The Zohran Pundit Fallacy

What they keep getting wrong

Where’s Waldo?

As the New York City mayoral race barrels to its conclusion and a 34-year-old Muslim socialist, according to all the polls and betting markets, prepares for victory, national and international media have begun to take notice. As someone who has known Zohran Mamdani since the end of 2017, this has been an intriguing period. I’ve spoken with German, Japanese, Italian, French, and British journalists thus far—my cover story on Mamdani was in The New Statesman, the great magazine of the United Kingdom—as well as plenty from the United States. I was quoted in a new Vanity Fair profile of Mamdani and in a New York Times story about Mamdani’s relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As they once said about Ed Koch, I’m unavoidable for comment. I genuinely enjoy speaking with other reporters and educating them, as best as I can, about Mamdani and the dynamics of New York City.

What I’ve enjoyed less, as someone with fluency in both New York and national politics, is the American pundit class attempting to make sense of the particulars of the race. This isn’t because I feel any great propriety over New York; rather, it’s simply that they continually misunderstand how it is policy is achieved in the city and state. I don’t care if anyone chooses not to vote for Mamdani or urges others away from him. It’s a democracy, and everyone is free to vote how they’d like. It’s fine to argue against Mamdani’s core policies or question his experience. It’s fine to believe public buses shouldn’t be free, rent-stabilized apartments should see rent hikes, five municipal-run grocery stores shouldn’t exist, or that a massive childcare expansion is poor policy or too expensive. Even if Mamdani has promised to not defund the police and made it clear, despite being a proud DSA member, he is not going to subscribe to their entire platform, I understand why a voter might be wary of a politician who joined an organization that believes in a fully open border. Mamdani’s old tweets, certainly, are fair game.

But what rankles me more is when writers and pundits speak to the supposed unreality of Mamdani’s promises. There’s a “smart” take circulating through the ether that what Mamdani is campaigning on is, in fact, unachievable, and he’s selling his voters snake oil. I don’t mean, here, to pick on Andrew Sullivan, a writer I admire, but he wrote recently on Mamdani and helped encapsulate this point of view. Before explaining why it’s not correct, I’ll reproduce some of it below:

But to be honest, when I read his proposals, at first I thought I was reading a high-schooler’s essay. Free everything! I mean: why not? Free universal childcare for kids as young as six weeks old. Free buses for everyone. Rent control for everyone already privileged by it. Subsidized collective supermarkets. $30-an-hour minimum wage by 2030 — up from $16.50. Woohoo! And arresting Bibi as an added bonus. (I have to say the last plank might even tempt me to vote for him.)

The problem, of course, is how to pay for it. And a NYC mayor, quite simply, cannot. Mamdani simply won’t have the power. None of the tax hikes he proposes — a new 2 percent tax on everyone earning over $1 million a year, and jacking up the corporate tax to 11.5 percent — can be passed by his council. Albany has the final say, will almost certainly say no, and the Democratic governor, Hochul, opposes the hikes.

So a lot of this is purely performative, no? He has a good chance to create his Soviet bodegas and, in all likelihood, freeze rents if he replaces members of the board. (That will, of course, make housing availability and expense even worse.) He may be able to wangle some increase in NYC’s minimum wage — by trying to bypass Albany. But doubling it in five years? Meh. All of the economic stuff is iffy because of the very probable lack of funding. Maybe a big victory will change the dynamics and allow a big tax hike in one of the most highly taxed cities on earth. But it’s hard to believe it.

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 core planks do not stretch the political imagination all that much if you know anything about the recent history of the city. Mamdani wants to freeze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 28 percent of the overall housing stock and 44 percent of all rentals. This covers around 1 million units. I live in a rent-stabilized unit, as does Mamdani. What this means is that, every year, my rent increase (or lack thereof) is determined by the Rent Guidelines Board, a nine-member body of mayoral appointees. My rent, I can report to you, is not terribly cheap. Bill de Blasio, in the 2010s, was able to appoint a board that froze rents in three different years. (He did this because Michael Bloomberg spent twelve years hiking rents on stabilized units quite dramatically.) Mamdani can enact a freeze. All that is stopping him, really, is Mayor Eric Adams’ last-ditch effort to stock the board with his own fresh appointees before he departs. This would certainly delay Mayor Mamdani’s rent freezes, assuming he must wrangle with pro-Adams appointees, but it wouldn’t make them impossible. Eventually, their terms will expire, and Mamdani will get his shot. He can also win re-election, as most mayors who aren’t indicted do, and have a second term to stock the RGB with tenant-friendly appointees who will listen to him. That’s how governing works.

