How Zohran Mamdani Won, and What Comes Next

0:06Hey, Eric. Hello. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. So you've been covering New York City politics for a long time now. And obviously we're here today to talk about Zoran Mamdani. He's the big story. He began this race as a total long shot candidate. He drove unusually high turnout and he won at a moment when much of his own party's leadership was reluctant to support or to endorse him. Does this moment remind you of anything we've witnessed in city politics before? Or are we looking at something genuinely new here? I think it's hard to overstate how much this is like something that just hasn't happened in city politics before.

0:47Nice. I was hoping for that answer. Yeah. I mean, you know, like there are parallels and I love thinking about New York City history and like there are, you know, I think that there are lessons, you know, and there are like comps back there to think about and talk about. But the idea of like, you know, young, out of nowhere, strident candidate just storming into power without the backing of like any of the powers that be in the city. And, you know, six months ago, nobody knew his name. And now he's going to be the mayor. The velocity, you know, like the speed of this story is kind of what's unprecedented.

1:25That's Eric Latch, a staff writer at The New Yorker who covers New York City politics. We're now a week removed from Zoran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral race, a result that upended the city's political establishment and drew the highest turnout in decades. Since then, we've started to see what a Mamdani administration might actually look like. He's begun assembling a transition team, naming figures like former FTC chair Lena Kahn as co-chair and signaling plans to keep Eric Adams' police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, in place. But even before taking office, Mamdani is also facing pressure from the White House, as President Trump has already threatened to withhold federal funds from New York City.

2:04And there's also been speculation that Trump might send federal troops into the city as well. I wanted to talk with Eric about how Mamdani is approaching this transition to power, what his early choices might reveal about how he plans to govern, and how he's preparing for conflict not just in Albany, but with Washington, D.C. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. So how definitive was Mamdani's win? I mean, now that we're, you know, significantly past Election Day, and we can see the numbers in terms of turnout and results. Yeah, I think a million votes, you know, which is what he got in the general, is a big deal.

2:41And in some ways, so he won the primary in June, you know, which I think he got about 450 ,000 votes in June and surprised everyone and beat former governor Cuomo. And then Cuomo mounted this kind of scorch-earth revenge campaign in the general election. And it was a nasty, nasty race and a kind of sort of a sad race, I think, for the city, how just negative and horrible it was. But in a kind of ironic way, I think, that Cuomo went down kicking and screaming quite as violently as he did. Only ended up, I think, increasing Momdani's power because he basically, you know, demonstrated, like, the ability not just to beat Cuomo but to just attract so many votes in the process.

3:24Yeah, no, it was crazy to see the numbers. And, yeah, it was either people turning out in order to cast their vote for Momdani or turning out to make sure that Cuomo was not the mayor. Yeah. It was like a turnout driver and then like a turnout driver in the other direction, which was kind of funny, I think. But like just to get the city so engaged and involved and then to have them win with over 50 percent. And, you know, I think that that is a big deal. So I want to ask the question, which is on everyone's minds, which is basically just will Mom Donnie be able to do anything, good or bad? Yeah.

3:59But, you know, I think that part of the criticism of his campaign was just that he was promising a lot of things that the mayor doesn't actually have, you know, kind of final say on. And so just given that freezing the rent, that that's something that involves, I think, what is the rent guidelines board, although he can appoint the members of that board, you know, free buses, you know, raising the state's corporate tax rate. Like how many of those things are kind of contingent upon people like Governor Kathy Hochul playing ball, city council playing ball? And kind of what is your sense of his ability to be able to, you know, follow through?

4:33I mean, as you know, as well as anybody, my prognosticative abilities are limited. You were coming on this podcast just a few days before the race saying that Sliwa had it in the bag. And you're lucky that we're even willing to have you back on after that. Totally. Thank you. This is so you can redeem yourself. Thank you. I appreciate it. No, but it's like I did not think, you know, going into the primary and even when Mamdani started to sort of gain some traction and momentum, it's like, you know, it's like the idea that he was going to win. It's not like I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I called this.

