The Question-Mark Mayoralty
In the months before the election of the young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, panic seized members of New York’s elite business community. Real-estate moguls, hedge-fund princes, and a well-known supermarket-chain magnate forecast disaster. Several of them vowed to move to Texas or Florida, or at least Hoboken, if Mamdani was elected. So far, however, the city hasn’t seen an exodus of its richest residents, and their alarm has lapsed into glum acceptance.
I recently asked Kathryn Wylde, the soon-to-be-retired president of the Partnership for New York City—a sort of chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and tech barons—how her members now view Mamdani. Has anything changed? Wylde, who voted for the new mayor, paused. “I would not say it’s positive,” she said. “But those who are at all open to him recognize that he’s smart, and they know that their kids voted for him. Now they are waiting to find out who he is.”
Mamdani, who took office shortly after midnight, remains the question-mark mayor. He ran an unabashedly progressive campaign. But he has made a point of talking with potential adversaries; some Partnership for New York City members have met with Mamdani, for example, and he had a surprisingly warm audience with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in November. How this charismatic 34-year-old will govern the largest city in America is something of a mystery, with three great uncertainties: How will Mamdani manage his relationship with the rich? How will he approach the Israel-Palestine issue? And how will he respond to the influence of his old friends, the Democratic Socialists of America?
Mamdani called his election a “mandate for change,” a claim somewhat belied by the fact that he won with a narrow 50.8 percent of the vote. And he has not backed away from an ambitious and costly economic agenda: He wants to make day care universal and buses free. He also campaigned on shifting the property-tax burden from working-class, outer-borough homeowners to “richer and whiter” neighborhoods. He has promised to accomplish this agenda by taxing the rich and their corporations and townhouses.
[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]
But Mamdani can’t afford to alienate the wealthy. Millionaires accounted for $34 billion worth of city and state personal-income-tax revenue as of 2022, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, an influential business-backed nonprofit. The commission found that New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires shrank from 12.7 percent in 2010 to 8.7 percent in 2022. Had that share stayed steady, the city and state would have collected an additional $13 billion in income taxes.
Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at NYU, told me that moves against the business community could also turn off people who were drawn to New York by the lure of economic opportunity. “Capitalism is built into the fabric of this city,” Moss said. “Why do you think all the immigrants come here?”
But New York’s business community might not turn out to be quite as oppositional as some expect. Its members are reasonably civic-minded. Wylde said her flock of CEOs are aware that their companies will suffer if talented people cannot afford to live in the city. And some of them don’t take a dire view of all high taxes. Almost two decades ago, the Partnership for New York City endorsed a payroll-tax increase to support mass transit; more recently, it supported a congestion-pricing fee for cars entering New York’s central business district.
Mamdani has left the door ajar to negotiation—and compromise—with business leaders and with Governor Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat. Of late, he has talked of balancing a rent freeze for tenants with insurance and tax cuts for landlords in working-class neighborhoods. In such moments, he sounds less like Rosa Luxemburg than a more familiar New York type, the liberal social Democrat—not far off from former Mayor David Dinkins or even Michael Bloomberg.
A more fraught question for Mamdani is how he will handle Palestine and Israel. Mamdani has declared that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his politics. He founded his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and has said he opposes Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. To have a mayor who speaks with antipathy toward Israel and some Jewish Zionist organizations is an unprecedented turn in a city with an estimated 960,000 Jewish residents and three Jewish former mayors.
Mamdani has pledged to order the police to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York. He recently criticized a prominent synagogue for hosting an event for a nonprofit that encourages immigration to Israel, including to settlements in the West Bank. Under pressure from Jewish leaders, this summer he said he would “discourage” use of the phrase globalize the intifada, though he has said that many people use the phrase simply to show support for Palestinians. Talk of a global intifada took on a chilling resonance this month after two gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people.
“Jews have been comfortable in New York City for a long time,” Moss told me. “For the first time, they sense that they are not automatically safe here.”
A liberal financier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t want to alienate the new mayor, told me that he attended a Mamdani event recently and appreciated that Mamdani listened carefully and took notes. The financier supports Mamdani’s commitment to addressing the city’s gross inequities. “Personally, I find it difficult to believe that an ambitious man like him is going to die on the hill of the Palestinian struggle,” this person said. “But I have lots and lots of Jewish friends who are freaked out.”
Mamdani’s relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America presents the third big question mark. A movement brimming with activist energy and ideological certitude, DSA gave birth to Mamdani’s political career, providing the vigor and street organizing that made him such a formidable candidate. He has promised to remain a loyal DSA cadre. Yet that loyalty will be tested when he departs his rent-stabilized apartment in Queens for the two-century-old mayoral mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Already, Mamdani has angered influential DSA members with some of his early decisions.
[Derek Thompson: The affordability curse]
Five years ago, Mamdani wrote that the city’s police department was “wicked” and should be dismantled; this past June, he told Meet the Press that billionaires should not exist. But in November, Mamdani reappointed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a centrist technocrat who hails from a family with a fortune valued at $10 billion. Then he pressured DSA not to put up a candidate to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom leftists view as guilty of the sin of moderation.
DSA comrades were not amused. In December, the two national co-chairs of the organization, Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer, appeared on the Dispatches podcast; the episode was titled “Can DSA Hold Mamdani Accountable?” Rania Khalek, the host, asked Siddique’s and Romer’s view of Tisch, whom Khalek described as coming from “this very billionaire Zionist family.” (Tisch is Jewish.) Neither co-chair challenged Khalek’s description of Tisch. “I don’t think either of us are happy about keeping somebody like that on,” Siddique said. Romer, a member of a Marxist-Leninst faction within DSA, described Mamdani’s decision as “really disappointing.”
In the lead-up to Mamdani’s inauguration, some wealthy New Yorkers sounded, if not accommodating, at least resigned to their fate. This past summer, Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global equity firm, wrote to his fellow oligarchs warning of the “dire consequences” of a Mamdani victory. But the day after Mamdani’s election, Sandler proclaimed himself ready to tough out the new socialist administration. “NYC will be worse for yesterday’s outcome. Potentially a lot worse,” he wrote. But “I am not planning to move Eminence Capital to another city or state.”
One imagines that such moments of ruling-class resignation could be a minor relief for Mamdani. As for DSA, it has not hesitated to break with prominent progressive politicians, including its most famous member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the national DSA withdrew its endorsement of her, at least in part because she took the heretical step of signing a press release supporting a missile-defense system to protect Israeli civilians. Which leaves the strange possibility that New York’s first socialist mayor might find himself more threatened by his left flank than by the occasional alienated hedge funder.