"Where Have You Gone, Bill de Blasio?"

Or, Hey New York! Don't Panic!

The results of the New York mayoral election got me thinking of mayors past. I stared tuning into politics around the age of 12 or 13, when John Lindsay was Mayor, Richard Nixon was President and, as the song goes, “revolution was in the air.”

Watching Lindsay on the nightly news made this impressionable kid in New Jersey think that politicians could be energetic, exciting figures who were clearly trying to make a difference, help the poor, stand up for civil rights—and get a character named after them on the Batman TV series.

Now, the next (?) (!) Mayor of New York, Zohran Mandami, says that the best New York City in his lifetime was Bill de Blasio.

“…the reason that I describe him as being the best mayor of my lifetime is he is the mayor who delivered universal pre-K to New Yorkers. He is the mayor who ran on three things effectively: end stop and frisk, tax the rich, to fund universal pre-K. And he delivered on much of that, and he showcased the ability of city government to actually meet the needs of New Yorkers.”

I thought when de Blasio came on the scene he had the potential to be the most liberal New York City Mayor since Lindsay, and in many ways he was.¹ The headline in my Beloved Print Edition™ of the New York Times reads, Free Buses and Billions in New Taxes. Can Mamdani Achieve His Plans? and reports on Mamdani’s ambitious plans to bring about nothing less than “a dramatic reimagining of city government.”

The Times references why New York’s next (?) (!) Mayor ™ likes the last one so much.

Like Mr. Mamdani’s rent freeze proposal, free child care has its roots in the de Blasio administration. Free prekindergarten for every 4-year-old in the city was a signature achievement of his administration.

As Mayor, Bill de Blasio proposed a “millionaires tax” to raise $800 million to fix New York’s subway and bus system, with an increase in the City’s highest income tax rate by 0.534%, from 3.876% to 4.41%, on taxable incomes above $500,000 for individuals and above $1 million for couples.

Did that get passed? No, it did not get passed.

And when Bill de Blasio ran for President (remember that?) he’d vowed to “tax the hell” out of rich people, with a plan that would tax capital gains as ordinary income, tax those with household incomes between $1 million and $2 million at 50 percent and those with more than $2 million at 60 percent, raise the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, tax Wall Street trades and other goodies from Bernie Sanders’ wish list.

Did those policies catch on? No, they did not catch on.

Will they now? Zohan Mamdani seems to think so.

According to the Times,

Mr. Mamdani is proposing a new income tax of 2 percent on residents making more than a $1 million a year, which he estimates would bring in about $4 billion year. He also wants the state to sign off on an increase of the top corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent, up from 7.25 percent now. This would generate an extra $5 billion a year, according to his campaign.

Raising those taxes further would not only need the approval of the State Legislature but also the signature of the governor.

On Thursday, the governor stressed that she wanted to have a positive relationship with the next mayor, whoever that is — but reiterated that raising taxes was a nonstarter.

“I’m focused on affordability,” she said at a news conference, “and raising taxes on anyone does not accomplish that.”

Zohan Mamdani’s rise reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend during the brief moment in 1988 when it looked like Jesse Jackson had a chance to win the Democratic nomination for President.

“This could be the greatest public education campaign for progressive politics we’ve ever seen” he said. But Jesse Jackson wasn’t the frontrunner for long, while Zohan Mamdani is most likely New York’s next (?) (!) Mayor. ™²

We’ll see how far Mamdani gets with his economic agenda as Mayor, and I’m sure he has a response to stories like these about the city’s business elites clutching their pearls.

According to the Times,

Daniel Loeb, the hedge fund manager, and some other New York City business leaders are aghast at Zohran Mamdani’s success in the Democratic mayoral primary and are considering backing Mr. Adams in the general election.

Egads! They’re aghast! But will they get behind another ugly, negative, Trumpy campaign that will once again fail against someone who’s talking about how much lunch costs?

Will they really support Eric Adams, or, as

Dan Pfeiffer

’s understated characterization puts it, go for “electing Andrew Cuomo—someone who was effectively kicked out of the party just a few years ago for being, frankly, an absolute scumbag.”

The day before the primary,

Dan Pfeiffer

wrote this prescient analysis of what he called “The Incredibly Stupid, Self-Defeating Democratic Panic about Zohran Mamdani.”

Whatever you think of Mamdani’s policy agenda or the political consequences of Democratic Socialism, there’s no question that his candidacy has sparked something powerful—especially among young people in New York City and beyond. The enthusiasm is palpable.

In a recent Marist Poll, Mamdani was garnering 52% of the vote among voters under 45 in a field of 11 candidates. That’s a massive share, and in the often-grudging machinery of mayoral politics, Mamdani’s campaign feels different.

Ever since the 2024 election, there has been an urgent conversation in the Democratic Party about how to win back young voters. Trump made shocking gains with that group, and if Democrats can’t reverse the trend, there is no path to long-term electoral relevance.

The Democratic Party establishment should be trying to learn from Zohran Mamdani.

And after the election, Mamdani’s strategist and media consultant Rebecca Kirszner Katz points out in this op-ed that “more 25- to 34-year-olds had cast ballots than any other age group.”

That’s revolutionary-level change.

As my readers are sick of hearing about know, I am obsessed with keenly interested in the question of how to get more young people interested in voting. As I’ve said here before,

Year after year, young people tell pollsters they intend to vote in the next election, and every time, the youth vote is at the back of the turnout race. Before the 2020 election, Polling done by Ipsos showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020.

But according to the Census, voter turnout that year was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.

Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote. The actual turnout was 23%, according to CIRCLE.

And 42 percent of young people ages 18-29 turned out to vote in 2024, but voters aged 50 or older were 52 percent of the electorate.

If Zohan Mamdani has a key to unlocking youth voter interest in politics, we need to listen to him.

The recent study from Pew Research of voter turnout in 2024, based on authoritative voter records, prompted headlines like this in the Times: If Everyone Had Voted, Harris Still Would Have Lost.

I’m no

Nate Silver

,

Michael Podhorzer

or

Dan Pfeiffer

, and am far from expert in analyzing data, but I’m not so sure. Especially when I see this in that Pew report:

And among young voters who were eligible to vote in both elections (those ages 22 to 34 in 2024), there was a 3 percentage point difference in the rate at which Biden’s 2020 voters turned out in 2024 (77%) compared with Trump’s voters (80%).

The Pew study found that 15 percent of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t vote at all in 2024, and that Trump succeeded in turning out a new electorate built on “low-propensity" voters.

I’ve talked endlessly written here about what I call the “dog food problem,” quoting the former Virginia Congressman who said if the Republican Party were a brand of dog food, “they'd take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill." Now it’s both parties, along with any belief that voting or politics can make a difference in people’s lives, or should be taken any more seriously than professional wrestling.

And now, those “low-propensity” voters are people who don’t have dogs, but are persuaded to buy the dog food anyway.

What’s a democracy to do? If, as the saying goes, “all the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy,” then bringing more people—particularly young people— into politics and voting has got to be a good place to start.

All I am saying, is give Zohan a chance.

1. But far from the most skilled, as some of my readers like to remind me.

2. No, I don’t think Andrew Cuomo can come back from the dead this time either. The lesson here was, just because someone has a lot of money and can raise a lot of money doesn’t mean he isn’t, with all his flaws, still a profoundly flawed candidate.