5:05And, you know, there's a there's so there's a degree of difficulty to these kinds of predictions. On the one hand, like, I think the discourse around the race was a little too caught up in kind of like the kind of what's realistic in the sense that, like, I don't think that a lot of Mamdani's voters really cared about that. I think what they were voting for was, you know, they were throwing a guy a vote because they appreciated that he was calling for it, that they appreciated the asking, you know. And so like the follow through, I think most – many of his voters I think know how hard this is and that there's a sort of strong possibility of failure as there is for all New York City mayors since time immemorial.

5:45I mean, you know, I think that like the top three sort of campaign promises that he made, freezing the rent, making the buses in the city free, and universal childcare. I'll take those very quickly, sort of one at a time, starting from the last one. Universal childcare, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, has already come out and sort of said she supports the premise, the sort of goal of that. So there seems to be some sort of political room to move. And so the question of like how you get it done, how you pay for it, how you recruit the teachers and how you sort of stand up a program of this kind, you know, it seems like there's space there.

6:22And what does universal child care actually mean? It means— Like how young does that start at? Yeah, so they're starting from six weeks of age. And what that means is not every baby in the city is going to be forced into like a city-run program. But what it means is like universally available. For parents who can't get leave or— Yeah. Yeah. And but sort of ironically, like before he won the primary, that that one was in some ways the campaign proposal that City Hall veterans who I talked to suggested was going to be the toughest one because it involves like, you know, there's all sorts of regulations around child care for kids that young.

6:59You have to staff it up like where are these teachers going to come from? It's harder to imagine that one than free buses even for some reason, maybe just like the idea of like, who are these people who will be rocking the babies? Yeah, well, and so, you know, because logistically, like free buses is not a technically difficult policy to enact. You just stop collecting the fares. You know, lots of people get on the bus today without paying a fare. But Hochul, at the same time that she's sort of expressed support for the child care idea, like really seems a lot colder towards the free bus idea.

7:33And like that gets to, I think, this dynamic that's, you know, the classic dynamic in New York City, which is like the way that power kind of ping pongs back and forth between the city and the state government often. You know, so it's like the buses are run by a state entity called the MTA. And so, you know, a mayor is an important kind of partner and stakeholder in like the MTA and like what it does, but he doesn't control it. So, you know, can that happen? You know, I think that this is just like politics. It's about like the politicking of it. You know, it's about building energy and momentum and buy-in and then executing it.

8:10But there's all kinds of arguments about, you know, why the MTA wants to keep collecting the fares. And so, you know, that one is we're waiting to see kind of how that starts to play out after Momdani takes office in January. And then the last one is the rent freeze, which in some ways is the most straightforward in the sense that the mayor, like you said, you know, the mayor basically appoints the members of this board called the Rent Guidelines Board. And that's the city like sort of bureaucratic body that every year determines how much landlords in. And this gets wonky a little bit, bear with me, but like, you know, basically the city has a pretty unique set of rent control laws.

8:54And, you know, within those laws, there's about a million housing units, apartments that what are called rent stabilized, which means that this board determines every year how much the landlords, the owners of these apartments get to raise the rent. And Momdani could ostensibly just appoint a bunch of people who support his idea of freezing the rent. And then they would freeze the rent increases for these rent-stabilized apartments in the same way that de Blasio did multiple times when he was mayor. Yeah, so de Blasio in his eight years did it three times. Yeah. You know, where he basically telegraphed what he wanted.

9:26And even – I mean Adams didn't freeze the rent, although Mamdani and his supporters criticized Adams for overseeing basically cumulatively 12 percent increase in rents in these apartments over the last four years. You know, these have been 3 % or so a year increases. And earlier this year when the board approved some higher increases in an election year, this was before Adams dropped out. It was like so politically uncomfortable that Adams just basically ordered them back in the room to get them a smaller number, a smaller number. So it's clear that the mayor sort of exerts control, direct control in this process, which is the thing that Mamdani keyed into so successfully in this race.

