Editors’ Note: This article was originally published in New Politics, Winter 2026 (New Politics Vol. XX No. 4, Whole Number 80), https://newpol.org/issue_post/a-sobering-but-hopeful-take-on-mamdanis-election/.
I do not share the euphoria of so many progressives and socialists at the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City. I came away sobered by it. Many of the left are celebrating Mamdani’s election as signaling a strong move to the left. I don’t see it that way. Mamdani’s vote underperformed other Democratic candidates around the country. I was also underwhelmed by the modest reform program and moderate strategy of Mamdani’s campaign itself. I was encouraged by how Mamdani ran his campaign. The canvassing and the messaging were exemplary models that progressives should emulate, especially those of us who believe independent socialist politics are required to change the system. I believe socialists should support Mamdani and the reforms he campaigned on and be hopeful the movement that supported his campaign can grow. But overall I feel this election shows how very far we have to go.
Underperformance
The November 4, 2025, election was nationalized. It was a massive anti-Trump vote. The anti-Trump vote trumped local issues in most places. But the New York City mayoral race pivoted around local issues and candidates. Mamdani did not get the anti-Trump bump that Democrats everywhere else got.
Mamdani’s 50.4 percent1 vote was the same percentage of the vote received by David Dinkins in 1989, the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the first person of color to be elected mayor of New York City. Mamdani underperformed the votes of recent Democratic mayors. Bill de Blasio received 73 percent in 2013 and 66 percent in 2017. Eric Adams received 67 percent in 2021. Mamdani and Dinkins only narrowly outpolled their opponents, Mamdani by 2.14 percent over Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Eric Adams in 2025 and Dinkins by 2.58 percent over Rudy Giuliani in 1989. The opponents of both Mamdani and Dinkins ran dog-whistle racist campaigns that fear mongered about crime and the progressives’ support for Palestinian rights.2 The racist-in-chief, Donald Trump, endorsed Cuomo. Mamdani’s mandate is barely a majority. It is sobering to consider that the racial politics of New York City do not seem to have changed much over the last thirty-six years.
While Mamdani’s opposition to Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza and support for Palestinian rights was laudable and netted him votes across the city, according to exit polling, it is concerning that only 32 percent of people who identified their religion as Jewish voted for Mamdani.3 Some people argue that the real Jewish vote was much higher for Mamdani because he won the votes of many secular Jews who would not describe their religion as Jewish in an exit poll. Either way, Jews in America identify about 70 percent as Democrats and 50 percent as liberals.4 Even taking into account the large concentration of Republican and conservative Orthodox Jews in New York City, it is disturbing that the despicable smears about Mamdani being antisemitic and the Islamophobic fear-mongering by the Cuomo campaign and some well-funded pro-Israel groups seems to have scared off many Democratic and liberal Jews from voting for Mamdani.
Democrats swept the three Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice races by 24 percent in a state Donald Trump won the presidential election by 2 percent. In Georgia, both Democrats running against Republicans for the Georgia Public Service Commission won in 67 percent to 33 percent landslides in their respective district races, flipping counties across the state that had voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election by wide margins.
In the two highest profile elections in this off year for state and federal elections, centrist Democrats for governor, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, won by much larger margins than Mamdani won by in New York City where Democratic enrollment is more than two times larger than Republican enrollment, 56 percent for Democrats compared to 26 percent for Republicans. Both Sherrill and Spanberger won by the same 14 percent margin compared to Mamdani’s 2 percent. Mamdani also underperformed Sherrill and Spanberger compared to the Democratic presidential vote in 2024. The 14 percent victory margin for both Sherrill and Spanberger was 8 percent higher than Kamala Harris’s 6 percent win in both states. Mamdani, on the other hand, underperformed Harris by 36 percent; she won New York City by 38 percent compared to Mamdani’s 2 percent.
