New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani won the election, but now his real battle with entrenched power begins.
Mamdani will face opposition from outspoken enemies and nominal allies alike. Entrenched power has many faces, many voices, deep pockets, and generally bad intentions.
He’s also a bit like the dog who caught the car, as the 34-year-old will now be in charge of a city of 8.5 million people with a $116 billion budget and 300,000-person staff.
Dana Rubinstein lists the mundane but massive challenges facing Mamdani:
Mr. Mamdani’s first order of business will be to appraise the remnants of the outgoing administration and decide who to keep and who to let go from the leadership of more than 100 offices and agencies. He will have to determine how many deputy mayors he wants and then hire them.
Mr. Mamdani will also have to decide whether to involve himself in the ongoing race for speaker of the New York City Council — the person who will be his governing partner — and he will have to cobble together a preliminary budget plan in January.
And that’s the part where he’ll face the least opposition from entrenched power. Not only do “New Yorkers historically love to hate their mayor the moment that he’s sworn in” as Amit Singh Bagga, a former official in the Mayor Bill de Blasio administration reminded City and State NY, Mamdani also made enemies on the campaign trail.
Working Families Party co-chair Ana María Archila, an early and key Mamdani supporter, warned, “(the election) was not going to be the last phase of the fight. The billionaires didn’t spend $30 million to just fold their tent.”
According to that same CNN piece, at least one anti-Mamdani billionaire, John Catsimatidis, is vowing “There’s something more that we don’t know and someday we’re going to find out.”
Time will tell, but entrenched power never quits, no matter how many fights it loses.
Previous Coverage of 2025 NYC Mayoral Race
Readers may want to review my previous coverage of this race as well as my piece on the two gubernatorial races decided yesterday.
Let’s start at the top with POTUS Donald Trump and his ICE enforcement arm.
Donald Trump’s Threats to Mamdani’s New York
Trump’s comments about Mamdani have been consistently inflammatory, calling him a “communist” and predicting that Miami will soon see a huge influx of “refugees fleeing communism in New York.”
Trump’s likely modes of attack include:
Sending ICE to NYC
Trump has sent ICE agents and National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, but so far only taken limited action in New York.
This is one fight where Mamdani can likely count on a united front with the entrenched power of New York’s other elected Democrats including Governor Kathy Hochul, the state’s congressional delegation and the courts.
For his part, Mamdani has vowed to hold ICE agents “to the same standard of the law. If you violate the law, you must be held accountable,” he said on November 5th.
Cutting Federal Funds Sent to the City
Before Mamdani’s election, Trump posted on Truth social that “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”
Federal funding makes up about $8.5 billion or 7% of the city’s budget. Trump and DOGE have already threatened to cut millions of FEMA funding from the city in this term although he backtracked on some of that and a Federal court ordered him to provide the rest of the funding as well.
Arresting and Deporting Mamdani
Trump’s most explicit threat to arrest Mamdani came in response to Mamdani’s promise to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.”
Trump responded “Well then, we’ll have to arrest him.”
Arresting Mamdani would be a dramatic escalation of Trump’s conflict with elected Democratic officials in blue states and given his rapidly increasing unpopularity is likely a bridge too far. Even arch-zionist Dem. Congressman Dan Goldman would likely have Mamdani’s back in this fight.
While Trump will no doubt be at a minimum a nuisance for Mayor Mamdani, the simple nature of the us vs. them narrative will keep things from getting complicated on that front.
Mamdani’s biggest headaches will likely come from his nominal allies, the entrenched power, in the state and national Democratic party.
Gov. Hochul Already Raining on Mamdani’s Parade
New York Governor Kathy Hochul finally endorsed Mamdani in September but that doesn’t mean she’s going to be enabling his agenda. In fact, she’s already opposing one of Mamdani’s signature promises, free bus fares:
…during the SOMOS organization’s political conference in Puerto Rico over the weekend, Hochul seemed to put a pin into the balloon of Mamdani’s free bus concept, stating that it would jeopardize the funding of New York’s public transit system.
“I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on the fares of the buses and the subways. But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Of course, we can,” Hochul said during a press conference during Somos, a social-political event held in Puerto Rico last week.
Free bus fares would cost New York’s MTA an estimated $652 million a year.
Hochul is also “unwilling to budge on a tax hike” which is bad news for Mamdani’s hope to increase New York’s corporate tax rate to 11.5% (matching New Jersey) and a flat 2% tax on individual New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million annually.
Hochul is already promising to resist attempts to pressure her on tax hikes.