10:09I see. I mean, you were saying that the focus on whether or not these policy proposals are actually that realistic, that that was something that kind of the pundit class maybe focused on too much in this campaign, given that Momdani's voters were in some ways going off of vibes, energy, also just like this general promise and focus on affordability. You know, it's him kind of taking that stance in a way that, you know, we haven't seen anyone really take it with such charisma and like genuine interest. But I do think that now that he's elected, I guess I'm just curious, like what we actually think we're going to see happen.

10:42And also, I feel like part of this is there are all these people who are like freaking out before he was elected. I mean, I even did this piece on, you know, therapists in New York City dealing with the, you know, so-called political anxiety, election anxiety. And sometimes it was just, you know, kind of your classic, like, I'm worried about this socialist coming in. But then sometimes it was like a landlord who was really worried about, you know, what would happen if the rents are frozen or you have business leaders who are worried about Mom Donnie saying that he wants to raise the state's corporate tax rate to meet that of New Jersey's.

11:13And so in the wake of all of those people freaking out and then Mamdani actually winning, what kind of behavior have you seen from financial leaders and key players in the city? All of these people who were, you know, making, you know, pretty big statements about how they were going to flee if he won. Yeah. You know, it just in this way, it was kind of it was a frustrating end to the election because the hyperbole was insane. You know, the idea that New York was just going to empty out of wealthy people because Momdani won, I think is ludicrous. It's like saying people are going to leave the U.S.

11:50because of Trump. I mean, it's like it's sort of the classic, you know, response. Yeah, exactly. I'm moving to Canada or whatever, you know, and how many people actually do that? And but the bigger question is like, what is the relationship going to be between, you know, this young socialist mayor who's got this ambitious agenda for change and very explicitly wants to like change the city? And then all these very powerful and entrenched forces that like are going to oppose that, you know, and is that just going to be like hopelessly, you know, for the rest of us, a kind of like conflict that like results in frustration and pain on all sides?

12:27You know, or is that going to resolve or open up political possibilities in ways that like benefit the city? Like that's like the big question. You know, so I wrote this profile of Mumdani that came out a couple of weeks ago. And one of the people I talked to for that story was Kathy Wilde, who was the head of a business group in the city, long time head of a business group in the city, sort of ambassador of the business community in the city who had brokered over the summer a series of meetings between Mumdani and members of the business community and real estate community. and the line that she was using, you know, after these meetings, when people were asking her, like, well, what was the reaction in the room?

13:04She was like, somebody asked me, like, what was the reaction in the room on a scale of 1 to 10? And she was like, 1 to 10. You know, like the business community, you know, like all other communities in New York City, as we say, is not a monolith, you know. And so there are certain very loud participants in this conversation, as all conversations, Bill Ackman on X, et cetera, that like are making it – but not every Wall Street type that Mamdani met over the summer hated him. And a lot are sort of seeing possibilities in him. And like Kathy Wilde, who very famously fought, feuded with Bill de Blasio, Mamdani's predecessor as mayor, seemed honestly quite chipper when I talked to her about – you know, about kind of like Mamdani as an individual to deal with, you know, beyond, you know, setting aside.

13:55the kind of ideological differences. Yeah, no, that makes sense. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, I want to get into sort of the early developments we've been seeing from Mom Donnie as he prepares to take office in January. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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14:57so i want to talk about what we're seeing as mom donnie's transition to power begins to take shape it's actually really funny i feel like there's so much interest in like his transition team and it's like this like sexy thing and you see people online like applying to be it's like everyone kind of thinks that they could be in it um whereas like care about eric adams's transition team i mean i guess we knew that it was going to be like all of his old cronies from when he was like brookenboro president. And that's maybe part of the difference here is that Mamdani doesn't like have a team in that sense.

15:25It's generational. Yeah. But it's it is funny, like talking about his transition team, the way that we would talk about like a president's transition team. It's just, you know, the mayor, but we're going to talk about it. So Mamdani has been appointing this transition team. And one of the big picks was former Federal Trade Commission chair, Lena Kahn, who is the co-chair, I believe. So what can you tell us about Khan and what her appointment indicates here? Yeah, I mean, part of it, I think, is sort of a generational sort of signaling. You know, so Khan, like Momdani, is in her mid-30s, you know, and it's just a kind of like new blood kind of thing.