A local example of the anti-Trump vote in 2025 was displayed in races around the city of Syracuse, New York, where I live. The Onondaga County Legislature, which represents the city of Syracuse and its suburbs and rural hinterlands, became majority Democratic for the first time in fifty years since the post-Watergate anger at Republicans in 1975. The Democrats won every contested race. Democrats also swept town council races in Syracuse suburbs that are traditionally majority Republican. Post-election interviews of candidates report that voters at the doors and on the phones just wanted to vote against Trump. Local issues had little to do with their vote.5
The anti-Trump vote did not come home to the Democrat in New York City. Mamdani’s Democratic vote was 15-20 percent below recent Democratic mayors and the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate. That his margin of victory was significantly lower than centrist Democrats like Sherrill and Spanberger indicates how many Democrats strayed from the Democratic line to support the not-so-subtly coded racial fear-mongering of the disgraced Democrat Cuomo on an independent line. Adams did win as a Black candidate in 2021, but he ran as the right-most candidate in the Democratic primary as a tough-on-crime former police officer. In the general election the enrolled Democratic voters came out for Adams against the Republican Sliwa running on the same basic crime message. That Mamdani won over 50 percent of New York City voters is an achievement to celebrate and build upon. But it does not signal a strong shift to the left in New York City. I believe that the enthusiasm of progressives at his victory should be tempered by an acknowledgment that the political base for Mamdani and his movement is far from secured.
Modest Program
I was also underwhelmed by Mamdani’s platform and the class politics of his electoral strategy.
Mamdani’s leading policy demands are good reforms that would improve the lives of working people. But they are not structural changes that begin to democratize power in the political and economic institutions that generate extreme inequality and public sector austerity in New York City. Despite the socialist ambience of the Mamdani campaign, its policy program was not substantively different from previous liberal Democrats in New York City like David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio or Democratic mayors in many other large cities.
The headline reforms—rent freeze, free buses, universal childcare, and progressive taxes to pay for them—can be accommodated without socialist inroads into the private ownership of a capitalist economy. New York City had a rent freeze three times under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015, 2016, and 2020. Many cities in capitalist economies have free public transportation, from the frontline cities of Kharkiv and Kryvyi Rih in neoliberal Ukraine to many cities in social democratic Scandinavia, and over one hundred cities in the United States.6 Universal free childcare is available in India, Japan, and many European countries,7 and the state of New Mexico has recently committed to it.8
Winning the progressive tax reforms to fund this program is where Mamdani faces resistance from the leaders of his own Democratic Party and the wealthy financial and real estate interests to which the corporate wing of the party is indentured. Mamdani’s campaign estimates that universal child care would cost $6 billion a year. Free buses would add another $800 million a year. A municipally-owned grocery store in each of the five boroughs would cost $60 million in start-up investments. Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety to redirect responses from the police department to socials service addressing mental health crises, homelessness, transit safety, and gun violence prevention would cost the city an additional $400 million a year. The freeze on rents in rent-regulated apartments, which cover about half of the city’s units, would not directly affect the city budget. But Mamdani’s biggest ticket item is his proposal to build over the next ten years 200,000 new units of rent-regulated municipal public housing. This program is estimated to cost $100 billion over ten years, or $10 billion a year.9 Mamdani is thus looking for additional revenue to pay for over $17 billion in new expenditures, or about 15 percent more than the $120 billion city budget adopted for 2026.
To pay for the additional expenditures in his program, Mamdani proposes progressive tax reforms. He proposes to raise the city personal income tax on the highest tax bracket (the top 1 percent with incomes over $1 million incomes a year) by 2 percent, from 3.9% to 5.9%. The personal income tax hike would raise $4 billion a year. He also proposes a hike on profitable corporations in the highest state corporate income tax bracket (income over $5 million a year) by 4.25 percent, from 7.25 percent to 11.5 percent. This corporate tax hike would raise $5 billion a year in state revenue, but how much of that would go to New York City would be dependent on state budgets.
