The broad swath of centrist Democrats and conservatives who have hoped to wound Mamdani enough to sap him of political capital are still figuring out how to land real blows.
More than half a year into his unprecedented tenure as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, has encountered his fair of challenges. There were the homeless deaths during a brutally cold winter. There was a budget gap that threatened to damage the city’s finances. There were squabbles over how to close it—Mamdani, at one point, floated a deeply unpopular property tax hike—and tussles with the City Council over how generously to fund an ambitious and very expensive housing voucher program. Later on, Mamdani’s decision to endorse two DSA members running for Congress alienated senior members of the House delegation. Through it all, his rivals and ideological enemies stood ready to pounce on just about every misstep, real or perceived.
What’s made the Mamdani mayoralty fascinating is how, for now at least, it’s overcome powerful and entrenched opposition. Never before was a mayor elected who was despised by so many wealthy New Yorkers. Plenty of elites disliked Bill de Blasio, the last mayor who identified as a progressive, but even he was a career politician who had forged close relationships with the major real estate developers in the five boroughs. Mamdani, from the jump, was an enemy of capital, even as he’s sought to smooth over relationships with the business community. His battle with Ken Griffin, a right-wing billionaire, over his support for a tax on luxury second homes—Mamdani cut a video singling Griffin out—was a reminder of where the mayor stood.
(Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
The broad swath of centrist Democrats and conservatives who have hoped to wound Mamdani enough to sap him of political capital are still figuring out, all these months later, how to land real blows. Mamdani, to them, is almost like a rope-a-dope fighter, ducking and dodging whenever they feel they’re close, slowly wearing them down. Emblematic of this dynamic has been Mamdani’s relationship with the New York Post. The Murdoch-owned tabloid delighted in flaying de Blasio for eight years before, for a period, evolving into an Eric Adams propaganda organ. The Post is powerful because it regularly provides granular local coverage that even The New York Times has backed away from, and it has the ability, with a large circulation and highly trafficked website, to influence other outlets, whether it’s television, radio, print media, or the conversation on social media. Even with the Post lambasting him almost every day, de Blasio did win reelection, but he steadily lost popularity and never quite regained the political momentum he enjoyed in his very first year, when he began building up his universal prekindergarten program. The Post bashed him for the homeless in the streets—the problem, of course, predated him—and for hating the police, though he had hired a law-and-order police commissioner and supported budgets to grow the NYPD headcount. When de Blasio attended funerals for two officers assassinated in late 2014, police turned their backs on him.
What made the Post’s attacks on de Blasio so effective was that they were able to create a narrative about his tenure that hardened rather quickly. De Blasio was portrayed as feckless, inattentive, and even vain, the caricature of the lazy, professorial liberal condescending to everyday New Yorkers. Much of this was unfair, but de Blasio did feed the beast in his own way, often showing up late for events and straining, with little success, to build a national profile. His run for the presidency, in 2019, was a disaster, and his endorsements in 2016 and 2020 caused him more agita than anything else. A Hillary Clinton supporter when many progressives went for Bernie Sanders, de Blasio nevertheless wasn’t beloved in Clintonworld and was mocked for his lonely door-knocking in Iowa. Meanwhile, he backed Sanders in 2020, but the support felt belated and he wasn’t taken seriously as a surrogate. Minor controversies, ginned up by his enemies, dogged him, too. There was eating pizza with a fork. Dropping the groundhog. Getting blamed, stupidly, for not plowing the Upper East Side after a snowstorm as a form of political retribution. When he found himself in highly pitched political fights, like Uber’s incursion into New York City, he saw his success rate drop.
With Mamdani, the Post and its allies have largely tried to run the same playbook. Virtually every day, there is an attack lodged, a controversy inflated. Mamdani is anti-police, antisemitic, overly woke, the boy with the silver spoon in his mouth. Sometimes, they bash Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, who has no role in the administration. Of late, the Post has been on the warpath because a map of immigrant enclaves left out Little Italy, even though it’s been many decades since any actual Italian immigrants lived there. Duwaji, meanwhile, is taking heat for traveling abroad during the Fourth of July; it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t collect a public salary and therefore is free to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Not all these controversies are irrelevant—given the Graham Platner fiasco, it’s fine to raise questions about Mamdani’s close association with Morris Katz—but the right wing threatens, with Mamdani, to become the boy who cried wolf. Complain every day, and nothing matters.
Current Issue
Mamdani has retained strong poll numbers because he is a rare political talent, a global celebrity who is also very attuned to the performative nature of being mayor of New York. He plainly relishes the job in a way de Blasio did not. He visits night clubs, plays soccer in the park, fanatically cheers on the Knicks, and documents all of it on social media, where he enjoys a massive following. Uganda-born, he can’t run for president, so he’s rooted in the five boroughs. He is helped, too, by the ineffectual nature of the attacks against him. The problem for conservatives is they haven’t settled on a consistent narrative, one that makes sense and can resonate with the broader electorate. Either Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor, is bringing Shariah law to New York or he’s too socially liberal, too supportive of trans rights. He hates the police, but crime is low so only his police commissioner can get credit—but he and Jessica Tisch, a billionaire friendly with the Post, have a decent working relationship. He’s a Marxist radical or he’s disappointing the left because buses aren’t free yet and he hasn’t been able to hike income taxes on millionaires.
In some ways, the pro-Trump conservatives who are angered most by Mamdani are learning, at last, what it has felt like for liberals to attempt to weaken Trump throughout the 2010s and early ’20s. Trump, now, is failing, but that has less to do with the left and a lot more to do with his shambolic, disastrous presidency. When Trump was stronger, Democrats would latch on to endless streams of mini-controversies that were less about substance and more about an inane tweet or utterance Trump made. Eventually, they learned that it was best to focus on what Trump was actually doing, the tangible wreckage. The affordability attacks work because Trump’s Iran War has driven up the cost of gasoline.
With Mamdani, the Post and their ilk find themselves with an opponent who isn’t easily rattled, who won’t bend at the slightest provocation. There are many substantive critiques to make of the Mamdani administration—can they balance the budget next year?—but his enemies can’t discipline themselves enough to stick to them. For now, they’re punching air and little else.