Zohran Mamdani represents the 36th District in the New York State Assembly. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is currently running for mayor of New York City, hoping to unseat the controversial Eric Adams, who recently escaped federal corruption charges after signaling a willingness to help the Trump administration crackdown on immigrants. Mamdani is running on a platform of lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers. He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss his city and his campaign.

Nathan J. Robinson 

I'm not from New York. I've spent about a week in New York in my entire life. It's an overwhelming, complex, and fascinating place. You know the city. You're from there. You get it in a way that I don't. You're running to succeed your current mayor, Eric Adams. So first, explain to me your current mayor. He seems very strange.

Zohran Mamdani 

I probably wouldn't put the word "succeed" with Mayor Adams in the same sentence given his record over the last few years. He is someone who ran on a promise to fight for the working class of New York City. But in office, he has used almost every opportunity to exacerbate the cost of living crisis that is pushing those very working-class New Yorkers out of the city that they call home.

Robinson 

And how's he doing that?

Mamdani 

Well, the mayor of New York City has a number of powers. One of them is that you set the rent for rent stabilized tenants across New York City. We have about 8.3 million people who call this city home. About two and a half million of them live in rent stabilized units. The mayor sets their rent through something called the Rent Guidelines Board. Under the previous mayor, we saw a number of rent freezes that occurred a few times. Tenants understood that their rent this year would be the same as next year because of just how immense the economic pressures were outside the home, and yet, under this mayor that we have right now, Mayor Eric Adams, he has raised the rent nine percent in the time since he's been in office. And those are rates we have not seen since we had a Republican running City Hall. 

This is just one example. But what I would say is that almost every time that Adams has been given an opportunity to intervene to help working-class New Yorkers, he has instead poured gasoline on the fire that's consuming them. And I think about when ConEd, which has a monopoly over many New Yorkers’ utility bills, had put in an application to the state to raise electricity and gas prices by close to $70 a month, the mayor signed off in support of both of those requests. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio created universal pre-K and 3-K, and Adams took his opportunity as the mayor of New York City to decimate the 3-K program and create an altogether new cost on many New York families of close to $20-25,000 a year to find replacement child care. 

Robinson

New York City seems to have not gotten, in many cases, the mayors that it deserves. You've had some bad governance over the years. A few months ago, I interviewed Jeremiah Moss, the author of Vanishing New York, who talked about the process by which New York City, a place in which all kinds of people could once flourish, became such an unaffordable place, a place that caters to billionaires in their little pencil towers while everyone else struggles.

What happened? You've had a series of these mayors. You've had Michael Bloomberg, who obviously was awful. Rudy Giuliani seems like he was pretty awful, too, even though he was “America's mayor.” Eric Adams seems both awful and also like he has a screw loose. Why has your city been so poorly served by its governance?

Mamdani 

I think part of the reason is that there is also a lot of money to be made in New York City, and a lot of those businesses that benefit from what is an untenable status quo for working people have continued to support candidates that they know will create even greater profit for them, and we see that with Eric Adams. When he was running, it wasn't just that he won the mayor's race, it was that so many national and local figures, both in the media and political classes, designated him as the savior of the Democratic Party.

Robinson 

That looks funny in retrospect. 

Mamdani 

Yes. But in many ways, he does symbolize the party—in the sense of its bankruptcy. This was somebody who was supported by big business by virtue of the fact that he was so open to influence. That wasn't some quirk that they were willing to accept; it was one of the very reasons that they wanted to support him in the first place. And he has made an incredible amount of money for a lot of the people who supported him. We all know about the corruption charges, the fact that he's the first mayor in modern history to be facing federal charges. But what I'm really talking about is that this is a mayor who has gone to bat for real estate and for so many other special interests in the time that he's supposed to be running a city for the benefit of the 8.3 million people who call it home. 

Robinson 

Didn't he say he was going to make New York City the crypto capital of America, too?

Mamdani 

He said a lot of things. It's quite hard to keep up with everything he has said about New York City, whether that it's the “Islamabad of America” or the crypto capital of the world. 

Robinson 

You are out talking to New Yorkers, and you hear what they are concerned about. You hear what they love about the city, and you hear what doesn't work about the city. And you, as a candidate, have to be responsive to their needs, aspirations, and demands. The most obvious thing is that it's a very unaffordable city and seems to be getting worse. Could you elaborate on what you think the most pressing concerns for New Yorkers are at the moment?