Both of these tax reforms will require state approval. Here Mamdani faces the staunch opposition to any kind of tax increases from Governor Kathy Hochul and the fiscally conservative majority of Republicans and most Democrats in the state legislature. New York City does not have home rule on its local property and income taxes. State control after the 1975 fiscal crisis also put tighter restrictions on the city’s ability to borrow. It was the big Wall Street banks’ decision to close the bond market to New York City in 1975 that forced a state takeover of New York City finances and drastic cuts in public services. Since then, eight of the city’s original nineteen public hospitals have been closed. The tuition-free city college system was replaced with tuition that has been rising ever since. Raising taxes on the rich is overwhelmingly supported by ordinary people, but opposed by state Democratic leaders and the corporate interests behind them.
Class Collaboration
The class politics of the Mamdani campaign have been in the direction of collaboration, not confrontation, with the corporate neoliberals who control the Democratic Party. Mamdani’s approach to the primary election made this clear. Both at the beginning10 of his primary campaign and again near the end11 when the polls began to show he could win, the Mamdani campaign together with leaders of DSA and the Working Families Party (WFP) decided that Mamdani would not challenge Andrew Cuomo on the WFP ballot line if Cuomo won the primary. If anybody typifies the corporate neoliberalism of the Democratic Party, it is Andrew Cuomo. He was a weak candidate who had been shamed in August 2021 into resigning as governor of New York by his scandals with sexual harassment and COVID-related nursing home deaths. Mamdani would have been competitive with a campaign on the WFP line after a close primary.
Yet Mamdani’s campaign showed more loyalty to the Democratic Party than Cuomo did when he ran against the Democratic nominee Mamdani on an independent Fight and Deliver ballot line after losing the Democratic primary decisively to Mamdani by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin. The Mamdani campaign’s decision to not run independently against a Democratic Cuomo candidacy if Mamdani lost a close primary election indicates that the Mamdani campaign and allied organizations like DSA and WFP are more concerned with maintaining and improving their standing and access within the structures of the corporate-dominated Democratic Party than with fighting to take the power from the party’s corporate wing.
In Office, but Not in Power
Mamdani has been elected to the office of mayor, but that does not give him the power to implement his program without the cooperation of other power centers that are not inclined to do so.
The first power structure standing in Mamdani’s way is the Democratic Party itself, which remains firmly in control of its corporate wing at the local, state, and national levels. Only 18 of 51 City Councilors are members of its progressive caucus. The other 27 Democrats are part of the corporate Democratic machine and the 6 Republicans are even more conservative. An adamantly pro-Israel corporate Democrat, Julie Menin, is a shoo-in to be elected Speaker of the council when it reconvenes in January.
At the state level, there is no organized progressive caucus in the legislature. There is a small Socialist Caucus, consisting of 3 of 64 Senators and 6 of 150 Assembly Members. It has little political weight in a state legislature where corporate Democrats and Republicans dominate. Democratic state party chair Jay Jacobs refused to endorse Mamdani after he won the primary. Governor Kathy Hochul is a corrupt12 corporate Democrat in the mold of Andrew Cuomo, who appointed her lieutenant governor and whose governorship she inherited when he resigned in disgrace. Hochul, who is up for re-election in 2026, is publicly opposed to Mamdani’s tax reforms, which require state approval.
At the federal level, Trump has threatened to cut off federal funding for a city he had said is led by a “communist.” Trump has threatened to deport Mamdani if he does not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Despite Trump’s threats, Mamdani received no endorsements from the six Democratic U.S. Senators representing New York City and its suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut, including New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, New Jersey Senators Corey Booker and Andrew Kim, and Connecticut Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy. Many Democratic U.S. House members representing the city and its New York suburbs refused to endorse Mamdani, including Laura Gillen, George Latimer, Greg Meeks, Grace Meng, Dan Goldman, Ritchie Torres, and Tom Suozzi.
Beyond internal opposition in his own party, Mamdani faces the capitalist power structure. Its private economic power centered around Wall Street tycoons, real estate barons, and the corporate media they own opposes Mamdani and his program. Capitalists can make or break the city’s economy and public finances by their decisions—or just their threats—on whether or not to invest in the city’s private sector and to finance city bonds for capital projects and refinancing existing debt.
