A year and a half ago, Zohran Kwame Mamdani launched a longshot campaign for New York City mayor, a little-known state assemblyman with a socialist vision for the financial capital of the world. Today he’s almost universally known, and in his first five months in office he has become a standard against which other big-city mayors are measured.
The comparisons began well before he took office. Last summer, before either one of them became mayor, Katie Wilson was referred to as “the Mamdani of Seattle.” Omar Fateh, a democratic socialist city councilmember in Minneapolis who challenged incumbent Jacob Frey for the mayor’s office, was called “the Mamdani of the Midwest.” New Jersey mayoral candidate Austin J. Edwards has been called “the Mamdani of Trenton.” Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins has been called, by at least one person, “the Mamdani of Miami.” These comparisons, whether intended as commendation or scorn, have typically been used to evoke the socialist agenda that Mamdani’s campaign was built on, and the fact that his victory upset a powerful Democratic establishment and pushed affordability to the center of the national political conversation. In the five months since he took office, “Mamdani” has become shorthand for something a little bit different. In large part, it is about focusing on the basic functions of city government.
In Los Angeles, where at least two current mayoral candidates have been compared to Mamdani, his name gets tossed around in a lot of contexts. One of the more frequent refrains, says Mike Bonin, director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, is “What about Mamdani?” As in: Sure, managing a big city with a diverse population, competing interest groups, limited resources, and sometimes uncooperative state and federal governments is hard … but what about Mamdani? The implication is that Mamdani is showing that cities, even with all their challenges, can be governed well.
That’s despite the still-latent promise of his leftist agenda. Mamdani ran on making New York City buses “fast and free,” expanding access to affordable childcare, freezing rent for thousands of tenants, building public grocery stores with lower-priced food, and generally making New York a place where working people can enjoy city life. He can claim progress toward some of those goals, including an investment from the state in expanded preschool and a new housing plan released this week that calls for faster permitting and a major city investment in public housing. But at this point in his short tenure, the buses are still slow and pay-to-ride, the public grocery stores aren’t yet built, and the rent is still among the least affordable in the country. It’s other aspects of Mamdani’s approach to governing that have made him a touchstone in urban politics around the country.
During two big snowstorms in the first months of his tenure, traditionally a perilous test for new mayors, Mamdani’s administration acquitted itself fairly well. The mayor was widely seen shoveling snow himself. He pivoted between the first and second storm to do better outreach to unsheltered homeless people and communicate how the city was approaching the job. In April he announced the city had filled 100,000 potholes since he took office.
“He got out there with a shovel and said ‘I’m trying, man.’ That resonates,” says Joseph Viteritti, a political scientist at Hunter College in New York. “He understood very cleverly that you can count potholes. You show that number to people, it’s impressive. He got that, and he knew what to do with it.”
Cities are required to adopt balanced budgets every year, but when Mamdani announced earlier this month that he was offering a balanced spending plan, coming back from a $12 billion budget deficit to start the year, he received viral levels of adulation. “Wait,” said one social media user, “so wtf were the previous NYC Mayors doing?”
“He’s able to speak to practical issues like filling potholes, but also why we’re doing it is that everyone is entitled to a dignified life supported by their government,” says Danny Pearlstein, policy director for the Riders Alliance, a New York group that advocates for better public transit. It’s often said that there’s no Republican or Democratic way to fill a pothole. But in the Mamdani administration, the nuts and bolts of governing are part of a bigger social vision for the city, which a majority of New Yorkers seem to think he genuinely believes in.
“Pothole politics” and “sewer socialism,” terms that describe basic competence as a farsighted political strategy, have re-entered the global lexicon. The City Council of Toronto, a city that’s bigger than Chicago, is cribbing Mamdani’s idea to build public grocery stores. The mayor of London, the other global financial capital, seems to consider him a buddy. Mamdani treats being a self-styled media personality as part of the job description, creating an Office of Mass Engagement to improve communication and organizing with community groups.
He has become a central political figure in the U.S. partly because he runs its biggest city. Previous New York mayors, from John Lindsay in the 1960s (the last mayor to receive more votes than Mamdani in a mayoral election) to Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000s, became spokespeople for American cities in general. He is also indebted to a broader leftward lurch in urban politics, with more focus on racial and economic justice and neighborhood-level affordability and quality of life. His emphasis on essential government services represents a refinement of that style of politics. But it isn’t an original idea. Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell took office in 2023 with a back-to-basics pitch. Months later, he sold voters on a plan to raise the sales tax to pay for transportation improvements — something they’d resoundingly rejected half a decade earlier. He says it wasn’t a coincidence that the one thing led to the other.
“Delivering on what we’re chartered to do at the most local level is in some ways the best political decision you can make, because that’s what we’ve all agreed by formal compact are our priorities,” says O’Connell. “You want to get those things right so you build trust and confidence to do bigger, more ambitious things.”
Mamdani himself sees it that way. “New Yorkers deserve a government that pursues excellence at every level,” he told Governing. “If government can’t fix the pothole on your block, repair the streetlight or answer the call for help, then why should anyone believe it can tackle the housing crisis, lower the cost of living or build a safer city?”
Still, Mamdani’s vision of working people laying claim to urban space is so expansive and difficult to achieve that he’ll have a hard time accomplishing it no matter how many potholes he fills. He came to his balanced budget announcement, which is still subject to negotiations with the City Council, through a combination of strident, tax-the-rich machismo and delicate political maneuvering with the New York state government. The budget relies on one-time infusions of revenue from the state that won’t necessarily recur next year. The city will face an estimated $7 billion budget gap in 2027, and that’s without factoring in the fiscal impact of labor negotiations with public-sector unions that will begin this summer, and the expectation to make big investments in his social goals.
“Part of how he’s closing this budget gap is with a lot of one-shots. That only patches over the problem and doesn’t solve it in the long run,” says Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit financial watchdog. “He has by no means solved this problem for New York or for himself.”
Some aspects of Mamdani’s rise are hard to quantify or emulate. One is what many urban politicos, even those who don’t share his socialist ideology, describe as a seemingly innate understanding of the role of mayor. Another is a personality that has charmed leaders across the political spectrum, from Kathy Hochul, the more moderate Democratic governor of New York, to President Donald Trump, his ideological opposite.
“You’ve got to accept,” says Marc Doussard, a political economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “that he’s kind of sui generis in some ways.”