Mamdani 

I think, ultimately, it does come back to that question of whether they can afford to live the life that they have built in this city. I spent much of last Sunday on Fordham Road in the Bronx and on Hillside Avenue in Queens, two areas in New York City that saw the most staggering shifts towards Trump and even larger drop-offs in voting overall in the presidential election. And I asked New Yorkers who lived in those neighborhoods why they voted for Trump when, previously, many of them had been voting Democrat. And what I had heard from them is this same issue, that they felt they had more money in their pocket four years ago—that they couldn't afford groceries, that they couldn't afford their rent. 

In their words, [Trump] was a candidate that spoke to their anxiety, spoke to the necessity for a cheaper life, that it would actually be coming about, and promised to bring peace to the world. And we know that those are insincere claims coming as they are from someone like Donald Trump. But what he did do is diagnose that despair and offer an answer to it, whereas many of those voters simply saw a void when it came to what our party is actually offering them. 

And so when I was concluding those conversations, I asked them: “what would it take for you to come back to the Democratic Party?” And I listed out some of the proposals that launched our campaign: to freeze the rent; to make buses fast and free; to make universal child care a reality for all New Yorkers, whether their child is six weeks or 5 years of age. And they said it's those very kinds of economic issues that would liberate their life as working-class New Yorkers from the anxieties that they're currently being consumed by. 

Robinson 

What I noticed on your website is that you've got a very simple platform. We did a whole thing on Kamala Harris's policies, a roundup of her policies—she went from having no policies to having a billion policies—actually, 54 policies by our count. We analyzed all of them, but it wasn't easy to remember any of her policies. I think Hillary Clinton had the same kind of problem where she gave people a whole wonky list of endless little tiny tweaks. It seems like you've gone in the opposite direction, in a Bernie Sanders kind of direction. You’ve come up with a short, punchy list of things that people will remember. So tell me a little bit more about how you formulated what you see as your core agenda going into this.

Mamdani 

I think we worked backwards to look at the costs that dominate working people's lives. And in New York City, the first cost is housing. A majority of all New Yorkers hand over greater than 50 percent of their paycheck each month to a landlord or a bank, with nearly a quarter close behind, and we're seeing at the same time evictions and homelessness surging. Around 500,000 of our school children can't afford enough food to eat. And so to me, it was very clear that you should speak to New Yorkers about the crises they're facing and what powers you have as the mayor [to address them]. That necessitates a rent freeze, at the very least for the more than two million tenants who live in stabilized housing. 

After housing, the second cost is often childcare. We are seeing in New York City an economic crisis because the families that leave New York City, by virtue of the child care costs of $20,000-25,000 a year, are taking with them about $2 billion in lost annual revenue. If we don't rectify this situation, we will continue to lose money and lose New Yorkers to a city that they believe will allow their dollar to go further. 

The final issue is transit. New Yorkers use public transit every single day to get to wherever they want to go. And when I've been in the State Assembly these last four years, I have fought to make buses free, and we won the first-ever free bus pilot in New York City history, making one bus in each borough free. What we saw is that when you do that, you increase ridership by more than 30 percent, decrease assaults on bus drivers by 38.9 percent, and of the new riders—the vast majority are making less than $28,000 a year—11 percent were previously driving their own car or taking a taxi. So you have an economic benefit, a public safety benefit, and an environmental benefit. So with all of those things and the fact that one-fifth of New Yorkers can't afford the bus fare, it makes obvious sense to me.

Robinson 

One plank of the Mamdani agenda is capping rent. Obviously, I think there is pretty much a universal consensus that, in the words of another legendary New Yorker, the rent is too damn high. However, every time you talk about rent control or rent freezes, many economists and those who call themselves the YIMBYs respond that caps on rent interfere with the signals of the market. There are those who benefit from it—those whose rent you have frozen—but [the idea is that] you disincentivize the construction of new housing and ultimately exacerbate the problem. How do you plan to make sure that by capping rents, you can still solve the supply side of the housing problem?

Mamdani 

You do that by ensuring that it’s not the entirety of your platform. We open with this promise to freeze the rent for every rent stabilized tenant, but we still have an entire housing policy platform. When we lay it out, we will speak about a citywide equitable development project that we have, a proposal to ensure that we are building enough supply so that every New Yorker can have a home. We’re doing so in a manner that understands it to be a citywide responsibility, as opposed to doing isolated spot rezoning, which has been what a lot of the current administration's policy has been through much of the last few years. 

I'm speaking to you today just having come back from a rally to end forced broker fees—New York City and Boston are two of the only cities in America that force tenants to pay broker’s fees for work that is hired and that should be paid for by the landlord but is so often paid for by tenants. And I say this as a tenant myself. You may not even meet the broker when you are getting an apartment—it may simply be somebody who tells you online where to go and what code to put in to enter into the apartment. That is a service—if any is being performed at all—being done for the benefit of the landlord. City Council is going to pass that legislation today, and I have legislation at the state level to do the same thing. It speaks to the different ways in which you can actually make housing more affordable and not only freeze the rent, but frankly, bring the rent to even lower than what it is right now. That is an ultimate necessity for people to continue to live in New York City.

