Who was the last mayor of New York City who made an impact on the national stage?
"Time and again, we’ve seen famous New York City mayors, from John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani to Michael Bloomberg, hyped as national political influencers, only to flop outside the five boroughs," writes Ross Douthat in The New York Times.
Even "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani couldn't make any noise in the 2008 presidential campaign. He was the frontrunner until the voters realized he had nothing interesting to say about what he would do if he were president. He eschewed the early state primary/caucus strategy of running hard in Iowa and New Hampshire to concentrate his entire campaign on winning Florida. He finished a distant third. By then, he was already toast.
Bloomberg also had designs on the presidency. He entered the race in November and dropped out the following March, having spent more than $1 billion in less than 100 days of campaigning in 2020. He amassed all of 41 delegates.
Another New York City mayor who was bitten by the presidential bug was a Republican mayor elected in 1965. He switched parties in 1972 to run for president. He never had a chance. Democrats wanted a real flaming liberal like George McGovern rather than the fake turncoat Lindsay.
Douthat calls the office of the New York City mayor "a political springboard to nowhere." Will Mamdani be any different?
“I’m skeptical, writes Douthat. "The odds are that Mamdani’s victory is actually less significant than you think.”
Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam, writing in The Free Press, agrees. He calls Mamdani an "accidental mayor" primarily because of his great good luck in drawing one of the most damaged politicians in America, Andrew Cuomo, as an opponent.
"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," writes Salam.
Alternative histories, or "counterfactuals," are fun and, like Charades, an interesting party game, but hardly relevant. Mamdani is in, Cuomo and Adams are on the ash heap, and America now has to deal with a socialist mayor.
The Mamdani revolution was led by downwardly mobile elites—children of the professional class struggling to make ends meet and entranced by the promises of frozen rent and fare-free buses. They were fired up by the same ideas that animated those Albany progressives: that some New Yorkers have been handed the short straw, that soak-the-rich policies can correct these imbalances, and that New York’s private sector was resilient enough to sustain a further ratcheting up of punitive taxation and regulation.
Their program was built on top of the city’s immense wealth. In 2018, the New York City metro area generated roughly one out of every 11 dollars of gross domestic product in the United States. The securities industry employed just 5 percent of New Yorkers but paid one-fifth of all private sector wages. The redistributive agenda of Bill de Blasio’s mayoral administration—Mamdani’s favorite—was grounded in the idea that this engine of prosperity needed to deliver more for the people who propelled the mayor into office.
Mandani is very young and could end up running for senator or governor, where his chances of making a national impact would be far greater.
However, he would need to achieve a moderate level of success before being taken seriously as a statewide candidate. He's not going to sneak up on anyone as he did with his mayoral candidacy. With the prospect that his policies will end in a spectacular failure, he may not be able to be elected to the Sewer Commission after he leaves Gracie Mansion.
