Now comes the interesting part

Winning in big cities as a progressive is easy; governing is harder.

Zohran Mamdani speaks to the press after voting (Photo by LEONARDO MUNOZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Andrew Cuomo’s decision to play sore loser in the New York City mayoral election and spend months reliving his defeat at the hands of Zohran Mamdani has basically allowed the Mamdani camp to take an extended victory lap over the last few weeks. While Cuomo spent the general election lapsing into increasingly desperate and vile Islamophobic attacks, Mamdani took the opportunity to make some smart gestures of reassurance.

Committing to continuity in the hands of New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is the most obvious, but housing-heads have been excited to hear that the current leader of the Department of City Planning, Daniel Garodnick, is also likely to play a major role in the new administration. Mamdani has spoken extensively with Maria Torres-Springer, the very respected city government hand (see her recent appearance on the Statecraft podcast) who’s played major roles across multiple administrations, and with other relevant people with deep experience in and around city hall.

That’s a smart approach. But the very existence of such a deep well of experience reflects the fact that, in Bill de Blasio, New York had a progressive factional mayor for eight years (from 2014 to 2021), as well as the fact that both the Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg administrations had strong progressive wings (Adams on housing and Bloomberg on transportation and public health).

And that’s what I’ve found a bit bizarre about the tenor of the general election campaign.

I can’t begrudge strategist Morris Katz’s desire to hype himself and his firm for winning the race, but a lot of coverage seems to suggest that a progressive factional candidate winning a big-city mayoral race is an unheard-of achievement of political strategy. And on the flip side, guys like Bill Ackman, who I know perfectly well were around for the de Blasio years, are talking about mass departures from the city, as if they don’t remember that this exact same discourse played out in 2013.

No one can predict the future, and a Mamdani administration might turn out to be shambolic, like Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago.

But progressives win mayoral elections all the time, and the typical case isn’t Johnson. Rather, it’s something like the Barbara Lee experience in Oakland or what we’re seeing with Karen Bass in Los Angeles, where not much actually happens.

When I look back on de Blasio, I see a basically good mayor: stronger than Adams in certain areas, weaker in others; better than Bloomberg on some fronts, worse on others. He accomplished a fair amount and kept the city from going off the rails until he (like most mayors) was overwhelmed by the events of 2020.

But the interesting thing about the Great Forgetting of Bill de Blasio is not that he was some embarrassing Johnson-like failure the left wants to memory hole. It’s that the left grew disillusioned with him almost immediately, to the point that four years after he stepped down, people responded to the election of a new mayor on a strong anti-billionaire platform as if we didn’t see a campaign with these exact same themes win twelve years ago.

The hard question for the urban left isn’t whether they can win elections in the most left-wing parts of the country. And it’s not even really whether they can do a good job in office. It’s whether they can sustain enthusiasm for their own champion as Mamdani has to wrestle with the actual problems of governance in a world where the prospects for socialism in one city are genuinely unpromising.

What’s actually new here

The Israel-Palestine conflict is, obviously, a topic on which a lot of people have quite strong feelings. Mamdani, by all accounts, is one such person.

He’s been passionately involved in the issue his whole life, and for most of that time, the style of anti-Israel politics that he believes in has been limited in the United States to the far left. His political rise came against the backdrop of the later phases of the Gaza War, during which the bottom absolutely fell out of pro-Israel politics in the Democratic Party due to both objective aspects of Israel’s conduct and Donald Trump’s electoral win in 2024. At the same time, the conflict is clearly quite important to a lot of Mamdani’s most passionate opponents.

Cuomo’s campaign has, in a tactically unwise way, centered this issue, even though it’s not remotely persuasive to swing voters, seemingly because it engaged a lot of his donors. A huge share of the freaking out about Mamdani is driven by this idea that he’s going to empower Islamist terrorism in the United States, an idea that I don’t think is remotely credible. Perhaps because these attacks lack credibility, Mamdani has made only minimal efforts to reassure people who disagree with him on this issue — doing things like bringing in Jeremy Corbyn for phone banking in the final days of the campaign.

