Before Donald Trump forcefully reoccupied the center of the political scene by having the now ex-Venezuelan president Nicolás captured Maduro On the night of January 3rd, for a couple of days the Democratic Party managed to hold the stage, thanks to the installation of Zohran Mamdani in charge of Mayor of New York on New Year's Eve.
Muslim (he swore on the Koran), immigrant from Uganda, son of a couple of Indian origins, naturalized as a US citizen only in 2018, married to an artist of Syrian descent and above all a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (the main socialist political organization in the United States, although it has just 90.000 members), Mamdani It represents the symbol of everything that Trump is not and that the tycoon would not like American society to be: inclusive, multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-faith, and progressive.
The implications of Mamdani's victory for the Democratic Party
Il program which allowed a Mamdani to win the elections – focused on the containment of the cost of living through the promise of free local transport and kindergartens, controlled rents and controlled food prices in supermarkets run by the municipal administration – seems to be the only one capable of offering prospects for regaining consensus for the benefit of the Democratic party in view not only of the mid-term elections next November, in which a third of the seats in the Senate and all those in the House will be up for grabs, but also in the race for the White House of 2028, when Trump will not be able to run for another term.
In fact, if the distance of democratic demands from the concrete needs of the people contributed significantly to Kamala Harris' defeat against The Donald in 2024, in order to concentrate instead on moderate proposals to defend values that are certainly noble, but with little impact on an electorate struggling with a significant increase in inflation, Mamdani's winning formula was to provide a response to material economic needs of New Yorkers, shifting the Democratic Party to an openly progressive position, winning the nomination by defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo in the primaries, who initially had a higher chance on paper but was much more moderate (Cuomo then ran as an independent, collecting 41% of the vote compared to Mamdani's 51% and Republican Curtis Silwa's 8%).
Moreover, the fact that Mamdani's inauguration ceremony was attended by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the radical challenger of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 in the Democratic primaries for the White House, attests to the awareness that the political proposal of the new mayor of New York It can set a precedent for success, capable from now on of giving the Democratic Party a regenerative turn at the national level in a liberal direction, as they say in the United States, or towards the left, according to the expression common to European observers.
The New York Administration as a Laboratory for US Policy
With nearly 8,5 million inhabitants, New York It is the most populous city in the United States. Its mayor runs a annual balance which this year reached almost 116 billion dollars and an administration made up of over 45 entities, including agencies and departments, with a total of approximately 325.000 employees.
Governing New York – as David Garth, the electoral strategist of many of the city’s mayors, starting with John Lindsay’s campaign in 1969, argued more than half a century ago – is the most difficult job after that of president of the United States.
At the same time the mayor of New York is also considered the most powerful local administrator in the world and the most influential American politician after the White House. Moreover, New York's municipal institutions, despite being centered on a duo of the mayor and the city council, have over time seen the former's powers grow at the expense of the latter's prerogatives, to the point that the latter's function has effectively ended up being limited to approving the budget.
Beyond the city's demographic size, it is precisely its civic institutions, which allow the mayor to exert considerable activism in government, that make New York's governance a significant test of power in the US political landscape. From this perspective, the reformist tendencies that Mamdani's election seems to have revitalized have long attracted particular interest.
The Corruption of New York Politics
In the city's centuries-long history (the development of a Dutch settlement founded in 1624 on Manhattan Island under the name Nieuw Amsterdam, New Amsterdam), reformism represents an acquisition of the last century. In the 1870s, New York's administration was known for the infamous Tammany Hall, the local organizational apparatus of the Democratic Party, headed by State Senator William M. Tweed. He set up a complex and lucrative system of bribes which, before leading to his imprisonment in 1878, allowed him to pocket approximately $200 million at the time, equivalent to approximately $5 billion today. Tweet's conviction did not put an end to corruption in New York City's administration, although an 1883 ordinance had established that a large portion of hiring for municipal jobs should be based on comparative evaluations of candidates' qualifications and abilities rather than following political recommendations. The early twentieth century made the figure of another Tammany Hall exponent, George Washington Plunkitt, proverbial, known for his hilarious distinction between “dishonest bribes”, those pocketed for personal enrichment, and the "honest bribes”, those received to finance the political activities of one's party.
As late as 1932, James “Jimmy” Walker, who had been elected mayor in 1925 and confirmed in office in 1929, was forced to resign after it emerged that he had awarded lucrative contracts and large municipal orders to contractors who had paid him large sums of money in return. Unlike Tweet, Walker did not spend a day in prison, but over time, according to an authoritative investigation by Melvin G. Holli (The American Mayor: The Best and the Worst Big-City Leaders, Penn State University Press, 1999), he achieved the unenviable result of being considered the third worst mayor in the history of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after William H. “Big Bill” Thompson, who headed the administration of Chicago from 1915 to 1923 and then from 1927 to 1931 with the support of gangster Al Capone, and Frank Hague, who led the government of Jersey City, New Jersey, from 1917 to 1947 thanks to mafia-style intimidation methods.
