Going into the second New York City Democratic mayoral debate on June 13, the momentum was clearly with Zohran Mamdani. The socialist state assemblymember had secured a strong second place position even before the first debate on June 4, and for weeks now has been slowly closing the gap with the front-runner, former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani put in a solid performance at the June 4 debate, projecting confidence in the face of opponents’ accusations that he is running on defunding the police or harbored an “antisemitic” position on Israel. Rejecting the more radical sloganeering on public safety, as he has throughout his campaign, Mamdani argued for the creation of a “Department of Community Safety” to help prevent crime through social service provision and mental health services, on the grounds that it would reduce overwork and overburdening of police with work better suited for social workers and mental health counselors, so those police could more effectively prevent and prosecute violent crime. When moderators singled out Mamdani by asking him whether he believed “Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state,” he answered that Israel had a right to exist as a state “with equal rights.”

In last night’s debate, Mamdani again countered attacks on public safety with a powerful statement of his distinctive approach to the issue — an approach that goes against the orthodoxy that has developed on some parts of the Left, but that socialists would do well to learn from.

Since the first debate, Mamdani has only picked up speed. The day after that debate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) publicly endorsed him and encouraged voters to rank him first on their ballots. (She recommended second- and third-place rankings for Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander, respectively). Then a Data for Progress poll covering the period May 30 to June 4, before the debate and AOC’s endorsement, showed Mamdani closing the gap with Cuomo to single digits. More recently, a survey by Public Policy Polling found Mamdani in the lead for the first time, besting the former governor by 5 percent. (Two other recent polls, though, still show Cuomo leading by double digits.)

The keys to Mamdani’s success are not hard to discern. He has a strong cost-of-living-focused platform, an energetic volunteer-driven field operation, and a substantive but contagious social media presence. Still, at thirty-three years old and with only four years in the state assembly under his belt, Mamdani has an uphill battle to convince voters to elect him as the city’s youngest mayor since John Purroy Mitchel briefly held the office in 1917.

Last night, Mamdani got another chance to make his case to unconvinced or unfamiliar voters on the debate stage. This contest featured a slightly smaller group of candidates than last time, with state senator Jessica Ramos and former Democratic National Committee vice chair Michael Blake excluded from the debate this round. Yet the stage was still overcrowded, with first- and second-place candidates Cuomo and Mamdani joined by New York City Council speaker Adams, NYC comptroller Lander, former comptroller Scott Stringer, New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie, and hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson.

The debate, which reprised the major themes of the June 4 face-off, offered little in the way of new insight about candidates’ positions or records. Cuomo was the target of most attacks, especially when it came to the many sexual harassment allegations against him and the COVID nursing home scandal, while Mamdani was questioned about his lack of experience and his stances on policing and Israel (absurdly, right at the moment that Israel was beginning a deadly barrage of air strikes on Iran). Tilson in particular seemed obsessively focused on attacking Mamdani for his alleged left-wing heresies.

Among the more satisfying aspects of the evening were a few sharp attacks on the former governor by Lander, who criticized Cuomo forcefully on the harassment allegations and the nursing home deaths. At one point, he called on an audience member to stand up — an audience member, Lander said, whose father was a nursing home resident who died during the pandemic when Cuomo forced nursing homes to admit patients who were infected with COVID.

Mamdani once more demonstrated a knack for the debate format, responding to questions and other candidates’ criticisms with impressive alacrity. When Tilson again tore into him for his positions on policing, the assemblyman had another opportunity to articulate the distinctive position on public safety he has championed from the beginning of his campaign. Mamdani said:

I will not defund the police. I will work with the police because I believe the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety. . . .

Sixty-five percent of crimes from the first quarter of this year are still not solved. We need to ensure that police can focus on those crimes, and [that] we have mental health professionals and social workers to address and tackle and resolve the mental health crisis and homelessness.

This approach, which emphasizes social services not as a replacement for but a complement to traditional policing, is a departure from the calls to defund or even abolish the police that became prominent on the Left starting in 2020. (Mamdani himself embraced the defund rhetoric at the height of the George Floyd protests but has since rejected it.)

Mamdani’s position is both politically savvy and substantively sensible. Proposals to defund or abolish the police are very unpopular, and understandably so — people reasonably worry that a reduction in police will leave them more vulnerable to violent crimes like theft or assault. Mamdani’s proposal to create a Department of Community Safety addresses the need to address deeper causes of crime like mental health disorders and homelessness without minimizing or dismissing people’s valid concerns about crime. At the same time, while rejecting the rhetorical frames of “defund” or “abolition,” Mamdani has spoken about reducing police overtime and trimming fat by, for instance, cutting the New York Police Department’s $80 million communications budget.

Mamdani’s public safety platform isn’t just a concession to what’s popular, however. Substantially addressing the root causes of violent crime in poverty would require massive wealth redistribution. When violence in the United States began to rise sharply in the 1960s, the inability of left forces to enact a robust redistributive agenda led US political leaders to construct a monstrous carceral state in response to public demands for a response to rising crime.

When it comes to reducing crime, the Left’s North Star must be attacking its roots by “winning redistribution from ruling elites,” as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg put it. And reforms to our often grievously unjust criminal justice system are both popular and necessary. Yet before we achieve the sort of ambitious redistribution that meaningfully reduces crime, an approach to the issue that focuses simply on reducing police budgets does not take seriously the real costs that crime imposes on people, costs that fall disproportionately on the poor, and which help explain popular opposition to defunding the police.

In this context, Mamdani’s approach of increasing funding for mental health crisis response and social services as much as municipal budgets allow, alongside judicious cuts to the police budget — framed as part of an effort to make the police more effective at stopping violent crime — is preferable to a purely anti-police program.

On this issue and others, Mamdani has shown himself an effective communicator who is able to translate left-wing values into sound policy proposals and commonsense language, all while maintaining the enthusiasm of his committed base. He has figured out how to do something that the Left has at times struggled to do in recent years: articulate principled leftist politics in a way that resonates with average people. Whether it’s enough to send him to City Hall this election cycle or not, it’s an approach worth studying and emulating.