With a couple of days of early voting to go before Election Day in New York City, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has maintained a significant lead in the polls over his main competitor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, months after Mamdani’s generational upset over Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
To hear the candidate tell it, that advantage is thanks to one thing: Mamdani’s policy platform, which is laser-focused on making the city affordable for working people.
The three-term state assemblyman and democratic socialist has a stacked to-do list that includes freezing the rent on 1 million apartments, making buses fast and free, establishing universal child care, creating a network of five city-owned grocery stores, and spending billions of dollars to build rent-stabilized housing.
“He’s focused on affordability, and he probably has one of the most expansive services agendas that we’ve seen in decades,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit think tank.
Mamdani knows it’s an ambitious list.
“The job of city government isn’t to tinker around the edges,” he said in a campaign video about the city-owned grocery store proposal. (Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment for this story.)
Big Apple political observers agree with Mamdani that his massive policy platform distinguishes him as a candidate. But big ideas require significant amounts of money, political capital or both.
“There are very real structural, budgetary and legal limits on what the city’s chief executive can accomplish without the cooperation and support of other branches of city or state government,” wrote Carl Weisbrod, who co-chaired former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s transition team and then led the city’s planning commission.
Should Mamdani win on Tuesday, he’ll face a balancing act.
“It would be unreasonable for any mayor to think they’re going to deliver right away on every promise,” Rein said. “He’s got to make those smart choices, and in his case, they should be bold choices, because he wants to deliver progress on his agenda. But he has to be able to do that while balancing the budget, preparing for federal cuts, and protecting critical services for needy New Yorkers and quality of life for all New Yorkers.”
Despite some skepticism, Mamdani’s ideas don’t break any laws — or, arguably, any laws of political gravity. Getting them done is a matter of political will and deft maneuvering.
He would most likely be able to ‘freeze the rent’ for millions of New Yorkers.
Mamdani’s big-ticket campaign item — the one that leads his website and is featured in TV ads — is “freezing the rent” for millions of city residents.
He’s talking about what are known as “rent-stabilized” apartments, for which a government board determines landlords’ maximum possible annual rent increases. There are around 1 million such units in the city, constituting almost half of all rental units and housing over 2 million people. (This reporter lives in a rent-stabilized apartment.)
Yearly rent increase maximums in rent-stabilized units are determined by the Rent Guidelines Board. The board makes rent increase (or lack thereof) decisions in June, affecting rents starting in October. The mayor appoints members of that board, who serve anywhere from two- to four-year terms, depending on their role. Mamdani has said that he would only appoint board members “who understand that landlords are doing just fine.” The rent has been frozen three times in the past six decades, all during de Blasio’s tenure.
Asked in one recent interview for a priority for his first 100 days in office, Mamdani didn’t hesitate.
“The first thing is putting together my Rent Guidelines Board,” he told FOX 5 New York last week. “This is a key part, because for New Yorkers, the number one crisis of affordability is that of housing. They feel it every single day.” (A second priority, he said, “is actually to make government work again.”)
There are some caveats, though.
Six out of nine members of the current board are serving on terms that have already technically expired. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who’s endorsed Cuomo, has the power to replace them in the final days of his term and has hinted he might do just that. However, board rules concerning outgoing mayors would mean that only four new board members “would actually continue on through the first year of a Mamdani administration,” as HellGate reports.
It’s also possible that certain Adams appointees could ultimately be convinced to support a rent freeze — and one of them, Alexander Armlovitch, told HellGate he would consider it in certain circumstances. Mamdani could also ask certain members to resign or move to dismiss them. But at that point, we’d be in uncharted waters, and the move might lead to a court battle.
“My understanding as a policy person is that he has very broad authority over who he names to the Rent Guidelines Board. That’s always been true of every mayor,” said Jessica Katz, who has served in three mayoral administrations, including as Adams’ housing chief in 2022 and 2023.
So, long story short, for nearly one-third of the city populace, Mamdani would likely be able to freeze the rent, though he may encounter some delay.
He could accomplish his major priorities with help from allies – including the governor.
For several key priorities, Mamdani would need the help of the city council, the governor, the state Legislature or some combination of that group.
Universal no-cost child care for children between 6 weeks to 5 years old would cost somewhere around $6 billion, the campaign estimates, though other estimates are higher. Making buses free would essentially entail the city paying riders’ fares, which Mamdani has said would amount to somewhere around $700 million. Establishing a city-owned grocery store in each borough — which Mamdani has described as “like a public option for produce” — would add some $60 million to the bill, The New York Times estimated this summer.
Some ideas — like city-owned grocery stores and, potentially, fare-free buses — could be included in the city’s budget, which since 2022 has run over $100 billion annually and most recently topped $115 billion. Universal child care would likely require more than the city currently has to spare.
Mamdani says he can raise $10 billion through a mix of a 2% income tax on residents making more than $1 million per year, which the campaign says would raise $4 billion; raising the top state corporate tax rate to 11.5%, up from 7.25%, said to raise $5 billion; and a mix of procurement reform and collecting unpaid fines and taxes, which the campaign says would net nearly $1 billion.
He wouldn’t get everything done quickly, and certainly not in his first budget, which he’d have to propose within weeks of taking office.