Another independent and conservative power center is the 50,000-member-strong New York Police Department (NYPD). With about 33,000 uniformed officers and 15,000 other employees the NYPD can exert powerful leverage through street protests, work slowdowns, and political strikes. Real estate and business interests support conservative policing that patrols the boundaries of race and class segregation that make for profitable development, displacement, and gentrification, and super-exploitation of concentrated poverty. The NYPD is a conservative institution that supports conservative policing philosophies. It has a long history of surveillance and repression of progressive social movements, including in recent years the anti-police brutality protests after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and the more recent protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The political power of the police defeated police reforms attempted by David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio. Mamdani seems to have decided to avoid taking on a losing power struggle with the NYPD at this time. He has reappointed the incumbent NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch, a pro-Israel billionaire heiress with a conservative policing philosophy who has opposed bail reform and collaborated with ICE. She has strong support from the banking and real estate interests. Mamdani apparently hopes that with Tisch at the NYPD helm, the police will acquiesce to his Department of Community Safety if it is authorized by City Council legislation, even though Tisch is not in favor of the change. Bill de Blasio’s appointment of Bill Bratton as NYPD commissioner, another top cop adherent to conservative “broken windows” and stop-and-frisk tactics, did not stop police from creating a political crisis for de Blasio when they turned their backs to de Blasio repeatedly when he showed up at the hospital and then the funerals of two police officers shot by a gunman’s ambush soon after anti-police brutality protests rocked the city following a Staten Island grand jury refusal to indict a police officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner. Given his limited power, Mamdani has to pick his fights. But events around crime and social protest will inevitably force him to respond. The NYPD may pick a fight with him whether he wants it or not.
Given this balance of forces, perhaps one lesson to take from Mamdani’s election is that the left should not seek executive power before it has the legislative majority and popular support and an organization to carry through its program. Otherwise, the left in executive office may be forced to administer the system it started out to change.
Positive Lessons
I do think there are positive lessons to take away from Mamdani’s campaign. Some online critics on the left are already posturing against Mamdani for not meeting their rhetorical litmus tests. For example, some refer to him as “Ziorahn” because he has backed away from using the slogan “Globalize the Intifada.” Mamdani is trying to communicate his case against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and for Palestinian rights in terms that broad masses of people can understand and support. Slogans that have divergent meanings for different audiences can be divisive and reduce support for the cause. He is trying to build support for what counts—his actions more than slogans, such as his support for the divestment of city pensions funds from Israeli bonds and arms manufacturers.
What also counts is on-the-ground organizing to support reforms. Some are portraying Mamdani’s re-appointment of Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner as an irredeemable betrayal. But these performative posers are not organizing on the ground to build a campaign with the social power needed to win real police reform.13 On that note, it is good that a group of activists who supported Mamdani’s electoral campaign are building upon their experiences to launch Our Time,14 a campaign to continue deep canvassing and other organizing to win Mamdani’s affordability agenda. New York City DSA has launched a Tax the Rich campaign to push for the tax reforms that are essential for funding Mamdani’s programs.15
One positive lesson the left should take from Mamdani is how he framed his messaging around policies that people can understand and believe are doable. His policy demands were concrete policies, not abstract slogans or value statements. For example, he called for a rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments, which people can believe can be done, rather than pushing affordable housing is a human right, which people might agree is a nice idea but leaves them wondering what the candidate would do to make this happen.
