOC, Mamdani is a brilliant communicator who is able to translate progressive values into everyday language.
Mamdani will have to figure out how to convince Democratic Party leaders, including Congressional leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, both New Yorkers, to support him rather than fight him incessantly — something far from guaranteed, given both of their repeated antagonizing the Left. At the same time, progressives should accept the reality that some Democrats running in swing Congressional districts and states will want to put some distance between themselves and Mamdani’s views.
Not all Democrats can win elections if they call themselves progressives, much less socialists. Trump and the Republican Party understand this and they will try to use Mamdani's victory to brand all Democrats as dangerous socialists. Like AOC, Mamdani will become a lightning rod for Republicans seeking to defeat Democrats in swing House districts next year.The day after Mamdani clinched the primary, Trump went on a temper tantrum on his Truth Social platform, calling Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic."
One of Mamdani's most important accomplishments could be to restore faith of young voters in the potential of electoral politics, the Democratic Party, and the role of government in addressing Americans' real needs. Hopefully, his victory will inspire liberals and progressives around the country to volunteer for next year’s midterm elections. There are at least 40 “swing” races that could shift the House from a Republican to a Democratic majority, perhaps by as much as a 20+ district margin. If the Democrats can hold onto their current Senate seats and win four potentially battleground races (Maine, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio), they will have a 51-49 majority.
A Democratic Senate majority can stop Trump’s judicial appointments. A Democratic House majority can veto his budget and other proposals, reign in his abuse and politicization of the military and federal law enforcement (particularly against immigrants), and hold hearings and conduct investigations about his corruption. A Democratic majority in either house can neutralize Trump and lay the groundwork for Democratic victories, including the White House in 2028, and thus promote a progressive pro-urban federal agenda to make Mamdani’s job, and the lives of all New Yorkers, easier.
Much is riding on how Mamdani leads New York City. If he is a successful mayor, he will do more than transform the lives of working class New Yorkers – he can inspire more young activists to run for office, from school board to state legislature to Congress (a trend that is already underway) and replace the Democrats’ gerontocracy. He will also help move the Democratic Party away from the corporate wing that has dominated it in recent decades toward a progressive party that puts people first.
[Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. For eight years he served as a deputy to Boston's Mayor Ray Flynn. He is the author or coauthor of several books on urban politics and policy, including The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century, a 4th edition of which will be published in 2026. A version of this article appeared in Jacobin on June 30, 2025.]
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