A week before 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani shocked the world by defeating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayor, he sat down with David Sirota on the Lever Time podcast to discuss why he thought he had a shot and his plans for City Hall.
The following is an abridged, lightly edited transcript of their conversation. Click here to subscribe and listen to the full Lever Time episode or check out the following featured interview on YouTube.
David Sirota (narration):
New York’s motto is, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” Well, the same holds true for politics. If a populist anti-corruption candidate like Zoran Mamdani could win there, campaigning for higher taxes on millionaires, free city buses, a rent freeze, and lower grocery prices, then maybe one could win anywhere.
New York is also a city where one out of every 24 residents is a millionaire. This is almost medieval. It’s like a feudal level of wealth inequality, and oligarchs want to preserve it rather than fix it. They’re dumping $24 million into Super PACs trying to defeat Zoran Mamdani. Why? Because he dared to propose that the millionaires pay slightly higher taxes to make sure poor people have access to some free buses. That, my friends, is the class war and the democracy crisis all rolled up into one mayoral election.
Of course, the encouraging news is that this race appears to be competitive despite all that spending. And it’s competitive because of the city’s system of public financing of elections, and because, while Andrew Cuomo seems to be in hiding, Mamdani has been everywhere.
Luckily, I managed to get a quick call from him between campaign stops. So you’re gonna hear our discussion about what the stakes are in this race and how he would run City Hall, knowing that the collective power of oligarchs would be trying to stop him at all costs.
But first, we started our discussion with a really straightforward question. I asked him why he thinks all the money and power in New York is so unified against him,
Zohran Mamdani:
Because we represent a challenge to politics as it’s been in this city and in this state and even in this country. We are running on a very clear message of making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, and there are a lot of people who have made a lot of money on the lack of that affordability. It’s one of the chief reasons why we’re seeing so many Trump donors billionaires pouring in millions of dollars to support Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC, because they know that this is going to be the exact thing they fear most — a Muslim immigrant progressive who actually fights for the things that I believe in.
David Sirota:
Why do you think a solid number of voters say they are supporting Andrew Cuomo? And obviously, you’re very competitive in the polls, but I mean, here’s a guy, and I’ve done a lot of reporting on him, who’s covered up nursing home deaths, was credibly accused of sexual harassment, plagued by serious corruption scandals, and yet he’s still a competitive candidate. What are we to make of that? Like, how do we explain that?
Zohran Mamdani:
I think a lot of that support is still name recognition. It is reflective of the fact that he is unique in that every single New Yorker knows his name. And in spite of being a former governor who’s the son of a former governor, he still can’t secure a majority of New Yorkers’ support in the first round of voting. No matter who is going to win this race, everyone will need ranked choice voting to get across that finish line.
What I’ve actually found in my conversations with New Yorkers across the five boroughs is that a lot of this support isn’t actually for him. It’s a support that is a relic of support for his father. I’ve had pastors tell me I’m supporting Mario’s son, and I think it is indicative of a campaign whose coalition is a mile wide, but an inch deep, that is premised in many ways on the sense of inevitability. And yet we know it’s a house of cards that as soon as you start to shake it, the whole thing could topple. And that’s what we’re seeing. We took what was at 1.3 months ago a 40-point lead he had in the final round and we have now cut that down to single digits, and that’s even though there is close to $20 million being spent against us by Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC.
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David Sirota:
How important has public financing been in your race? I mean, it seems to me that Andrew Cuomo would have been able, and his donors would have been able to buy this race without you having access to public campaign financing. I’m just curious about your take on how pivotal that is for you, for candidates like you to run in the race like this.
Zohran Mamdani:
It’s incredibly important, because what it allows is the amplification of the voice of ordinary New Yorkers, as opposed to the billionaires who have grown used to buying our elections. We raised the maximum amount of money we could spend in this race, which is $8 million, by raising an average of about $80 from more than 20,000 people. And we saw that our number-one profession of our donors was teachers. This is a campaign powered by the very New Yorkers who’ve been left behind by the politics of Andrew Cuomo and the politics of the past.
However, in creating this public matching fund system, I do not think there was enough recognition of the possibility of how super PACs could make a mockery of it, because while it has equalized the playing field to a greater extent than before, we are still speaking about having $8 million going up against, effectively, $30 million and a distortion of our democracy funded by the very people who put Donald Trump back in the White House.
David Sirota:
If you win, you have to work with, or maybe fight, some of the same powers that are aligned against you in this race. These are the powers that have often tried to stop progressives like you in the rare occasions that people like you get elected, and they try to make an example out of people like you by putting up an obstruction. The question then is, what will you do to try to get things done when you know, looking ahead, that will be the case — that the opposition will be looking to stop you at every turn?
