Barring a miracle, New York state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, will be elected mayor of New York City today. The only question appears to be how much damage he will cause the city and the Democratic Party before his term ends. We advise the city’s voters not to put it to the test.
Mamdani’s signature proposal, a freeze on rents, has a long track record of failure everywhere it has been tried before, including in New York City. Faced with caps on revenue, landlords don’t spend money on existing housing, and, unmaintained, it deteriorates in condition and availability, so rents rise for the shrinking stock of real estate that is left. Mamdani has promised to build 200,000 new rent-stabilized housing units over the next 10 years, but construction will be tied up in the same environmental and union permitting machine that has made construction nearly impossible in every blue city in the nation. The end results will be millions of wasted dollars, fewer homes, and higher rents for everyone.
Mamdani has also pledged to raise the city’s minimum wage to $30 an hour, another policy that, in addition to killing jobs, will make things less affordable, not more. His city-run grocery stores will fail just as they have in Kansas City and Chicago, while Mamdani’s free bus rides will turn the city’s transit system into unridable homeless shelters.
To fund this extravagant spending, Mamdani plans to raise the corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5% while adding a surcharge on New York City residents earning over $1 million annually. These moves will send more employers and higher earners south to better weather and lower taxes in North Carolina, Florida, and Texas.
As his socialist policies make everything more expensive while eroding New York’s tax base, Mamdani will make the city less safe. New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Eric Adams have cut New York’s crime rates, although they remain too high. But Mamdani’s agenda will reverse that progress. Where Tisch wants to hire more police officers to a force that is at a 20-year low, Mamdani wants to freeze hiring and create “mental health teams” instead. Worse, he has pledged to close Rikers prison by 2027, even though the planned replacements are behind schedule and would house only half the population Rikers currently does. In addition to not hiring new police officers and mass releasing prisoners, Mamdani has pledged to legalize prostitution, which will make it easier for organized crime in the city to profit from sex trafficking.
New York City’s public schools would also suffer under Mamdani, who, in addition to ending gifted and talented programs, would relinquish mayoral control of the system, replacing it with “co-governance,” which is another phrase for letting teachers unions do whatever they want. The result will be higher headcounts, more spending, zero accountability for bad results, and lower test scores.
Outright socialism is all the rage in the Democratic Party. As recently as 2010, a majority of Democrats preferred capitalism to socialism, but now a whopping 66% tell Gallup they have a positive view of socialism. According to Pew, it is the youngest Democrats, the future of the party, who support socialism the most.
Democrats may try to contain Mamdani’s influence to New York City, but the party’s two most popular national figures, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), both Democratic Socialists of America members like Mamdani, have been promoting Mamdani’s vision across the country through their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Mamdani’s socialist ideas are the future of the main party of the Left.
Born in Uganda, Mamdani cannot run for president. But his influence on the Democratic Party will extend far beyond New York. Every contender in the 2028 Democratic primary will face a choice: embrace or reject his socialist vision. Given current polling, most will likely embrace it — and in doing so, they will also inherit responsibility for the results his policies produce.