In terms of lessons learned or broader implications of the campaign, I think this stuff is important. Pro-Israel politics is currently out of juice inside the Democratic Party, and with the Heritage Foundation cozying up to Nick Fuentes while a broader culture of Hitler revisionism rises on the right, it may not have much time left in the G.O.P. either.

It’s foolish to do straight-line projections into the future. The salience of this issue will probably drop with a cease-fire in place, Israel may well elect a new coalition next year that is more cognizant of global public opinion, and domestic politics may shift yet again. As of the 2022 midterms, I would have said that a commitment to anti-Israel politics was a major structural disadvantage for the American left. Now, three years later, it looks like a big boost. Things change.

But what’s not going to change is that the mayor of New York City is not an important actor in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Mamdani administration is not going to liberate Palestine.

I know people who are fired up find deflationary takes annoying. But on the substance of urban government, the left-wing candidate winning a race in a big city is just not that novel.

In 1989, when I was a kid, David Dinkins — a D.S.A. member and everything — shocked the world by mounting a successful primary challenge to incumbent Mayor Ed Koch. Dinkins then beat Rudy Giuliani in a hard-fought general election, and spent his challenging single term as mayor wrestling with a high crime era in urban America and with the very toxic racial politics of the 1990s. De Blasio won on essentially the exact same themes as Mamdani. And it really has to be said that it’s not as if the Bloomberg and Adams administrations that bookended de Blasio were examples of hard right governance.

That’s one of the problems for big-city left factionalists: The people they’re beating are already pretty progressive, and there’s not a lot of juice to squeeze out of that orange.

Bill de Blasio’s disappointing competence

The de Blasio administration, like almost any other progressive mayor in a large American city, faced three pretty sharp constraints:

1. Because you are stereotyped as soft on crime, it’s absolutely essential to your politics for crime to be going down.

2. Baseline levels of taxation and public spending are already high, so there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit.

3. Cities are small compared to countries or states, making the threat of capital flight quite real, even if your opponents overstate it.

When de Blasio won and I heard people fretting about a return to the bad old days, I think they were primarily worried about (1).

The long 20-year stretch of Giuliani and Bloomberg was associated with strong pro-police politics and falling crime, and de Blasio took office under a cloud of suspicion from rank-and-file officers. He handled this pretty well, I thought. Discriminatory stop-and-frisk policies were greatly curtailed, but New York continued to be an aggressively policed city and crime continued to fall. This fell apart after George Floyd, but that happened in a lot of cities, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame de Blasio for it personally.

I just want to note that his tightrope walking was not a political success. The N.Y.P.D. always had a grumbling and resentful attitude toward him, and the left never appreciated that all his work to prevent a total breakdown in relations and police effort was, in fact, vital to keeping crime low and saved countless lives.

Michelle Wu in Boston has seemingly done a better job of just getting progressives to embrace an overtly pro-cop brand of politics, and that’s perhaps a more hopeful model for Mamdani. But either way, there’s minimal room for error on crime, especially for a progressive mayor.

On (2), I think the free bus discourse is a microcosm of the issues here. I and most other transit nerds will tell you that cutting fares is a poor use of the marginal increment of transit funding. Mamdani and his fans will tell you that having an exciting slogan is better politics than fussing around with technocratic optimization.

There’s some truth to both perspectives, but I think the deeper truth is that residents of New York City already face a combined state, local, and federal top marginal income tax rate of 51.776 percent. New York has the highest per-pupil school spending in America, and the transit authority has the highest operating costs for buses and nearly the highest for subways in the country. A new left-wing elected leadership in a genuinely low-tax, low-spending jurisdiction could probably do a lot of good by just spending more money. But taxes went up during the Bloomberg administration and again under de Blasio. You don’t need to believe that Mamdani is going to wreck the city to see that he also isn’t going to dramatically improve it just by wanting to spend more. It’s not a low-spending place!

Which brings us to point (3).

