Within the first hour of Thursday morning, the unquiet of nighttime New York was outdone by a fireworks extravaganza. At first, I thought this was some new feature of the start-of-the-year festivities for which the City is famous, especially the dropping of the ball in Times Square, whose attendees are, per New York lore anyway, overwhelmingly tourists. I knew that Zohran Mamdani was scheduled to be sworn in on January 1, but I’d forgotten that the mayor takes the oath of office right after midnight.
The Significance of Mamdani’s Victory
This particular swearing-in ceremony is unlike any other. At a time when white nationalist, racist bigotry falls easily from the mouths of elected officials—including the President, the Vice-President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Stephen Miller—Mamdani’s election as the mayor of America’s largest city reminds us that this remains an extraordinary and complicated country, in the best sense of both those words.
Mamdani is not just foreign-born; he was born in Kampala, Uganda. He’s Indian and a Muslim to boot. If you’re old enough to remember 9/11—the only time I’ve ever seen New York City truly unnerved—and the long wave of Islamophobia that followed, you’ll appreciate the significance of what just happened.
Had a poll been taken a few weeks after 9/11 to find out how likely New Yorkers thought the election of a non-white Muslim was at some point in the future, my guess is that the overwhelming majority would have said that there was next to no chance; and some would have found the question itself a bit nutty. Yet here we are.
There’s something else that makes this occasion momentous. Non-European immigrants, even those who are of the first-generation or later, are told to blend into the mainstream, to become “real” Americans, and to be less “ethnic.” Mamdani didn’t follow that script during his campaign. He spoke lovingly of Astoria, Queens, his ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhood.
He had firm opinions on which place served the best biriyani, kebabs, and shawarma. He talked about his love for chai and South Asian rappers, and indeed was himself once an amateur rapper, known first as Young Cardamom, then as Mr. Cardamom. He reminisced about discussions he had with “aunties,” a term of respect and endearment traditional Indians use when addressing women of or beyond middle age.
Far from trying to obscure his ethnic, cultural, and religious roots Mamdani spoke of them with pride and joy—as attributes that add to New York’s vibrancy and specialness. I don’t think that’s the narrative your run-of-the-mill political consultant would give a mayoral aspirant of Mamdani’s background. Mamdani chose what was, at best, a risky strategy. But it resonated with millions of voters because it was sincere, not a shtick.
Mamdani’s Stance on Israel Didn’t Matter
Some of Mamdani’s political positions were much riskier. At a time when politicians have been bending over backwards to deny that the war that Israel launched after Hamas’s October 7 attack had devolved into genocide and that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a form of apartheid, Mamdani didn’t take the easy route. He used both nouns, repeatedly, to describe Israel’s conduct. When asked about his support for the BDS movement, he reaffirmed it and didn’t resort to some version of the familiar, “Well, my views on that have evolved. They are different now.”
If there were a manual for running for office in the United States, one of its maxims would surely be that candidates must repeatedly express unconditional support for Israel. Anyone perceived as “anti-Israel” risks enabling opponents to raise huge sums from donors determined to sink the careers of politicians they view as unfriendly to the Jewish state.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders has pointed out, many Democrats fear criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza lest pro-Israel organizations—especially AIPAC turn against them. This fear is not unjustified. To take one example, AIPAC spent $14.5 million to defeat Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY), who had called the war a genocide.
A similar effort was evident from campaign contributions during the New York Mayoral election. Wealthy Jewish donors—including Bill Ackman, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Daniel Loeb—poured between $250,000 and $8 million into the pro-Israel Super PAC, Fix the City, which spent nearly $31 million on the mayoral election. Another such PAC, Sensible City, spent $107,000—on attack ads.
But New York’s Jewish community is not of one mind on Israel, let alone Israel’s war on Gaza. It contains different strands of opinion, ranging from diehard supporters and arch critics to gradations in between. Moreover, younger Jewish voters have become markedly less supportive of Israel’s policies than their parents and grandparents, and Israel isn’t as important to their identity.
Still, for someone of Mamdani’s background, the safe thing to do would have been to steer clear of matters related to Israel, to the degree possible, and certainly to eschew words like “apartheid” and “genocide.” Mamdani didn’t do that, even though he knew full well that his rival, Andrew Cuomo, would paint him as an enemy of Israel.
Sure enough, Cuomo called Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer.” Worse, when the radio interviewer Sid Rosenberg observed that Mamdani would be “cheering” if there were another 9/11, Cuomo’s response was, “That’s another problem.” Other politicians went further. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) declared that Mamdani is “a full-blown jihadist who has called for the genocide of Jews,” a claim as outrageous as it is false.
When Cuomo said during one of the mayoral debates that his first trip abroad as New York’s Mayor would be to Israel, Mamdani could easily have said, “Mine too.” Instead, Mamdani avoided cheap rhetoric and took time to visit several synagogues, including during the High Holy Days, and met with congregants and several rabbis. He bet that Jewish New Yorkers don’t all see the politics of the Middle East with the same eye.
