A Platform for the Working Class

While I’m distracted by the menu, Mamdani never loses his train of thought. He starts with a discussion of housing. The working class, who built New York, Mamdani says,

is that very class that is being pushed out of the city. They cannot afford to live in the place that they call home. They’ve had to live under a mayor who has taken almost every opportunity available to make a cost-of-living crisis that much harder to bear. This is a mayor who has raised the rent of more than 2 million rent stabilized tenants every single year he’s been in office.

As mayor, Mamdani would end the rent hikes, he says, freezing the rent of all of the over 2 million tenants in rent-stabilized buildings for his entire mayoralty. That’s something within the mayor’s power, unlike many good campaign promises which are contingent on more federal or state funding. (New York City has no power to levy taxes.) Rent-stabilized apartments are governed by a Rent Guidelines Board, which meets every year to set rent increases, and whose members are appointed by the mayor.

These apartments, says Mamdani, “have been the bedrock of stability for working-class New Yorkers for years,” and increasingly, many are struggling to pay rent, as Adams has failed to protect the affordability of their homes. Adams ran as a tribune of the “working class,” but as mayor, proudly proclaimed “I am real estate” and has governed exclusively on behalf of the city’s landlords.

Mamdani is also running on other policies that would be extremely popular but require more funding from the state government. He’s promising universal free childcare, citing the contribution of childcare costs to the city’s affordability crisis; Adams’s reign of austerity has devastated childcare programs established and built out by his predecessor. As well, Mamdani plans to make city buses fast and free, an issue he has pursued with some success as a state legislator.

Mayors can’t always fulfill such campaign promises due to New York City’s lack of taxation powers, but these three policies certainly have mass appeal. Mamdani says these issues “are specific and also transformative interventions for working-class New Yorkers. They’re also just the beginning of what this campaign is going to propose over the duration of this race.”

The week of our conversation, the news cycle was full of the scandals surrounding Mayor Eric Adams, who has been indicted by the federal government on multiple corruption charges. The city’s elites seemed to be on the back foot, fearing the loss of a mayor who has protected their interests; exploring, in desperation, the possible return of former governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned after numerous charges of sexual harassment during a period in which 13,000 people died of COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes — a tragedy for which he has been blamed because, among other mistakes, his health department directed nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus, a congressional committee found.

To Mamdani, this chaotic situation is a moment of left-wing opportunity. “We often say as socialists that the choice is between socialism and barbarism, and if we are clear-eyed about the threats to this city from either the current mayor or the previous governor, then it is up to us to stand up and offer our vision as an alternative.”

Building the Socialist Movement

Mamdani, who is thirty-three and the only child of Mahmood Mamdani, a renowned anti-imperialist scholar, and Mira Nair, an award-winning film director, continues:

We’re seeing a bankruptcy of leadership at every level of government. So many New Yorkers do not believe any longer that government is anything to count on or to believe in or to trust. It is one that is failing them at every turn. It’s one that is asking them for their tax dollars to then fund the genocide to kill children halfway across the world in Palestine, in Lebanon and Yemen and Syria.

It doesn’t have to be that way, he argued. We could have “a New York City where the people who built it can afford to live here and can afford all the basic necessities of their life and even do more than that. This is a city where we should be able to afford to dream.”

Mamdani is running with the backing of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). Interviewed during NYC-DSA’s deliberative democratic endorsement, he told me that if NYC-DSA didn’t endorse him, he wouldn’t run. The day before our conversation, all seven branches of NYC-DSA had voted to endorse Mamdani by an overwhelming margin of more than 60 percent. Two days later, he was endorsed by a supermajority margin (107 out of 130) by the delegates at NYC-DSA’s convention.

Mamdani plainly has a democratic mandate for his campaign within NYC-DSA. Yet important leaders within the group have expressed concerns about the move, though none of them publicly. Considering NYC-DSA’s small base relative to the city’s population, and that the group has no presence at all in many neighborhoods, some fear that a mayoral campaign will fail to garner public support, exposing weakness while animating well-funded opponents, possibly imperiling important work in the state legislature or on the city council. Others say Mamdani, who was only elected to the assembly four years ago, should do more to help the organization build power and legislative accomplishments at the state level, and that running for executive office is premature both for him and for the organization.

Yet Mamdani and his supporters carried the day within NYC-DSA, in part because of the candidate’s considerable charisma but also because his politics bridges divides within the group. His commitment to Gaza and to the antiwar movement has impressed many in DSA who are more skeptical of elected officials, while his “sewer socialist” interest in priorities like transit endear him to those who are more policy-focused — groups that often overlap but can also be at odds.