When de Blasio won, conservatives raised the specter of mass flight of the wealthy to other more business-friendly jurisdictions. That didn’t happen, and I think it probably won’t happen under Mamdani either.

But because it would have been bad for de Blasio if it had happened, one of the things he did — and that Mamdani will have to do — was try to prevent it from happening by holding meetings with major C.E.O.s and Wall Street leaders after winning the election.

The hyper-inegalitarian economic structure of New York City breeds a lot of resentment and the de Blasio “tale of two cities” pitch was really good politics. But the tax structure is already highly progressive. If it became a middle-class city due to either flight of the wealthy or wage compression, you would either need huge tax hikes or else a big cut in public spending. The mayor is just not well-positioned to radically restructure the American economy.

A boring job, but someone’s got to do it

If you’re a moderate New Yorker who reluctantly voted for Cuomo and are annoyed that Eric Adams spoiled a potentially promising mayorship with corruption, and doubly annoyed that we could be living in a world where Kathryn Garcia is cruising to re-election, I think all these considerations should be reassuring.

Mamdani gives every impression of being a sharp guy with a sharp team, and he’s already in dialogue with responsible people about the realities of city administration.

Here’s a funny anecdote that captures what I personally find annoying about the campaign, but reassuring about the substance (emphasis added):

His bid for student vice president at the elite Bronx High School of Science would ultimately crater, with its wayward pledge of fresh juice for all, squeezed from locally sourced fruits. (“I promised things that were simply impossible,” he conceded years later.) But through a blitz of frantic campus recruitment, inveterate bluffing and cajoling internet posts, a campaign much dearer to a teenage Mr. Mamdani — and much more resonant to him now — was hurtling ahead.

There’s an old saw that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and even though I wish it weren’t true, it is probably accurate to say that part of the slow boring of hard boards is dishing out a decent amount of B.S. overpromising.

Fiorello La Guardia, who Mamdani has cited as a model, famously said “there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage,” which is just to say that in practice, municipal government heavily involves front-line delivery of public services. It’s worth noting that Cuomo — not Mamdani — was the preferred candidate of New York City’s predatory public-sector labor unions, as was Eric Adams before him. That’s not to say that Mamdani will definitely be a visionary reformer who takes on the entrenched interests and dramatically improves the cost-effectiveness of New York City government. But he might, and the alternatives definitely wouldn’t.

The relevance of La Guardia’s witticism is that there just aren’t that many paths to success as a mayor. If crime goes down and businesses want to invest in your city, you’re in pretty good shape. That’s been the situation under all of New York’s 21st century mayors, and it’s all been basically fine. If you can improve the cost-effectiveness of local public services, you’re a hero, but none of them have really done that. And that’s it.

Plenty of progressives have won big-city mayoral elections, but there are no modern-day progressive heroes in urban America, because there just isn’t much scope for progressive heroism.

You sometimes get someone like Dan Lurie in San Francisco on public safety or Cory Booker in Newark back in the day on education who becomes noteworthy as a moderate reformer. But even though de Blasio was a fine mayor, he didn’t catapult into progressive superstardom because it’s impossible to deliver on what progressives want.

When de Blasio won, he was hailed as “the next big thing in progressive politics.” Four years after he left office, progressives act like they’ve never heard of him. Not because he was a terrible mayor, but because the only way to actually deliver on what progressives want — better public services, a lower cost of living in big cities — is to actually reform wasteful spending and pointless regulation. There’s just not that much to be achieved through “soak the rich” rhetoric.

Meanwhile, given all that, I think the N.Y.C. business community should be asking themselves why they lined up behind a candidate in Cuomo who did not promise anything resembling a strong-on-the-merits reform agenda.

A good candidate with a good platform might have lost to the left anyway, but at least they’d be laying the groundwork for something. The fundamentals of N.Y.C. are strong enough that it’s really hard to fundamentally screw the city up. But the status quo governance is sufficiently dysfunctional that the only way forward is genuine reform, not Mamdani’s stated ideas or Cuomo’s wagon circling.