16:02But also kind of old blood, right? What do you mean? I mean, I guess the fact that she, you know, she was, you know, the former FTC chair. I know that like J.D. Vance likes her. It's like she's not, it's definitely new blood in the sense that she is not the kind of person who I would normally associate with, like, a New York City mayor's transition team, but also, like, people can project a lot onto her. Yes. And, like, what her participation in this team means. Yes. I mean, she's a public figure in this. I mean, the transition team leadership is like a half dozen people, and the other ones are sort of more anonymous, functionary-type sort of veterans of City Hall or City Hall fights, and Khan is more of an outsider and kind of coming in sort of an over-the-top.

16:42And I have wondered, too, whether it's part of Mamdani's arguments about, like, what the power of the city can be, you know, is sort of also part of what Khan is signaling here is sort of just trying to find the levers, you know, and kind of, like, engage in these big debates about power and politics in the country and the shape of them. You mean like in the sense that Google and Meta and Amazon all have like a pretty large presence in New York City? Yeah. And Khan has this history of cracking down on these big tech companies? I mean one of the signal – one of the big signal moments to me, one of the most important moments of the de Blasio years was, you know, de Blasio attempted in his first term to cap Uber's growth in the city.

17:30And Uber won. You know, and it was like this big test of sort of city power versus the platforms and like city versus tech and, you know, and sort of the balance of power there. I'm cautious a little bit because Khan also comes in. I mean, she was in the background during the campaign, like on primary night. She was at the primary night party back in June, you know, so she's been around. But she wasn't front and center during the campaign in any way. And sort of like this is sort of just a kind of new development that a little bit it's like she's going to end up in City Hall. Like or is she just helping out right now?

18:05Yeah, exactly. Just ever always the question with these transition teams. Right. Yeah. I guess I'm just thinking about like we were talking earlier about business leaders freaking out or not freaking out about Mom Donnie. And, you know, at least the Post, you know, the good old New York Post was claiming that Khan's involvement immediately raised alarms with big tech and Wall Street honchos, many of whom have long bristled at her aggressive enforcement tactics, tough merger reviews and anti-monopoly crackdowns while she headed the FTC. Yeah, I mean it's just going to be both, you know, because it's just going to be all – because there are going to be a bunch of these appointments that like make, you know, city powers that be go crazy or make sort of national figures sort of recoil.

18:51Even national figures in the Democratic Party recoil from Momdani. But then there's also just a whole bunch of other moves. You know, just a couple hours ago before we taped, Momdani announced that his first deputy mayor, who's sort of the number two at City Hall, is going to be this former de Blasio deputy mayor named Dean Fulhan, who's like a – you know, he's like a – Is it normie? It's just like this is not a – that's not a revolutionary pick. Yeah. You know, that's a kind of – I didn't recognize the name. That's a kind of reaching for experience and reaching for sort of understanding of city power.

19:22Fulhan is somebody who also has deep experience in Albany, you know, and sort of understands the dynamics between City Hall and Albany and these kinds of things that Mamdani is going to be navigating in order to get these proposals that he wants to accomplish done. You know, and it's just like that, you know, it's just sort of like for every Lena Kahn, there seems to be a Dean Fulhan so far, you know. So it's just we're getting both. Yeah. So you mentioned deputy mayor. What are the other top bill positions that we should be keeping an eye on? Yeah. So along with Fulahan, today Mumdani announced that L.

19:57Biscard Church, who was Mumdani's chief of staff in the state assembly and sort of was his closest advisor during the campaign, is going to be chief of staff at City Hall. And that's sort of continuity and also a kind of DSA cred, sort of a commitment to sort of movement politics that Mumdani represents. You know, that's something that Biscard Church has talked about publicly, sort of organizing and keeping discipline from the left. You know, and then before Election Day, he announced that he was going to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on at the NYPD, which was a big deal. You're anticipating my questions.

