Nicole Gelinas New York Braces for a Mayor Mamdani The city’s future may depend on the socialist front-runner not doing much of what he says he’ll do.
Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist running for New York City mayor, is coasting toward city hall. He has won over younger voters with promises to freeze rents, provide free child care for infants and toddlers, and open city-run grocery stores to cut living costs. His appeal also rests on being young, photogenic, and relentlessly easygoing. He benefits as well from a fractured opposition: instead of a single challenger in the November 4 election, he faces two—former governor Andrew Cuomo and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—who are likely to split the anti-Mamdani vote.
Mamdani’s rise is striking for another reason: crime, one of the electorate’s top concerns, hasn’t derailed him, despite his past hostility to the NYPD and far-left statements on law enforcement. Just four years ago, worries about crime carried current mayor Eric Adams, a former cop and Mamdani’s ideological opposite, into office. Yet by early September, Mamdani led Cuomo, his closest rival, by more than 22 points and Adams by 37; Adams soon dropped out.
The turning point came in the June primary, when Mamdani shattered New York’s fragile political balance and left the city’s centrist forces unable to regroup. Adams’s narrow 2021 primary win, notes progressive journalist Ross Barkan, had reflected the lingering strength of the old coalition—machine politics, unions, business interests, and outer-borough voters concerned about crime—that governed the city for decades. That result, Barkan says, “tricked people” into thinking that the coalition could hold for Cuomo this year. But Cuomo’s effort to rebrand as a crime- and tax-conscious centrist, along with his union backing, could not overcome his liabilities—most glaringly, his 2021 resignation over sexual-harassment allegations.
As Barkan observes, a different kind of voter asserted itself in June—“not just the gentrifier, professional-class voter,” the stereotype of a Mamdani supporter, “but younger people of color, younger immigrant groups.” Mamdani’s victory reflects this demographic shift, as outer-borough voters of all races who remember the high-crime 1970s and 1980s steadily disappear from the rolls.
At the same time, New York’s political center has eroded. The Democratic Socialists of America now dominate low-turnout primaries, while the center has offered Democratic voters little—and even less, in this year’s mayoral primary. Adams’s scandal-plagued tenure left him too weak to run again as a Democrat, and Cuomo, overconfident, scarcely campaigned. By mid-September, the centrist core was so diminished that it couldn’t even push Cuomo out of the race after his primary loss; he continued on a third-party line, while Adams, too, ran as an independent. (His name will stay on the ballot despite his withdrawal.) The two spent the summer attacking each other—Adams even held a press conference just to call Cuomo a “snake and a liar”—instead of focusing on Mamdani. Meantime, Sliwa ran an energetic campaign on crime and taxes; but in today’s New York, a Republican without Michael Bloomberg’s deep pockets or Rudy Giuliani’s crisis-era momentum faces steep odds.
With Mamdani’s victory looking inevitable, New York’s best hope of safeguarding its two essential assets—its wealthy tax base, which funds expansive basic and social services; and its sense of public safety—is that checks and balances curb his ambitions. Much of his program requires state approval, and the city’s unpredictable political climate could also act as a brake. Mamdani himself has reason for restraint: keeping the city minimally stable is the surest path to reelection. Governor Kathy Hochul, who endorsed him on September 14, faces her own reelection next year. Will she fear another close call with Republicans, as in 2022, and move to check Mamdani—or worry more about a primary challenge from her left and yield to his demands?
The governor’s stance next year will be critical to New York’s future, since Hochul will hold power over one of Mamdani’s most significant proposals: sharply raising taxes and spending. Mamdani’s affordability pitch is simple: $10 billion in new annual city spending, funded almost entirely through new taxes on the wealthy and corporations. He claims that $9 billion could be raised “at a glance” by taxing “the wealthiest New Yorkers,” including $5 billion from a higher state corporate tax and $4 billion from a new 2 percent surcharge on city income over $1 million. The remaining $1 billion, he says, would come from that perennial holy grail: efficiencies. Most of this revenue—about $6 billion—would finance his biggest initiative, “free child care for every New Yorker aged six weeks to five years” at pay “parity with public school teachers.”
Mamdani is so confident in his premise—more taxes on the rich will make life better for everyone else—that he offers almost no details. His child-care plan gets just 117 words on his website. Basic questions go unanswered: Why should infants and toddlers, who mainly need to be fed, held, and supervised at play, require care from staff trained and paid like public school teachers, whose average salary before health and retirement benefits, as of 2023, was about $100,000? Would the program start with three-year-olds and then expand gradually to younger children, or would it immediately include infants, despite the immense logistical challenges of entrusting babies, who cannot report abuse or neglect, to strangers?
