Zohran Mamdani is banking on voter’s inability to understand the complex dynamics of the city’s economy by blaming greedy landlords, and Democratic Party leaders, for the high cost of living.
Donald Trump rode voter economic illiteracy to the White House last year, through empty promises to lower the cost of eggs and gas, while shamelessly blaming Joe Biden for high prices that he had nothing to do with. Trump’s charismatic politics of grievance succeeded in shifting public attention from Biden’s hard to convey, but impressive, record of economic growth, low unemployment and higher wages.
Zohran Mamdani is using the same strategy to become New York’s mayor He is banking on voter’s inability to understand the complex dynamics of the city’s extraordinarily successful housing market, blaming greedy landlords, and the Democratic establishment, for the high cost of living.
Just as Trump succeeded in shifting attention from Biden’s economic record, Mamdani’s upset in the primary was based on using slick promises and voter ignorance to shift voter attention away from his shocking lack of management experience, and comparing his own record to Cuomo’s economic success as a prosperity governor who balanced New York State’s $150 billion budget for ten years.
Imminent Multi-Billion Dollar Budget Deficit Makes New Spending Impossible
The man who would be the most inexperienced mayor in New York’s 360 year history promises to freeze rent for the city’s 1 million rent stabilized apartments, to spend $800 million in tax dollars for free bus trips, $5 billion on free child care, and another $5 billion annually to build low income housing. All during years when the city faces massive cuts in federal assistance and a recent report from Citizens Budget Commission titled, Running on Empty, Precarious NYC Budget Not Prepared for Looming Risks” anticipates budget shortfalls starting at $7.8 billion next fiscal year, increasing to $10 billion in 2028.
Mamdani is the worst politician imaginable to manage the city’s budget. His policies would actually hurt lower income New Yorkers, not help them. By driving down the value and quality of real estate, while adding billions in new spending commitments, he would bankrupt a thriving New York economy. This would cause cuts to city salaries and vital services like police, as well as reducing existing funding streams for things like parks, libraries, city universities and repairs for city-owned low income housing. At a time when Trump is slashing federal aid to New York, he is the worst politician imaginable to manage the city’s budget.
NYC Has Added 1 Million One Million People without Displacing the Poor
“Every politician says New York is the greatest city in the world,” Mamdani recently tweeted. “But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?”
No one? Really? The reality of New York’s economy today is that 8.5 million people can indeed afford to live here, and that more than a million of those people have moved to the city during the past 30 years. And that the addition of highly priced new housing for all these newcomers has been done without displacing lower income New Yorkers.
This includes more than 520,000 low income residents-more than the entire population of Miami- who live in heavily-subsidized government-built New York City Housing Authority housing, and today pay an average rent of $588 a month.
And it includes another two million people who, like Mamdani, live in about 1 million rent stabilized, below market rate apartments, paying an average monthly rent of just $1,600. It is these people that Mamdani claims are being victimized because their “greedy” landlords received a 3% Consumer Price Index-driven increase from New York’s rent stabilization board a few months ago. He hopes that voters will never notice the fact that the actual costs of building services and materials last year had risen by more than 6%.
The most recent income analysis of the city’s 1 million regulated households found that between 2021 and 2023, while rents increased less than 5%, median income of rent stabilized residents rose 27%, to $60,000. The median “rent burden” grievance that Mandani claims makes the city unlivable is, for rent stabilized tenants, just 28.8% of income.
Also missing from the debate over housing is the fact that although New Yorkers pay more in rent for unregulated market rate apartments than people in other cities, they also earn more. A lot more. The average cost for a 2-bedroom apartment in New York City is about $5,500, almost double the average 2-bedroom in Miami ($2,800). Meanwhile, the base pay for a New York firefighter, according to Indeed, is $134,398. This is four times as much as the $32,000 a Miami firefighter earns.
Real Estate Values Boosted City Property Tax Revenue by $3 billion last year
Higher rents for residential and commercial space reflect the desirability of living, working and shopping in the nation’s most prosperous city. The city’s high property values, along with high income residents, are the reasons the city tax collections keep rising. Valuable, desirable real estate is the goose that, for centuries, has laid golden eggs, in the form of tax revenues, for the richest city in the world.
