Mamdani’s Mojo Comes With Some Blind Spots

NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani engineered a seismic electoral realignment in New York City. The groups he pushed to the periphery are not going quietly.

The mayor, through a mix of deliberate action and bureaucratic blunders, has alienated many leaders in the Black, Latino and Jewish communities. And he and his administration have seemed to go out of their way to jab at the descendants of Italian and Irish immigrants, many of whom live in the outer boroughs and never supported him to begin with.

Looking at the math, Mamdani can withstand the fallout. At least for now.

His margin of victory against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was commanding in both the primary and general elections last year. His polling is formidable — and only growing more so — across racial and ethnic lines. And a slate of candidates he endorsed in last month’s Democratic primary routed the establishment so thoroughly that even political strategists outside the far left are now seeing the city’s electorate as divided along generational lines rather than geographically disparate ethnic groups.

But in riding a wave of victories, Mamdani risks drifting away from a longstanding rule of elected office: try to win over your enemies and skeptics. One day, you might need them.

“It would be smart for them to expand their coalition,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who represented a huge voting bloc of Black homeowners in the New York City Council before winning his current post. “It’s important to reach out to communities who didn’t support you. That’s just part of good governing and coalition building.”

Dustups with political forces outside the mayor’s base might not trigger any immediate alarm bells in the bunkers of political strategists. But they nevertheless tend to snowball, creating distractions from City Hall’s affordability agenda and, in the worst-case scenario, potentially metastasizing into something that could threaten his reelection campaign.

Mamdani skipped the installation of a new archbishop — which a City Hall official chalked up to an internal mistake. His team declined to include Catholics in a July 4 speech and initially omitted Little Italy from a map of ethnic enclaves (cue outrage). Mamdani canceled — then un-canceled — a Puerto Rican Day Parade event at Gracie Mansion. He never held events at all to celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month or the Lunar New Year. And he has been lukewarm on parades.

It’s the type of deference that has been expected of mayors for more than 30 years.

“And it’s just not their thing. They want to do their own thing for the people who were never part of the original,” said Chris Coffey, chief executive of political and strategic consulting firm Tusk Strategies. “You can draw a correlation between the map, breakfasts, endorsements and the Office of Mass Engagement. I’m not saying they don’t care about these groups. But I am saying there appears to be a belief that the people — the establishment, the nonprofits that work with the city — haven’t done a lot of it right. So they just don’t care about them as much as they care about other folks who tend to fit their electoral priorities.”

Building coalitions with ethnic groups has been a political way of life in New York City for generations — as Mamdani’s predecessor knew well.

For former Mayor Eric Adams, no flag raising ceremony was too small. No traditional garb off limits. No country’s capital too far-flung to squeeze into one of his favorite aphorisms.

The Democrat, by turns moderate, conservative and MAGA-curious, recognized early the value of cultivating relationships with some of the hundreds of ethnic groups that make up the city, even if individually they were not significant voting blocs.

As Brooklyn borough president, he used (some might say misused) a nonprofit to fund a steady stream of events at Borough Hall honoring everyone from the Greeks to the Ghanaians. During his 2021 mayoral run, he successfully stitched together enough typically overlooked voters — Russian, Chinese, South Asian and many others — to squeak out a victory when combined with far larger groups from Black, Latino, outer-borough white ethnic and moderate Jewish communities.

“No mayor in modern history was a better encapsulation of old-school ethnic politics than Eric Adams in his prime,” said Democratic Strategist Trip Yang. “Zohran Mamdani is the complete opposite.”

As numerous election analysts have pointed out, Mamdani’s coalition is primarily defined by age, with the mayor and his endorsed state and congressional candidates not only winning younger voters across racial and ethnic lines, but coaxing scores of them to the ballot box for the first time in a significant expansion of the electorate.

Mamdani has tailored his engagement strategy accordingly. He has continued to build his social media reach — his Instagram account alone has 12 million followers. He has endorsed fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America, some in races against Black and Latino establishment candidates. And he has created the Office of Mass Engagement to keep his volunteer army in fighting shape while reaching voters directly through campaign-style door-knocking operations. That has left some of the traditional channels of engagement — civic groups, elected officials, community boards and nonprofits — feeling jilted as of late.