Mamdani is equally casual about the magnitude of his tax hike. He argues that raising the corporate tax rate from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent would simply match neighboring New Jersey’s. But as the Manhattan Institute’s Ken Girardin notes, this comparison ignores a key fact: unlike New Jersey, New York also imposes a separate city corporate tax, which already pushes the combined city/state top rate to 17.4 percent.
Mamdani seems sanguine about raising the city’s top personal income-tax rate by two points. Since its creation nearly 60 years ago, the tax has ranged from 2 percent in the late 1960s to nearly 4.5 percent at its peak, settling at just under 3.9 percent today. An increase of 2 percentage points, then, would mark a hike of more than 50 percent, the largest in city history. The top rate on seven-figure earners would climb to 6 percent; for context, only 13 states levy rates that high or higher. New York already burdens residents with both state and city income taxes. Mamdani’s proposed city hike would stack on top of Cuomo’s 2021 increase in the state’s top rate to 10.9 percent. If enacted, New York’s combined city/state top rate would approach 17 percent, well above California’s 13 percent.
Such sudden corporate and personal tax raises would threaten New York’s fragile tax base. The city’s Independent Budget Office notes that the top 1 percent of households—fewer than 40,000—pays about 41 percent of city taxes, which provide nearly a quarter of annual revenues. New York is already losing millionaires, as the Manhattan Institute’s E. J. McMahon and the Citizens Budget Commission have separately found. A city-only tax is especially risky: it’s easier for high earners to move just outside New York City to the surrounding suburbs to avoid Mamdani’s levy than to flee the state entirely.
The hikes would be damaging for another reason: they would enable a major surge in city spending, making future budgets more volatile. New York’s city-funded budget, excluding state and federal aid, is $89.5 billion. A $10 billion increase—90 percent from new taxes—would mean instant, recurring growth of 11.2 percent, before inflation. In a recession, income-tax revenues would plunge as wealthy earners saw losses in markets and bonuses. Once New Yorkers had grown accustomed to universal day care, however, the city would have little flexibility to roll it back, forcing either deep cuts to basic services or raises in broader, steadier taxes such as the property tax.
New Yorkers worried about Mamdani’s taxing and spending can take some comfort in Albany’s power. As mayor, Mamdani would need the governor and state legislature’s approval to raise the local corporate and the personal income tax. At first glance, it’s not clear why the lawmakers would resist; the leader of the assembly, Carl Heastie, followed Hochul with a September endorsement of Mamdani. After all, they have passed tax hikes before—and recently: earlier this year, for instance, the state boosted a downstate payroll tax for the MTA by $1.4 billion annually. But the politics of raising an income tax levied solely in the city are complicated. Even Democratic lawmakers outside the city have long resisted giving it too much control, since every dollar raised locally is one that the state cannot later tax and spend itself. The governor, meantime, has signaled that she is not inclined to elevate state taxes next year.
Recent precedent exists for such reserve. In 2014, Governor Cuomo rejected Mayor Bill de Blasio’s request to raise city income taxes by $800 million to fund his own pre-K plan for four-year-olds. Instead, Cuomo used swelling state revenues to pay for the program himself, while sharing in the credit. If the state’s economy stays strong—a big “if”—Governor Hochul could take the same approach, diverting some revenue growth to fund a scaled-down version of Mamdani’s child-care plan. Mamdani, like de Blasio, could still claim victory.
Another obstacle to Mamdani’s push for higher city income taxes is just as critical: personality. New York’s wealthy residents and business community have at times quietly accepted higher taxes. The Partnership for New York City, for instance, backed the recent payroll-tax hike. And in 2002, newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg persuaded his peers not to oppose a temporary income-tax increase to close the post-9/11 deficit, which pushed the city’s top rate to almost 4.5 percent.
But Mamdani has disadvantaged himself by casting businesses and the wealthy as adversaries. Appealing to altruism and a sense of belonging, he has even said that billionaires should not exist. Mamdani’s “biggest mistake so far,” says Sid Davidoff, who served in the 1960s administration of Mayor John Lindsay, is that “he’s made [business and the wealthy] the enemy. You can’t make them the enemy. They have to be behind these programs. . . . I get the idea, that he’s not gonna kowtow to the rich,” but “he really has to open up his ability to have a communication with that part of the city.”
Mamdani faces a similar constraint on another key proposal: eliminating fares on every city bus. Even if he found $700 million in new annual revenue to replace lost fare dollars, he cannot simply decree buses free. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, ultimately controlled by the governor, runs the system and would have to agree to get rid of the fare box (44 percent of riders already illegally evade the fare). More than lost revenue would be in question. Would fare-free buses, without a stronger law-enforcement presence, attract more homeless and mentally ill people? Would the buses create new demand, thus requiring the MTA to spend even more on additional service? And would the buses draw paying customers from the subway, cutting into that revenue?