20:33No, no. Tell us more about Tisch because I think that was a really big moment. Yeah. And you profiled Tisch back when she was the sanitation commissioner and was kind of a – how would you put it? It's like broken windows sanitizing. Yeah, Tish is a—I mean, Tish was one of a handful of sort of public-facing officials in the Eric Adams administration who got credit for, like, actually getting some stuff done. Like, it's all—sort of Adams ran a kind of split city hall, and one side of it was professional and kind of grinding the gears of local politics and doing stuff. And then the other side was running around handing reporters bags of potato chips filled with cash.

21:24And Tish was sort of among the more prominent and successful of the sort of people that worked under Adams. She was sanitation commissioner. She had started her career at NYPD during the Bloomberg years working on - Amy Quinton Technology stuff. Technology stuff. you know, the city's surveillance camera network, the phones that the cops have in their hands as they do their jobs now. And she became sanitation commissioner under Adams. You know, she's the member of prominent, very wealthy, and very sort of politically influential New York City family, and is a favored daughter of the city's like sort of elite and powerful classical class and sort of represents a kind of old strain of like elite reformers and technocrats that have been with us in New York since the 19th century.

22:18And at sanitation, she spearheaded the containerization of trash in New York City, which is not a revolutionary concept, maybe elsewhere in the world. But here it was. But here it was. And, you know, and then after a lot of after several of Eric Adams' police commissioners had to sort of resign in scandal, he tapped her to sort of stabilize the police department, which to a large degree she did. And then, you know, basically after Mamdani won the primary in June, the question of whether or not he would ask her to stay at NYPD became a real like obsession of like powerful and influential and wealthy New Yorkers who might not be like on X all day, like denouncing Mamdani as a communist, but who nonetheless had like questions about how he would approach the job and whether he was up for the job.

23:18And it sort of became this like litmus test, I think, for a lot of people of like, can he, you know, will he be able to sort of manage the city in a way that they find palatable? And so asking her to stay on was a big deal in that sense. I mean, has he gotten any pushback from the progressive block of his supporters, people who I presume hate Tish and very much associate her not only with like kind of worst capitalist aspects of the city, just given that she's like a billionaire, but also just how associated she is with Adams is like law and order thing. And just, you know, she's like, I feel like Mom Donnie spent a lot of his time kind of critiquing Adams's use of the police and increased police presence on subways.

23:59And I guess I'm just wondering if the progressive voters are upset about this pick. Yeah, I mean, I think you're seeing a little bit of it. I mean, Tish is no one's idea of a democratic socialist. who he was going to put in charge of PD and how he was going to oversee PD as mayor has been an obvious high-stakes sort of issue that's been dangling out there even before he won the primary. It's like he has walked back and sort of renounced his past sort of overt criticisms of the police and policing. The Defund the Police movement. He made comments supporting that back in the past. Yeah. And sort of – but that's been a challenge for him is sort of explaining how – what besides running for mayor sort of changed his mind in the context of how he views policing and how he's going to deal with like the very real and immediate sort of issues that could come up.

24:55You know, he's going to be inaugurated January 1st and it's like how are they going to deal with protests? How are they going to deal with homeless encampments? How are they going to deal with the mentally ill on the streets and in the subways? How will a mayor Mamdani approach oversight of the NYPD is a huge open question. I've wrote this in pieces like several times. Like every mayor in recent history has had their time in office like defined in large part by their relationship with the police and what the debates about the NYPD are at the time that they're mayor. So the idea that Mamdani would somehow sort of be an exception to that rule, you know, it seems like a long shot to me.

25:34And these are things that I think will just naturally get like a ton of attention as he takes over. I mean, you've reported a lot on Tish and obviously a lot on Mom Donnie. And I guess I'm just curious, like just more for your opinion on this. If you had to predict, do you think that what we're going to see is Tish kind of bending more toward Mom Donnie? And like her presence, her continued presence at the NYPD lets the people on the Upper West Side and in Brooklyn Heights like sleep a little bit easier at night. But actually, we're still going to see a lot of these like public safety reforms that Mamdani has talked about, like focusing less on the police and more on mental health.