What I learned about Zohran Mamdani in two hour-long interviews

What Mamdani told the New York Editorial Board and the Daily News Editorial Board

I am part of a group of journalists called the New York Editorial Board (subscribe to our Substack!) who gathered around a table to talk policy and politics for an hour with Zohran Mamdani back in February, in the midst of his astronomical rise. I also talked to Mamdani for an hour in late May when he sat with the New York Daily News editorial board. His answers in both contexts have stuck with me since. They say good and bad things about how Mamdani would approach the mayoralty. Here’s what I learned.

Mamdani thinks of himself as an advocate and communicator first — but when you scratch the surface, he is thinking intelligently about how to run the city.

Revealingly, he told the New York Editorial Board, “I think at its core, a mayor is a messenger, a delegate, a liaison.” That answer can fairly be called naive, since he’s running to become the chief executive of a government with a budget of $115 billion and some 350,000 employees on its payroll; I asked him why he didn’t use the term “manager” among his three descriptors.

He answered quite well, revealing himself to have a healthy management philosophy that’s taken lessons from recent mayors whether they’re named de Blasio, whose record overall he admires, or Bloomberg, with whom he has many substantive disagreements.

Mamdani said, “I do not believe that every single head of an agency needs to align with me 100% across every single issue, but rather specifically on that issue of that agency…” and went on to hold up Bloomberg as a positive example.

There’s healthy humility here: “We can never pretend to have a monopoly on knowledge or approach,” he went on. “And while I have critiques of any mayoral administration that has been proceeding to varying degrees, I truly seek to build on the legacy of almost each one of them.”

He oversimplifies, until he’s pressed.

Mamdani isn’t the second coming; he’s a politician, and that means he has a penchant for bending facts and caricaturing his foes. In speaking to the Daily News editorial board, he spoke of Andrew Cuomo’s “unwillingness to tax billionaires and the most profitable corporations, his donors, to fully fund the public schools that he had starved for many many years.”

The facts: Cuomo, who indeed had been resistant to raising taxes significantly on the highest earners, did in 2021 agree to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. That same year, he committed to increasing foundation aid for New York City schools. There’s no honest way to look at K-12 education funding over the years, which is now north of $35,000 a year, and conclude that the schools here have been “starved.”

Mamdani revealed more of that unfortunate glibness when asked where he might find savings in the city budget. “Is there anything you would spend less money on?”, we asked.

His first answer: “I would spend less money on the NYPD communications department.” Even if one argues that the department’s public information office was bloated — a charge with which Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch seemed to agree when this year she cut the 87-person office in half — it’s a drop in the bucket of the overall city budget, a facile response for someone who’s supposed to be seeing the big picture.

Pressed further, he got around to real savings: “I also believe that we need to bring down the NYPD’s near billion-dollar overtime. I think that we need to eliminate that overtime. I think that we need to disband the Strategic Response Group. I also believe that we need to cancel the proposal to build what has been dubbed ‘Cop City.’”

How about beyond the NYPD? He has offered few specifics to date.

As he put it, “I would take a very hard look throughout the entirety of the budget to understand who is actually working for the City of New York and who is being paid a favor for having worked with Eric Adams for decades — and to make sure that every single dollar is being spent appropriately. Because I think one of the worst things for someone who believes, as I do, in the necessity of government fulfilling its mandate to make lives easier for people, is ineffective, inefficient government, and you have to take that head on.”

He is still leaning on generalities.

Getting bogged down in specifics isn’t a recipe for campaign success; just look at Brad Lander or Scott Stringer. But sooner or later, Mamdani will have to get more granular when he’s pressed on policy particulars. Right now, when prodded for details — such as on how to handle budget crises resulting from declining federal aid, or the feasibility of universal childcare, or why it makes sense for rent controls to be handed down within families, and to people with higher incomes — he reverts to broad pronouncements.

Mamdani’s goal isn’t just a bigger government; it’s a better-functioning government.

That’s a key argument in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance,” and it has clearly resonated with Mamdani. He told the Daily News, “If you care as deeply about public goods and public service as I do, you have to care just as much about public excellence.”

To that end, he’s painfully aware of how bureaucratic barriers hinder private-sector housing development. Speaking like an “Abundance” groupie, he told the Daily News Editorial Board, “I think a lot of this also has to do with the speed of these processes and the need to speed these processes up…what we're seeing is, a dire need for a comprehensive approach to land use that is citywide in nature and some aspects of it will require City Charter revisions. because ultimately what we need to do is to ensure that we speed up the production of housing.”

Mamdani’s philosophy of ‘public excellence’ could extend to education — but doesn’t seem to yet.

