Why Zohran Mamdani Works In This Moment Bloomberg Com

He proposed free crosstown buses. He pushed for steep tax hikes on the wealthy—including an 18.5% property tax increase— insisting none of his rich friends threatened to leave the city over higher taxes. He championed millions to build supermarkets in long-neglected neighborhoods. And under his plan, city workers could give privately raised cash to New Yorkers booking dental appointments or keeping their children in school. These progressive policies, however, are not from New York City’s Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Experts said they were from Michael Bloomberg, New York's billionaire former Republican mayor and a prominent supporter of Andrew Cuomo's run for mayor.

MORE: Muslim donors flood Mamdani's campaign for NYC mayor, see national impact As Mamdani reshapes the city's political map, some experts told ABC News a striking parallel is emerging. Behind the labels of "socialist" and "technocrat," both men share aligned goals: taxing the rich during crises, promoting expansive transit ideas, and bold plans to bring fresh food to low-income communities. Still, experts said, even when policies overlap, most New Yorkers do not see them as similar. Zohran Mamdani defeated a Republican, a fellow Democrat, and an army of billionaires when he emerged victorious in the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, will be the first Muslim to ever hold the position, and the youngest mayor in over a century.

More than 2 million New Yorkers voted in the closely watched race, making it the largest turnout for a mayoral race in more than 50 years. With around 90% of ballots counted on Wednesday morning, Mamdani had won just over 50% of the votes cast. The 34-year-old campaigned during a time of rising financial insecurity on making the city more affordable for most of the city’s residents through rent freezes, free buses and universal childcare. To pay for those policies, he promised a modest tax increase for New York City’s millionaires and a rise in the corporate tax rate. Read More: A Politics of No Translation.’ Zohran Mamdani on His Unlikely Rise In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the mayor-elect goes behind the scenes of his meeting with the president and talks about some of his political heroes.

Zohran Mamdani won’t become New York City’s mayor until January 1, but there is already immense pressure on him to achieve great things. Yet the 34-year-old democratic socialist, who will be the city’s youngest mayor since Hugh John Grant served in the late 19th century, shows few signs of being overwhelmed. In fact, in a new conversation with The Nation, Mamdani spoke of his determination to make bold and unexpected moves both to protect New Yorkers from economic and political threats and to directly improve... The boldness of Mamdani’s postelection approach has extended to talking with ideological opposites—as he did in his high-profile November meeting with Donald Trump at the White House, and in a less widely reported follow-up... Trump’s respectful response to the outreach from the incoming mayor who, just weeks before the two met, had referred to the president as “a despot,” shocked pundits and politicians—including a good many Republican candidates... Mamdani told me that he went into the White House meeting with a clear understanding of the differences he has with Trump, whom he decried throughout much of the 2025 campaign as “a fascist”...

The mayor-elect knew that a long string of political figures from the US and around the world had been dressed down, embarrassed, and attacked by the president during White House meetings. He also knew that, while he would be civil to Trump, he would not disavow his deeply held progressive beliefs, nor minimize their fundamental ideological differences. According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the... “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month.

“There may even be other missing Mayors.” New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a. the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists... (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia.

He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history. And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall. Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion),... It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them.

Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him. Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani.

In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite. (“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in... Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours. Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense.

For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall. In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just... It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires,... The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months. Daily stocks & crypto headlines, free to your inbox

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