The man says he usually goes for walks on his lunch hour in Manhattan but on a furiously hot Wednesday it would be foolhardy, so he is sitting on a wall shaded by trees at the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park.
“And where I am from, I like the heat,” he says, smiling. He speaks with a strong Indian accent even though he has been living in the city for decades. He lives in Jersey and commutes to the city to work. We chat for a while about the day’s big events: he hope the Israel-Iran ceasefire will hold and believes that Donald Trump is sincere in his hatred for war.
But he rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the mention of Zohran Mamdani’s electrifying New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary victory the night before. “I cannot understand why all of these people come here from the East if they do not want to enjoy capitalism,” he says.
Mamdani, he predicts, would be a disaster if elected as mayor and would catapult the city back to the folkloric deprivations of the 1970s – the ghettos, the crime-stalked nights, the blackouts, the streets lined with uncollected rubbish. As it turns out, in his paean to capitalism, he is echoing the words of New York’s biggest landlord.
“You want to have leadership that speaks to what New York is,” Scott Rechler told the New York Times. “It’s the capital of capitalism.”
[ This man could be just what the American left needsOpens in new window ]
The scale of Mamdani’s win over the returning patriarchal figure of Andrew Cuomo – who conceded defeat less than an hour after the polls closed on a broiling Tuesday night – has terrified the captains of industry and commerce. The late-night conservative talkshows forecast a future of New York entrepreneurs and wealth creators fleeing a city run by a socialist – or, as Trump has labelled Mamdani, “a communist lunatic”.
Cuomo’s numbers were so disheartening that he has yet to confirm his intention to continue against Mamdani as an independent in the November vote.
New York political affiliations are 6:1 Democratic. Mike Bloomberg was the last Republican mayor, and he threw his financial heft behind Cuomo’s underwhelming campaign. By Wednesday, the Wall Steet Journal headline read: “Wall Street panics over prospect of a socialist running New York City.”
They needed a saviour. But who could that blue-caped hero be? A familiar face, it turned out. Barely had the floor been swept after Mamdani’s Tuesday night victory party at a rooftop bar in Long Island City than current mayor Eric Adams was charting the next phase of a wily political career.
After meeting business leaders, he officially announced his campaign as an independent. In 2022 Adams was inaugurated as a Democratic mayor but his popularity plummeted after he was indicted on bribery and campaign finances charges, which were quashed by the Trump administration. Adams had dismissed Mamdani as a “snake-oil salesman” at the beginning of the campaign, prompting the memorable New York Post headline “Scamdani”.
Adams has laid out the blueprint for the narrative behind his bid to return to office for a second term after a mayoral race that will intensify once the summer distractions of the Mets and Yankees are over with.
To Adams, Mamdani is a princeling: a privileged son of academics voicing socialistic rhetoric and promising to cure the struggles of which he knows nothing. A Mamdani mayorship would, he warned, see a defunding of the city’s police force and a rise in crime – and fear – among the 4.6 million subway users in the city’s five boroughs.
Free bus transport, childcare costs, rent control and a vision of city-owned price-controlled grocery stores featured strong in the Mamdani manifesto, which has propelled him towards the Democratic candidacy. He says corporate tax hikes and a tax raise for the wealthy will meet the costs of the policies. He has also vowed to end Adams’s practice of co-operation with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids to deport immigrants.
Crime will rise, Adams warned. The money will leave the city.
“Most troubling is his calls to give everything away free. Nothing is more troubling when people are struggling [than making] promises that can’t be lived up to.”
Adams possesses a blue-collar triumph-over-adversity life-story, flipping a childhood of extreme poverty in late 1960s Bushwick and juvenile delinquency into a 20-year career in the police force followed by a political life where he navigated his way through the ranks with guile and persistence. His pitch will be that he has lived the struggles and life experience that Mamdani is purporting to champion. He will also stoke the fears of anti-Semitism that Mamdani has persistently rejected, arguing that he is pro-Palestinian.
“I think the Jewish community should be concerned,” he said this week. “It is problematic when you have a socialist who is displaying anti-Semitic views to be able to run and be elected in New York City.”
The Maga right has responded to Mamdani’s triumph with predictable performative alarmism. Marjorie Taylor Greene reposted a digitally altered image of the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a black burka with the caption “This hit hard”. Meanwhile, Tennessee Republican congressman Andy Ogle posted a copy of the letter he sent to attorney general Pam Bondi on Thursday requesting that Mamdani be investigated to establish if he should be subject to denaturalisation proceedings on the grounds that he may have procured US citizenship by “concealment of material support for terrorism”.
Mamdani has, during the course of a campaign for which he was a rank outsider just months ago, spoken of the racism he has faced since declaring himself in a field of 11 candidates.
“I get messages which say the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim. I get threats on my life, and on the people that I love, and I try not to talk about it. Because the function of racism, as Toni Morrison said, is distraction. My focus has always been on making this a city that is affordable, on making this a city that New Yorkers can see themselves in. And it takes a toll.
“Because this is a city that every single person deserves to be in, a city we all belong to and the thing that makes me proudest in this campaign is that the strength of our movement is built on our ability to have built something across Jewish and Muslim New Yorkers; across New Yorkers of all faiths, all backgrounds and all boroughs.
“Anti-Semitism is such a real issue in the city. And it has been hard to see it weaponised by candidates who do not seem to have any sincere interest in tackling [it] but rather in using it as a pretext to make political points.”
In short, the November race will be riveting and personal and deeply unpleasant. And Mamdani’s sudden emergence into the national spotlight, redolent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock 2018 midterm win over Joe Crowley, presents the addled party with a new dilemma. Nimble and persuasive and inspiring as Mamdani’s campaign was, he still earned just 430,000 votes. It’s a mere 10th of the city’s population. He will need to build on that if he is topple the Adams-led resistance to change.
And there are cross-party concerns that Mamdani simply does not have the experience to run the mayor’s office having entered politics just four years ago.
Against that, his campaign, wedded to a clear vision and ideology based around the concerns of ordinary city workers, has cast in sharp contrasting illumination the muddled, directionless present of the Democratic Party as a whole. New York party grandees Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries both congratulated the 33-year-old on his win but have not formally endorsed him. Ocasio-Cortez supported him early and vocally. And a significant city show of support was offered on Wednesday by congressman Jerrold Nadler, whose constituency includes the influential and heavily Jewish Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Nadler compared Mamdani’s breakthrough as comparable to Barack Obama’s day-star rise in 2008. “Voters in New York City demanded change and, with Zohran’s triumph we have a direct repudiation of Donald Trump’s tax cuts and authoritarianism,” he said.
Nadler’s support will help to assuage doubts among the city’s Jewish community. Primary election maps depicted Cuomo’s successes in Manhattan as being limited to the Upper West and Upper East sides of the city, as well as the Bronx and the outer reaches of Queens. If Cuomo decides to bow out, Adams will seek to build on those boroughs.
But a recent Marist poll showed Mamdani, despite his brandishing of Binyamin Netanyahu as a “war criminal” during the campaign, had garnered 20 per cent support among Jewish New Yorkers intending to vote and now, Nadler has vowed to work with the candidate and with “all New Yorkers to fight against all bigotry and hate.”
An epic political autumn awaits New York.
