Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via AP
Zohran Mamdani speaks at a campaign news conference at Astoria Park in Queens, New York, on June 24, 2025.
New York City’s Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has emerged as the answer to results-oriented leftists who had been longing for someone to carry Bernie Sanders’ torch. He centered his campaign on economics instead of culture, and energized grassroots support by talking nonstop about the cost of living, with policies that were simple and easy to understand: Fast & Free Buses, Freeze the Rent, Child Care for All. And it seemed to resonate widely across New York City.
In 2014, I went to work for Mayor Bill de Blasio, the last progressive with big ideas to occupy City Hall. I was inspired by de Blasio’s campaign for mayor because he too focused on delivering material benefits for working-class New Yorkers. He talked about things like minimum wage increases and universal pre-K in a proto-Bernie fashion, emphasizing income inequality. Then he actually delivered on those promises and more: taxing the rich to enact universal pre-K, raising the minimum wage for city workers, freezing rent, expanding paid sick leave, and keeping crime low.
Today, thousands of kids attend pre-K every morning in New York City, easing a cost burden for parents trying to make ends meet. It is a simple, universal, and highly visible policy that improved people’s lives, not something that’s convoluted or means-tested, or a hidden tax credit, or a small pilot program. Such progressive governance didn’t leave the streets strewn in garbage or drive away rich people, as the New York Post often predicted. De Blasio made it easier for parents from the Bronx to Staten Island to meet their child care needs. For this, Mamdani called de Blasio “the best mayor of my lifetime,” noting that “perception and record are not always the same thing.”
Part of the reason why the perception of de Blasio’s record became so distorted is because of how New York City’s tabloid press, business elites, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo responded to him, reflexively opposing leftist governance even when those policies benefited them.
Over time, people have begun to reevaluate de Blasio’s tenure and realize what he was able to accomplish. Nevertheless, Mamdani can learn from de Blasio’s struggles because he’ll face the same headwinds, not just from elites on Twitter who’ve consumed one too many deranged Bill Ackman tweets, but from the same organized money that tried to kill de Blasio’s universal pre-K program.
MAMDANI FIRST CAME TO THE ATTENTION of many last November with a “man on the street” video filmed in Queens and the Bronx, where he asked working-class New Yorkers who they voted for in the 2024 election. Many said they voted for Trump, expressed their struggles to afford necessities like MetroCard fares, and voiced dissatisfaction with Democrats for not doing enough to address people’s economic hardship. Mamdani listens without judgment. One person says, “It’s like if you’re speaking the things that people want to hear about, I don’t care what color you are, I’ll vote for you.” Near the end of the video, Mamdani asks, “If there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal childcare a reality, are those things you’d support?” We now know the answer.
The video, and the spirit behind it, captured much of what the democratic socialist left and economic populists have been calling for: meeting people where they are, listening to their material needs, and building a bigger tent by reaching Trump voters and the disaffected based on a positive vision rooted in cross-partisan, working-class economic solidarity.
Mamdani brings all of that, and more. He has a sunny disposition and a warm, approachable presence. He seems like a nice, normal guy, which helps defuse silly concerns about radicalism. And he doesn’t just speak simply and clearly, he does it a lot, on podcasts and TV, online and in person, even with people he disagrees with. He clearly understands that we live in an attention economy and you have to compete in it. There is no self-defeating, cautious liberal calculating about whether he might say the wrong thing or if an interviewer has the “right” politics. He just shows up, talks to people, and tries to persuade them. In other words, he does politics—something that many Democrats seem unable to do.
During the campaign, Mamdani faced a slew of absurd attacks. But he didn’t alter the campaign’s core focus on cost-of-living issues. He understood that there’s no finely tuned outrage meter. The opposition is going to call you extreme whether you push a “big-government” solution or a modest liberal tweak. There’s no point in overanalyzing or backing down in anticipation of blowback.
He also didn’t change the way he spoke. Establishment Democrats have often been afraid to say anything compelling because consultants have programmed them to sound like robots. Zohran didn’t speak like a Human Euphemism Generator, mumbling about “creating a fair economy.” He said to make buses free; that’s a real, tangible policy people can understand.
Mamdani can also draw lessons from de Blasio’s fraught relationship with the press.
One might think that with all these strengths, Mamdani would have an easy time in office. But backlash comes for everyone. And Mamdani can learn from de Blasio where the traps lie and how to avoid them.
De Blasio entered office promising to reform the NYPD and end stop-and-frisk. He ended up clashing with the NYPD after making remarks that were unfairly interpreted as anti-police, fueling an immense amount of negative tabloid coverage and playing into a caricature invented by the Post. The lesson isn’t to walk on eggshells on the topics of crime and public safety, but to understand that the politics of crime in New York have a potent history, rooted in the 1970s and 1980s and etched into the public imagination by films like Taxi Driver and the national media.
That history makes it especially important for Mamdani, who once called for defunding the police, to articulate a credible public safety agenda. He’s since backed off his defund stance and stated that he’d “work with police…because the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety.” Mamdani’s relentless focus on economics will help, but mayors have to govern the whole city, so he needs a credible policing strategy.
The first place to start is to simply affirm that people’s desire for public safety is real and valid. In a city with a lot of rich people and a lot of poor people, there will be scaremongering about crime. But falling into the trap of repeating that crime is actually low, while accurate, won’t be sufficient. In addition to giving voice to working people’s economic struggles, Mamdani can talk about how many working-class communities in New York suffer from gun violence, and that building a just society means delivering both economic justice and physical safety.
Law and order can also mean cracking down on corporate crime and slumlords who violate tenant protection laws, as well as taking on physical safety threats. People are as much enraged by the disproportionate treatment given to white-collar criminals relative to other criminals. In this sense, Mamdani can reframe tough on crime messaging, which naturally appeals to conservatives, with a populist economic lens that could also appeal to leftists and liberals, while still giving voice to legitimate physical safety concerns.
Mamdani can also draw lessons from de Blasio’s fraught relationship with the press. He frequently sparred with reporters and was criticized for not developing relationships with them. He seemed reluctant to engage, and that fed more negative coverage. Mamdani’s “go everywhere” campaign strategy suggests he well understands the importance of engaging with media. But the lesson applies to governing as much as it does to campaigning. Unlike Mayor Eric Adams, frequently captured on video doing nothing, Mamdani can continue to directly engage with New Yorkers, on the streets and subways, about the issues they care about.
De Blasio was also criticized for being disengaged from New York City’s cultural life. He was seen as aloof. His absence from New York’s public spaces meant that people found they couldn’t connect with him and didn’t have a sense of his personality. In this vacuum, trivial and silly attacks about him going to the gym or eating pizza came to define him. Where Bloomberg was seen at the opera and Adams at the private club Zero Bond, each signaling a different form of elite belonging, Mamdani can show up more among the people, across the spectrum of New York’s cultural life.
And of course, if his entire campaign revolved around delivering on the cost of living, his governance needs to actually reflect that, while making very clear who is standing in the way of that progress. The “campaign in poetry and govern in prose” trap breaks the faith and trust of voters, cementing a perception that Democrats simply don’t follow through. When successes happen, they must be tangible and big and immediate and broadcast to everyone, to neutralize the general boredom the press has with policy.
These lessons matter because the left needs more national models of how to deliver for working people, as the sewer socialists did in Milwaukee and as de Blasio did just a decade ago. While de Blasio’s achievements were undermined by a hostile press and missteps of his own making, Mamdani has a chance to avoid the same fate and build a national blueprint for big-tent economic populist governance.
