The Bull and Bear Cases on Zohran Mamdani

The Democratic nominee for mayor has a record of out-there positions but also has shown a willingness to listen and learn.

Dear readers,

I haven’t known exactly what to say about Zohran Mamdani’s thumping win in New York’s mayoral primary because I haven’t known exactly what to think about it. At a visceral level, I’ve been less bothered by it than I expected to be. Partly that’s because — like a lot of people who voted¹ for Andrew Cuomo — I didn’t like Andrew Cuomo or think he would be a particularly good mayor. He represented stasis and sclerosis, was worse on policy than incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and also didn’t seem terribly eager about doing the job. Cuomo ran a campaign that would have had him beholden to many of the “stationary bandits” that make New York’s government ineffective and overly expensive. Part of me is just relieved that I won’t “own” or have to defend a Cuomo mayoral performance that was sure to be unimpressive.

That said, Mamdani has a record of saying and believing crazy shit, and I worry deeply about what kind of mayor he will be in the likely event that he wins. While I’m actually fairly sanguine about Mamdani’s approach to the economy (for reasons I’ll discuss below) my biggest fear about him is that he will tolerate an unacceptable level of crime and disorder in the city, and that he will be unable to work effectively with the police department to keep order in the city.

His record on crime is extremely left wing. In 2020, during his first campaign for state assembly, he attacked the then-mayor and council speaker over their efforts to “keep as many cops as possible on the beat” (Mamdani’s words — he meant that as a bad thing) because “the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” He has a broader history of saying things like “queer liberation means defund the police,” and his commitment to anti-carceral politics has been deep enough that he’s even been willing to break with core Democratic constituencies to pursue it. In addition to that attack on Bill de Blasio for not being left-wing enough on policing, he voted against a law criminalizing ghost guns and another one strengthening criminal penalties for assaulting transit workers, despite that law being a priority for the Transport Workers Union.

But recently, the way Mamdani talks about the police is very different. While he broke with most of his rivals in the Democratic primary by not calling for higher police headcount, he no longer says he wants to shrink the force, and he says the police “have a critical role to play” on public safety. He frames his plan for a “Department of Community Safety” (which would be staffed by non-police employees who would respond to issues like mental health crises) as a way to allow police to spend more of their time fighting crime. But while his positioning and his rhetoric on these issues has changed, he hasn’t really explained why it changed, nor has he revisited or shown regret for his more extreme comments in the past. I am concerned that his reluctance to employ the NYPD to address quality-of-life issues will lead to a higher level of disorder and crime on our streets and subways. And I worry that he won’t be able to effectively manage relations with NYPD officers — who are likely to neither respect Mamdani nor feel respected by him — and that we could end up with quasi-strike behavior from the police that leads to further disorder and crime.

Zohran Mamdani, Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, spoke during a press conference celebrating his primary victory with leaders and members of the city's labor unions on July 2, 2025 in New York.(Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP)

While those are my worries, I’m not sure they’ll come to pass if he’s elected mayor. Here’s the bullish case for Mamdani on crime and order. He has an ambitious economic agenda — that has been his primary focus in the campaign — but the surest way to derail that agenda is to develop a dysfunctional relationship with the NYPD that leads to a surge of public disorder and makes him unpopular. His change in rhetoric demonstrates that he knows this area is politically hazardous for him. He has said he is open to keeping NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch in place — I am hopeful that he will do so, and that her unusually high level of credibility across the political spectrum will be the glue that holds his relationship with the department together. He has also talked about how he admires the track record of Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and she is an example of a progressive politician who has managed to improve her relationship with the police over time and ultimately build an effective partnership. Maybe he will take a page from her.

On the economy, Mamdani’s abstract ideological commitments are extreme and left-wing. But then, Bill de Blasio’s were even more so. Here’s something astounding de Blasio said to New York Magazine in 2017 as he sought re-election:

Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.

De Blasio’s mayoralty wasn’t my cup of tea, but we survived — in fact, the city did quite well economically. In practice, the mayor’s role in the economy is heavily circumscribed in ways that de Blasio bemoaned in that same interview. So I am not terribly concerned that Mamdani would be able to use his perch to “seize the means of production,” any more than de Blasio was able to use it to end private control over real property.

There are also aspects of Mamdani’s economic viewpoint that are downright market-friendly. His virally popular plan to fight “Halalflation” — the rising price of chicken-and-rice from New York’s food carts — is deregulatory, as he argues the city should issue more truck licenses so that cart operators don’t need to pay extortionate rents to license holders. This reflects an understanding that costs of doing business pass through to consumer prices and that both consumers and business owners can benefit from deregulation. Mamdani also supports the recently enacted “City of Yes” reforms that seek to increase housing production through the relaxation of zoning requirements. He has talked about how housing is an area where his views have changed over time — that he’s come to understand the importance of private capital for housing production. And Mamdani’s shift is part of a broader one we’re seeing on the left in New York City: While City of Yes is a signature policy for our centrist mayor, Eric Adams, he only got it passed because he drew support from most of the leftists on the city council.² Adams is actually something of an outlier among outer-borough centrists, most of whom are worse on housing and zoning than leftists like Mamdani.