Another positive lesson is the impact of Mamdani’s canvass operation. The campaign says it enlisted 104,000 volunteers who knocked on more than 3.1 million doors, made 4.6 million calls, and sent 2.7 million text messages.16 The canvass was in the form of deep canvassing that listened to voters instead of preaching at them, or, as Mamdani put it, “Don’t lecture, listen.” Deep canvassing is different from traditional drive-by election canvassing that quickly talks about the candidate’s bio and top issues and asks for support in order to identify who to mobilize on election day. Deep canvassing takes 10-20 minutes to have a conversation with people, hear what their concerns are, and share experiences to establish an empathetic relationship before giving the candidate’s program. Social science research indicates that deep canvassing is the most persuasive form of campaigning, with one study concluding that it is “102 times more effective than traditional canvassing, television, radio, direct mail, and phone banking combined.”17 There is evidence that Mamdani’s canvassing changed the top issue for New York City voters from crime, which Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa emphasized, to Mamdani’s theme of affordability.18
Another positive lesson is the example of DSA as a dues-paying mass-membership political organization of several thousand members. It provided the initial cadre for Mamdani’s campaign. DSA had the resources to pay staff to organize its members into the Mamdani canvassing, phone banking, sign posting, and other campaign activities. From that DSA core, the Mamdani campaign built out an organization of over 100,000 volunteers. In an era when most social movements are temporary mobilizations that subside as quickly as they rise, permanent membership organizations are needed to sustain movements.
DSA functions as a political party, but without its own ballot line and independent opposition to the Democratic Party. It functions as a faction within, rather than an alternative to, the thoroughly capitalist Democratic Party. I fear too many people are concluding from Mamdani’s election that democratic socialism can be successfully pursued through the Democratic Party. I would argue that if we are going to defeat the corporate power structure, we need our own party, one that is independent of the capitalist parties. We would do better to take our program directly to the people and build independent working-class power than to confuse people with our affiliation to a party whose thoroughly entrenched corporate leadership opposes our program. We would do better to focus on our own organizing without wasting time and resources on internal Democratic Party factional politics.
Advancing Municipal Socialism
It is important for the future of municipal socialism as part of a broader socialist movement that Mamdani be successful in implementing his program. Socialists should organize support for his reforms and defend him from the backlash that powerful corporate interests will .unleash. We are not going to build socialism in one city, but effective municipal socialist administrations that deliver reforms that benefit working people can demonstrate to the public that socialist solutions are feasible and effective. They can create the popular foundation for more far-reaching change locally, at the state and national levels, and, indeed, internationally. Leftists around the world are watching what happens with the Mamdani administration.
I have called Mamdani’s program modest. Capitalism as a system is not threatened by its reforms, although many capitalists will vigorously oppose them. They want working people so preoccupied with the daily struggles of making ends meet so they are easier to exploit. They are militantly opposed to any progressive taxes on their personal and corporation incomes.
Winning more radical socialist reforms that increase the power of working people as against the power of capitalists will be more likely if the Mamdani administration is successful in winning the reforms it campaigned for and maintains and increases popular support. An unsuccessful Mamdani administration could set back municipal socialism for years. Municipal socialism needs to be more about democratizing the structures of power than getting progressives into the existing power structure. Democratizing power would take it from absentee-owner capitalists and their minions in the city and state government and place it in democratic public city institutions.
Home-rule reforms would be a central feature of such a program. New York City should have the power to set its own income and property tax rates rather than requiring approval by a state legislature filled with people who live upstate and outside of the city.
A city-owned public bank should be a central plank in a more far-reaching program of municipal socialism. A public bank could be capitalized with the deposits the city now places in capitalist banks along with deposits from the public. It could make loans and investments to advance city priorities like affordable housing, mass transit, and clean energy. It could underwrite municipal bonds and thus free the city from Wall Street’s veto power over public policy. Public banking was proposed as an option in the state legislature in 1975 as an alternative to the bankers’ decision to refuse underwriting city bond financing and force public austerity on the city. A public banking movement already exists. Mamdani supported public banking enabling legislation in the state Assembly. It is time to follow through on making this public option a reality.19
Another sector ripe for socialization and democratization by a municipal socialist movement is the energy sector. Public power was another public option that New Left veterans raised in the 1970s in response to the 1974 and 1979 energy crises in which energy prices shot up due to oil shortages stemming from geopolitical crises in the Middle East and price gouging by the shared monopolies of the oil and utility industries taking advantage of the crisis.20 Cost control, democratization, energy efficiency, and building clean renewables were all part of the argument for public power in that era. Today the climate crisis makes the case for renewables and the public power to build them all the more compelling. A public power utility in New York City provides the political and economic power to carry through a citywide Green New Deal for a rapid transition to 100 percent clean renewable power and heating at a time when the city’s incumbent investor-owned utilities (IOUs), Con Edison and National Grid, are slow-walking the retirement of existing fossil fuel energy systems and the building of renewable alternatives. Indeed, these IOUs are planning to invest billions in new and renewed gas infrastructure that they plan to profit from for decades to come, spewing out planet-heating greenhouse gases that accelerate the existential climate chaos.