Mamdani’s other affordability proposals are eclectic, but each is problematic in its own way, and he would have broader power to advance them than he would on taxes or free buses. Chief among them is a freeze on rents for the city’s nearly 1 million regulated apartments, despite the strain that this would place on landlords already struggling to keep up with rising maintenance costs, including for the 9 percent of buildings classified as in distress. Under state law, Mamdani could appoint the board that officially determines rent levels and stock it with allies. In theory, a strong governor could push the legislature to strip this discretion, perhaps tying rent increases automatically to inflation. But that would demand far more political courage than just resisting tax hikes.
Mamdani has also proposed to open at least five city-owned grocery stores. Such supermarkets would almost certainly lose money and undercut stores and bodegas with already-low profit margins. The state has no power to stop him. New York’s best hope is that, after a few attempts, he abandons the idea, recognizing the burden of running loss-making supermarkets at scale. Mamdani, one hopes, would learn quickly, too, that when shoppers are unhappy with the products or service at the municipal grocery store, they will blame the mayor, making the venture too costly politically to maintain.
Where Mamdani could exert the most authority without state oversight is in public safety. Though the Adams administration has reduced murders from their 2020–21 surge, the city’s safety balance remains precarious. As of early September, murders stood at 221—still 12 percent above the 2017 low of 197—while overall felony crime remains 28 percent higher than before the state’s more lenient criminal-justice laws took effect in 2020.
To keep the safety situation reasonably stable, moreover, the state and city have resorted to unsustainable measures. Last year, Governor Hochul deployed the National Guard to the subways after four murders in six weeks, while the mayor sent hundreds of officers on mandatory overtime underground. Until his appointment of Commissioner Jessica Tisch in fall 2024, Adams had mismanaged the police force, further damaging morale. The NYPD’s uniformed headcount, at just below 34,000, stands near record lows, more than 6,000 below early 2000s levels.
Horrific, and preventable, crimes continue to rattle New Yorkers. In early September, a career violent criminal, on the streets despite a recent parole violation, allegedly invaded the home of an elderly Queens couple, Frank and Maureen Olton, torturing and murdering them. Afterward, the suspect used the couple’s money to buy a ticket to a Times Square movie. And the disorder on city streets and subways remains elevated compared with 2019.
Mamdani has largely neutralized crime as a campaign issue, though, by belatedly absorbing a lesson that many progressives still resist: appear to care about it. The 2025 version of Mamdani has distanced himself from the radical platform that he endorsed in 2020 that sought to “#DefundTheNYPD” and called the department “wicked and corrupt.” He even told the New York Times that he planned to apologize to the NYPD for his previous disparagement of the force.
On the policy side, Mamdani’s 17-page plan for a “department of community safety” is just wonky enough to obscure concerns, at least for some. Peter Moskos, a policing expert and author of Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, says that, when he speaks to Mamdani supporters about the risk of a crime increase, they respond, “ ‘He has a public-safety plan. What about his public-safety plan?’ And I roll my eyes. Half of it is unfunded. Two-thirds of it, we know doesn’t work.”
Moskos’s eye-rolling is justified. The new department would spend $1.1 billion annually, about $605 million in “transfers of existing programs” and $455 million in new money. Much of the plan is re-spun and inflated social-services spending: more homeless “outreach” to help those needing to “navigate their housing options,” for example.
“Mamdani wants to expand the use of civilian ‘violence interrupters,’ activists who try to mediate conflicts before they escalate.”
To replace some police work, Mamdani wants to expand the use of civilian “violence interrupters,” activists who try to mediate conflicts before they escalate—now a progressive shibboleth. His policy paper, touting such programs, cites a place that doesn’t exist (“Charlotte, MD”), and the real-world examples are hardly persuasive: Chicago and Baltimore, both with per-capita murder rates several times New York’s, and a Mexican city so beset by gang violence that the U.S. government counsels against visiting. Mamdani thus wants New York to abandon what we know works—consistent policing and prosecution—to try something deployed as a last resort by cities that, suffering from impossible local politics or scarce resources, have given up on the obvious.
The centerpiece of Mamdani’s proposed “department of community safety” is a shift from policing to $400 million in new “mental health support” to “keep . . . streets and subways safe.” The idea is to expand a program dating to de Blasio’s mayoralty that sends mental-health workers rather than cops to some 911 calls. Mamdani also plans to deploy 100 subway outreach teams—each with three specialists, including peers, mental-health professionals, and EMTs—at stations with high levels of disorder. But the city and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority already do this type of work, and they’ve consistently found that it is labor-intensive and hard to expand, not least because it is tough to find professionals such as certified nurses who want to make a career of wandering the subways all night.
