Paint This Town Red: Mamdani and the NYC We Deserve
Some thoughts on NYC’s primary election
Identifying and resisting the Bloomberg tradition in New York City politics
I came to New York City during Mayor Bloomberg era. I was a recent Princeton Seminary grad, where I’d completed an 18-month graduate placement just across the river in the Mayor’s Office in Newark, NJ. That fall, in 2010, I was eager to learn and contribute to the public life of New York, beginning with my tenure as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs in New York. During my fellowship rotations working for a labor union, a worker center on Staten Island, a city agency, a public affairs corporation, and more, I learned some hard lessons. The most critical one: New York City’s political class talks incessantly about public-private partnerships. That talk almost always means that the private sector is the senior, dominant partner; the public and community sectors, the junior partner in decision-making power. Some New York institutions viewed the Bloomberg days as a technocratic dream of efficient government, but for the majority, the multiracial working-class New Yorkers who make the city run, the dream of purportedly data-driven solutions were widely understood to be a thin veil over nightmare levels of racial and economic inequality. Under Bloomberg, real estate and financial interests openly ran the city, stop and frisk policies routinely violated civil liberties, the City Charter was amended to give him a third term, and living wage proposals were shut down repeatedly, until he was forced to make a concession on the Fair Wages for New Yorkers act.
The Bloomberg regime is the shadow over New York City politics. It’s the guiding ethos that Mayor DeBlasio valiantly challenged without overturning, one that Mayor Eric Adams extended, especially in policing, and one that former New York Governor, now mayoral candidate, Andrew Cuomo, would reinstitute. Cuomo and Adams are of course different in some ways, but are alike in that both politicians are heirs of the Bloomberg tradition. Both politicians represent a Gracie Mansion set up, purchased by, and managed on behalf of the affluent. Both Adams and Cuomo make policy nods to economic opportunity, mentorship, and the like, but never quite aim for economic justice, fairness, and institutionally guaranteed access to public goods for every New Yorker. Indeed, Bloomberg endorsed Adams in 2021 and, days ago, backed Cuomo as his candidate for Mayor. The Cuomo-Adams tradition of purported swagger and brash self-presentation is perhaps decent at retail politics, but is subject to a mantra that might be summarized as: what’s good for (big) business is what’s good for the five boroughs. It’s a political tradition that wants a city where corporations, investors, and well-capitalized industry associations - think the Real Estate Board of New York, for example - establish the agenda of “reasonable” public policy, with wealthy donors of course reinforcing and enforcing the parameters of what’s reasonable. It is a tradition where moderate city management, we are told, will “get the city back on track”, as former Governor Cuomo put it in a recent debate, where social policy and programs are a budget bargaining chip, always at risk of enduring massive cuts or shuttered programs altogether. This future of New York, like its recent past, is dystopian — and as far as the ballot box goes, preventable. If the Bloomberg political tradition present in Cuomo-Adams is to be rejected, where does that leave voters?
I’ll cut to the chase: Zohran Mamdani should be the next Mayor of New York City. For New Yorkers reading this week’s post, I’ll explain why I, as a trained political scientist and a black pastor in the tradition of black social Christianity, support Mamdani’s candidacy and the governing possibilities that it represents. For those outside NYC, the upshot here is that a politics of public investment and deep affordability, to name a couple of things, can be both an electoral asset and a catalyst for the necessary, wider work of social movements.
I Hear You, But What About…aka Black Politics and Mamdani’s Campaign
Let’s address a few objections off rip, as the youngsters say. Fiorello LaGuardia, by a country mile and a good subway ride, is the best Mayor in New York City history. Like all politicians, we can point in his case to miscalculations and missteps, but his achievements of defeating Tammany Hall, reforming civil service employment, building sewers and unifying the subway system, and locally administering New Deal programs — all of this, crucially, with “mobilizations of workers, the unemployed, tenants, and political radicals” pushing him to do so “in response to the Great Depression” — are a relevant standard for equitable municipal governance. More specifically, LaGuardia’s legacy, as Freeman argues in the article linked above, points to the kind of informed public engagement that all New Yorkers would need to embody in order for a Mamdani mayoralty to be effective. Equally important, for those who wonder about the relationship of socialism to black politics in New York City, two quick points.
Quiet as its kept, David Dinkins, New York City’s first black Mayor was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America; though his politics evolved over time, at the moment of his election, he delivered a welcoming speech to a meeting of the Socialist International that DSA organized at the storied hospital workers union, Local 1199. In view of this history, Mamdani could be seen, in some ways, as picking up an under-reported, unheralded, yet crucial dimension of Dinkins’ political tradition — one that, note well, is decidedly different from the Bloomberg tradition of New York City politics.
Mamdani is not only building on Dinkins’ legacy, but also the community-driven, bring the results home socialism that Charles and Inez Barron have long modeled, together and individually, over the course of two decades in New York City and New York state politics. The Barrons, in the interview cited above, anticipate and speak to understandable concern many voters likely have: can a socialist get stuff done in New York City? Their record is a resounding yes, one that includes renovated libraries, three new schools constructed, and at least three affordable housing projects, built on the basis of neighborhood median income rather than the wider, less equitable metric of area median income. I point out the legacies above to note that a vote cast for Mamdani is not a departure from black politics, but in some ways, an extension of it. It’s an effort to help realize a New York City that is, as Mayor Dinkins put it, a “gorgeous mosaic” that is affordable to the working families and communities that have helped give New York City its vaunted, deserved status as a metropolitan area.