I also think it’s a good sign that he’s been working with Kathy Wylde to build bridges to the city’s business establishment.

This is not to say that I am fully buying the “abundist” turn that Mamdani telegraphed in the closing days of the Democratic primary. The rhetorical framework he’s offered about future upzonings is a lot worse than the one embodied in City of Yes — he wants to speed up zoning changes for “any project that commits to the administration’s affordability, stabilization, union labor, and sustainability goals” which is basically a recapitulation of this meme about NIMBYs. There’s a lot that’s half-baked about his ideas to expand government, including his plan for a government-run grocery store pilot, which he intends to finance with a pool of subsidy money that doesn’t actually exist. And I think the large corporate and high-earner personal income tax increases he has proposed are unwise and likely to push business away from the city. Fortunately, he would need approval from state lawmakers to raise those taxes.³

I’ve covered a lot of local issues here for a nationally focused newsletter, so I’ll just hit a couple more topics before I explain why, despite my somewhat softened view on Mamdani, I intend to vote to re-elect Mayor Adams.

Obviously, there’s been a lot of attention to Mamdani’s views about Israel, and I simply don’t care about this at all — mayor is not a foreign policy job, and the amount of attention the Israel-Palestine conflict gets in our mayor’s race is ridiculous. (Indeed, the amount of attention it gets in our entire national politics is ridiculous.) Of course, Mamdani is himself excessively fixated on the issue, his apologia for the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” is obtuse, and his pledge to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York is preposterous (on what legal authority? We are not signatories to the ICC). But this is simply at the bottom of my list of issues — I don’t care what the mayor of New York thinks about an intractable regional conflict halfway around the world that’s been going on for literally a thousand years.

The last thing I’ll note is that Mamdani is bad on education, and that his past support for abolishing the standardized test for admission to the city’s prestigious magnet high schools is a knock against him — though, again, if he actually wanted to get rid of it, he’d need a change to state law that he’s very unlikely to get.

Mamdani will probably be elected mayor, and we will probably find out whether he’s moderated and matured in the ways I hope or whether he’ll be an extremist disaster in the way I fear. But I am intending to vote to re-elect our incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, who will be on the general election ballot as an independent.

The funny thing about Adams is that, despite everything, he actually has quite a good record to run on. Most importantly, violent crime has been falling precipitously and is now below pre-COVID levels. Steve Morris from The Recount summarizes the good news about New York in 2025 as follows:

-pedestrian deaths are down

-biker deaths are down

-shootings are down

-homicides are down

-car crashes are down and car travel time is down

-subway crime is down and ridership is up

-fare evasion is down

-bus travel is quicker

-congestion pricing succeeding

I’d add to this that New York is, under Adams’s leadership, finally containerizing its trash, and that his sanitation reforms have produced a city that is literally cleaner, with fewer rats.

One funny thing about this election is that Cuomo and Adams have sought to occupy the same ideological lane, but Cuomo’s theory of the case was that New York is a city in “crisis” and that only he, with his tough energy, could protect us and see us through. Adams, meanwhile, has had to argue that the city is on its way up — cleaner, safer, and more convenient than before he took office. I think the Adams argument is more coherent and makes more sense. But his argument (like Cuomo’s) does not sufficiently address the cost-of-living concerns that have fueled Mamdani’s rise. And of course, there is the petty corruption, and the sordid implicit with Donald Trump to get out of trouble for that petty corruption, both of which have given New York voters good reason to sour on Adams.

I nonetheless think Adams has done a pretty good job and I’d rather see him serve another four years than take the risk of what a Mamdani mayoralty might be like, particularly on crime and public safety. But I understand what has tempted so many New York voters to take a flier on him.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. I ranked Whitney Tilson first on my ballot, but under New York’s ranked-choice primary voting system, my vote ultimately transferred to Cuomo.

2. For another example of New York’s left moving in a good direction on housing issues, see this video from leftist council members Chi Ossé and Crystal Hudson about how supply-side reforms are essential to pushing rents down.

3. I do worry the state legislature will sign off on at least some of his plan for higher city taxes, though I think the likelier outcome is that state lawmakers will raise state-level taxes and keep the revenue in the state budget to address federal Medicaid cuts. Why send the money to Mamdani when Albany lawmakers can control and spend it themselves?