We Can Do Better Than Zohran Mamdani

But He'd Still Be Pretty Good, and You Absolutely Have To Rank Him Somewhere On Your Ballot

For all his faults, he is straight up the most compelling political speaker I’ve ever seen. By a lot.

Last week, in response to my latest anti-Cuomo screed, a reader reached out with a fair question. Why, they asked, did I address all of my New York politics blogs to the older generation? Why was I so smugly laser-focused on educating what I described as the “reasonable, liberal, college-educated parents in Manhattan or Brownstone Brooklyn, who hate Trump but believe that their adult children are kind of insane and part of a generation of hysterical censorious communists”? Why didn’t I pick on someone my own age?

I had an easy answer: My peer group is doing fine. With perhaps one exception, everyone my age who might read this newsletter and can vote in this election will not rank Cuomo anywhere on their ballot. The “Don’t Rank Cuomo” movement has not caught on in any serious way, but it has reached complete saturation with exactly one demographic subgroup in the city, and that’s college-educated yuppie 18-29 year olds in Brooklyn. I also didn’t spend a ton of energy telling my friends not to vote for Trump, or play right field for the Mets. They weren’t going to anyway. Meanwhile, Gen X and Baby Boomer Liberals from Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn are perhaps the electorate’s highest-turnout demographic, and are one of the three key voting blocs that local journalist Michael Lange identified as still up for grabs. Whichever way they swing, their choice may decide the election. My friends do not have this kind of power in this election.

But if I’m being honest, there’s a second reason I chose liberal parents as my foil: They’re an easy target. Parents are lame. You can always get cheap clout by making fun of them. Writing something directed at my peer group, implicitly assuming they don’t know something and that I need to patronizingly enlighten them, is a much dicier social proposition. Nevertheless, it’s what I’m going to do today, both because I believe the conventional wisdom in my peer group is slightly wrong, and because the potential social drawbacks are mitigated nicely by the fact that I suspect very few people my age actually read this blog (my sense is it’s mostly their parents, to whom I should really start being a little nicer!).

So here goes. Zohran Mamdani is not my top choice for mayor and he should not be yours either. There are multiple candidates in the race who would be significantly better.

To be clear, I will absolutely rank the 33-year old Queens State Assemblymember, who currently polls a close second behind Cuomo and a dominant first in “volume of literature shoved underneath the door of my South Slope apartment building,” on my ballot. Depending on how polling looks in the next two weeks, I may rank him first (I’ll explain the ranked choice advanced strategy in a future blog). On a personal level, I feel a significant affinity for him, as a fellow Bank Street to NESCAC alum from the Upper West Side. He is the only candidate to appear on Odd Lots so far, and the only one to take time out of his busy campaign schedule to mourn the loss of Absolute Bagels in the West Side Rag. If he wins the primary, I’ll be elated (he’ll have beaten Cuomo!), and if he becomes mayor, I think he’ll be pretty good, certainly a dramatic improvement over our current incumbent. But his campaign has significant flaws and people my age should reckon with them.

I.

“There is no point in running a campaign on things you do not actually believe you can actually deliver,” Mamdani told the hosts of the FAQ NYC podcast. “I have now started beginning my speeches by asking the crowd to recite our platform back. I say that ‘we’re running to freeze the’ ‘RENT!!!’, ‘make buses fast and’ ‘FREE!!’, ‘deliver universal’ ‘CHILDCARE!!’ The point of that is to make clear that if you’re voting for me, you’re voting for my platform.”

Mamdani was responding to the incessant complaint that his campaign is vibes-based and superficial, lacks policy substance, and builds excitement by promising ridiculous fantasies that could never occur. I agree with Mamdani that this complaint is unfair, especially when compared to the lack of policy rigor of his main opponent. As he says, he’s made a consistent effort to be specific about the policies he’s running on, (I’ve seen him do this chanting routine a bunch of times, and the crowd always has their lines down), and he is very clear on how he plans to enact them. If he wins, he’d have an undeniable mandate to execute these plans and probably would have the political capital to make them happen. The problem is with the policies themselves, which I think are flawed and potentially counterproductive ways to make the city more affordable for working people. In order:

Freezing the rent for the two million New Yorkers that live in rent-stabilized housing has been the most prominent idea of Mamdani’s campaign, ever since he plunged into the ocean in an Instagram reel to explain it in January. It’s the thing the mayor has the most direct power to do, through appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board that sets the rent increases. As Mamdani likes to point out, Bill de Blasio’s Rent Guidelines Board choose to impose no increase in three of the eight years that he was in office. Under Eric Adams, on the other hand, a mayor with deep ties to the real estate industry, the Rent Guidelines Board has increased the rent sharply every year.