I asked Hochul about this comment: “I’m from Buffalo, we don’t put up with a lot of crap…” https://t.co/oRXoSHxHoa pic.twitter.com/IG7dzedK2K
— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) November 8, 2025
But Mamdani has allies in the state legislature including the “politicians in charge of the state Assembly and Senate, Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, respectively — both of whom endorsed Mamdani’s mayoral bid.”
As NY1 News reported:
“It’s November. It’s still kinda early. We gotta see how things fit inside of the state budget,” Heastie said. “But I think there’s a willingness. I don’t want to speak for the other two partners in this. But we want Zohran, the mayor-elect, to be successful.”
The fight to fund Mamdani’s affordability agenda will be a relatively straight-forward one against entrenched power. Mamdani faces far more insidious threats from new friends in the city and around the country.
How Much Will Obama Be In Mamdani’s Ear?
While former POTUS Barak Obama did not endorse Mamdani (he has a policy of staying out of municipal races), he did reach out as described in this NY Times story, “Obama Calls Mamdani to Praise His Campaign and Offers to Be Sounding Board.”
This was an ominous development for Obama critics who were already wary of Mamdani following his mid-campaign compromise on pro-Palestine rhetoric.
The circumstances of that event are worth a look back at, per CNN in July:
Gathered alongside approximately 150 prominent business leaders at the offices of Tishman Speyer on Tuesday, Dr. Albert Bourla, chairman and CEO of Pfizer — who is the son of Holocaust survivors — asked Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor to explain his previous defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada.”…During Tuesday’s meeting, Mamdani also told the packed room he understood why the phrase is also seen as a call to violence against Jews, why it is painful and triggering for them, and that he would discourage its use in the future, the two attendees told CNN.
A rhetorical compromise is one thing, fortunately, so far Mamdani has avoided any signature Obama bait-and-switch moves.
Most notably, Mamdani will be keeping his 100,000 strong volunteer force active in city politics, a sharp contrast to Obama who veal-penned and then shuttered his grassroots army soon after being elected president in 2008.
But Obama won’t be the only “Mamdani supporter” encouraging the young mayor to compromise on his promises.
This exchange between podcaster Kate Willett and YIMBY wonk Alex Armlovich (ex-CNBCNY talking head) is telling:
I think he has a mandate to the people he centered–riders, renters, families–but that he’s trusted to decide the best way to transform life for those people
He has to deliver transformative, noticeable change for those people but he has real flexibility in how he does it
— Alex Armlovich (@aarmlovi) November 10, 2025
It’s important to only judge Mamdani on decisions and statements he has made, though, rather than assuming he’ll bend with the wind coming from the mouths of Abundance Bros and others attempting to speak on behalf of entrenched power.
So far his staffing decisions seem sound.
Mamdani’s Transition Team
One of Mamdani’s biggest allies during the campaign was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who pushed Mamdani to focus on the transition and the first 100 days, per CNN:
When Sanders came back to New York for a closing rally at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on the last Sunday in October, he was feeling better about Mamdani’s chances. But he had a different set of concerns, which he aired out in meeting after meeting in his hold room backstage, according to a person in the room. He waved off requests for selfies and handshakes and instead demanded more detailed plans from Mamdani’s transition head Elle Bisgaard-Church and campaign manager Maya Handa. At one point, Sanders asked former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan for her ideas on what to do at City Hall.
A former mayor himself, Sanders honed in on the first 100 days mark, telling them, “They’ll try to crush you,” and urging, “you’ve got to give people a sense of action.”
Learn a little from Trump, Sanders told them: it’s not policy or communications – but seeing them as the same and as producing results.
“Have you done research into your executive authorities? Do you have anybody on that?” Sanders asked. Aides offered up ideas they’d been working on. “What else you got?” he kept saying.
Mamdani’s transition team, co-chaired by former Biden FTC Commissioner Lina Khan, is also drawing praise from progressive policy wonks:
Elana Leopold, a political strategist who worked for former Mayor Bill de Blasio, will serve as team’s executive director. The other members are Melanie Hartzog, a former deputy mayor for health and human services under Mr. de Blasio; Lina Khan, a former Federal Trade Commission chair; Grace Bonilla, the head of United Way of New York City and an alumna of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration; and Maria Torres-Springer, the former first deputy mayor to the current mayor, Eric Adams.
I’m hoping NC commenters with more interest in policy and more direct experience of New York politics will have interesting things to add about Mamdani’s choices.
For his part, Matt Stoller is excited to see Khan on Mumdani’s team saying:
One of the more interesting dynamics at work in New York City is that Mamdani brought on anti-monopoly leader Lina Khan as one of his transition co-chairs.…Is there now a nascent unification of political populism with governing expertise?