The fatal flaw, though, is that these programs aren’t replacements for policing, as Mamdani implies, but require more policing. Both the MTA-led and city-led teams of mental-health professionals, who initiate subway encounters with people in mental distress, depend on cops. These officers don’t usually have to interact directly with those suffering a mental-health crisis, but they do need to stand in the background, partly because civilian mental-health workers fear (with reason) getting attacked.
Another reason the police are necessary is that, under Adams, the city has expanded involuntary hospitalization for the severely mentally ill. His administration pushed for a new state law that now authorizes transporting not just those making imminent threats but also people who endanger themselves by failing to meet basic needs such as food, water, and clothing. This more assertive approach is making some difference in the level of street and subway disorder, though it’s hard to quantify. Yet, without police backup, a nurse cannot transport an uncooperative suffering patient, who can just walk away. Mamdani has said that he views involuntary commitment as a “last resort,” adding that he is “skeptical about its efficacy.” He has yet to answer a central question: Should someone ranting on the subway, though not making direct threats, be permitted to remain there? If police aren’t available to transport that person, and if there is no option of arrest for low-level offenses, then what happens?
New Yorkers who understand the long, hard work of keeping crime down have few options for institutional checks on Mamdani. Managing the police department is the mayor’s single greatest power. For all his flaws, Adams consistently pressed the legislature over the pre-2020 bail leniency laws that stoked rising crime and disorder, and his pressure helped push the governor and lawmakers to tighten them. But gaps in the state’s criminal-justice reforms remain. For example, the eight-year-old “raise the age” law—which shifted most 16- and 17-year-olds accused of crimes from adult courts to family court—has coincided with more youth shootings and homicides. Mamdani is unlikely to continue Adams’s effective pressure on Albany.
New York’s best prospect for preserving public safety is that, once a Mayor Mamdani has seen and heard for himself the on-the-ground details from NYPD brass and from public-health experts inside government, he would change his mind. “What would I tell Mamdani?” says Moskos. “Consider that you might be wrong.” An about-face would obviously “piss off his base,” but the rational reason for Mamdani to do this, Moskos maintains, is that, otherwise, he would watch “the city go to hell. That’s a square that can’t be circled.”
Mamdani does hear from supporters urging caution on law enforcement. “I’ve told him this personally,” says Sal Albanese, a Mamdani backer and former city councilman from moderate south Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s. “If he doesn’t make the city safe, his whole affordability agenda will be down the tubes. I said to him, look, part of your base is Muslim New Yorkers—many of them small-business and bodega owners. If they don’t feel safe, if they’re being robbed, if somebody gets shot, if you’re seen as not supporting the police, you’re gonna have a big, big problem.”
New Yorkers are also enduring a plague of petty disorder—and here, Mamdani betrays a troubling failure to grasp cause and effect. At a forum hosted by Vital City, when NY1 anchor Errol Louis pressed him about the brazen open-air sale of illegal alcohol at this fall’s West Indian American Day parade in Brooklyn—“tons of unlicensed vendors selling booze, beer, mixed drinks, all kinds of stuff, totally illegal, so blatant that, in my opinion, it had to have been noticed or condoned, frankly”—Mamdani mildly observed that the issue is a lack of vending permits: “If you want to tell someone that they cannot vend because they do not have a permit—and in the same breath, you’re uninterested in providing them with any avenue to actually procure a legal permit,” he said, “then where do you leave people? You leave people with a diminishing faith in civil society. . . . We ask New Yorkers to trust.” This philosophizing evades reality. New York has long limited vending permits, as it cannot have dozens of vendors competing on the same stretches of park, street, and sidewalk. Further, even if New York did increase the number of legal permits, it wouldn’t extend to the right to sell alcohol on the street. Yet Louis’s observation also helps explain why many people support Mamdani. After all, Adams hasn’t addressed rampant illegal vending. Many voters frustrated with Adams are willing to give someone else a try.
New York’s future, at least for the next four years, may depend on a combination of hobbled governance and political self-preservation: that a Mayor Mamdani won’t do much of what he says he’ll do, partly because the governor and state legislature won’t let him and partly because, moving to the center to avoid an electoral loss in four years, he changes his mind about letting the NYPD police the city.
The flaw in this theory: Why would Mamdani govern as if he faced a serious centrist challenge, when he just dispatched two such supposed threats? If the Democratic center cannot quickly reconstitute itself, why wouldn’t a struggling Mamdani dig in even deeper on socialism in 2029? New Yorkers who know how the city works—and how it can stop working—remain in anxious limbo.
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