The politics of this are straightforward. There are more tenants than landlords. Many tenants in rent-stabilized housing are poor, elderly, or both. Most landlords are by definition quite wealthy (they own an asset worth millions of dollars pretty much no matter what they end up doing with it). Some of them are large conglomerates or even major corporations. And no matter what, invariably everyone hates their landlord. “Take money away from landlords and give it to tenants” has the shape of a nice, just, lefty policy everyone can get behind (and indeed, many of the other candidates are behind it, at least for this year). And in the short term, it probably would have a slightly redistributive effect, without causing significant or lasting harm.

But in addition to being distributionally imperfect (the median income of a tenant of a rent-stabilized unit is much lower than that of a tenant in a private apartment, but many wealthy people enjoy the benefits of rent stabilization too; anecdotally I know three different people with six-figure salaries and no children who live in stabilized apartments in trendy neighborhoods), a rent freeze would not actually fix the core problem with the city’s housing crisis, which is that demand far outstrips supply. The only sustainable solution to that problem is to build a lot more housing, everywhere, as fast as possible. In the absence of that, in the long term, hard-capping the rent of about a quarter of the units will only make the remaining three quarters even more expensive, as landlords who own both private and stabilized units will raise the rents where they can to make up for the losses where they can’t. Even worse, a long-term freeze might turn the stabilized units into dilapidated slums that the landlords cannot afford to upkeep with basic plumbing and utilities upgrades that have become significantly more expensive since the pandemic.

To his credit, Mamdani seems to understand that a freeze needs to be paired with a dramatic expansion in housing supply. Dig around his website and you’ll find plans to dramatically upzone neighborhoods to permit more construction, fast-track planning and community review processes that can jam up projects for years (and make them much more expensive), identify public-owned plots of land that could site new large-scale housing complexes, and eliminate parking minimums. In the words of Brooklyn-based political researcher Tyson Brody, “this all seems thoughtfully YIMBY, just couched in the ‘correct’ phrasing with slightly more gestures to public investment.”

Still, emphasis matters. As he said in the FAQ NYC interview, Mamdani expects to be able to deliver his policies because he will have a clear mandate to do so. When the powerful real-estate lobby attacks him for what they will consider a declaration of war on their industry, he will be able to point to the screaming crowds chanting “FREEZE THE RENT” over and over for six months for political cover. He will not be able to point to similar enthusiasm for eliminating parking minimums. Someone like Zellnor Myrie, who has made building a million new units of housing his core campaign promise, would have a clearer mandate to execute this agenda in the vanishingly unlikely event that he wins. Emphasizing a rent freeze for some over new housing construction that would durably lower rent for everyone is a choice that Mamdani’s campaign made, and it will affect how he governs. All other things equal, I’d prefer to vote for someone who made the opposite choice.

Similar issues plague Mamdani’s Free Buses initiative, the pilot of which served as the key legislative accomplishment of his four years in the State Assembly. Making buses fast is an excellent policy goal and I credit Mamdani enormously for identifying and prioritizing it. And making them free could be a way to do that, in theory, by cutting down delays caused by lines of people swiping their cards one-by-one. Empirically though, free buses in Mamdani’s 2024 pilot program ended up spending 7% more time waiting at each stop than their full fare counterparts. Most buses load passengers on pretty quickly now that they are equipped with OMNY readers on all three doors. The gains in efficiency from eliminating swipes did not make up for the added time of slightly increased ridership. And despite optimistic projections, the pilot did not lead to a decrease in the street congestion that causes most bus delays in this city. Simply making buses free, it turned out, is not enough to make them fast.