Stoller goes on to “describe a bunch of economic termites, aka firms with market power, that drive up the cost of state and city government. More than just cost, they are the infrastructure on which governance operates, so the inflexibility of politicians is often a result of them being reliant on entities like these.”
These “economic termites” include monopolists in public safety equipment, emergency radios, transit buses, court and city management software, health care middlemen, and other vital city services.
But this NY Times story about the selection of the transition team did make my Spidey sense tingle a bit when they listed some of the voices in Mamdani’s ear when he made these decisions:
Ms. Hochul, who endorsed Mr. Mamdani in September and will be key to enacting much of his agenda, has assumed an unusually active posture in the hiring process, saying she will help him find a “very seasoned team to help manage a wildly complicated city.”
Mr. Mamdani and his team have sought advice from a wide range of people, including Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former chief of staff; Janette Sadik-Khan, who was transportation commissioner under Mr. Bloomberg; and Kathryn Garcia, the director of state operations under Ms. Hochul and the runner-up in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary. (Ms. Garcia attended Mr. Mamdani’s victory rally on Tuesday night.)
Others consulted by Mr. Mamdani and his aides include Marshall Ganz, a professor at Harvard University and an expert in community organizing; Matt Bruenig, a labor lawyer who founded a left-leaning think tank; and Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a deputy mayor for health and human services under Mr. de Blasio.
Ron Klain?!?
The man Lambert described on this site as having “set the course for Biden’s Covid policy of mass infection without mitigation before Jeff Zients took over.”
Yes, that Ron Klain. Yuck. Talk about servants of entrenched power.
We can only hope this is a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
Mamdani Uses and Dumps a Key Supporter
Mamdani has certainly shown the ability to be ruthless during the campaign.
Just ask New York City Comptroller Brad Lander who did as much to help Mamdani win the primary as any other person, but who won’t have a role in the Mamdani administration, per CNN:
(Lander) rebooted his campaign as a Cuomo takedown machine, with an explicit strategy of doing all the bashing — replacing his ads with an anti-Cuomo spot, building every event and robocall script around negativity, so that, advisers calculated, Mamdani could close out with all positive and hopeful feelings.
He even sent an aide extra early to the debate site to find the exact right seat to put the son of a man who died in a nursing home on Cuomo’s watch during Covid-19 to be both in the camera line and in the former governor’s line of sight. And perhaps most importantly, Lander figuratively and literally wrapped his arms around Mamdani, validating him to suspicious progressives and particularly to Jewish voters.
But over the summer, Mamdani would confide he wasn’t much impressed with Lander. Nice enough guy, but he didn’t seem particularly effective as comptroller, Mamdani said according to a person familiar with his comments. The two went weeks without talking, and though Lander would get defensive and blame overlapping post-election vacations, all his talk that he’d be the one really running the city next year had gotten back to Mamdani and not gone over well.
Ouch. Politics is an ugly business, but that’s not news and personally, I’m glad to see that Mamdani can be ruthless.
Progressive politics in the west have had more than enough “nice guys” like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn who are always seemingly ready to get rolled when the fight against entrenched power gets ugly.
Lander is now rumored to be considering a primary challenge to AIPAC Congressman Dan Goldman. If Lander wins that one, happy ending all around.
Mamdani Cultivates Multiple Insiders
It’s not just Ron Klain, another NY Times campaign post-mortem names more two other “critical liasons” to entrenched power who have cozied up to Mayor-elect Mamdani:
Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama administration aide and director of the Democratic National Committee, and Sally Susman, a longtime corporate executive and member of the finance committees for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Gaspard met Mamdani years ago. Susman met him this summer, one of several C-suiters who privately reached out to him after his much-talked-about July meeting with the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of 350 members representing banks, law firms and corporations.
That same piece also shares some insight on how Mamdani is seen by entrenched power now that he’s won office:
Robert Wolf, another Partnership for New York City member and a major fund-raiser for the Democratic Party, told me that he has begun texting with the candidate, becoming an informal pulse check for the city’s finance and business community. Wolf also met with Mamdani for an hour at his campaign office this month, an in-person follow-up to an hourlong Zoom meeting in August.
“Zohran, to me, is more of a progressive capitalist,” Wolf told me, adding that he was convinced by their private interactions that Mamdani understood the importance of the private sector thriving in his New York. “He’s someone that wants to figure out how to use the government in an appropriate way on things that help equality and help the underserved.”
The conversations have allowed Mamdani to reframe his previous positions, tweaking the us-versus-them language of his democratic-socialist values to be a tad less punitive.