Jewish Voters: Mamdani vs. Cuomo
Mamdani was right. Exit polls showed that he won 33 percent of the Jewish vote in New York. And since he received two-thirds of the votes cast by those below age 45, it seems safe to assume that his share of the votes among younger Jews surpassed one-third. What’s more, as an analysis in The Forward shows, there were important neighborhood-based variations in the Jewish vote.
Some parts of the city—Borough Park, the Midwood area near Marine Park and Seagate, Crown Heights with its large Lubavitch community, and Manhattan’s Upper West Side—overwhelmingly chose Cuomo: he took between 66 and 88 percent of the votes.
But in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, Clinton Hill, Greenpoint, Fort Greene, and portions of Brooklyn Heights between 60 and 72 percent of Jewish voters voted for Mamdani. The same pattern appeared in Morningside Heights and Washington Heights in Manhattan. Elsewhere in that borough—the Upper West Side, the Lower East Side, SoHo, Chelsea, and Tribeca—the margin between the two candidates was between two and five percentage points, close to an even split.
There is no single explanation for this result, but two seem plausible. There’s overwhelming evidence by now of a generational divide among Jews, on Israel generally and on the war in Gaza and the occupation specifically. Plus, many Jews consider themselves progressives.
Mamdani’s positions on Israel therefore appealed to many Jewish voters. Plus, in the manner of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), another democratic socialist, Mamdani focused on making class-based appeals, especially the problem of affordability, which cut across racial and ethnic lines.
Mamdani’s Governance Challenges
Yet this same issue, affordability, will now prove to be Mayor Mamdani’s biggest challenge, precisely because the solutions he offered are big and bold—and expensive. They include providing free universal childcare for kids between six weeks and five years of age, free and fast bus service for all New Yorkers, and the construction of thousands of new homes to lower rents.
Both programs would be a boon for people struggling to get by, particularly the government-funded childcare proposal. Average childcare costs in New York soared by 79 percent during the last six years alone to the current $18,200. To put that figure in perspective, one-third of New York’s households earn less than $50,000 a year, and a quarter can’t afford to cover the cost of rent, food, and healthcare.
Mamdani has also promised to build 200,000 more residential units during the next decade to make housing more affordable in a city in which the median listed monthly rent last year was $3,397—a 5.6 percent increase over 2024.
Here’s the problem Mayor Mamdani faces: the price tag for his childcare pledge is estimated at $6 billion annually. His plans for additional housing construction are projected to cost $10 billionover a decade. With fare evasions taken into account, his proposal for free busing is expected to cost around $800 million annually.
Some of the money needed to make good on these and other campaign proposals can, as Mamdani has insisted, be mobilized by tax increases on the wealthiest households (those making more than $1 million a year—about 22 times the income of those in the bottom 20 percent) by two percent and by increasing the taxes paid by the most profitable companies from 8.85 percent to 11.5 percent.
But the extra tax revenues gained from higher taxes may not turn out to be extra spending money for the City.
Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, has bequeathed him a $4.7 billion budget deficit. Worse, New York City’s Comptroller projects that the shortfall could reach $10.41 billion in 2027 and $13.24 billion the following year.
Even if these forecasts turn out to be inflated, the City will still face large deficits. Mamdani may also have to contend with cutbacks in federal aid to New York, something that President Trump vowed to enact if Mamdani were to be elected mayor. When the two met at the White House on November 21, the atmosphere was cordial, even pleasant. But Trump is nothing if not mercurial, so Mamdani can’t rule out reductions in federal funding that will deepen his budgetary problems.
None of this means that Mamdani will fail to make good on his campaign promises. But those promises, which inspired millions of New Yorkers to vote for him, will determine how he’s judged—and sooner than he might anticipate.
Having defeated Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani will soon see the wisdom of an aphorism offered by Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s dad and a former governor of New York: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Cuomo senior’s point was that once in office, politicians confront the task of turning the stirring visions they offered voters during the campaign into reality.
In Defense of Big Government
I want Mamdani to succeed. For decades, starting with President Ronald Reagan, Americans have been conditioned to believe that government is at the root of their day-to-day problems, even though some of the very presidents who sounded this warning themselves ran up massive budget deficits. Reagan, for example, increased the nation’s budget shortfall by 94 percent by the end of his second term and the national debt by 186 percent.
Besides, many European governments provide an array of services to the public, including, in varying forms, universal healthcare and childcare. Yet in this country, such government-provided social programs are derided as wasteful, top-down schemes that deny people freedom of choice and—heaven forbid—subject them to the tyranny of socialism.
Much of this predictable narrative is self-serving, and the campaigns of office-seekers who parrot it are funded by super-rich individuals and big corporations who, for various reasons, oppose social welfare programs. Yet both favor cutting taxes and regulations, even as they profit handsomely from federal contracts as well as tax legislation they can shape, thanks to Supreme Court decisions that, over the past 15 years, have vastly increased the already substantial influence of money in our politics.
Mamdani has an opportunity to show that government can be a force for the good, particularly by improving the lives of those who have the least means and face the biggest hardships.
This isn’t Stalin’s or Mao’s vision; it was FDR’s and LBJ’s and hence very much part of the American political tradition. It’s one Mamdani wants to revive. As he said during his inaugural address, “To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this—no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”