New York City property tax collections rose 9%, to $33.7 billion last year, providing the city with an extra $3 billion to balance its ever-growing $114 billion budget and provide generous salaries and benefits to 300,000 employees, as well as massive subsidies for city owned housing, city universities, hospitals, and homeless services.
From its start nearly a century ago, the quid pro quo that has sustained the most successful middle class housing system in the world has allowed the owners of rent regulated apartments to pass the cost of living adjustments on to their tenants.
Mamdani wants to break this system by freezing rents for the next four years, depriving landlords of the revenue required to meet the rising cost of expenses needed for basic upkeep, staffing and repairs. He proclaims that tenants cannot afford to pay more, hoping that voters will remain ignorant of the fast rising income of New Yorkers, and the high wages paid for employees in the nation’s most competitive city.
Mamdani’s “Luxury Beliefs” Actually Hurts the Poor
Author Robert Henderson has called Mamdani’s success a prime example of “luxury beliefs,” which he defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
Mamdani’s policies would result in bankrupting the city, or forcing deep budget cuts that make it less safe and less livable.
His new spending promises will never materialize, leaving countless young voters around the country disillusioned by the inability of Democrats to deliver change they can believe in.
And just as the left wing populist “defund the police”(which Mamdani supported before he didn’t) and “decriminalize the border” positions built Trump’s success, if New Yorkers elect Mamdani, he will also become, to Trump and Republicans, the poster child for everything wrong with the Democratic Party.
Mamdani helped Trump win in 2024
Mamdani is a political opportunist working to advance his own fast-rising career, the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Zionist-hating, Hamas-boosting faction of the American electorate. As his auctions clearly demonstrated in 2024, he could care less about the prospects of the Democrats winning back the House in 2026, or the 2028 election.
Zohran Mamdani was a leader of the 2024 election’s “Leave it Blank “ movement, of left wing politicians protesting against “genocide Joe” and urging young and Muslim voters to withhold their vote for Harris because they were complicit in Israel’s retaliatory war started by Hamas with its October 7, 2023 mass murder and rape spree.
As reported in The Hill, “Mamdani didn’t just fail to support Democratic presidential nominees Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden in last year’s existentially urgent campaign, he spoke out and organized against them. In March of 2024, Mamdani urged voters to withhold their vote from Biden.
”Last summer, as the world watched the Democrats make history by nominating the first Black woman on a major party ticket, Mamdani proudly platformed the Uncommitted Movement, which protested her convention.
“This was not passive disagreement. It was an intentional and successful effort to sabotage the Democratic ticket in a general election — when the risks could not have been more clear, when every vote mattered, when Democrats were working tirelessly to defeat an authoritarian megalomaniac.”
As a result of the loud anti-Democratic Party “establishment” diatribes led by Mamdani and others like him, hundreds of thousands of voters turned to Trump, or Jill Stein. Many of America’s 3.7 million Muslim voters also turned away the Democratic ticket. An estimated 45% of those who voted for Biden in 2020 shifted their votes to Trump or third party spoiler candidate Stein, or skipped voting entirely. This helped Trump achieve his narrow wins in key swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Dems Win On Competence. Mamdani Will Be Trump’s Poster Child for Incompetence
Mamdani’s “rent freeze” emergency is a manufactured crisis. It will not make New York more affordable for everyone. He is hoping that New York voters don’t have time to peel back the curtain on his vaporware cliches disguised as policies.
New Yorkers are smarter than to act as though they were voting in a high school popularity contest. They should vote for the person who can sustain New York as the world’s most successful city, not break it in pursuit of impossible socialist goals. They should vote Andrew Cuomo for mayor.
The strongest hand that Democrats can play to stop Trump’s nightmarish autocracy and win back control of the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028 is competence and responsive government. Democrats are using the shutdown to their advantage by finally getting short attention span voters to pay attention to the economics of health care insurance. By exposing the bankruptcy of Trump’s substance-free populist slogans, they may succeed in winning back voters in seven mission critical sowing states who voted for Trump during the last election.
Electing Zohran Mamdani makes this far less likely. He would impose damaging policies on the most prosperous and safest large city in the nation, hurting not only the people of New York, but the Democratic Party in 2026 and 2028. And with this, possibly the future of American democracy, as well.
