A young revolutionary is about to come face-to-face with political reality.
A year ago, not even the most perfervid Astoria leftist would have thought that Zohran Mamdani would soon be elected mayor of New York City. Back then, it was easier to imagine Eric Adams coasting to reelection on the strength of declining crime, or state attorney general Letitia James, who came close to running for governor in 2021, swooping in to unite a fractious Democratic coalition. With Adams badly damaged by a federal indictment and James anxious about what a mayoral bid would mean for her ongoing battle with President Donald Trump, however, the path was seemingly clear for Andrew Cuomo to make a dramatic comeback.
Though it was no secret that Cuomo had real weaknesses, thanks to his polarizing tenure as governor, his name recognition and formidable fundraising machine were enough to freeze out other serious contenders. As a result, the Democratic mayoral field was so bereft of talent that Mamdani—an obscure, hard-left state assemblymember with hardly any legislative or professional accomplishments to speak of—was able to cut through, buoyed by surging anti-Israel sentiment and a series of half-baked pseudo-solutions to the city’s very real affordability crisis.
From one vantage point, then, Mamdani is best understood as an accidental mayor. If federal prosecutors had initially declined to prosecute Adams, if James had jumped in and Cuomo had stayed out, if Hamas had surrendered its hostages a few months sooner, if moderates and conservatives had consolidated behind a single candidate in the general election, or if any of a number of other possibilities had manifested—the outcome of New York City’s 2025 mayoral race would have been quite different.
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Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here. This piece was adapted from City Journal.
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