A statewide Public Power NY campaign got two bills considered in the state legislature in 2023. One bill, the NY Utility Democracy Act, would have socialized the electric power distribution utilities statewide under democratically elected local boards. That bill never got out of committee. Another bill, the Build Public Renewables Act, did pass in watered-down form. The original bill would have enabled the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to build renewables on any site on its own initiative. But the Democrats, who control the state legislature, amended it into a form of lemon socialism. It lets the existing NYPA build publicly-owned wind and solar only when private industry does not want to build at a given site. Today the statewide public power campaign is focused on getting even the watered-down bill implemented.21 Mamdani voted for the Build Public Renewables Act as a member of the Assembly and has expressed support for public power during his mayoral campaign. Public power would seem to be a structural reform that should be on the near future agenda of municipal socialism in New York City.
Another power-building reform would be to expropriate big landlords in New York City in order to stem rising rents and create more affordable housing for residents. In a referendum in the city of Berlin, Germany, in 2021, a 59 percent to 38 percent majority voted to expropriate large landlords with more than 3,000 units and turn the units into democratically managed public housing.22 Berlin’s city government has yet to implement that mandate, which shows why movements need to stay active between elections. Such a reform in New York City would radically alter the balance of power between landlords and tenants.
One progressive tax reform that Mamdani has puzzlingly not endorsed is to have the state keep the revenues of the Stock Transfer Tax, which generates upwards of $15 billion a year. This tax is a tiny sales tax of one tenth of one percent on stock sales, but the revenues have been rebated right back to stock traders since the aftermath of the 1972 New York City fiscal crisis. Ralph Nader, who has been campaigning for this reform for many years, recently called out Mamdani for being “AWOL despite urgings by your numerous colleagues in the state legislature to sign on to a bill that would end the rebate and specifically allocate the many billions of dollars annually to mass transit, education, health care and environmental protection.”23 Supporting this reform seems an easy lift for Mamdani or at least the Tax the Rich campaign in New York.
A final power-transforming reform I think should be on the municipal socialist agenda is community control of the police. The Black Panther Party raised this demand in the early 1970s. It called for elected neighborhood review boards with real investigative and policy-making powers in their communities and an elected city-wide police commission to set police department policies. The elected police commission instead of the mayor would hire and fire the police chief and discipline police officers for misconduct as well as implement services that Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety would undertake such as violence prevention and de-escalation interventions and better social and mental health services. It changes the power relationship between the community and the police—and the real estate industry that wants the policing to preserve race and class segregation from which it profits. It gives the community the permanent power to reform and regulate policing without being dependent on the mayor of the moment.24 Chicago has moved the furthest on enacting community control of the police. The Chicago City Council adopted an ordinance in 2021 that enacted a Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability that has been elected and has pushed through some police reforms despite residual political resistance, underfunding, and limited powers.25 The Chicago community control movement is now organizing for a referendum to expand the Commission’s powers.26
Getting to more transformative reforms depends on early successes for the Mamdani administration, which means municipal socialists need to continue deep canvassing and organizing to win more people over to the program and push the reforms through. Observing how persistent racial fears and resentments seem to be considering the narrow majorities that voted for David Dinkins in 1989 and Zohran Mamdani in 2025, deep canvassing and organizing in the communities where racism persists would seem to be a high priority for defending Mamdani from the organized backlash that is sure to come from the elitists and racists in the political and economic power structures and for building a broader movement to support more transformative municipal socialism.
