ZOHRAN Mamdani has won the mayorship of New York City, the most valuable metropolitan area in the world accounting for 4 per cent of American GDP, even though he promises socialism. In his acceptance speech, he thanked voters for ‘a mandate for change’ and ‘a new kind of politics’.
On one hand, Mamdani has benefited from a leftist shift beyond NYC. Leftists won most of the elections on Tuesday. (These elections are asynchronous with midterm and general elections, as chosen by the states.)
This shift is not necessarily personal. The nationally governing party is normally punished in local elections, despite the local remit. The timing is inconvenient for the Republicans, in the midst of a federal budget shutdown (now the longest on record) and a lagging economy (mostly a legacy of the Biden administration’s inflationary policies, but also the inflationary and disruptive effects of Trump’s tariffs).
Mamdani has benefited from conflicted candidates. The previous Mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, damaged tourism, the budget and public safety by doubling down on the city as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, accommodated in ever more expensive hotels, some of which were damaged. Soon immigrants were camping on the street. Adams belatedly called for changes to the sanctuary laws, and reduced crime, but in the process he upset the left without repatriating the right.
Adams eventually dropped out to help fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo. Even Trump endorsed Cuomo, in hope of preventing Mamdani’s victory, thereby abandoning the repeat Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. But Cuomo is tainted by sex scandals and aggressive but flawed briefings during covid lockdown when he was New York Governor. He lost by more than 9 points.
On the other hand, weak political opposition is insufficient to explain Mamdani’s lead in the polls all year. He easily won the Democratic Party’s primary this summer, against Adams and Cuomo and others. He did so while the Republicans promised that the economy and budget battles would be fixed by now.
Mamdani offers an opposing economic vision, an explicitly ‘socialist’ vision: free bus rides, controls on food prices, frozen rent (for the 2million whose rent increases are currently limited), free public housing, free child care, more teachers, police reduced in favour of ‘a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and homelessness crisis’. Mamdani claims to be making the City ‘affordable’ and empowering ‘the working people’. But the greatest beneficiaries will be the workless.
Almost a month ago, Trump described Mamdani as a ‘communist’. Trump corrects journalists who use Mamdani’s self-description of ‘democratic socialist’. The mainstream media say Trump is wrong. But Mamdani betrays himself, such as this prepared sentence in his victory speech: ‘We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.’
This is a populist victory of the old-fashioned leftist kind, in opposition to the ‘wealthy’. This is why some commentators characterise Mamdani as the leftist equivalent of Trump. He repeated himself in victory, and promised to ‘turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few’.
But this is unsustainable. In the long term the wealthy flee, the workless immigrate, the city collapses fiscally. We’ve seen this model in California and Britain, particularly London. In August, New York City projected a budget deficit of $7.77billion this fiscal year, growing to over $12billion in following years. The City blames inclining immigration and declining federal funding. That was before Trump vowed to cut federal funds if Mamdani won.
In the primary victory, Mamdani claimed that democracy had been ‘attacked’ by ‘billionaires and their big spending, by elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust, and by authoritarian leaders who rule through fear’.
In election victory, Mamdani promised to expand ‘protections’ for labour unions, and ‘put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks’. NYC is home to at least 123 billionaires and 12,000 millionaires, who can emigrate to neighbouring states much more easily than a British millionaire can emigrate to another country.
Mamdani’s populism is in opposition to elders too. He will be the youngest Mayor of NYC since 1892 (he is 34). He claimed a victory for ‘the next generation of New Yorkers who refused to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past’, ‘a generation of change’, ‘a new age of politics’. This should remind us of British politics in the 1920s and 1930s: look how that ended.
What about the short term, in the New Year, when Mamdani takes over?
Expect identity politics, for one.
Mamdani celebrates himself as Muslim, South Asian, Indian, African (he was born in Uganda) and immigrant (he naturalised in 2018). On college applications, he claimed to be both Asian and African American!
On Tuesday, he claimed victory for ‘those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemen bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers, and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, and Ethiopian aunties’. No white people there.
Later he beckoned the woke’s privileged: ‘Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall: your struggle is ours, too.’
Note his self-description in the victory speech: ‘I am young despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologise for any of this.’
Expect institutional anti-Semitism in the largest metropolitan Jewish population in the world.
Mamdani’s Islamo-centrism terrifies anyone with experience of Sir Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London) who says that ‘hope won’ in NYC, and Shabana Mahmood (Home Secretary) who claims that ‘Islamophobia’ is out of control but Islamism is not.
On the campaign, Mamdani refused to repudiate the chant ‘globalise the intifada’.
Recently (but inevitably) he accused his opponents of Islamophobia. Standing outside an Islamic Centre in the Bronx, he tearfully complained how unsafe his aunt felt travelling in a hijab after 9/11, which makes one wonder whether he realises how unsafe non-Muslims felt at the time. His responses to pushback suggest not. In any case, critics accuse him of dishonesty after discovering that the woman in question was his second cousin, was photographed outdoors without a hijab, and can’t confirm his story because she’s dead.
Mamdani promised to ‘build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism, where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong, not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.’
So Jews get solidarity but Muslims get power.
Expect more rhetoric about ‘power’ – that tiresome, undefined, unfalsifiable windmill against which the woke are always tilting.
In victory, Mamdani spoke the following prepared, incomplete sentences: ‘Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor. Palms callous from delivery bike handlebars. Knuckles scarred with kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.’ I am holding back vomit.
Woke politics is confrontational, Manichean and vague. Inevitably, wokesters govern by railing against straw men while neglecting real issues, fiddling while Rome burns.
Mamdani is like an extended Barack Obama: executive inexperience (he is a state assemblymen), youthful naivety, sophistry, and woke demographic credentials. Look how Obama’s presidency turned out: hubris, divisiveness, over-spend, and hypocrisy (in counter-terrorism, for instance).
Echoing Obama, Mamdani said in victory: ‘We have spoken in a clear voice. Hope is alive.’ Hope is not enough. Indeed, the politics of hope can be self-delusional.
Mamdani indicated in the same speech his frighteningly vague but unlimited ambitions. He promised ‘a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt. Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis . . . a new age of relentless improvement.’
Sadiq Khan already shows New Yorkers what to expect: prosperity for the disadvantaged while the wealthy flee; ever greener but more expensive, less safe, and less reliable transport; celebrating diversity in the police while ignoring exploding violent crime; complaining about violence against women (in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), while covering up Muslim rape gangs. (The Metropolitan Police are now reviewing 9,000 previously dismissed cases.)
For New York under Mamdani, look at London under Khan.
