Mamdani for Mayor (if You Want a Foil for Republicans)

Two groups must be especially thrilled by the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming New York’s next mayor.

The first: young, progressive-leaning voters who gave the charismatic 33-year-old State Assembly member his come-out-of-nowhere victory in last month’s Democratic primary. They want what he wants: rent freezes, free public buses, city-owned grocery stores, tax hikes for corporations and millionaires, curbs on the police, a near doubling of the minimum wage to $30 an hour and the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The second: Republicans who want to make sure that Democrats remain the perfect opposition party — far-left, incompetent, divided, distrusted and, on a national level, unelectable. Remember when Ronald Reagan ran against the “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 and carried 49 states? Get ready for the G.O.P. to run against “Mamdani Democrats” for several election cycles to come.

That’s a thought that ought to give moderate Democrats pause before they accept Mamdani’s mayoralty as a political fait accompli, or even think of getting behind him. Among the reasons the Democratic Party’s brand has become toxic in recent years is progressive misgovernance in places like Los Angeles; San Francisco; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and Chicago. If Mamdani governs on the promises on which he’s campaigned, he’ll bring the same toxicity to America’s biggest city.

How so?

Some of Mamdani’s proposals, like the city-owned groceries, are almost too foolish to mention: Public grocery stores struggle to stock their shelves, can’t compete with private groceries, lack economies of scale and have a recent record of failure in the United States. Other ideas, like free buses, would merely exacerbate the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s shaky finances, which is one reason Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, didn’t renew a free bus ride pilot program last year.

Turns out, socialism works no better in Brooklyn than it does in Havana.

But those ideas won’t be as destructive as Mamdani’s other brainstorms. “Freeze the rent,” his popular campaign slogan, applies only to rent-stabilized apartments, which account for about half of the city’s rental units. But a rent freeze would have precisely the same effects in New York as it has everywhere else: Particularly in a time of inflation, it would lead landlords to cut costs on maintenance, jack up prices on non-stabilized units, convert rental buildings to condos or co-ops and stop new developments that would require affordable housing.

The upshot won’t be a renter’s paradise. It will be decaying and abandoned buildings, middle-class flight to the suburbs and urban blight.

Then there’s Mamdani’s disdain for corporations and the very rich, epitomized by his view that “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” For billionaires, that needn’t be too much of a problem: The oysters at Caravaggio will be missed, but there’s always a jet at Teterboro to whisk them to safety, and permanent residency, in Palm Beach.

But for New Yorkers less fortunate, it will be a problem: Roughly 50 percent of New York City’s income taxes are paid by the top 2 percent of earners, who already labor under one of the highest city and state tax burdens in the country (15.9 percent in 2022). When New Yorkers pack up and leave, they take billions in taxable income with them.

As for the other geese laying golden eggs, large corporations employing thousands of workers and paying hefty Manhattan property taxes, they also have exit options: Consider Illinois, which marquee employers like Boeing, Citadel and Caterpillar have all left in recent years.

What about other urban necessities, like public safety? Mamdani has backed away from his earlier support for defunding the police and has made positive noises about Jessica Tisch, the well-regarded police commissioner. But her views on issues like bail reform, the handling of pro-Hamas demonstrations and quality-of-life policing against minor crimes are diametrically opposite to his. It’s a political marriage that, were it to come to pass, would be destined for rapid annulment.

All of this is a shame for New York, which spent decades working its way up from the policy fiascos of the 1960s and ’70s. For Democrats especially, it’s worth remembering that the state of so much of urban America in those decades is part of what fueled years of Republican ascendancy, including all the tough-on-crime policies that progressives later sought to overturn. History doesn’t repeat as farce. It simply repeats as a predictable kind of tragedy.

There’s talk of President Trump offering the incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams, or the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa — or both — jobs in his administration to unite the anti-Mamdani vote behind Andrew Cuomo, the former governor. Why would Trump do that? A Mamdani mayoralty would be the political gift that keeps on giving. The state of the city would become a reflection of the Democratic Party writ large. Every Mamdani utterance would become a test for every Democratic politician, starting with Senator Chuck Schumer on Israel.

Marxists often counsel: “Sharpen the contradictions.” With Mamdani as mayor, it would be Trump who’d be doing the sharpening.