Zohran Mamdani:
I will continue to understand the power of mass politics and the necessity of having a coalition that supports you, both inside and outside. Because what we’ve seen is that we cannot simply win an election on June 24 as one candidate, one person. We have to win it with one platform where New Yorkers know exactly what they’re voting for.
They’re voting to freeze their rent, they’re voting to make the slowest buses in the country fast and free. They’re voting to deliver universal child care. And when they know that, it means that we then win with a mandate to deliver those things.
And we take that mandate to Albany, and we take that mandate to elected officials across the ideological spectrum. I have experience in doing this, having won the first fare free bus pilot in New York City history by building alongside elected officials of a wide variety of ideology across the Democratic Party, and doing so by ensuring that we made clear that the most important part of that coalition was not me, but rather was the idea that every bus should be free, because that’s an idea that every elected and every New Yorker can see themselves in.
David Sirota:
When you look to being mayor of such a large city, when you think about the central problem preventing a more affordable city, is this question of oligarchs and corporations and their greed? (It’s a question for the Democratic Party, too.) Is it, as some in the so-called abundance movement argue, that there are too many liberal or progressive regulations making it too hard to build or get anything done? What is, in your analysis, the central driver of scarcity, or the central obstacle to building and delivering prosperity?
Zohran Mamdani:
I think it’s a synthesis of both of these issues, and I would say that these regulations in and of themselves, I wouldn’t call them progressive or liberal regulations. But what I’ve found time and time again is a real level of political cowardice that is endemic in our system in New York City, where we will use processes and things that are by law advisory as justifications for not pursuing the very things that we need most.
I have seen many a worthy idea die at a community board meeting that actually has no legal ability to stop that. It is simply used as a justification to not pursue that protected bike lane, that proposal to build low-income housing for seniors — so many of the very things that we are in dire need of in the city.
And I think that what is exciting to me is that as a leftist, as someone who believes firmly in the importance of the public sector and public service, that they are a necessity of us bringing public excellence back. We understand and acknowledge that any inefficiency within our own work will be used as a justification to remove the entire sector itself, and that is a responsibility to live up to — to ensure that we look at the public sector as a shining example of what could be.
David Sirota (narration):
At this point, I turned our conversation to one of the quirks of New York politics. In New York, the mayor gets elected with a mandate, but the governor is especially powerful and can veto a lot of what a mayor wants to do. In fact, in an interview this week, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul all but promised to veto Mamdani’s tax proposals if he ends up winning the mayor’s race.
Gov. Kathy Hochul (audio clip):
I’m not raising taxes on people at a time when affordability is the big issue. I’m actually cutting middle class. I don’t want to lose any more people to go to Palm Beach.
David Sirota (narration):
This kind of thing happened when Bill de Blasio was mayor. Governor Andrew Cuomo constantly tried to veto his agenda. So I asked Zoran Mamdani what he would do about that problem.
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Zohran Mamdani:
I’ve dealt with that myself already as a first-term assembly member. When I went up to Albany, I was helping lead the fight to increase taxes on billionaires and corporations, which Andrew Cuomo, who was at the time the governor, did not want to do, primarily because of the fact that they were his major donors.
And we were able to overcome his objections to increase those taxes to raise $4 billion in new revenue to fully fund the public schools that he had been starving for years. And part of the way we were able to win that battle was by organizing across the legislature.
I continue to see an appetite for these forms of revenue raisers, as well as the exact things we would spend that money on between the state Assembly and the state Senate. And I think it’s that partnership that will be key in delivering this economic agenda for New Yorkers.
David Sirota:
If you win, what do you think Democrats across the country should take away from that win?
Zohran Mamdani:
I would say it’s premature for me to announce that with seven days to go until the election, but I would tell you that in addition to being a city with a proud progressive history, we are also the wealthiest city and the wealthiest country in the history of the world. This is, in many ways, the heart of the battle for the future of the Democratic Party — a battle between cosmopolitan finance and the ideal that brought so many to call themselves Democrats in the first place, a commitment to the working class.
I think that there is a clear path and a clear precedent for so much of what we’re trying to achieve in our own history in Fiorello LaGuardia, who I would argue is the greatest mayor in our city’s history, as someone who took on twin crises of delivering dignity to the working class New Yorkers had long been denied it and fighting an anti-immigrant animus.
And that’s what we see in this moment: a necessity to take on authoritarianism on the outside and understand democracy not simply being under attack from Washington, but also under attack from within, where more and more New Yorkers do not see themselves in this electoral process, because they don’t see their needs reflected in these very campaigns.
What I’m excited about is that this is a campaign focusing on affordability and also seeking to bring in the very New Yorkers have been left out by virtue of their class, by virtue of their religion, by virtue of their race, to ensure that this city’s election looks a lot more like the city itself.