Notes
1. Mamdani’s 50.4 percent vote is what was reported the week following the election, the same percentage as Dinkins received in 1989. When all the votes were counted, Mamdani’s vote came up to 50.78 percent. But that does not change the basic point that both of these DSA people of color got the same basic portion of the New York City vote 35 years apart.
2. John Nichols, “Rudy Giuliani Has Been Peddling Racist Political Tropes for More Than 3 Decades,” The Nation, Dec. 9, 2020.
3. CNN Exit Polls 2025, New York City Mayoral Election.
4. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Jews’ political views,” May 11, 2021.
5. Mark Weiner, “Onondaga County GOP seeks answers after stunning losses. The consensus: Trump is a problem,” Syracuse Post-Standard, Nov. 6, 2025.
6. Abigail Johnson Hess, “Americans spend over 15% of their budgets on transportation costs—these US cities are trying to make it free,” CNBC, March 2, 2020.
7. Child Care.
8. Reuters, “In U.S. first, New Mexico launches free child care for all,” Nov. 2, 2025.
9. Katherine Li, “Breaking down Zohran Mamdani’s proposals by the numbers: What has he planned and how much will it cost?,” Business Insider, Nov. 4, 2025.
10. David V., “Zohran Mamdani Should Run Third-Party in the General Election for New York City Mayor,” The Call, June 9, 2025.
11. Peter Sterne, “Many expect Zohran Mamdani to take the WFP line if he loses to Cuomo. That’s far from a sure thing,” City & State, June 24, 2025.
12. David Moore, “Hochul’s Stadium Swindle” The Lever, June 22, 2022; Jay Root, “Despite Hochul’s Vow, Her Policies Have Indirectly Aided Husband’s Firm,” New York Times, May 28, 2023.
13. Jonathan Ben-Menachem, “If We Want Mamdani to Beat the NYPD, the Left Must Build Power,” The Nation, Nov. 13, 2025.
14. Our Time.
15. Liza Featherstone, “Next After Electing Zohran Mamdani: Taxing the Rich,” Jacobin, Nov. 19, 2025.
16. Tascha Van Auken interview, “How Mamdani Won: Field Director Tascha Van Auken on Grassroots Organizing Behind Historic Victory,” Democracy Now!, Nov. 15, 2025; Allan Smith, “What Democrats can take from Zohran Mamdani’s outreach efforts for 2026,” NBC News, Dec. 8, 2025.
17. Andy Kroll, “The Best Way to Beat Trumpism? Talk Less, Listen More,” Rolling Stone, Sept. 15, 2020.
18. Susan Kang, “Mamdani Is Showing Dems Don’t Have to Chase Voter Opinion — They Can Shape It,” Truthout, June 21, 2025.
19. Andy Morrison, “New York City’s Forgotten Public Bank Plan,” Jacobin, Dec. 3, 2025.
20. Lee Webb and Jeff Faux, “Model State Energy Act,” Congressional Record, Dec. 18, 1974; James Ridgeway, New Energy (Beacon Press, 1975); Leonard Rodberg and Geoffrey Stokes, “The Big Switch: A Plan to Save New York,” Village Voice, Feb. 18, 1980.
21. Public Power NY.
22. Nelli Tügel, “Expropriate the big landlords,” Rupture, Jan. 9, 2022.
23. Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein, “Open Letter to Zohran Mamdani – Political Moderate,” CounterPunch, Dec. 8, 2025.
24. Howie Hawkins, “Community Control of the Police: An Idea Whose Time Came and Never Left,” Black Agenda Report, Feb. 26, 2020.
25. Tonia Hill, “Architects of Chicago police oversight commission applaud success in eliminating gang database, Shotspotter and more,” The Tribe, Oct. 8, 2024.
26. Shawn Mulcahy, “Advocates renew push for direct community control of police,” Chicago Reader, May 24, 2024.