But more than anything else, the endorsement reflects a deep yearning in the organization for a big, unifying project like the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, which attracted new members and had a visible impact on the left movement, expanding what many Americans thought was possible for the first time in decades. While not everyone in the chapter likes the odds of this race — NYC-DSA has long hewed to a principle of running to win — paradoxically, DSA’s most consequential project to date (and the one for which members are most nostalgic) was a twice-losing presidential campaign. A big campaign like this could also help build NYC-DSA, as the Bernie Sanders campaign helped build DSA across the country. It’s clear that even when socialists don’t win, left politics can benefit from contesting for executive office.

Discussing the relatively small reach of NYC-DSA, and although the group has never run a mayoral candidate before, Eric Adams recognized it as an adversary early on in his mayoralty, taking pains to attack and demonize the socialists, often by name. That’s probably because he recognized DSA’s potential appeal and its history of punching above its weight.

Socialist leaders like Mamdani share this view. “We’re in a city of far more people who are interested both explicitly in socialism but also in alternatives to this current moment,” Mamdani says. “I started to call myself a socialist after Bernie’s run in 2016. It gave me a language that I didn’t know to describe things that I felt were disparate parts of my beliefs, when in fact they were all intertwined as one.”

Mamdani speaks with intensity about how such campaigns, even when they don’t win, build the Left. “My life was transformed by Khader El-Yateem. He gave me a sense of belonging in a city that I had always loved, but one in which I had not known if my politics had a clear place. [My] campaign can do similar things for far more New Yorkers.” El-Yateem is a Palestinian Lutheran minister who ran for city council in 2017, endorsed by NYC-DSA. He lost, but his campaign built electoral infrastructure and convinced many that socialists could win elected office in New York, which Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on to do the following year. Others have followed suit at the city, state, and federal level in every election year since.

He believes his mayoral campaign can put

working-class people first and ensure that the proposals that we put forward are ones that will clearly and directly benefit those people. Not a hop, skip, and a jump, not an “if then” or an “inshallah,” but “I’m going to freeze your rent. I’m going to make childcare free. I’m going to get you where you’re going on that bus faster than ever before and without you having to even reach into your pocket.”

He speaks confidently because he’s a good talker, but also because he’s used to making such arguments: he pushed hard for better subway service and free buses in a campaign called “Fix the MTA,” which pressured the state for more funding for the ailing transit system, the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The campaign achieved some modest budget victories, including a free busing pilot, with one free line in each borough. Mamdani envisions a fast and free bus system “in the service of a working-class New Yorker being able to get wherever it is that they want to go, and to get there fast and to get there in a ride that is safe and one that gives them their peace of mind back, because so much of the world is trying to take that from them.”

Why Socialism?

By the time of our interview, several progressive candidates had already entered the primary: city comptroller Brad Lander, who could have a plausible path to victory, and Queens state senator Jessica Ramos, who already has the backing of two Teamsters locals, with other labor support almost certainly forthcoming. Other liberals are competing for a more moderate lane, including state senator Zellnor Myrie and former comptroller Scott Stringer.

The contingencies and possible scenarios are many and complicated: if Adams drops out or is removed from office, public advocate Jumaane Williams, who has called himself a democratic socialist and was endorsed by NYC-DSA in 2018, would become the temporary mayor and, if he chose to stay in the race, an incumbent — a situation which Williams has indicated some interest in.

The quality of progressives already in the race, Mamdani says, bodes well for “the ultimate goal to defeat Eric Adams, the right-wing austerity mayor.” It’s clear that Mamdani is serious about this goal, regardless of his own chances of winning. And because New York City has ranked-choice voting, there is no reason to look upon any candidate as a “spoiler” in a broad-left coalition’s effort to oust the corrupt Eric Adams. Mamdani and many others have suggested that candidates and organizations could unite under a simple message: “Don’t Rank Adams (or Cuomo).” It could end up being tactically smart for some candidates to cross-endorse each other (a move that, when Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia did it in the last mayoral election, nearly allowed Garcia to overtake the better-known Eric Adams).

Why, I asked Mamdani, with such a deep bench to the left of Adams — and Cuomo — does this mayoral race need a socialist?

Running as a socialist, he says, “informs the depth of the policies that you offer at the forefront.” Those policies are about looking to the future, he emphasizes that there’s far more for us to do than simply go back to a time before Eric Adams: “For working-class New Yorkers to be able to afford to live here, they don’t need to go back to 2020. They need to go forward to 2025 and have a fundamentally different City Hall that puts their concerns at the forefront of its administration’s priorities.”

At this point in our conversation, I’ve eaten more than my share because the candidate, speaking almost in full paragraphs, is so intent on laying out his socialist vision for New York. I offer to split the last dumpling. Mamdani insists that I have it; he lives nearby and can eat here anytime. Back to the issue at hand.

