Mamdani for NYC Mayor: The Fight We’ve Been Waiting for

I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee (Mamdani) to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all.

Instead, he finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.

On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues—increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line—in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there. On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the overprivileged few—the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them—are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.

First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels. Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented—as it is in all things—by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city, and even taking direct control of it—a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.

The upshot of all this? This is our race.

Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class—unfortunately a rather large sector of the party—along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza, two groups with significant overlap. This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress—Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer—are Brooklyn voters. So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, representative of a New York city-adjacent district. for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”

Next we have the independent candidates themselves, who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current mayor of New York. That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump. The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million—the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics. Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.” His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke—the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is—he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa)—dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000. Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.

And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires—in this case for Eric Adams—including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor. As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.” At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.

(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist—said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era—I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.)

The upshot of all this? This is our race.

Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way to wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck—even if just that—all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.