Zohran Mamdani brings the Bernie Sanders method to New York

Thirteen days out from the primary, the race for Adams’s job has evolved into a competition between Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with seven candidates trailing behind. Five are trying to notch enough ranked-choice votes to win the final count; state senator Jessica Ramos and businessman Whitney Tilson are largely running to stop Mamdani.

None had built campaigns quite as ready for this moment, as Democratic anger at the Trump presidency boils over.

Mamdani did not join other Democrats in renouncing the “defund the police” movement. He defended his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and his opposition to a “Jewish state” of Israel instead of one that defended “equal rights” unlinked from religion.

Those had been candidate-killing issues in other campaigns. But New York Democrats will vote while the Trump administration is ramping up immigration raids and enforcement in major cities; when Israel’s 20-month war in Gaza has infuriated younger voters; and when the cost of housing and groceries has become a bigger issue than crime. 

In polling conducted by Data for Progress, which found Mamdani only narrowly behind Cuomo in the ranked-choice vote, 28% of voters ranked “housing” as their top issue, 20% ranked other economic issues, and 18% ranked “crime and public safety.” Support for Israel didn’t rank.

“Trump has shown us that on one side of politics, there’s a limitless imagination, and on the other, we are constantly constructing an ever-lowering ceiling,” Mamdani told Semafor. He has promised to freeze rent, make city buses fare-free, open city-run discount groceries, and raise taxes on the richest New Yorkers and businesses to pay for this.

Those promises sounded more credible, he said, after Democrats watched the new president demand deeper tax cuts at the same time he wanted to buy Greenland. “I’m talking about less money than Andrew Cuomo gave to Elon Musk as a corporate tax break.”

Mamdani entered the race in October, when conventional wisdom said that a more experienced, less progressive candidate could unseat the scandal-plagued Adams. City Comptroller Brad Lander positioned himself early as that candidate, joining the campaign before Mamdani; Adrienne Adams, the (unrelated) city council speaker, jumped in three months ago, after Adams’ deal with the Trump DOJ effectively ended his campaign as a Democrat.

Cuomo entered the race weeks later, and neither Lander nor Adams has been able so far to dislodge Mamdani as the ex-governor’s biggest threat.

The ranked-choice voting system complicates any other candidate’s strategy. Voters cup to five candidates on their ballots, and tabulators count their preferences until one candidate gets a majority.

In 2021, the first year under the new system, city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia was the first choice of only 20% of primary voters, but nearly won the primary, because so many Democrats marked her as an alternative, lower on their ballots.

“The state of politics for New York right now for the Democratic Party is really an amazing litmus test for the Democratic Party across the nation,” Adrienne Adams told the New York Editorial Board, in one of its candidate interviews.

Progressive groups and leaders, like the Working Families Party and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have urged voters to leave Cuomo off their ballots and rank only the candidates they align with most.

For the WFP, that was Mamdani in first place, followed by Lander, followed by Adams, followed by state senator Zellnor Myrie; for Ocasio-Cortez, it was Mamdani, Adams, Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Myrie.

The non-Cuomo alternative candidates have sometimes portrayed Mamdani as green and unrealistic. But they’ve been busier introducing themselves as the responsible alternatives to Cuomo, appealing to the 50% of likely primary voters who view him unfavorably.

“If I’m running against someone, I’m running against Andrew Cuomo. He’s who’s leading in the polls,” Lander said in an interview after a forum for Jewish voters in the Upper West Side. “I’m running against a corrupt, abusive, self-serving politician who’s only running to rehearse his own grievances.”

Mamdani’s buoyant, omnipresent social media campaign has been hard for Lander and the rest of the field to compete with. When the spotlight has fallen on him, he has kept it by proposing simpler, bigger, and more aggressive ideas, like free childcare and a graduated rise to a $30 minimum wage.

Justin Brannan, a city council member running for comptroller with Mamdani’s support, said that he would not support him on BDS. But Adams, he said, had helped create the conditions for an electorate that craved an anti-austerity agenda, and didn’t want to be told it was impossible.

“New York City used to be the place for big ideas, and somewhere along the way, we just stopped doing them,” said Brannan. “De Blasio with universal pre-K was, like, the last time we did something big. The past almost four years with Eric Adams, we’ve been like, ‘Oh, if we can keep the libraries open six days a week, that’s a huge victory.’”

At the Upper West Side “New York Jewish Agenda” forum, Stringer proposed a $1 billion “very, very rainy day” fund to protect the city from Trump administration attacks on grants or programs.

Lander suggested putting “less than $100 million” of the city’s Medicaid funding into an independent authority “so we can provide reproductive and gender affirming care” without Trump interference.

Three days later, Mamdani summoned reporters to the Financial District for his plan to “Trump-proof” New York: The taxes that would raise $10 billion, and total resistance to his deportations.

Asked if he agreed with Mayor Adams that the NYPD should arrest protesters who interfered with ICE enforcement, Mamdani rejected the premise.

“It’s ironic to hear that from a mayor who literally drove on the sidewalk in the final days of the previous mayoral election,” he said. “This is an indication of their willingness to be accomplices to what is going on and what ICE agents are inflicting upon New Yorkers.”

Six months ago, that answer might have been a problem for Mamdani. But most Democrats assumed, at that time, he had a lower ceiling — that the positions he’d taken would hold him down.

After Mamdani’s “Trump-proof” press conference, an X account that clips news interviews shared one of the candidate sticking to his position that ICE should be abolished altogether.

“A lawless president does not mean we abolish entire agencies and our laws,” Adrienne Adams wrote on top of the video. “People elect us as leaders to solve problems, not pledge allegiance to rigid ideologies.”

One day later, she deleted that response, which had been torn apart by pro-Mamdani commenters. It was not, according to her campaign, what she really wanted to say.

The decline of Eric Adams, since he wrapped himself around the president’s finger, was the catalyst for Mamdani’s rise. He presided over falling crime, which lowered the salience of that issue; he suggested that the forced busing of migrants from Texas, to take advantage of the city’s generous sheltering laws, was forcing austerity on the city.

As Adams receded, with Trump in office, the agenda changed. Mamdani’s campaigning changed it too. His early ad campaign, put together by the team that made ads for Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman, got him into the conversation with candidates (Lander et al) who were taken more seriously as potential mayors. He leapt over them as Cuomo’s closest competitor — and then put him into the cohort of potential mayors.

This involved a lot of risks, taken in attention-getting ways, like his visit to the courthouse where a grad student leader of Gaza protests was being arraigned. Following the candidates, I heard many times that Trump had given Democrats envy of enormous plans that were crisp and memorable and not green-eyeshaded to death; Mamdani was the only contender doing that.

Two years ago, some of the same dynamics here played out in Chicago — which has an all-party runoff system, not a Democratic primary then a general election.

Voters forced a choice between Brandon Johnson, an anti-austerity progressive, and Paul Vallas, a conservative Democrat who, unfortunately for his campaign, was on tape attacking Barack Obama.

If Mamdani wins this primary, I’d expect the specter of Johnson, who is tremendously unpopular now, to hover over New York. Adams is already running as an independent; Cuomo has the ability to.

Tilson’s campaign, after Cuomo’s, is the most oriented around stopping Mamdani.

At a weekend stop at a Ukrainian festival, after he gave a short speech while wearing a patch-covered jacket from his trips to bring aid to that country, he warned of a city that would be threatening to Jewish New Yorkers and far more poor, if Mamdani were able to win.

“We are the wealthiest city in the world,” said Tilson. “I think he and the DSA people he surrounds himself with would create a hostile business environment that would drive away businesses and hurt economic growth.”