On August 15, 2025, the political landscape in New York City reached a fever pitch as Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old progressive and self-described democratic socialist, concluded his “Five-Boroughs against Trump” tour with a major endorsement from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. At a packed event at the 32BJ SEIU Queens Headquarters, Richards compared Mamdani’s campaign to the 2008 movement that swept Barack Obama into the White House, stating, “Zohran has inspired hope, and I couldn’t understand it all at first, but then I thought back to who inspired me in 2008, Barack Obama. He gave me hope. It was this feeling of hope,” according to the New York Post.
This endorsement was hardly isolated. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso have also thrown their support behind Mamdani, signaling a shift among some of New York’s most influential local leaders. Yet, the city’s top Democratic power brokers—Governor Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—have so far withheld their public endorsements, reflecting a divide within the party over Mamdani’s unabashedly left-wing platform.
It’s not hard to see why Mamdani’s candidacy has become a lightning rod. Polls in both the U.S. and Canada, as reported by Pew Research Center and Abacus, show that the cost of living remains the top concern for voters. Nearly two-thirds of Americans surveyed cite inflation and the affordability of health care as “big problems,” while three-fifths of Canadians list the cost of living as their primary issue. Mamdani’s campaign leans into these anxieties, offering a sweeping “affordability agenda” that promises to lower costs and make life easier for New Yorkers, as outlined on his website.
His proposals are bold, to say the least. Mamdani has pledged to freeze rents in stabilized apartments and spend $100 billion over the next decade on 200,000 new social housing units, with 70 percent of the funding coming from municipal debt. He wants to make bus rides free in new priority lanes—a plan with an $800 million price tag—and create a new Department of Community Safety, costing $1.1 billion, to tackle subway and street safety, mental health, gun violence, and hate crimes. Outreach workers would be deployed at 100 subway stations to greet commuters and offer support.
But that’s just the start. The plan includes no-cost child care from six weeks through five years of age, free baby baskets for newborns, and a new tax on Columbia and NYU to fund free tuition at the City University of New York (CUNY). Mamdani also proposes establishing state-operated grocery stores, withdrawing subsidies from private grocers, and exempting public stores from rent and property taxes—moves that have drawn comparisons to state takeovers of the “means of production.”
Perhaps most eye-catching is his commitment to nearly double New York’s minimum wage from $16.50 to $30 per hour by 2030. To pay for this ambitious slate of programs, Mamdani calls for $10 billion in new annual taxes: $5 billion from raising the city’s corporate income tax rate from 8.85 percent to 11.5 percent (giving New York the highest corporate tax rate in North America), $4 billion from a two percent tax hike on personal income over $1 million, and $1 billion from enhanced tax and fine enforcement and “smart” procurement strategies.
The scale of these promises has attracted both enthusiasm and skepticism. At the Queens endorsement event, Richards insisted, “This is not about socialism, it’s not about the establishment. This is about working people and ensuring that working people can thrive to survive in this very city that’s becoming out of reach for everyday New Yorkers.” Mamdani himself, who lives in Astoria, focused his remarks on issues like immigration, small businesses, and the cost of living—though he did not shy away from criticizing former President Trump. “There is no one that is safe, from the cruelty that marks so much of what animates the Trump administration,” he told attendees, as reported by Fox News.
The growing momentum behind Mamdani’s campaign received a further boost when it was revealed that former President Barack Obama had reached out to congratulate him after his landslide Democratic primary win over former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June. According to The New York Times, Obama offered not just congratulations but also governing advice, emphasizing “the importance of giving people hope in a dark time.” MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton commented that Obama’s outreach “normalizes” Mamdani’s candidacy for wary Democrats, saying, “It gives the sense that President Obama’s world is comfortable with his candidacy. It normalizes him.” Sharpton argued that Obama’s interest helps counter the perception that Mamdani is “too radical.”
Indeed, several figures in Obama’s orbit have reportedly been in regular contact with Mamdani’s team. Former Obama aide Ben Rhodes penned a guest essay urging the Democratic establishment to embrace Mamdani’s strategy as a model for the party’s future, lamenting, “Even when presented with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York—an innovative example of fresh political tactics and policies—many party leaders recoiled. The party seems—quite literally—afraid of its own future.”
Still, Mamdani’s policies have not escaped scrutiny. Proposals like city-run grocery stores and rent freezes have raised eyebrows among business leaders and centrists alike. And controversy followed Mamdani in June when he dodged a question about whether he condemned the phrase “globalize the intifada.” At the time, Sharpton publicly called on Mamdani to meet with Jewish leaders and make clear his opposition to antisemitism. “He’s running for mayor of New York. You need to take off the table, ‘Do you support international intifada?’ Period. Not go around it,” Sharpton said on MSNBC. Mamdani later clarified to business leaders in July that he would not use the phrase and would discourage others from doing so, according to The New York Times.
Despite the controversies, Mamdani’s campaign has become a rallying point for a new wave of progressive activism in New York. His anti-Trump tour, culminating in his home borough of Queens, drew crowds of union members, activists, and everyday New Yorkers eager for change. Members of 32BJ SEIU, an influential union representing over 80,000 property service workers in the city, joined Mamdani and Richards at the endorsement event, underscoring labor’s growing role in the campaign.
Yet the race is far from settled. The reluctance of top Democratic leaders to endorse Mamdani signals lingering unease about the party’s direction. Is the city ready for a platform this sweeping? Will Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism prove to be the answer to New Yorkers’ cost-of-living woes, or will it trigger a backlash among moderates and business interests? As the campaign barrels toward November, these questions loom large over the nation’s largest city.
For now, Mamdani’s rise reflects the growing clout of the affordability agenda and the willingness of some Democrats—local and national—to embrace a more radical vision for the future. Whether that vision becomes reality will depend on how well Mamdani can unite a diverse and often divided city behind his message of hope, change, and tangible relief for working people.