Fiorello H. La Guardia, considered the best mayor of New York
The title of best American mayor goes, instead, to one of Walker's immediate successors, Fiorello H. La GuardiaThe son of Italian immigrants, La Guardia was a Republican who was elected in 1933, riding a wave of backlash against the corrupt regime that New Yorkers had come to associate with the Tammany Hall Democrats.
The Guard, however, proved to be a sui generis republican, since he implemented progressive policies This immediately distanced him from the conservatism of his own party. In particular, he collaborated closely with the federal administration of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to secure substantial funding (over a billion dollars at the time, between 1934 and 1939) for extensive public works projects, which helped reduce the high unemployment rate among New Yorkers affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was also able to modernize infrastructure, building bridges, highway interchanges, tunnels, and the airport, opened in 1939, that now bears his name.
The Guardia also worked to combat the infiltration of organized crime into the city.
He banned slot machines and pinball machines, whose installation was controlled by the underworld, and in 1935 he even went so far as to temporarily ban the sale of artichokes, because their price had been artificially raised by a mafia clan that managed their distribution.
Robert F. Wagner Jr.
Another mayor who stood out for his reformist policies was Robert F. Wagner Jr., in office from 1954 to 1965. His three administrations boosted the construction of public housing, the allocation criteria for which sought to to break up the concentration of African Americans and Hispanics in certain areas of the city to end what was effectively a racial segregation of residential neighborhoods; they prohibited discrimination in housing based on race, skin color, and religious belief; they established a public university consortium, the City University of New York, with low tuition and tuition waivers for less affluent students, also to encourage the enrollment of members of ethnoracial minorities.
Furthermore, to help reduce poverty, Wagner created a vocational training program for unemployed youth, with a particular focus on single mothers. He expanded union rights for municipal employees, granting them the right to collective bargaining.
He established a commission to investigate incidents of racial and ethnic discrimination, the first municipal agency of its kind in the United States, and promoted increased hiring of African Americans, Hispanics, and Puerto Ricans in the city government.
The mayor also wanted to send signals of inclusiveness through his private behavior. For example, in 1961, he refused to renew his membership in the New York Athletic Club, the city's most exclusive multi-sports club, because it did not accept African-Americans or Jews as members. This was a far-reaching signal in a country where, in the Southern states, racial segregation in public places still prevailed.
Other progressive initiatives
The commitment to defense of minority rights and against the poverty was continued by some of Wagner's successors. Lindsay, mayor from 1966 to 1973, excluded from municipal contracts companies that discriminated against African Americans, Hispanics, disabled people, women and the elderly in hiring.
The Democrat David dinkins (1990-1993), the first African-American mayor of New York, took action to curb police abuse, which most frequently targeted blacks and Hispanics. Another Democrat, Bill de Blasio, In office from 2014 to 2021, he ran on a platform focused on reducing economic inequality in the city, a sort of foreshadowing of what Mamdani's own agenda would be. He proposed making preschool free, funding it with a surcharge for New Yorkers earning more than half a million dollars, and promoted the construction of 200.000 housing units to reduce the shortage of market-rate housing and consequently rent prices. De Blasio also made undocumented immigrants accessible to social services in the city, ensuring they were hospitalized and allowed to attend public schools. He also instructed the New York City police not to arrest anyone caught smoking marijuana in public places and to end the practice of stopping and frisking suspects on the street for weapons and drugs, a practice that often led to racial profiling against African Americans and Hispanics. Furthermore, de Blasio disbanded a special police unit that, since the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had been secretly monitoring the activities of Muslim organizations in the city and had ultimately caused tensions between the Islamic community and law enforcement. De Blasio also maintained the provisions that, since the 1980s, had made New York a "sanctuary city," meaning an administration whose employees were prohibited from collaborating with federal authorities in identifying and apprehending illegal immigrants.
The partisan fluidity of some New York mayors
The Guard also inaugurated a tradition of mayors not particularly tied to the party with which they had been elected or even aligned themselves on independent positions. This second category includes Vincent R. Impellitteri, An Italian native of Isnello, in the province of Palermo. President of the city council for the Democratic Party, he became mayor pro tempore ex officio in 1950 after the resignation of William O'Dweyer, who had been appointed U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. When the Democratic Party refused to support him in the election to complete O'Dweyer's term, Impellitteri founded his own party, the Experience Party, which won him confirmation as mayor in 1950. Wagner, although he had always run for the Democrats, in 1961 he broke ties with Tammany Hall, whose corrupt patronage practices he had long opposed, and was re-elected without the support of his own party organization. Lindsay, elected in 1965 as a Republican, in 1969 he created the Independent Party of New York City, with which he obtained a second term.