Mamdani’s full name — Zohran Kwame Mamdani — further underscores a connection to black politics in its most transformative dimension. His middle name, Kwame, reflects his birth in Ghana and is, more particularly, a homage to Kwame Nkrumah; Nkrumah, for context, achieved international renown as a founder of Ghana, its first prime minister, and one of the most notable Pan-African theorists and socialist politicians of the anti-colonial, human rights struggle of the mid-20th century. Mamdani’s candidacy, in other words, can be seen as rooted in the internationalist, socialist tradition that has always been part and parcel to, though sometimes forgotten — or suppressed — within black politics.
The most viable pathway to win — and block Cuomo
If you’ve made it this far, perhaps you’ll grant that Mamdani’s politics are consonant with the visionary strand of black radical politics. A further question remains: can he win, though? Less than two weeks out from the June 24th primary, the polls consistently indicate that Mamdani is the candidate best positioned to defeat Cuomo. His cross-endorsement earlier this week with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the first-ever under New York City’s ranked choice system, strengthens both Mamdani’s candidacy and the overall voting block of a progressive Mayoral candidate. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, of course, endorsed Mamdani recently, further adding wind into his sails. Mamdani has proven himself an able fundraiser, adept messenger, and, contrary to concerns about his limited management experience, seems to have built the most effective campaign operation, certainly in terms of ground game, of this election cycle.
Affordability now, across all the boroughs
In addition to electoral viability, there’s another, simple point to be made: New York City has gotten far, far too expensive. That’s a point which everyone from the incumbent to all of the mayoral candidates acknowledge Given that reality, New Yorkers deserve public sector leadership that makes the city affordable as broadly, quickly, and deeply as possible. Mamdani’s relentless campaign focus on affordability may prove to be a winning argument - it’s certainly one substantiated by the facts and by lived experiences across Gotham. His plan to freeze the rent in over 2.5 million rent-stabilized units, while also pushing on housing production for 200,000 units - more production can decrease housing costs overall — across 10 years is a good, viable plan. Providing city-run grocery stores, supporting small business, and opening a department of community safety are, it seems to me, common-sense, common good policies that merit support from the electorate. The theory of government underpinning his campaign is that the local public sector should leverage its powers — through things like service provision, establishing a cross-agency administrative direction, leveraging and withholding incentives, and partnering with Albany — to be a blessing to New Yorkers hardest hit by decades of institutional disinvestment from both City Hall and the uneven effects of America’s economy.
The political-governing importance of the affordability-first pitch to voters
Local politics isn’t just about articulating good policies. It’s also about assembling and activating a constituency that can design, enact, and crucially, successfully implement a policy agenda in real time. In a Mamdani administration, we could witness a partial, more demographically diverse revival of the LaGuardia coalition, in the sense that the affordability argument he’s making has a kind of precedent in LaGuardia’s mayoralty. The current President is obviously not FDR, nor is the MAGA agenda remotely like the New Deal policy consensus that LaGuardia had to work with, but there is a crucial point to be made on messaging. Mamdani’s affordability-first pitch to voters is not entirely dissimilar to “reduce the price of eggs” narrative of the presidential cycle. We know of course, that far more than the cost of dairy products was at play in the last election cycle, to put it mildly, but it’s also true that bargaining in politics requires shared framing to make passing budgets and political programs possible. My point, here, is a modest but important one: Mamdani’s affordability for every New Yorker message is the best available campaign theme and political frame from which to negotiate a hard, fair bargain for New York City residents in Albany. It could enable a Governor, for example, to say, “We may not agree on everything or see the world the same way, but I agree that we need to make New York City more affordable, and so we’re collaborating on X issue”. That’s a viable, even attractive state-level scenario for policymaking, and it’s one that might not exist but for the judicious messaging of Mamdani’s campaign. Don’t be fooled by the viral clips and slick social media production, the beginnings of a more equitable approach to governing and bargaining — in a way that doesn’t leave the hardest hit New Yorkers under the bus — are both transparent and resident within the basic argument set forth by Assemblymember Mamdani’s campaign for Mayor.
Let’s Head To The Polls, Family!
I have committed twenty years of my adult life, twelve of them pastoring, to preaching Jesus’ Gospel of good news to the poor, a beloved community where, as Mary’s Magnificat suggests, the hungry are filled with good things and the lowly are exalted in society’s priorities. If one believes that something like that is true, one is obliged to make proximate choices — there are no perfect ones available — about who builds out a governing agenda and achievable policy vision that reflects one’s values. I suspect at this point, you have a good sense of where I land on that particular question.
Nevertheless, I grant that other candidates have good ideas — such as City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ guaranteed income pilot, Comptroller Brad Lander’s proposed Office of Workers’ Rights, former Assemblymember Michael Blake’s local median income approach, to pick a few examples. Ranked choice voting enables our ballots to reflect the full measure of our policy preferences and political choices. While I plan to rank Mamdani first, I will likely rank the candidates above in some order on the ballot. I’m ranking Mamdani at the top because his campaign ties the affordability case to an equally important political reality. Working people deserve a political who believes, at both the level of first principles and at the fire in the belly level, that the well-being of working people should govern New York City and be the North Star for its municipal agenda.
Making New York City more affordable, to pull on the old Keynesian case, also puts more money into the hands of families as consumers, whose aggregate spending can stimulate our local economy and, incidentally, improve New York City’s overall financial standing. As of today, early voting in New York City has begun. Let’s paint this town red and build the more free, more fair New York City that our elders, our children, and our futures deserve.