This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City.
Illustration by Stuart Davis
There is a steeliness to Zohran Mamdani that wasn’t obvious when he first appeared as a candidate for mayor, ablaze with ideas while extending a panoramic embrace to New York’s most invisible communities that inspired a surge of new voters in November. I remember watching a video of him entering a community room bursting with first-generation West African New Yorkers at Co-op City earlyish in the campaign. They greeted him with a roar of appreciation—a kind of ecstasy, really—that seemed to take the candidate himself by surprise.
By that juncture Mamdani had become that rare political figure, a conduit of people’s deep-seated wishes—a perilous status that is often a setup for disappointment. New Yorkers were finding him irresistible, but many worried that he would prove to be too naïve to outsmart the city’s most fiercely defended private interests. Now, on the eve of taking power, he has revealed himself to be a hard-nosed practitioner of realpolitik, especially within his own coalition. This bodes well for his chances in the ice-pick wars of New York politics.
Most telling was his somewhat ruthless decision to block Brad Lander from City Hall. Lander, who was also running for mayor, helped clear the path for Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary last June by urging voters who ranked him at the top of their ballots in the first round of voting to rank Mamdani second. In joint appearances the two men presented a unified front, soothing anxieties about Mamdani among a swath of older voters, especially liberal, nonreligious Jews queasy about Israel’s war crimes but fearful of an antisemitic surge. In the final round Mamdani went head-to-head with Andrew Cuomo, who, with the support of New York’s richest donors—Republican and Democrat—conducted a fearmongering and contemptibly dystopian campaign. Mamdani would have squeaked past Cuomo in any case, but it was the addition of Lander’s 120,000 supporters, who broke almost entirely for Mamdani, that handed him the considerable political capital of a landslide victory.
The widely held assumption was that Lander would get a top job in Mamdani’s administration, possibly that of first deputy mayor, a position he seemed to covet. Instead that role went to a seventy-four-year-old technocrat, Dean Fuleihan, who served as Bill de Blasio’s first deputy mayor from 2018 to 2021. With a profound knowledge of bureaucratic and legislative management (and, perhaps just as important, no electoral aspirations of his own), Fuleihan seems a wise choice for an untested mayor who will feel pressured to master the labyrinthine machinery of New York City fast.
Lander, for his part, has been consigned to challenge Congressman Dan Goldman in the 2026 Democratic primary for NY District 10, which encompasses Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn from Dumbo to Sunset Park. It’s a precarious venture, even with the new mayor’s promised support. Alexa Avilés, a city councilmember from Brooklyn and an avowed democratic socialist, also indicated she might challenge Goldman, and many in the DSA hoped that Mamdani would back her—but after Lander’s announcement that he would join the race with Mamdani’s support, she withdrew from the running.
Mamdani also aborted the plans of Brooklyn city councilmember Chi Ossé to primary Hakeem Jeffries, appearing at a DSA electoral meeting to urge members to vote against endorsing Ossé; days later, a majority did just that. Ossé is twenty-seven, an energetic star in the progressive youth movement shaking up NYC politics. For him to challenge Jeffries would have been a staggering overreach that would have risked fatally alienating the man who could well become House majority leader in 2027. Mamdani has every reason to strengthen relations with Jeffries, who could make or break the efforts of Congress’s left bloc to secure more national influence. Pragmatists know that in a two-party system the Democrats are the left’s only path to power.
Recently Patrick Gaspard, the former Barack Obama advisor who was closely involved in Mamdani’s campaign, personally pressed Mamdani to have a series of conversations with Obama about the vast network of independent volunteers the former president built during his 2008 campaign under the banner of Obama for America. When he took office Obama folded OFA into the Democratic Party. Gaspard says that he considered that decision a mistake at the time—and he has suggested that Obama now agrees. In effect Obama disarmed himself, surrendering the ability to mobilize his most ardent supporters in defense of difficult policy proposals and of the president himself when he faced virulent political attacks.
Mamdani attracted 104,000 volunteers to his campaign, and unlike Obama he clearly intends to keep them close and active. “This is not about calling legislators,” Gaspard told the New York Editorial Board, a group of journalists covering the city’s politics. “These are people who have skin in the game, and who are ready to go out and knock on doors again and do the thing on street corners, in front of supermarkets. They’re ready to be called to a purpose, and [Mamdani’s] ready to organize that to a constructive purpose in all the essential parts of his agenda, but also the crisis du jour that will invariably come up.”
The new mayor is not a reformer like Obama was. His agenda for New York is transformative and broad. If his proposal to create a network of universal childcare succeeds, with caregivers trained and paid on par with public school teachers, he will dramatically improve the lives of millions of New Yorkers. It would be a spectacular achievement, and according to a recent poll more than 70 percent of New Yorkers support it. As it was in the 1930s, New York could become the proving ground for a changed America—if Mamdani can keep showing the canniness and political instincts to push his agenda through.