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MAMDANI AND LANDER COMBINED TWO STRANDS OF PROGRESSIVE POLITICS  
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David Dayen
June 30, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Inspiration and results, together again. _

, Andrea Renault/Star Max via AP Photo

 

In the immediate aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s shocking upset in the
Democratic mayoral primary, there was a thirst for more fresh blood,
more primary challenges, and one man’s name came up over and over
again: New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Should he challenge Rep.
Dan Goldman in Manhattan? Should he wait until 2028 and go for Chuck
Schumer? Lander’s cross-endorsement and passionate support for
Mamdani at the end of the race was earning him credibility to become
the next dragonslayer in New York politics.

I don’t expect everyone to read the _Prospect _(though you should),
but we actually reported on Lander’s next job, should Mamdani
vanquish every billionaire puppet that the city’s elite will throw
up against him in the general election. “The word on the street is
that if Mamdani wins, he will appoint Lander first deputy mayor, the
equivalent to the city’s chief operating officer,” wrote Robert
Kuttner
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on June 16. I have since gotten soft confirmation of this—Lander
pretty much said it himself
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in an interview—and while nobody wants to make things too explicit
with more than four months before the general election, I think that
this is pretty much expected at this point.

That could be perhaps the greatest achievement to come out of last
week’s primary victory. For a decade, the progressive left has had
separate factions, one gravitating to bold ideas and another to the
block-and-tackle work required to manifest them. Mamdani and Lander
appear to have fused the two, recognizing both that the delivery of
tangible improvements for people is how you build trust in a party
that has too often toxified itself with broken promises, and that you
can’t offer people warm gruel and expect them to treat it like
caviar. Finding policies that people are enthusiastic about is a
critical part of politics, and so is getting those policies enacted.

To simplify wildly, Mamdani has brought together the Sanders and
Warren wings of the party, something that could have happened much
sooner but didn’t. Both are vital for success, and if Mamdani pulls
it off, it’s a model that even the establishment could, and should,
adopt.

(If you want this set of ideas more as audio than the written word, on
my podcast _Organized Money_
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it with my co-host Matt Stoller and prominent Mamdani supporter Zephyr
Teachout.)

I was in Washington in the immediate aftermath of Mamdani’s victory,
and in talking to people I saw elation, undoubtedly, but also a
certain ineffable guardedness. Inevitably the conversation would turn
to Lander, and how people just knew him far more. Lander was active in
the Local Progress network, which identifies and mentors local
lawmakers, many of whom do eventually end up in Congress.

Lander, on New York’s City Council and as comptroller, was
instrumental in many progressive advances: paid sick leave, consistent
scheduling for fast-food workers, integration of Brooklyn-area
schools, etc. Ezra Klein chose him
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as the technocrats’ favorite, and while his praise for Lander’s
redevelopment of the area around the Gowanus Canal, with its
affordable housing mandate, public access to the waterfront, and
set-asides for artists, was interesting coming from someone who
literally invented the term “everything bagel liberalism” to decry
infrastructure projects serving multiple uses, it spoke to how Lander
is expert at moving the right levers of power to get things done in a
sprawling city with a clunky democratic structure, where progress is a
real achievement.

Lander’s plans [[link removed]] in his mayoral
campaign reflect this penchant for equitable growth and an emphasis on
details. Read this document
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about reform of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and I defy
your eyes not to glaze over, but it’s really important stuff: a path
for making low-income public housing decent enough to actually live in
for its 517,000 residents. (It involves, for instance, a “Yelp for
Repairs” setup to identify the best vendors.)

As deputy mayor, Lander’s goals may be different, folded into
Mamdani’s big-ticket items on affordability like free and fast
buses, public groceries, rent freezes, and free universal child care.
Mamdani simply had a better way to inspire people, with boldness over
competence. But he absolutely recognizes that bold ideas are doomed
without competent execution.

The famous halal cart video
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example of bringing the “More Perfect Union” type of media
techniques into a political campaign, is on a surface level about why
the price of lamb over rice is going up. It’s a great hook: cheaper
street food! But beneath that, it’s about a dysfunctional
bureaucracy in New York City where it’s so impossible for small
businesspeople to get licensed that they must buy an existing one,
often for thousands of dollars. That inefficiency is a huge expense in
a low-margin industry, and addressing it might get halal down to $8 a
plate instead of $10.

As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told me a couple days after
Mamdani’s victory, the mayor in her state’s largest city of
Boston, Michelle Wu, literally got her start as a college intern for
the then-mayor working to get food trucks licensed. Mamdani’s early
advocacy involved debt relief for taxi medallion holders. My colleague
Moe Tkacik has labeled this trend
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socialism,” facilitating entrepreneurial ideas and giving people
their coveted economic liberty. This is a deeply empowering notion,
and as John Ganz points out
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working class and the middle class around a shared goal of thriving.
The shared enemy is big business; it’s telling that one of the big
companies that unsuccessfully poured in money to stop Mamdani’s rise
was Doordash, which exploits its rideshare workers but also makes it
tough on those halal cart guys, who pay through the nose for delivery
app orders.

But it’s also a competence story, about dedicating governance to
efficiency and results. “It’s this notion of progressive mayors
who are deeply committed not just to fancy speeches but to actually
delivering for people every day,” Warren said. There’s a name for
this, and I know because I helped come up with it: “deliverism
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that politicians have a short window to match their inspirational
rhetoric with tangible benefits. As I said then: “You cannot talk
about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the
voting public to keep listening to you. There are diminishing returns
to parties that never get results.”

Mamdani understands this intuitively, and that’s why Lander was
brought into the fold, outside of the political realities of
ranked-choice voting. Someone with experience inside New York City
government is critical to the project of not just winning on
progressive populism, but building a legacy that makes future promises
credible.

That is an exciting prospect, fusing the poetry of campaigning and the
prose of governing, with the reality always in mind that the two are
actually inseparable and need to be fully aligned. The public is tired
of bait and switches, where the 30 days before an election look
nothing like the two to four years after.

Lander has called this
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a politics of hope and cooperation. That’s right, but it won’t be
fully realized until after the balloons are swept away. It’s
incredible that governing has become so divorced from the point of
politics, but the Mamdani election (if it happens) could become the
beginning of a new era.

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David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

* Zohran Mamdani
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