Tuesday was, as you’ve certainly heard, a very good day for Democrats. Not only did Zohran Mamdani win a decisive victory in the New York City mayoral race, but Democrats won governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, retained all of their Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania while making statehouse gains there and broke the GOP’s supermajority in the Mississippi statehouse, among other things.
Out of all this, I want to focus on one pragmatic question: Mamdani won on a set of specific and often inspirational policy prescriptions; now that the dust is settling, how likely is it that he’s going to be able to follow through within the messy ecosystem that is New York politics? Mamdani himself made an allusion to this tension during his victory speech Tuesday night, pointedly referencing a Mario Cuomo quote about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose.
Besides the heft of the million-plus votes he drew while achieving a majority, there are a few specific facets of the election results that might actually smooth the path for him to get his policies enacted. Some are practical and some political. On the practical side are the three housing-related ballot proposals, which were all approved (as had been my recommendation in these pages, and therefore, I will assume that it was my influence that made the difference 😉 ).
The proposals collectively strip some of the City Council’s ability to restrict rezoning and housing proposals, streamlining processes to get more housing built quickly. Much of that power would shift to the mayor, by shunting projects through bodies like the City Planning Commission and the Board of Standards and Appeals that he will control, and through a newly created Affordable Housing Appeals Board on which the mayor will have a seat. Giving Mamdani more of a direct say on housing construction should boost his efforts to expand our affordable housing stock.
Mamdani’s three signature policy prescriptions, endlessly repeated on the campaign trail, are: freezing the rent on stabilized units, creating a program of universal free child care and making buses “fast and free.”
Of these, the rent freeze is the most directly doable, in the sense that as mayor he will basically possess the power to enact it unilaterally. This is not something that the mayor dictates directly, but it is determined by a Rent Guidelines Board that is made up of mayoral appointees. It’s true that by law the board’s members must represent different constituencies and interests, such as members of tenant and landlord groups, but all serve at the pleasure of the mayor. Put another way, he can direct them to land on zero percent rent increases every year. This is in fact what happened relatively recently under Mayor Bill de Blasio, who presided over three years of such freezes. One wrinkle is the way that such freezes can push non-stabilized, that is, market-rate rents up. That’s something Mamdani says he will offset by moving to significantly increase the housing stock as a whole.
Universal child care and free buses are a little trickier, insofar as they are unlikely to be things that he can do on his own. The increased taxes on very wealthy people that Mamdani has proposed to pay for the child care program and its estimated cost of some $6 billion would need to be approved by Albany lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has said she opposes any new tax increases. The MTA is also overseen at the state level, where Mamdani is currently a member of the Assembly (it’s worth noting that while he seems to have been well-liked enough, he was not particularly visible or effective). There’s greater skepticism even among some Democrats about his bus proposal, which would significantly reduce MTA revenue. This is probably a tough time to make some of these arguments, as the federal government’s economic agenda already threatens the state, the city’s and the MTA’s budgets as it is.
But two of the most dangerous issues for Mamdani lie outside that trio of promises. On public safety, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how Mamdani will engage with the police. Cops and their unions have long made up a workforce that is often talked about as having the most direct ability to derail a mayoral administration – a problematic reality for all manner of reasons. The mayor-elect, though, who seems like a truly generational talent at staying on message and communicating with a multiplicity of constituencies, has I think partly neutralized the tension by playing up something that the cops tend to agree with him on, which is that they’re being asked to do too much. While a lot of critics had attempted to hammer him on past statements about the NYPD, the main thrust of his Department of Community Safety initiative is about taking things off their plate and allocating efforts like mental health interventions to experts instead of forcing overworked cops to do it. He also, I think crucially, committed to keeping Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, an entreaty she now seems to have accepted, which could smooth relations with the force.
Trump, of course, has pledged to unlawfully retaliate against New York for picking a Muslim Democratic socialist to lead the five boroughs. The idea of a president actually seriously threatening to deploy the National Guard over dissatisfaction with the results of democratic local elections would have seemed insane just a year ago, but here we are. That threat existed before the election, though, and voters clearly didn’t think of it as a significant enough issue to avoid voting for Mamdani; on the contrary, some seemed to have preferred him as a mayor who could stand strong against the authoritarian president.
That brings me to the politics. Of the two New Yorkers who are the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leaders in their respective chambers, Schumer never endorsed Mamdani and Jeffries waited until near the end of October to do so. Schumer even refused to say on Election Day who he had voted for. Hochul did, though, and she is in a far more important position in terms of the enactment of Mamdani’s agenda. While Hochul is far less domineering than Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s chief rival in the election, was when he was governor, she still has a whole lot of sway in the state capital and could throw significant political weight around if she wanted to. Now, it’s obvious that she and the mayor-elect sit at different spots in the Democratic Party continuum, and she has been less than enthused about some of his specific proposals, especially those that would involve raising taxes. But she has also tentatively inched closer to Mamdani as the sheer extent of his popularity has become evident.
Now that the once-little-known assemblyman has trounced her former boss — who, despite the personal animosity between them, probably fell closer to her own personal policy preferences — twice in a row, finishing with 50% of the general election vote in a three-way race that featured the biggest turnout in a generation, she can probably see which way the winds are blowing. Don’t forget that Hochul has her own reelection race next year, and while much of the chatter so far has been around whether she can be successfully challenged from the right by a MAGA candidate like Rep. Elise Stefanik, an upstate Republican, I think this election changes the calculus.
A lot can shift in a year, but what this week demonstrated is that the Trump brand is politically radioactive right now. The more Democratic candidates were able to tie their opponents to Trump, the more they tended to blow them out of the water. In New Jersey, GOP candidate Jack Ciattarelli significantly underperformed his own 2021 results in part because he threw in his lot with the unpopular president, a dynamic so evident that even former Republican governor Chris Christie (who is admittedly no Trump friend himself) identified it as the main reason for Ciattarelli’s loss.
Here in New York, Stefanik is incredibly closely tied to Trump in a way that now seems like electoral poison, and I imagine that Hochul is getting less worried about her than she is about failing to harness the energy that delivered Mamdani his resounding victory. Yes, there’s far more to the state than just New York City, but there is no gubernatorial victory without a significant victory in the city that represents well over a third of the state’s population and the bulk of its economic activity. All of this is to say that I can see Hochul expending some significant political resources to help shepherd Mamdani’s agenda through Albany, which he’s going to need to actually deliver.
