Yes, he won, and he won convincingly. He started out with zero name recognition and went on to defeat the sy-in of a famous New York political family, not once, but twice.
He won because he stayed laser-focused on his message of affordability, the 2025 turbocharged version of “the rents are too damn high.”
He won by toppling the titans of the city; the financiers, the builders and the gatekeepers, making them the enemies of the people. He won by adopting the guise of an ideologue who could, who would seek compromise.
For sure, there were multiple factors that propelled the young mayor-elect to victory. The Eric Adams administration was a clown show. Andrew Cuomo not only carried with him lots of personal and professional baggage, he was a brutally bad campaigner.
But this socialist assemblyman from Queens was the smiling, unflappable, candidate of change and of hope.
Beginning on Tuesday night, after the race was called in his favor, with the election results still simmering, he shed his cloak of compromise and of conciliation. Apparently, the mayor-elect, less than two months away from assuming power, felt he could speak his full truth.
On the night of his improbable but impressive victory, he delivered a fiery speech. When he spoke about his victory, he was boastful. When he spoke about President Trump, he was confrontational.
On Tuesday night of this past week, that 34-year old who’ll occupy Gracie Mansion on January 1, delivered a 25-minute speech of deliverance, quoting the father of American socialism, Eugene V. Debs saying, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”
He said he wants to be the mayor of all New Yorkers, but he’s not a unifier, he’s a classifer. He deeply believes in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It’s the struggle that Marxism envisions that can only be resolved by the overthrow of the capitalist class. And he sprinkles in Israel as his go-to demon oppressor, for good measure.
He believes big government will solve everything. “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve,” he said, “and no concern too small for it to care about.”
And this past Wednesday, in a New York Times interview, he really came clean.
He said his proposed tax on billionaires wasn’t only to pay for his promise of universal childcare, it was also about fairness. He told the newspaper, “I think that our tax system is an example of the many ways working people have been betrayed.”
Tax the rich to right social wrongs. They are the enemy. Capitalists are corrupt.
Since the mayor-elect is such a devotee of Debs, here’s something else that socialist said: “Progress is born of agitation.”
Make no mistake, the winner of Tuesday’s mayoral election is an agitator but who now has to govern in the real world, not in his dream socialist utopia.
Just ask Bill de Blasio, a relatively meek socialist compared to the new mayor-elect, just how hard that can be. When he left office after eight years, de Blasio was so loathed, he couldn’t even win the Democratic nomination for the congressional seat in his old Park Slope district.
If the new mayor wants to use progressive governance in Chicago, San Francisco or Seattle as his north stars, New Yorkers are in for a long and dark night, and so will he.
Because when all is said and done, New Yorkers want a more affordable place to live, but they don’t want a city that is less safe and less clean, with more vacant stores and with landlords who’ve abandoned their buildings. They don’t want a city where gangs terrorize neighborhoods and shift workers are afraid to ride the subways at night.
They want their kids to get a solid public school education and they want businesses to thrive and to provide the jobs that put food on their tables.
They don’t want to run the gauntlet of the mentally ill on their way to work. And they don’t want prisons relocated to their neighborhoods.
Sacrificing for the greater good will go only so far in Gotham.
Of course New Yorkers want their city to change for the better, but make no mistake, they will hold responsible the man who governs.
Yes, he deserves credit for getting elected. And although he now claims a mandate, there’s a long journey ahead for him where progress will be measured not from agitation, not from lofty rhetoric, and not from shutting out half of the city that didn’t buy into what he was selling. As one New York State assemblywoman said, “Mamdani won my district but with only 53% of the vote, even though my district is overwhelmingly Democratic. He needs to unify New Yorkers who are clearly divided.”