And the big moneymakers — the income and corporate taxes — would need state approval. Mamdani has endorsements from all of the state’s major Democrats, signaling the tax hikes could ultimately make it through the Legislature. But Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she is “not raising taxes at a time when affordability is the big issue,” and her spokesperson recently reiterated that she is “not open to raising income taxes.”
But Hochul is up for reelection in 2026. And committing to new taxes or some other form of funding for New York City — particularly to pay for a popular policy like universal child care — could be the price she pays for Mamdani and his supporters’ backing for another term. During a recent rally in Queens for Mamdani’s campaign, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also spoke, the governor’s brief remarks were interrupted with roaring chants of “Tax the rich!” as the Democratic leaders of the state Assembly and Senate stood behind her, grinning awkwardly.
“I can hear you,” the governor eventually relented. (“I couldn’t hear what they were chanting,” Hochul deadpanned to reporters later. “I thought they were saying, ‘Let’s go Bills.’”)
Mamdani wouldn’t only need Hochul’s help for tax revenue, though. In order to construct 200,000 “permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes” over the next 10 years, the candidate proposes spending $100 billion, adding $70 billion in municipal debt over the next decade to the $30 billion the city was already planning on incurring. In order to do that, he’d need to raise the city’s debt limit, which would require approval from the Legislature and governor.
Other agenda items wouldn’t require state approval. Mamdani has pitched making city buses both free and fast, for example, and the latter item is securely in the mayor’s wheelhouse. Namely, he has campaigned on carrying out street redesign projects across the city, an area where Adams has long fallen short. “It doesn’t cost much, you don’t need Albany, all the tools are in the power of City Hall,” Mamdani pitched voters in one ad.
There are more Mamdani proposals than we’ve explored here. For example, he wants to establish a Department of Community Safety to augment the police department and “prioritize prevention-first, community-based solutions, which have been consistently shown to better improve safety.” He wants to raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030 — another area requiring state approval — and he would seek to incentivize residential housing development by reforming “our disjointed planning and zoning processes” through things like eliminating parking minimums. The list is lengthy and includes ideas big and small.
But the would-be mayor has a significant asset: political will. He’s well-liked among New Yorkers, unlike his competitors. And with enough popular support and dealmaking skill, there’s a real path toward achieving his agenda, should he be elected.
“One of the stranger opinions I have, given the context of this mayoral race and the increasingly unhinged attacks launched from the Andrew Cuomo camp, is that Mamdani’s actual campaign platform is relatively modest,” the writer and journalist (and, briefly, Mamdani’s former boss) Ross Barkan observed recently.
“The core planks do not stretch the political imagination all that much if you know anything about the recent history of the city.”
He would have to take on Trump while leading a massive bureaucracy.
Donald Trump has hovered over the race. Should Mamdani win the mayor’s office, the president has threatened to “take over” the city — presumably with some combination of federal agents and military force — and cut its federal funding.
Trump has already approved cuts that will affect New Yorkers — namely, Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill” machete job, which slashed SNAP benefits and Medicaid to pay for massive tax cuts, largely for the rich, and lots of new spending on federal law enforcement and detention.
The law “will cost the state of New York over $15 billion per year, kick 1.5 million New Yorkers off their health insurance, eliminate benefits for up to 1 million food stamp recipients, cause the loss of over 200,000 jobs, and threaten nearly half of all hospitals throughout the state with financial collapse,” the Fiscal Policy Institute said upon the bill’s passage this summer.
On top of that, Trump could attack funding for the New York City Housing Authority, which would set back Mamdani’s plans to “double the city’s capital investment in major renovations of NYCHA housing.”
“I think the major threat is Donald Trump,” Mamdani said during an appearance on the HellGate podcast last week, when asked what he’d be up against as mayor. He noted Trump’s recent efforts to withhold $18 billion in federal funding for New York City-area infrastructure projects and the president’s attempt to create a mass deportation force.
“We have to approach this job with the expectation that crisis will be a regular part of life in dealing with Donald Trump, and that we simultaneously have to move the ball forward on medium- and long-term initiatives,” he said. “It cannot be that every hour of every day is just spent in a defensive posture to Donald Trump, because part of the reason we got Donald Trump is that we didn’t have an affirmative vision of what life would look like beyond Donald Trump.”
Katz, the veteran of city government, said Mamdani’s team could make or break his potential tenure. The mayor leads an enormous bureaucracy, and the city’s workforce hovers around 300,000, comparable to the overall population of Saint Paul, Minnesota, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
For every major policy, there are dozens of commitments and decisions the mayor and the mayor’s appointees must make.
“Government insiders are looking to see the names of who he appoints,” Katz said. “There’s 300,000 city employees and 8 million New Yorkers. He’s going to be running an operation at a scale which requires an amount of oversight and delegation that is a very gentle balance. So picking the right people, and letting them do their job, is going to be the number one thing that everyone’s looking for who’s been in these kind of positions before.”
And even with a great team in place, the city will have plenty of curveballs in store for the next mayor.
In a recent profile of Mamdani, an unnamed city hall veteran told The New Yorker that a mayor’s waking hours are filled with bad choices.
“You’re constantly making bad decisions that you know are bad decisions,” the person said. “You’re presented with two bad options, and you’ve got to pick one, and that’s your day.”