This reminds me of something John Lennon said about the compromises necessary to be a Beatle, “One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee. It happened bit by bit, gradually until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand — the people you hated when you were ten.”
Compromise with entrenched power is necessary for anyone aspiring to govern and make real change, but some of Mamdani’s meetings do arouse concern, and also evoke admiration of Mamdani’s slick touch, from yet another NY Times piece:
Mr. Mamdani cold-called one of the city’s most powerful power brokers and asked for a meeting. It was a bold move after the business community had spent more than $20 million trying to defeat him, funding the largest super PAC in New York City history.
It also seemed antithetical to his man-of-the-people ethos.
And yet, Mr. Mamdani picked up the phone, and that power broker, James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, which represents the city’s mightiest landlords, set up an intimate gathering.…Few candidates have touched off fear and opposition among New York’s captains of industry the way that Mr. Mamdani, 33, has. Some have talked of moving out of state. Others are backing efforts to block his election.
But a surprising thing has been happening when Mr. Mamdani gets behind closed doors with New York’s elite. They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed.
It’s partly because of what Mr. Mamdani, the well-educated and well-mannered son of Manhattan intellectuals, does: He listens, asks questions and is amiable.
But it’s also what he doesn’t do: He doesn’t lecture the business leaders, instead absorbing their points of view and, at times, promising to think about their arguments.
But there’s one person Mamdani doesn’t seem to be charming, one he’s already committed to keeping on his team.
Keeping Eric Adams’ Police Commissioner
I covered Mamdani’s decision to keep zionist oligarch Jessica Tisch in October, describing it as “the kind of compromise move that shows he’s aware of his political difficulties with the enforcement arm of the city government he will be running,” but warning “it’s unclear if he realizes the magnitude of what’s he’ll be up against.”
There’s no more entrenched power than the NYPD and Tisch is “a woman with three Harvard degrees, a $12 million Upper East Side duplex and no experience as a uniformed officer” and mayoral ambitions of her own.
After the election, Ken Klippenstein called the decision to keep Tisch, “Mamdani’s First Loss“:
It is his first major concession not just to the political establishment but more significantly to the national security system.…His decision to keep Tisch, however, is a whiplash-inducing swing back to the usual protagonists of American life.
The Harvard-educated Tisch, 44, is daughter of billionaire James Tisch, the Chairman of the Board of Loews Corporation. (Members of the Tisch family contributed over $1.2 million to the Cuomo-aligned Super PAC Fix the City.) Though she’s only been Police Commissioner for a year, Tisch has taken national security doctrine to heart.
At a press briefing last month, Tisch called a proposed $80 million federal cut to the NYPD’s counterterrorism budget a “betrayal” and demanded that the matter be placed above politics.
“Counterterrorism funding cannot be a political issue,” Tisch said. “If these cuts go through as planned, it will represent a devastating blow to our counter-terrorism and intelligence programs in New York City.”
Tisch went on to describe the tools that would be effected, including:
“intelligence analysts who uncover plots before they become attacks”
“camera systems that enable us to monitor conditions in real time”
“heavy weapons who guard our subways in major events”
“counter-terrorism patrols”When asked if the loss of these tools would affect actual crimefighting (as opposed to the pre-crime focus of counterterrorism), Tisch conceded that they wouldn’t.
As a candidate, Mamdani repeatedly emphasized how seriously he takes “public safety” — perhaps in order to distance himself from defund-the-police rhetoric. Mamdani may think that keeping Tisch on is merely a concession to public safety, but it’s really a concession to the system of National Security, as Tisch’s counter-terrorism rhetoric illustrates.
No, not national security like the big, bad CIA, FBI or ICE, but national security in a more subtle, corrosive sense: the belief that some decisions are just too important to be left to elected officials, to voters, to democracy. Some things, as Tisch put it, “cannot be a political issue.”
Ali Winston had more on Mamdani’s relationship with Tisch and entrenched power in a Wired piece titled, “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.”
While Mamdani’s public safety proposals center on the creation of a $1 billion Department of Community Safety that will handle non-emergency 911 calls in place of armed cops, some of his other stated positions conflict directly with Tisch’s own positions and background with the NYPD, where she got her start in the department’s controversial intelligence division during the height of its “mosque-raking” mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers.…Tisch was a main architect of the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, an enormous, $3 billion, Microsoft-based surveillance network of tens of thousands of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, social media feeds, biometric data, cryptocurrency analysis, location data, bodyworn and dashcam livestreams, and other technology that blankets the five boroughs’ 468-square-mile territory.