The billionaire financier Michael Bloomberg He won the mayoral office in 2001 and 2005 as a Republican candidate, but won the 2009 election as an independent. Mamdani is the most recent epigone of this political fluidity because, despite having received the Democratic Party nomination, he is an avowed socialist.
The political shortness of breath of former New York mayors
Despite the influence and prestige of the office, New York mayors they have never managed to project themselves onto the national political scene for over a century now. Lindsay in 1972 as well as Bloomberg e de Blasio In 2020, they attempted to win the Democratic nomination for president, but were unsuccessful. Rudolph Giuliani, in office from 1994 to 2001, he ran in the 2008 Republican primaries for the White House with the same unsuccessful outcome. The guard He hoped to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee in 1944, but his expectations were disappointed, and he did not even obtain the leadership of a federal government department, which was another of his goals following the completion of his three terms as municipal head.
To find the only two former mayors with significant political careers, we have to go back to the nineteenth century. DeWitt Clinton, after having administered New York between 1803 and 1815, was elected governor of the state in 1816 and won a second non-consecutive term in 1824. Previously, he had been the Federalist Party's candidate against President James Madison in 1812, but had failed to defeat him. The Democrat Fernando Wood, mayor from 1855 to 1857 and then from 1860 to 1851, he was later a member of the House of Representatives from Washington in the 1860s.
The dawn of the Mamdani administration
Although he has become a source of inspiration for progressive Democrats and represents for the moment a sort of anti-Trump Much more charismatic and determined than California Governor Gavin Newsom, Mamdani cannot aspire to succeed The Donald in the White House because he does not meet an essential constitutional requirement to run for president: being a natural-born US citizen.
Furthermore, the beginnings of Mamdani's administration have sparked controversy which risk reviving that internal rift within the Democratic Party, between the openly pro-Palestinian component and the one more receptive to Israeli demands, which contributed to causing Kamala Harris' defeat in the 2024 presidential elections. In fact, rather than focusing on the implementation of the socio-economic points of his program, in the city outside Israel that has the largest number of Jewish residents in the world (almost one million people, concentrated mainly in the borough of Brooklyn), Mamdani began his mandate by revoking some executive orders promulgated by his predecessor, the Democrat Eric Adams, which defined anti-Semitism in the broad terms indicated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (according to which it is considered such also “to draw comparisons between contemporary Israeli politics and that of the Nazis”), allowed the police department to regulate protests in the vicinity of sensitive places of worship such as synagogues and prohibited municipal officials, especially those who manage the pension funds of city employees, from carrying out anti-Semitism. boycotts of Israel and the application of sanctions and forms of financial divestment against that state.
As a demonstration of the negative repercussions that Mamdani's early initiatives can have on the unity of the Democratic Party, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives and one of the most staunch supporters of the State of Israel and its right to exist, did not attend Mamdani's inauguration, even though his constituency (the 8th district) is part of New York City.
Mamdani's approach and the future of the Democratic Party
It is evident that the relaunch of the Democratic party must take the path, much less controversial internally, of returning to confer priority to socio-economic issues, extending on a national scale what Mamdani proposed for New Yorkers. Suffice it to say that, with the consumer prices rose last month by 2,7% compared to December 2024 and with the high cost of living continuing to weigh on the budget of Americans, among potential voters under the age of 40 (the cohort that is traditionally more fluid in choosing to vote between one election and the next), 58% are in favor of opening up government-run supermarkets to contain the cost of groceries, and 62% support the idea of a rent cap. Fifty-one percent would welcome the election of a Democratic Socialist with a Mamdani-like platform to the White House in 2028. Specifically, 41% of those who voted for Trump two years ago have a positive opinion of the new New York mayor, specifically because of issues related to the need to combat the rising cost of living.
This kind of orientation has not escaped notice. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York State. In this state, for example, the average annual expenditure on childcare services for a family ranges between about $26.000 and $40.000, often reaching nearly half of the income. Thus, a week after Mamdani took office, in a joint press conference with the mayor, Hichul announced the launching a plan to make the State of New York entirely responsible for the nursery schools for New York children aged two and up. Beyond the good intentions, however, the challenge of implementing this commitment remains, given the governor's refusal to raise taxes on the wealthiest to fund welfare and the $10 billion child care freeze imposed by the Trump administration to the detriment of five Democratic-led states, including New York. Funding is precisely the most critical issue, affecting both the feasibility of a significant return to welfare policies, not only nationally but also in New York City itself, and their electoral effectiveness, benefiting Democratic candidates next November and in 2028.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include “The indispensable nation.” History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022), The Black Soul of the United States. African Americans and the Difficult Path to Equality 1619-2023 (2023). The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5 (2024).