The argument against rent-stabilization is that it creates a relatively privileged tenant minority, with the rest of the tenants subject to market forces. Of course, this argument usually comes from fiscal conservatives who never much like my rejoinder: make all apartments in New York City subject to regulation from the Rent Guidelines Board. Imagine! Mamdani hasn’t dared to campaign on that kind of socialism, which is far more common in European cities. The reality of rent-stabilization in New York today is that there would be far more stabilized, cheaper apartments if Democrats and Republicans, in both the City Council and State Legislature, hadn’t voted in the 1990s to allow rent-stabilized units to become market-rate. For two decades, until 2019, landlords could harass tenants of stabilized units and drive them out so future tenants would have to pay the much higher market rent. Democrats in Albany eventually made this policy, called vacancy decontrol, illegal. The trouble is that there are no current legal means to add stabilized units to the housing stock. The YIMBYs reply, simply, to build, build, build—Mamdani himself supports building much more housing—but few of them can tell you, in a city like New York, how much new market-rate housing is requited to actually lower rents enough to make an apartment remotely affordable to a New Yorker bringing in $40,000 or $50,000 or $60,000 a year. How many decades must they actually wait? This is why tenant law exists. You subject everything to the market, and the market will privilege those who can pay far higher rents. In a rich, global city like New York, there will always be the tenant who can fork over, without a second thought, $7,000 a month. This is why, in the twentieth century, the public sector built and subsidized housing for the working-class and poor. The market can’t do it alone.

But back to Mamdani. Yes, he can freeze rents—he can even roll them back, too—and this will help a significant minority of tenants. What about buses? Sullivan and pundits like him don’t quite understand that it is not terribly expensive to make all MTA buses in the five boroughs free. The smarmy “how do you pay for it?” question falls flat here because the cost of these buses, up to $800 million annually, sounds like a large number until you learn that New York State has a budget that exceeds $200 billion annually, while the city budget tops $100 billion. Scraping up $800 million, between the city and state, isn’t all the challenging, even with potentially large Trump-inflicted budget gaps. Taxes don’t have to be raised; Mamdani can, like mayors past, go to the state legislature and negotiate for some of the funds. He’ll need approval from the state—the MTA is a state-run agency—but so what? He can win it. Perhaps Democrats there, along with Gov. Kathy Hochul, will not offer as much money as he’d like. Perhaps, in 2026 or 2027, he’ll begin with a pilot program, and free buses aren’t citywide until later in his term. That’s a reasonable goal. There are enough redundancies in the city budget, for example—far too much spent on contractors, far too much channeled towards deputy leaders in bureaucracies like the Department of Education—that extra municipal funds can be channeled towards buses. The state can help pick up the rest of the bill, and Democrats in the State Legislature won’t be hostile to Mamdani. It should be noted that Michael Bloomberg himself, running for a third term in 2009, proposed free buses. No one vilified him for that.

Mamdani’s childcare program, which would be the most transformational policy and cover all children under the age of five, would run about $6 billion annually. It would build on universal prekindergarten, the social safety expansion overseen by de Blasio. Universal childcare is, by far, the costliest of his campaign promises, but it’s also one that is broadly popular. Hochul, running for re-election next year, would love to say she helped fund a childcare expansion in New York City, where she’ll need a lot of votes. The real estate and finance elites who largely dislike Mamdani won’t be opposed to this, either. Free childcare won’t impact their bottom line. Mamdani has proposed a 2 percent tax on New York City residents earning more than $1 million a year, and an increase in the state’s corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent to pay for childcare and other proposals. Sullivan and his like-minded colleagues have framed this proposal as a fantasy because the mayor can’t hike taxes on his own; he needs the approval of Albany. Hochul, for now, has said she is against any new tax increases—this is why Sullivan thinks Albany will “almost certainly say no.” But, again, this is why national commentators should fully familiarize themselves with New York. Cuomo, as governor, absolutely did not want to hike taxes to close a budget hole during the pandemic. He did anyway because the Democrats in the State Senate and Assembly forced him through negotiations. Both the Senate Majority Leader and Assembly Speaker have signaled an openness, next year, to raising taxes on the rich to help pay for childcare. Mamdani, a state assemblyman himself, knows Albany, and he is plenty capable of building a coalition with the Democrats in the legislature to pressure Hochul. Or, if Hochul refuses a tax hike, she can endorse a budget that allocates far more in state funds towards childcare in the five boroughs. All of this is possible. It’s not “performative” at all. It’s the push-and-pull of local politics, with opposed camps reaching, at some point, a middle-ground. Contra Sullivan, a “big tax hike” is believable. And Hochul, unlike Cuomo in his gubernatorial years, is not vindictive or petty. She’ll pick up the phone with Mamdani and talk. The same applies to the minimum wage debate. All wage hikes must go through Albany. Will Mamdani get his $30 by 2030? Maybe not. But Democrats in Albany would like to see the city’s minimum wage increase to match inflation. Hochul, like with taxes, could be a movable roadblock. Winning concessions from her is not like a Democrat in the minority making bold promises about getting a bill passed through the Republican House in Washington.

Will Mamdani be a successful mayor? I have no idea. He is going to govern at a very challenging time. Trump is likely to flood the city with National Guard troops, dispatch far more ICE agents, and attempt, as much as he can, to muddle the city’s fiscal future by withholding federal funding. Wall Street profits are up, but the economy itself is middling. Within the city, business elites will root for a socialist mayor’s failure while rank-and-file police could grow hostile like they did under de Blasio. How will Mamdani tackle all of it? I believe in his talent and vision, and early indications are that he’s serious about building out a strong, serious government, one that can execute on its policy goals readily and be free of corruption. This is, in every sense, a change election, and New Yorkers are largely excited to see what comes next. We need fresh energy in this town.