On the menu of problems a mayor has to worry about daily, heritage events and cultural faux pas are small potatoes. But they have already sparked outsized distractions and helped cement preconceived notions about him from corners of the city opposed to his rise.

That’s not even taking into account more serious rifts with Black community leaders and huge swaths of Jewish voters who have long been load-bearing pillars in citywide coalitions.

Black elected officials, political consultants and other civic bigwigs have been less than thrilled with their representation in the mayor’s City Hall. They reacted with outrage to an ill-advised plan to raise property taxes that was ultimately scrapped. And they watched in dismay as a group of largely white members of the Democratic Socialists of America chanted “you’re next” when an image of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on a television screen at congressional candidate Claire Valdez’s victory party — a manifestation of what makes many older Black voters uncomfortable with democratic socialism.

“Help me understand. How does that say: 'We are about building Black and brown communities. We are coming in partnership,'” Rev. Robert Waterman, pastor at the Antioch Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant and founder of the African American Clergy & Elected Officials Organization, said of the Jeffries incident. “That just does not ring a bell for me.”

The mayor’s rift with groups of Jewish voters is well-documented. He has been a vocal booster of the Palestinian cause, an ardent critic of the Israeli government and has said the country should not continue to exist as an explicitly Jewish state. At times, rhetoric from both he and his wife has inflamed tensions with the community and prompted accusations Mamdani is encouraging antisemitism, even as the mayor has boosted funding to combat hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers.

“Most people campaign on the extremes and try to govern in the center and there’s a reason for that: You don’t want to deal with putting out fires every day. You actually want to govern,” said David Greenfield, head of the Met Council, the largest Jewish nonprofit in the country focused on reducing poverty. “Some of these errors are intentional in my view and some are unforced, but you really have to look at it and ask yourself if there is a broader strategy.”

The mayor’s office pointed to polling that shows Mamdani's favorability has only risen in the first six months in office: A June Siena Research Institute poll found Mamdani with a 58 percent approval rating among New York City voters. And an April Marist survey found he is particularly popular among Black voters who opposed him in last year’s primary but became supporters in the general election — showcasing the sometimes divergent feelings between community leaders, many of whom are older, and those they represent.

“I don’t have patronage. I don’t get funding from the city. I’ve dealt with every mayor since Abe Beame and I don’t see him operating much different except that he’s expanding [the electorate],” said Al Sharpton, who argued concerns about Black representation in City Hall are overblown and noted Mamdani has come to his National Action Network in Harlem on numerous occasions.

A separate poll found Mamdani above water with Jewish voters nationwide (though a survey of New York City Jewish voters in the spring found the opposite). And while Mamdani incensed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez and Rep. Adriano Espaillat by endorsing against them in a pair of congressional primaries last month, the mayor has performed well with Latino voters since his primary.

Mamdani has attended upwards of 70 cultural events in Black, Latino and Jewish communities and appeared with Archbishop Ronald Hicks multiple times since being elected, according to City Hall. He has pursued policies that benefit these same stakeholders, including pausing a tax lien sale and establishing a deed theft office. And the mayor has even made a noticeable effort to court a business community that longs for his downfall.

“Since taking office, Mayor Mamdani has always strived and always will be a mayor for all New Yorkers — and the motivation he brings to every policy and every engagement is how best to deliver for working people,” spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement. “Between securing $1.2 billion for universal childcare, delivering a historically safe city, protecting tenants, and taking steps toward affordable grocery stores, it's no surprise the mayor and his agenda remain extremely popular across the board.”

Indeed, Mamdani has in short order made a career out of defying the old laws of politics. And he and his advisers have not hidden their feelings about how the civic infrastructure connecting government with voters is badly outdated and has left many behind.

But mayors tend to lose popularity over time no matter how much star power they possess in the beginning. And elected officials and community groups, while distinct from voters themselves, can either help that process along or try to staunch it.

One Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to discuss Mamdani’s political proclivities said the more voting blocs feel estranged from the mayor, the smaller the margin of error when it comes time to run for reelection.

“You have a core group that’s never going to be with him. And even if you add a layer on top of that of older and more moderate voters of color you’re still not losing,” the strategist said. “But you’re in a place where if something gets a little off — something happens with Israel or a land-use project or whatever it is — now you have to be careful about white liberals who voted for him, who are with him, but are not wedded to him.”