The New York Editorial Board asked Mamdani what he’d do to ensure that New York City’s public schools deliver better results for students despite spending more per pupil than any other large system. He dodged, with an answer about students living in homelessness and class-size reduction. Neither was a serious answer to the core question of why with ample resources the schools can’t deliver results.

Mamdani talks a lot about equity, underfunding, paying teachers and paraprofessionals more, and the like; he doesn’t talk much about how to ensure the public schools consistently challenge kids who need to be challenged, and reach for an excellent level of instructional quality. That’s what most parents want to hear. At this point, it’s hard to discern whether he has an education strategy beyond spending more and citing equity.

On housing, he needs to think much harder.

Mamdani says some of the right things about the need to relax rules to goose housing production in New York. He wants citywide upzoning; he opposes parking minimums; he opposes deference to councilmembers on proposed rezonings. He told the Daily News editorial board, “In the private sector, we need to make it easier to build. And what I mean by that is by removing the requirement to build parking lots…by increasing density around mass transit hubs, by upzoning wealthier neighborhoods that have historically not contributed to affordable housing production, and also by streamlining the process by which we build.” He spoke of “ending the piecemeal approach that we have taken which is one I think best typified by a member deference approach to zoning decisions and instead putting together a citywide approach to the production of housing.” All good there.

But his core housing promise is to spend $100 billion in New York City capital funding to build 200,000 new rent-stabilized units, which would require the city borrowing about $70 billion above its current debt limit, which allows the city to borrow just another $30 billion under the state Constitution’s legal formula. I asked him, “What is the limit right now? And under law, how did the limit get to be that way?”

He couldn’t answer either question, not even when pressed to give a “ballpark in tens of billions.” He certainly could now, after having been put on the spot. But it’s important for a would-be mayor who’s getting behind such expansive and expensive policies to understand precisely what he’s doing and why, in real time.

Mamdani talks a good game on building bridges.

His critics claim that Mamdani subscribes to my-way-or-the-express-train thinking, but when you really listen closely to him, that’s not what he’s saying at all.

He boasted to the New York Editorial Board of his “ability to build coalitions across the ideological spectrum.” I haven’t personally seen clear evidence of that ability — but it says something that Mamdani thinks this, rather than simply activating his progressive base, is a key to success.

He appears to understand the dynamics of how change happens in America. Asked whether making tough choices when governing might test his Democratic Socialist of America bona fides, he talked about the importance of uniting people around common goals regardless of underlying ideological differences: “It's clear to everyone that I'm fighting for these things and that the votes that they see across New York City are not necessarily die-hard for Zohran specifically as an individual, but are die hard for freezing the rent, for making buses fast and free, and for bringing universal child care.”

He continued: “there are different aspects of the same message that appeal to many, many people, as long as you don’t ask them to stand up and subscribe to every single thing that you might say and every single thing you might believe, and that you're respectful when you’re faced with that disagreement.”

He reads a lot — including Vital City.

It’s genuinely appealing that Mamdani isn’t just reading sources that reinforce his priors. He’s trying to learn. He seems to know what he doesn’t know.

The New York Editorial Board asked him why he thinks felony assaults have been rising, and what policing strategy might bring them down.

He answered: “When you're looking at CompStat from 2023 to 2024 you see increases in, as you've said, felony assaults, you also see increases in rapes. And these are horrific, these are things we have to take on. I was quite taken by the article in Vital City that was talking about looking at crime and stepping back in an analysis, not only on a year-to-year basis but also over decades, and one thing that it identified was that crimes that had a financial motive — theft, burglary, larceny — have fallen dramatically over the years and crimes that are borne more out of anger, crimes that are also far more random, have risen.”

He’s a fetishist for universal programs.

Mamdani declared himself “deeply skeptical of means testing,” in favor of universal programs. I get it; this is consistent with an argument one often hears from the left, and even among some moderates, that creating programs with complex eligibility requirements often fails to achieve their goals, while creating political rifts that didn’t previously exist. The universality of free Pre-K was key to its success in New York.

But means-testing, even though it creates barriers to entry, has its place. It’s better to offer low-income New Yorkers half-priced subway fares than to slash the fare for everyone and wind up with a huge hole in the MTA’s budget (or the other option — making poor people pay full freight). Eligibility to live in public housing is properly means-tested, as are countless other programs focused on helping the neediest among us. Mamdani has to be careful not to make the universality of public programs an article of faith.

I left my two conversations with the young politician impressed by his dexterity and his commitment to educating himself — and troubled by some rigidity in his worldview. If he keeps listening and learning, as anyone aspiring to take on this incredibly challenging job should, he can be a successful mayor.