Robinson 

You've mentioned the ways in which the current mayor is in office in part because there are wealthy interests who would prefer that someone with his agenda inhabit that office. Someone may ask you, then, as I am going to ask you now, look at the difficulty that the left has had at attaining power. You are a democratic socialist. What hope do you possibly have of going against these interests? In a city where the political system is rigged to put someone like Eric Adams or even Michael Bloomberg into office, what's your plan? How are you going to succeed in this race?

Mamdani 

I think that there are a number of things that give us a pathway to winning, and one of them is the fact that in New York City, there's a public matching system. So if you are a New York City resident, and you give anywhere between $10 to $250 to a candidate running for mayor, the city will match that eight times. And so a $250 donation then becomes north of $2,000 in terms of its worth for a campaign. And what that means is that if you raise around a million dollars, you will then get an additional $7 million or so from the city, enabling you to run an $8 million campaign. 

Robinson 

How did that happen? That's awesome.

Mamdani 

The idea of it is to empower small dollar donors. The idea is to take on the barriers of special interests you're talking about. I think it's the kind of thing that would be very difficult to pass today. I'm glad that it does exist. So many congresspeople who have stood up for Palestinian human rights have faced multimillion-dollar onslaughts from [pro-Israel lobby groups such as] AIPAC and DMFI and company, and you have to raise raw dollars to compete with that. But when you're running for a citywide office in New York City, you have a pathway to $8 million by only raising $1 million. So I think that is a major way that you can compete. 

This is also a moment of political uncertainty as well as political possibility. People feel failed by the answers they have been told for many decades. And while there is not a majority of socialist or progressive thinking across New York City, I would say there is a majority who feel left behind by this economic system and the policies of this current administration, and that is an ingredient that could give rise to an entirely new coalition of people who feel left behind and are ready to get behind a leftist in order to turn the page.

Robinson

It can't hurt that the guy who was supposed to be the great centrist hope for the Democratic Party turns out to be a massively corrupt criminal—accused, not convicted.

Mamdani 

Allegedly.

Robinson 

But just to touch on the links with what has just happened at the national level with the election that we have just gone through, there is a certain way in which the Democratic establishment has been discredited, not just through Eric Adams’s alleged personal corruption but through the Democratic Party's complete failure to stop the far right at the national level. And I think that we're certainly finding, based on the influx of subscriptions to Current Affairs magazine, that there is all of a sudden a hunger for an alternative message.

Mamdani 

Yes. I think that people do see the bankruptcy of leadership at multiple levels of Democratic governance across this country, and I think in classic fashion, the political and consultant class is seeking to blame the left for the failures of the center, as if it were a left campaign that we just saw come to an end over these last few months. In reality, what we saw is a wavering commitment to continuing to have Lina Khan as head of the FTC, a desire to campaign with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban, and a departure from some of the most successful parts of Biden's domestic economic agenda, all while maintaining the same line for an absolutely horrific and disastrous foreign policy that has continued to fund a genocide that continues unabated across Palestine. 

Robinson 

Well, speaking of that disastrous foreign policy and that genocide, you have been an activist for Palestinian rights and have been against that genocide. It awkwardly interacts with running for local office, but is there any way you've been able to deal with that in the New York State Legislature, and is there anything you can do on issues of foreign policy like that from the New York mayor's office, other than to change whose flag you raise at the endless flag-raising ceremonies?

Mamdani 

As a state representative, I introduced first in the nation legislation to bar New York charities from funding Israeli war crimes. I did that because on an annual basis, charities registered across this state send tens of millions of dollars to fund the Israeli settler enterprise, a funding scheme that has now grown to include units of the Israeli military that have been found guilty of aiding and abetting that very genocide or have been found complicit in it. And that is an example of the kind of legislative action that we have to take because we know that the horror that we feel in watching this genocide unfold is due to the fact that we are not just witnesses to it but are responsible for it. And I think the mayor has incredible power just by virtue of his bully pulpit—I would argue he has the second-largest bully pulpit in America, and he used that bully pulpit when he was first running by saying that he would retire in the [Israeli occupied] Golan Heights.

Robinson 

What a thing to say.

Mamdani 

When he went to Israel, he promised greater cooperation with Israeli settlers and has called many of the war criminals of the Israeli government friends of New York City. That kind of support from the leader of this city needs to come to an end. 

Robinson 

I'm going to pose as a constituent, someone you meet when you're going door-to-door and is the kind of constituent that makes you go, “Oh boy, here we go.”