Once you get rid of the supposed efficiency gains, you’re left with another straightforward redistribution of wealth, in this case from the MTA to its riders, just like a rent freeze redistributes from landlords to tenants. This is also imperfect distributionally (bus riders are poorer than other New Yorkers on average, but I ride the bus a lot and so do my software engineer friends), but it’s much worse than a rent freeze because the MTA desperately needs every dollar it can get. The $652 million a year in lost revenue from free buses could, for example, buy 500 more brand-new electric buses, which actually would improve speed and reliability, in addition to yielding significant long-term savings on maintenance and fuel costs (not to mention emissions reductions). The Fair Fares initiative already provides substantial relief to riders who struggle to afford the fare, thanks in large part to expansions championed by Adrienne Adams, who’s running on expanding it even further. If you want a candidate with good ideas around bus-related socialism, you should prefer her to Mamdani.

Delivering universal childcare, to be fair, is a very good idea. As think tank analyst Eli Dworkin told me when I interviewed him this spring, the scarcity of affordable, high-quality childcare is the second biggest driver of the young-family exodus that threatens our city’s long term future(Housing is number one.) There’s a lot the public sector could and should do to address this critical market failure. It’s such a good idea, in fact, that Brad Lander, Scott Stringer, Zellnor Myrie, and Adrienne Adams are also running on it in some form. Shameless copycats! So the concern here is not which candidate has the best policy proposals (they’re all basically the same), but which one has the skills, experience, and vision to execute it.

Last December, Bryce Covert wrote a retrospective for New York Magazine about the Herculean task of standing up Bill de Blasio’s universal Pre-K initiative. The work required the vision and political savvy to get a plurality of voters excited about a big public socialist spending initiative, something that Mamdani excels at. But it also involved stitching together this unwieldy patchwork of nonprofits and local school boards to provide the programming, identifying spaces to hold it within existing schools, standing up a “School Construction Authority” to rapidly build new ones to increase capacity, and then running a massive publicity campaign to ensure that parents knew about the program and actually signed their kids up. Mamdani may prove to be excellent at all of this too, but it’s a different skillset, and given that their plans are so similar, if I were a single-issue childcare voter, I’d probably prefer someone like Lander or Adrienne Adams, who has more experience managing sprawling, complex government projects like this.

II.

With all of this said, I will still rank Mamdani somewhere high on my ballot, and you should too. At the moment he appears to be the most (if not the only) viable alternative to Cuomo, and it’s incredibly impressive that he’s managed to raise money, amass volunteers, and generate grassroots enthusiasm to the scale that he has. Unlike the rest of the field (including Cuomo), he understands the value of attention, but more than that, how to convert that attention into durable support. While many other candidates try to get attention for things that have nothing to do with policy (one recalls Ron Desantis launching his presidential campaign on the new Twitter Spaces platform, or Andrew Yang offering a chance to win $1000 for anyone who signed a petition on his website), Mamdani understands that the policies themselves have to be attention-grabbing. For all the praise of his flashy social media posts and videos, the policies are the core engine of the campaign. A whole lot of low-information voters are really excited about a candidate who might freeze their rent, make their buses free, and deliver universal childcare.

I’m not sure there are better policy proposals that could create this kind of enthusiasm. I know that “Congestion Pricing Now” (something I chanted with about twenty five other people in Columbus Circle last June) or “End Parking Minimums,” or even “Let’s Go Knicks” (sorry Zellnor) will not cut it.

But you, my college educated yuppy Brooklynite who probably doesn’t read this blog, should have higher standards. You should not settle for the shiny objects that politicians need to capture mass attention at this scale. You should be willing to interrogate whether freezing the rent for rent stabilized housing would durably solve the city’s affordable housing crisis, whether city buses truly should be free, or whether Mamdani would be the candidate with the best chance to deliver universal childcare. Next week, I will look at all the polling, explain my logic for ranked choice strategy, and then tell you what I believe to be the ballot that minimizes Cuomo’s chance of winning. There’s a good chance that Mamdani will end up being number one on that ballot, and I’ll rank him there if he is. But if I had a genie wish to decide the winner, it wouldn’t be him. Brad Lander and Zellnor Myrie, for example, would both be better.

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