Zohran Mamdani is discovering how much more difficult seizing the means of production is than posting about seizing it on social media. To date he has delivered just one of the many radical campaign promises he algorithmized to become New York City mayor. And when he took to social media to crow about that partial win on taxing the rich, he may have inadvertently ripped a new financial blackhole in the city’s budget.
Nevertheless, the Democratic party establishment, that pointedly refused to back the radical’s mayoral bid, is being seduced by his social media socialism. Barack Obama recently visited New York to be photographed with him, and Governor Kathy Hochul caved to some of his tax and spending plans. Unsurprisingly, when she gave an inch, he took a mile. Mamdani is now demanding an extra $1 billion a year to fill a budget blackhole – stabbing Hochul in the front in a stage-managed public feud.
In aligning the party with his DSA agenda and enabling it, the Democratic establishment is taking a risk. New Yorkers are starting to see through their mayor: his handpicked and socially media boosted pick for City Council, Lindsey Boylan, was just trounced by a Democrat from the more moderate wing of the party. Voters either don’t believe he can deliver his promised agenda – or they don’t like what little of it he is delivering.
Democrats with an eye on 2028 beware. By the time of the presidential election, the results of the Mamdani experiment will be in – and they might be alarming enough to make the country recoil from the party.
Not so long ago, revolution was in the air in New York City. On the campaign trail, Mamdani made a series of viral guarantees to the city. As well as taxing the rich, he promised to make bus travel free, open a network of city-owned grocery stores, “immediately” freeze rent on rent stabilized apartments, create a new department of community safety that would replace the police for mental health emergencies and provide free universal childcare
Four months later and he has already quietly conceded defeat on most of those heady promises. Free bus travel will now be a small pilot project. Instead of a network of city-owned grocery stores there will be just one – opening in three years at a cost of $35 million. Rents were not frozen “immediately,” a vote by the Rent Guidelines Board will take place later this year. The new department of community safety has just two staff members. Free universal childcare shows some promise of success – the first phase funding has been agreed by Governor Kathy Hochul.
Even the one pledge Mamdani has partially delivered on is a rather neutered version of his extravagant vow to tax the rich. Hochul, who as governor has authority over tax raising in NYC, finally gave him permission to tax second homes worth $5 million to raise $500 million after first rejecting his plans for income and corporate tax hikes of $23 billion. A face-saving exercise; something to throw his followers who don’t follow the details too closely.
The mayor, however, also saw a viral opportunity. The second home tax was timely – reviews were just in of his first 100 days and they were decidedly lukewarm. So he dusted off the old playbook that had catapulted him to power and took to social media to demonize the wealthy.
“I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we’re taxing the rich,” Mamdani said to camera. The backdrop was billionaire Ken Griffin’s 24,000-square-foot Manhattan penthouse. He went on to call the Citadel CEO out “This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million, whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.”
Griffin was livid. In an email leaked to the Wall Street Journal, his chief operating officer, Gerald Beeson, stated that Citadel might not move forward with a massive new Midtown construction project. Beeson pointed out that the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue would create 6,000 highly paid construction jobs, more than 15,000 permanent jobs and would entail more than $6 billion of spending. He wrote that over the last five years Citadel “principals and team members (including nonresidents) have paid nearly $2.3 billion in city and state taxes.” And he noted that Griffin has personally directed $650 million in charitable gifts to New York City.
There is a high chance Griffin is not bluffing about relocating. He moved his company’s global headquarters from Chicago to Florida in 2022 after the then-Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to get a grip on soaring crime.
With one video Mamdani may have erased all of the potential gains, and then some, that his new tax could have raised. If he had not singled him out, Griffin would have probably just sighed and paid it. Other billionaires may now follow his lead out of the city.
How to deal with Zohran Mamdani is a thorny issue for the Democrat establishment. They are at once seduced by his social media wizardry and his apparent success with voters (although it’s worth noting he only won 50.8 percent of the vote), while also cognizant of the catastrophe that his spending plans would have on the city and the party.
This is especially true as the 2028 presidential elections hove into view. Does the Democratic establishment throw the ticking time bomb that is Zohran Mamdani as far away as possible – or do they try to defuse it?
Obama decided to roll up his sleeves and attempt to cut some of the wires. He met Mamdani for a photo opp with pre-school children in the Bronx to promote the mayor’s plan for free universal childcare for children aged six weeks old to five years old. To the Democrat party this feels like the safest of his policies. One which may even have blueprint potential for 2028.
But, in endorsing the project, Obama and the Democratic establishment are turning a blind eye to New York’s $5.4bn budget blackhole as well as Mamdani’s wrecking spree of the taxbase by chasing billionaires out of town. The estimated $6 billion annual cost of the scheme and how to pay for it ought to give the adults in the room pause for thought.
While Hochul has blocked most of Mamdani’s requests for tax rises and more state money, she has greenlit the first down payment on his childcare scheme. Big hurdles still lie ahead. The deal includes more than $1 billion in state funding, but it does not include permanent funding. She is one foot in, one foot out. But with reelection coming up in November, perhaps she wants Mamdani to sprinkle a little of his social media stardust on her?
That stardust might be all gone by 2028. The city may be bereft of billionaires and their tax dollars. The childcare scheme may have pushed it towards bankruptcy. Democrats may have caved in to even more of Mamdani’s tax and spending. Mamdani might be deeply unpopular.
By enabling Mamdani, the Democratic party becomes complicit in his project. Obama refused to endorse him during his run for mayor and Hochul only did so when it became clear he was going to win. All that has changed is that Mamdani now has power – the age-old aphrodisiac.
What they are failing to reckon with is that his mayorship is a proxy battle for the heart of the Democratic party. Instead of standing their ground and fighting the DSA insurgents, they’ve opened the gates and are ushering the enemy inside the city walls. The most obvious of Trojan horses.
AOC will no doubt be the DSA standard bearer on the Democratic presidential slate. A household name after years of radical positioning. And by 2028 many of these policies will be mainstream in the party thanks in no small part to Mamdani as well as other DSA mayors across the country. Like MAGA to the Republican body politic, the DSA will be close to taking over its Democratic host.
Even if establishment Democrats do manage to constrain Mamdani from inflicting tremendous damage, he and AOC will only claim it is proof the doom-mongers were wrong and that it’s time for the full fat version of their radical agenda. Perversely, the example of a bankrupt NYC might open the eyes of a generation of voters who, without the example of the malevolent USSR, believe extreme socialism is a force for good – not just social media clout. Their online vitriol will turn inwards, against the party.
Instead of mounting a resistance, Obama and Hochul have entwined the party’s fortunes with the Mamdani project. All the viral videos in the world might not now save them from the DSA virus coursing through their system.
