The Democratic New York City mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, is seeking to convince the establishment wing in his party to back his campaign ahead of the city’s general election.
The socialist millennial stunned political pundits when he captured an upset win during last month’s Democratic mayoral primary. However, while Mamdani’s victory was met with a surge of progressive enthusiasm for his campaign, moderates expressed unease about many of his positions, including his criticisms of capitalism, past support for anti-police movements, and refusal to denounce language deemed offensive to Jews — including the phrase, “globalize the intifada.”
Although many of those positions held support from the young, affluent voters who handed Mamdani his primary win, the socialist candidate in recent days has shifted to general election mode in an effort to woo moderate factions of the party that he’ll need in his camp in order to clinch the final November victory.
Last week, Mamdani held court with business leaders amid unease from corporations about his proposals to raise taxes on the rich and support for abolishing billionaires.
But the roughly 90-minute meeting with executives at Rockefeller Center failed to end with solidarity for Mamdani, as many members representing banks, law firms, and corporations continued to express unease about Mamdani’s candidacy, even as he walked back past comments saying billionaires shouldn’t exist and suggested he would open to shifting his position on a rent freeze for stabilized units after four years, according to the New York Times.
Mamdani also made overtures to centrists when he allegedly said he’d “discourage” people from using the slogan “globalize the intifada,” during the meeting last Tuesday. However, the mayoral candidate has continued to draw criticism for his refusal to condemn the chant, viewed as a call for violence against Jews.
This week, actors Debra Messing and Ari’el Stachel, both Jewish actors from New York City, expressed concern over refusals to condemn the phrase, speaking out against the “antisemitism that is really frightening all over the streets of New York City right now.”
“When asked directly about chants to ‘globalize the intifada,’ one politician [Mamdani] refused to condemn it, characterizing the phrase as open to interpretation with ‘a variety of meanings to a variety of people,’” Messing wrote in an op-ed. “Some say it’s a call for justice. But for those of us who know what the word intifada has meant in practice, it’s not abstract… It’s the bombing of a Jerusalem café where a Holocaust survivor went to have tea… It’s the story a friend told me about a grandmother and her 2-year-old grandchild killed while buying ice cream. These are not metaphors. These are memories. And they are real for so many Jews.”
Mamdani has eyed another avenue toward moderate voters in his apparent shift in rhetoric regarding law enforcement. In the past, Mamdani has suggested that the policing system is a systematically anti-queer and racist structure and backed the “defund the police” movement. However, he is now proposing a “Department of Public Safety” separate from the police department. And Mamdani has pledged to consider keeping Jessica Tisch on as New York City’s police commissioner if he wins the election.
The socialist candidate also made a trip out to Washington, D.C., last week as he sought to win over establishment skeptics on Capitol Hill. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hosted a breakfast meeting for her fellow members of Congress to spend time with Mamdani as he hopes to get their support.
However, the few dozen lawmakers who attended the breakfast meeting Mamdani hosted alongside Ocasio-Cortez were mostly progressive members of Congress.
Ocasio-Cortez, after the meeting, encouraged those still skeptical of Mamdani to get to know him.
“Something that I feel like I share with Zohran is that: the way sometimes people are painted in media doesn’t always align with who we really are as individuals,” she said. “I think that when people get to know him as a person, when people get to know us as real people, what they find kind of surprises them, I think, in a positive way.”
The most powerful Democrats in Congress, both fellow New Yorkers, have declined thus far to endorse Mamdani’s campaign.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) continued to withhold support after holding a meeting with Mamdani in Brooklyn last Friday. The House leader issued a lukewarm statement after the meetup, where the two spoke about a range of issues, including the rise of antisemitism in New York City.
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Another Democratic member of the New York delegation who has not endorsed Mamdani is Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY), who told Spectrum News on Tuesday that she said she wants him to clarify his past comments around the term intifada before she backs him as mayor.
“I think that it’s best that I have this conversation so that my credibility among my constituents is, you know, intact,” she said, noting the large Jewish community in her Brooklyn district. “And so that, that’s what I intend on doing.”