Recently, a team of amNewYork and Schneps Media editors and reporters sat down with each of the three mayoral candidates for interviews about their campaigns and visions for the Big Apple. This is the third in a series of stories about those interviews.
As the clock ticks down to the Nov. 4 general election, there’s seemingly little reason for Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani — who has been consistently ahead in the polls by double digits — to feel much anxiety about the outcome. Still, he insists he is taking nothing for granted.
The democratic socialist Mamdani, who turned 34 on Saturday, compared himself to his chief rival, independent former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who found himself in a similar position weeks before losing the Democratic primary. On June 24, however, it quickly became clear that the polls were far off, and Cuomo ended up losing that contest to Mamdani by nearly 13 percentage points.
“We may know how Andrew Cuomo felt with this many days to the primary election, we don’t want to find out how he felt on primary night,” Mamdani said in an Oct. 8 sit-down interview with editors and reporters from amNewYork and Schneps Media. “And that means making sure that we are looking to earn every single vote.”
To secure that support, Mamdani said he has continued to build upon the massive canvassing operation that in part powered his upset primary victory over Cuomo. He said he now has over 80,000 volunteers, who are often knocking on upwards of 100,000 doors a week.
Mamdani’s primary campaign was also propelled by its ability to turn out young, disaffected, and new voters, as well as its relentless focus on lowering skyrocketing costs. His platform of freezing rent increases for the city’s one million stabilized tenants, affecting almost half of the city’s apartment stock, making bus service free and speedier, and expanding free child care to be universal, has energized his supporters.
Still, Mamdani, who is currently a Queens Assembly member, is already preparing for what is increasingly looking like victory on Nov. 4 — and the four years to come.
Eyeing a ‘team of rivals’
While the lawmaker indicated that he has yet to make any specific personnel decisions, an effort being led by his senior adviser, Elle Bisgaard-Church, he said he is looking to surround himself with a “team of rivals” — referring to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2006 book of the same name chronicling how President Abraham Lincoln formed a cabinet of those with opposing viewpoints.
“What we have made sure to do is have an approach that both assesses people on their own merits…and one that is looking to ensure that the room within which I sit to make some of the most important decisions is not filled with those who are characterized by the quickness with which they can say yes to any one of my ideas,” Mamdani said. “But rather an approach that is more befitting of a team of rivals, where you can interrogate the strengths and the weaknesses of any idea internally before actually sharing it externally.”
Mamdani said the conversations he has already been engaging in with former top city officials are “informing the question of what comes next.” Among those the democratic socialist has spoken with, he named Dan Doctoroff — who was deputy mayor for economic development under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg — and Maria Torres-Springer, Mayor Eric Adams’ ex-first deputy mayor.
Seeking the counsel of such experienced City Hall insiders could help Mamdani, who has faced skepticism among the Democratic Party establishment over his plan to bankroll a large expansion of the social safety net by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is headed into a reelection year, has said she will not raise taxes, though she did endorse Mamdani’s campaign last month.
Can he fund his agenda without a tax increase?
Although Mamdani said he believes that hiking taxes on top earners is still the best path for funding his programs, he indicated there are other ways it can be done.
The Democratic nominee suggested another route could be saving hundreds of millions of dollars at the city level through methods such as reforming the city’s contracting processes, collecting unpaid fines and fees, and hiring more fiscal auditors to ensure taxes are being collected properly.
“There’s a large focus of this on what we will do with Albany,” Mamdani said. “But there are also means by which we can reform our own processes, our own approach, that could save the kind of money that would be critical in the implementation of this agenda.”
Mamdani said the roughly $700 million he estimates it will cost to make buses free is an amount the city and state can afford based on the large sums they already spend on other programs.
Public safety
Another one of Mamdani’s top priorities will be standing up his Department of Community Safety. The proposed agency would take over several responsibilities from the NYPD relating to mental health emergencies, victims’ services, and combating gun violence.
He has pitched the department as a way to relieve police officers of acting as mental health professionals on top of their duties as law enforcement personnel. Separating out those tasks from the NYPD could help the department, which has been losing hundreds of officers a month due to attrition, retain more cops, he said.
“We’re asking officers to respond to serious crimes and to be mental health [professionals] and to conduct homeless outreach,” he said. “This vision for the Department of Community Safety is also a vision for how to ensure that the job of an officer is one that is possible to fulfill, and that we are building a department that can retain the officers that they are recruiting.”
Mamdani also explained why he has disavowed 2020 social media posts in which he championed defunding the police and called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” He said his opposition to the department was motivated by cases where justice and safety were not aligned, such as the 2014 killing of Eric Garner at the hands of an NYPD officer.
But since being elected a Queens Assembly member in 2020, Mamdani said he has come to know police officers one-on-one. He said the engagement with members of “New York’s Finest” taught him that “behind every headline, behind every caricature, is a New Yorker just trying to do their best.”
“In running to be the next mayor of this city, I know that my responsibility is one that will require me to lead the men and women of the NYPD and put their lives on the line,” he added.
On Israel and Gaza
The Assembly member, who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, also spoke to what has proven to be one of the thorniest issues for him on the campaign trail: his persistent criticism of the Israeli government and staunch advocacy for Palestinians.
Mamdani referenced his commitment to battling antisemitism in the city, born from “many conversations” with Jewish leaders. Those include boosting funding for hate crime prevention through his Department of Community Safety.
“I’m proud of the fact that our campaign has a significant amount of support from a number of Jewish New Yorkers, and also that I know there are Jewish New Yorkers who feel very differently than I do about questions of Israel and Palestine,” Mamdani said. “And I’m looking to represent those same New Yorkers as well.”
Mamdani defended his comments that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state. This is something that many Jewish people see as inflammatory, as the state of Israel — a democracy formed in 1948 in the aftermath of the Holocaust — has been under repeated attack since its foundation. Many feel that the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state would be a direct threat to the survival of Jewish people around the world.
However, despite Mamdani’s ardent pro-Palestinian views, he said that his administration will likely include many who disagree with him on Israel and Palestine.
“There will be many a New Yorker in real decision-making authority within my own mayoral administration that will have a very different view on Israel and Palestine,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll know, sometimes I won’t. Because, why do I need to ask the Department of Transportation commissioner what they think about Israel and Palestine?”