Winston quotes Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) founder in residence Albert Fox Cahn’s concerns with Mamdani’s relationship with Tisch and the entrenched power of NY’s surveillance state:
It’s a really open question about whether he’ll push policies that’ll dismantle the infrastructure of mass religious and racial profiling and the pseudoscience of surveillance as safety, and focus on evidence based alternatives, or he’ll be too afraid of the NY Post.
This raises a fundamental question: When mayors are so terrified of firing police commissioners who are inconsistent with their own agenda, do we really have democratic oversight of policing?. Are they overseeing police in name only, and if not, what does that say about the state of democracy in America? Forget Trump; this is on the local level.
For her part, Tisch has been busy leaking to the NY Post with complaints that Mamdani hasn’t been in touch and “demands autonomy from Mamdani” in return for generously staying on at the NYPD.
Her allies in entrenched power are not shy about speaking out:
…the business world is rallying behind commissioner Tisch. Numerous entrepreneurs and investors have praised her leadership, viewing it as a stabilizing factor during a period of uncertainty. “Public safety is the primary driver of economic confidence,” noted Jim Zelter, president of the investment firm Apollo Global Management, emphasizing the importance of maintaining continuity at the head of the department.
Kevin Ryan, founder of AlleyCorp, a venture capital firm and startup incubator, also described the decision as one “that demonstrates the new mayor’s willingness to rely on competence rather than ideology,” noting that the commissioner’s continued presence will ensure operational continuity within the police force.
The Intercept reminded its readers of the needle that Mamdani had to thread on the campaign trail regarding the NYPD:
As Mamdani’s opponents seized throughout the race on his past criticism of police, his public safety pledges on the campaign trail reflected an attempt to thread the needle between the NYPD and its critics — strengthening the power of the department’s civilian oversight board, keeping NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in her job, and building a Department of Community Safety to “ensure that no New Yorker falls through the cracks of our social safety net.” Together, the proposals simultaneously aim to make it harder for police to escape accountability, preserve one of the department’s institutionalist leaders, and take certain responsibilities away from police as a way to lighten their load.
The Department of Community Safety, Mamdani’s marquee public safety proposal, would do violence prevention, crisis response, and mental health work by deploying non-police personnel throughout the city. The idea, successfully modeled in other cities, is to free police officers from spending time on those issues and let them focus instead on responding to the most violent crime.
The Intercept also points out that there is a lot more to running the NYPD than dealing with the commissioner:
The Mamdani administration will also have to determine who will run the agency, who will staff it, how it might affect the next round of police union contract negotiations, and what relationship it will have with the NYPD and its oversight body, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. That, according to Mac Muir, a former CCRB investigator, represents “a serious bureaucratic and infrastructural challenge ahead.”…Even if rank-and-file officers get on board with Mamdani’s plan, his administration will likely confront obstacles from department and leaders of the 50,000 member police union.…“His biggest issue, in my opinion, is going to be the extreme recalcitrance and push back from the rank-and-file members of the department and their union leaders to change and to reform,” said Sarena Townsend, the city’s former deputy commissioner for intelligence and investigation. Townsend was pushed out of city government under Mayor Eric Adams after she refused to dismiss a backlog of use-of-force cases in city jails…
“In situations where the rank and file don’t trust the mayor or the decision that the mayor is making, or their leadership,” Townsend said, “the rank and file just won’t do the things that they’re being asked to do, or they’ll revolt in other types of ways.”
Oh boy.
Mamdani is truly riding a tiger of entrenched power as the Mayor-elect of NYC.
This is why Mamdani volunteer Norman Finkelstein is warning Mamdani he’ll need to confront the NYPD or be eaten alive.
The thing about Mamdani’s compromise on the police commissioner is, it’s not like this is buying him any slack from his most brutal critics like the Anti-Defamation League:
👀 Inbox: The Anti-Defamation League announces launch of initiative “to track and monitor policies and personnel appointments of the incoming Mamdani Administration and protect Jewish residents across the five boroughs.” pic.twitter.com/MLMjvRsbig
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) November 5, 2025
Mamdani’s certainly made some of the right enemies. He’ll be wise to remember the servants of entrenched power are implacable, unforgiving, subtle, ruthless, and tireless.
He’ll need plenty of those qualities to chalk up any wins against them.
Mamdani should keep the words of ally Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, in mind when he makes key decisions, “Siding with the 1 percent over his base and the rest of the city is what would really pose problems to his governing coalition.”
Stick with the people who elected and they’ll help you fight the entrenched power, Mr. Mamdani.