“There’s an opening for more than simply an alternative,” he continues, “but also an affirmative case for what government can do. As socialists, we believe in government being a positive force in people’s lives, that it can make life better.”

That can be a tough sell given the city’s recent history. “So much of my focus has been on the issues where New Yorkers feel most failed by government. The MTA [the city’s transit system] is for many New Yorkers the most frequent way that they engage in government and its failings. And so it is a socialist agenda to say that we need world-class, reliable, safe, universally accessible public transit.”

On policing, Mamdani eschews the language of “abolition” or “defund,” no doubt realizing that this kind of rhetoric tends to worry New Yorkers who already feel unsafe in their neighborhoods or on the subway. Instead, Mamdani identifies a point on which many agree, including police officers: that police are asked to do much to address the many crises in our society, and we’d all be safer leaving some problems, including traffic and some mental health crises, to civilian experts outside the NYPD. As mayor, he says, he also would discontinue the Strategic Response team (which has been responding with violence to protesters), reduce the NYPD’s enormous public relations team, and cancel plans for New York City’s version of “Cop City,” a proposed $225 million police training campus in Queens, which, like Atlanta’s militarized police training center in the middle of a forest, will squander millions on policing in the name of “public safety” even as other needed public programs are decimated.

But Mamdani speaks on this issue with more humility than many movement leaders — including himself, by his own admission — did back in 2020. Of calls to rethink policing, he says, “I understand why people are skeptical. What we are talking about here is asking people to conceive of society in a fundamentally different way than they have thus far. It behooves us to provide them with evidence and reasons why they should believe.”

Mamdani may be one of the few legislators who can point to a data-supported track record of reducing crime, albeit in a small and specific way. After he and State Senate deputy leader Mike Gianaris introduced their pilot free bus program, they analyzed the before and after data and found a 39 percent drop in security problems (a study on free buses in Kansas City found a strikingly similar result). Mamdani says drivers have told him that “when you remove the fare box, you remove a site of tension between a rider and a driver. And you allow the driver to do their job, which is drive the bus.”

Given that Mamdani has been such a strong advocate for the Palestinians during this past year of genocide, including sponsoring the Not on Our Dime bill, which would prohibit New York’s nonprofit organizations from supporting illegal settler activity in the occupied territories (which numerous such organizations are currently doing) and being a stalwart presence (and occasional civil disobedience arrestee) at the antiwar protests, I ask why not instead run for an office with more impact on international relations — a congressional seat, for example? He points out that Adams himself has repeatedly brought the politics of right-wing Zionism into New York City government by encouraging a brutal police response to pro-Palestine protesters, including following the advice of billionaire advisers to send police to student encampments, where one officer even fired his gun.

“We could have seen students killed,” he says. Adams, Mamdani says, “has used his bully pulpit to erase an entire people’s humanity, denying calls for a cease-fire. A cease-fire.” Israel, he insists, is already on the ballot because of the way the current mayor has elevated the issue.

Tonight, I was arrested with 100+ Jewish NYers from @jvplive @JFREJNYC + @IfNotNowOrg calling on Sen. Schumer to publicly support a ceasefire in Gaza.

As the war drum beats across the US & Palestinians continue to be killed indiscriminately, now is the time to stand up. pic.twitter.com/pnMy7l61Nk

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) October 14, 2023

On the even more controversial issue of migrants, Mamdani, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, is also poised to contest the dominant, right-wing narrative. “Mayor Adams has demonized the very people that are looking to our city government for help,” he says:

It’s a deeply personal issue to me. My father’s family were refugees in 1972, expelled from their home in Uganda, becoming refugees, living in a refugee camp in London. It forever changed my grandfather, who in many ways lost his sense of self. He and my grandmother used to go on a weekly basis to Gatwick to watch the planes take off back to Uganda. He was forever a different man after becoming a refugee.

His state assembly office, he says, has worked with community organizations to help over a thousand asylees get the city services they need. “This is an example of what you can do with a staff budget that is the size of a salary of one deputy mayor,” he said:

Now imagine if you were running a city with an over $100 billion annual budget, and a workforce of more than 300,000 people, and a commitment to seeing these very New Yorkers as part of the nth generation to come to this city in pursuit of a better life. [The migrants] are the continuation of the very things that we have said we love about ourselves in our city, and yet we have denied them their ability to be characters in that same story.

Mamdani has to rush out to another appointment. I linger to drink tea and make some notes on our conversation. The waiter tells me he arrived in the United States in May 2023, a brand-new resident of Queens. Of Mamdani, he says, unprompted, “He’s my friend.” It reminds me of how so many millions have felt seen and heard by left leaders like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Movements are not made primarily by politicians, but we do need leaders. The question is whether Zohran Kwame Mamdani could become the tribune that working-class New Yorkers need.