Mamdani 

I love them.

Robinson 

So you meet a constituent, and you say, “Tell me a little bit about your most serious concerns.” And I say, well, Mr. Mamdani, I'm really hoping you're going to do something about all the immigrants that are coming to our city and taking up all the social services. And all the crime in our city. I'm very concerned that all the leftists want to let people out of prison and abolish the police. I don't want to return to the 1970s—I was here in the 1970s, and you couldn't walk down the street without getting mugged! And then Mayor Giuliani came in, and he cleaned all that rubbish, etc. 

I don't need to go on. How do you speak to a constituent who tells you that the problem is, as Eric Adams might have told them, crime and immigration?

Mamdani 

I think the first thing you have to do is actually listen to them and not try and dissuade them of what they are feeling but respond to it. Too often, what the Democratic Party is guilty of is hearing a critique or a concern and then trying to wave it away with a bar graph or a set of statistics. And for the two concerns around immigration and around disorder, I would say that we need to develop new policies as opposed to the ones that have been shown to be failures that have been carried out by the Eric Adams administration.

I'd give one example. Right now, we have street vendors across New York City, and there is a law that requires the city to give out permits to street vendors, but it is refusing to give out those permits. What it is doing is requiring street vendors to purchase permits off the black market. And so a vendor of a halal cart is spending $18,000 just to be able to sell. And because of that black market, because they have to get a license from the illegal market, they then have to increase the price of their food from $8 to $10. They have to make up that $18,000 cost, which is completely created by Eric Adams's ineptitude. And what you can also talk about is bringing order by giving dignity to people who are trying to make a life for themselves in New York City and taking them out of the shadows. 

And I think to the question of crime, you can ask them, where do you feel this the most? Often, what you will hear is public transit. I feel this when I'm going on the trains or the buses, or I feel this even when I'm at home and thinking about those things. And I think it's important to respond to it by saying two things. The first is one of the reasons I'm fighting for free buses. When we won a free bus pilot, we saw that assaults on bus drivers went down by 38.9 percent, and that almost identically mirrored what happened in Kansas City when it went down by 39 percent when they made buses free. We need to bring safety back to our buses in reality and in perception. This is a clear way that we do so. Every time a bus driver is assaulted, it is horrific for the worker who is simply doing their job and for the passengers who are just trying to get where they're going. 

And, secondly, I would say that most people, when they're thinking about crime on the subways, are also just thinking about mental health crises and homelessness. It's not necessarily an act of crime itself. We will be putting out a proposal to create a new Department of Community Safety that would empower a force separate from the police to respond to mental health crises, and their responses would be based out of the subway system in many of the commercial units that are now vacant across the subway system, very much inspired by the successes of programs in Philadelphia with Hub of Hope, as well as in the BART system out west. And I think it’s speaking to these concerns and answering them in a way that is honest to yourself, but also honest to this perception that is sometimes grounded in either anecdotes or reality, and saying that what we're doing right now isn't working, so here's what we're going to pursue. 

Robinson 

Yes, I like what you do there. I believe in defunding the police in many cases, but it's a purely negative policy—it's what you're going to take funding away from, whereas you're talking about funding real safety and taking safety seriously. We believe that everyone should be safe, but we just don't believe that is done through militarizing the subway, sending men with guns in to attack someone who jumps the turnstile or what have you. To conclude here, we've gone through the core sort of economic issues, but describe to us a little more your vision for what New York under a competent, effective leftist mayor could become. 

Mamdani 

It could become the city that it was always meant to be, which is a place that working people can flourish in, where working people can dream of more than simply getting off the hamster wheel to go to sleep and getting back on it in the morning to go back to work. What we have right now is a crisis where the people who've built this city, who sustain this city, are the ones who are being pushed out of this city all while we are concerned about this imaginary flight of the wealthy from New York City. In fact, it’s the working class who are leaving this place that we call home. And what a Mamdani mayoralty would look like is spending each and every day figuring out how we could make this city more affordable and how we could bring a shred of dignity back into the working class's life on a 24-hour basis.

Robinson 

Current Affairs is prohibited as a 501(c)(3) from offering endorsements, but we wish you the best of luck in your campaign. If people want to support you, what should they do?

Mamdani 

They should go to zohranfornyc.com, and they should click the link to donate as well as to sign up to volunteer. The only way that we can build a campaign that's worthy of New Yorkers’ hopes and New Yorkers’ beliefs is if it's a fully funded campaign. We are doing incredible work to get there, but we need a lot of help to get to the finish line.

Robinson 

And thanks to New York's amazing campaign finance laws, your money goes a long way.

Mamdani 

Yes, it does.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.