Living For The City

Zohran Mamdani Moves Towards November

The punditry across the country has weighed in on the unlikely rise of Zohran Mamdani. I hesitated to join them. But as someone who grew up ten minutes from Kennedy Airport and spent most of my adult life on the Upper West Side, I know this city.

I saw the Bronx burn in the '70s through the safety of my father’s shadow—his Marine-hard hand swallowing mine as we moved through the heat and howl of the South Bronx on our way to Yankee Stadium. You learned to walk fast and not look back.

I stepped through the slime of Times Square in Koch’s “How’m I doing?” ’80s, heading to concerts, my boots sticking to the sidewalks.

I watched the city reborn in the ’90s—only to see the towers fall. Not on TV. In real time.

I saw Giuliani before the parody, sharp-edged and snarling; Bloomberg, the city humming like a machine; then the slow unraveling, de Blasio, COVID, and Eric Adams.

And now, the air in New York has changed. Not just because the wind off the water carries more weight than usual. Something has shifted—trembled, really. If you wait at the crosswalks of Queens Boulevard or stare too long at the glass above Bryant Park, you can feel it.

A young man with a name the newspapers once spelled out phonetically is now the Democratic nominee for mayor of the greatest city in the world.

Zohran Mamdani, 33, a Queens-born Muslim, has done what was once thought impossible. He dismantled the old political scaffolding and walked calmly through the wreckage, carried by a coalition built online and organized offline.

He didn’t do it with charm alone, though he has plenty. He did it with a plan. With a promise. With a campaign built not on fear but on cost—on the unrelenting math of what it takes to live in New York City without wealth, and the growing belief that no one should have to become a banker or a grifter to afford a week of groceries.

He spoke plainly: freeze the rent, run the buses for free, build grocery stores that don’t gouge, tax the billionaires who’ve spent decades deciding which parts of the city deserve light and which will be left in shadow.

And the people—mostly young, many new to the boroughs, but enough native to them—listened.

And then they voted.

Mamdani is an idea more than a governing principle, which may be a difficult task. If he wins, he will face an uphill battle.

First, free buses—the MTA is controlled not by the city but by Albany. He’ll have to cut deals in a capital long allergic to redistribution.

Then, government-run supermarkets.

I may show my age here. I was in college when the Berlin Wall fell. My generation heard Cold War stories about bread lines behind the Iron Curtain. Maybe that comparison is extreme. Maybe this newer generation deserves a shot at their dreams.

After all, New York is still a place where one can reimagine the future. Picture a city where housing doesn’t hollow you out, where public transit is a right, and where grocery stores exist to serve, not exploit.

But Mamdani’s proposals will meet institutional resistance. Passing them will take political skill City Hall hasn’t seen since Fiorello La Guardia.

Power does not concede just because the numbers come in. It pauses. It recalibrates. It waits for someone to blink.

And blink they have. Not the voters. The powerful.

The hedge funders, the developers, the ones who once picked up the phone only when Cuomo called. Now they don’t know whether to text Eric or Bill or Mike to ask what the hell is happening.

Schumer and Jeffries offered congratulations but not endorsements. Clinton managed to wish Mamdani well without mentioning his name. Governor Hochul, mid-re-election, said she looked forward to working with whoever became mayor—then turned to the cameras and warned, without irony, "I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach. We’ve lost enough."

In another breath she might have added Jersey City, where Goldman Sachs executives now tour glassy spaces across the river, weighing which tax rates will be kinder if New York remembers who it belongs to.

They’re all doing the math now.

The donors. The dealmakers. The developers who once owned this city in all but name. They backed Cuomo. Then, within hours of his fall, whispered support for a mayor under federal investigation.

No one blinked. No one apologized. They just moved to another table. The only principle was momentum.

And so it is that Eric Adams, who ran on order and transparency and now governs in ambiguity and scandal, finds himself the beneficiary of the city’s fear of change.

He is no longer a mayor with momentum. He is a firewall—a last line of defense for moderates who’d rather stick with a flawed incumbent than risk a socialist running New York.

It is less an endorsement than a retreat.

They believe in inertia. They believe in wealth. They believe in deal flow.

Mamdani, to them, is risk. Adams is risk management

Meanwhile, Curtis Sliwa waits in his red beret.

The Republican and Guardian Angels founder occupies a strange space: too well-known to ignore, too erratic to trust, too far outside the machine to be co-opted.

His strengths are real—decades of name recognition, credibility among outer-borough seniors, a gritty charisma. So are his flaws: inflammatory remarks, exaggerations, and limited appeal beyond certain zip codes.

His hope lies in polarization. The more the city splits—left versus establishment—the more his pro-cop, anti-elite persona could resonate with the disaffected and nostalgic.

But Trump casts a long shadow, and Sliwa may need to distance himself to grow. Each time he speaks, he risks reminding voters why, after all these years, he remains a character—not a contender.

Still, in a fractured race, he may matter more than he should.

If the field holds—Mamdani, Adams, Sliwa, and a fading Cuomo—a win could come with just 35% of the vote. Every bloc matters.

Mamdani has the youth, the tenants, the digital left. Adams draws churches, unions, and the anxious center. Sliwa appeals to safety-first seniors and those who miss when Giuliani had a badge and Bloomberg had a balance sheet. Cuomo, if he stays in, siphons from everyone—but mostly Adams.

The betting markets are tuned to this tension.

Mamdani leads, but the undercurrents swirl. If this were a primary, ranked-choice voting might favor him. But in the general, it’s plurality: no second chances, no transfers. Fragmentation is peril.

A united center could beat him. A divided one gives him City Hall.

Every whisper about Cuomo staying in, every look from Hochul at a donor lunch, every press hit from Adams calling Mamdani a "snake-oil socialist"—it’s all part of the new calculus.

But beneath the polling and the mechanics is something older.

The ache of the city itself. The sound of a place trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up again.

What Mamdani represents is not inevitability. He is not the messiah, and he is not the problem.

He is the consequence of a city where 70% of people rent, and half spend more than a third of their income trying to stay in the borough where they were born.

He is the byproduct of a Democratic Party that talked about justice but rarely risked anything to deliver it.

He is the reply.

Whether that reply becomes law—or breaks against Albany’s rocks, media doubt, and donor retreat—remains to be seen.

The polls, the markets, the whispers on the 6 train all say this could still go either way.

But what’s different now is that no one’s laughing. Not the landlords. Not the lobbyists. Not the developers who spent twenty years building condos and loopholes, assuming the voters would grumble but obey.

This time, the voters disobeyed.

And the city, for all its noise and nerve, is suddenly quiet.

Not in mourning. Not in panic.

In suspense.

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Attempting something new here. Finding music to fit the narrative. Some times I’ll explain the choices. Today, with these two, no explanation is needed. Let me know what you think.