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MAMDANI FOR NYC MAYOR: THE FIGHT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR  
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Tom Gallagher
July 29, 2025
The Stansbury Forum
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_ This is our race. Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels
that we the people have to find a way wrest control of the economic
future of this country from the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos,
Zuckerberg, all of the billionaires. _

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A SHIFT THE NATION IS OBVIOUSLY IN DESPERATE NEED OF

I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily
favored former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York City
Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much
better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his
party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee, him, to
sail on through the final election in November as is generally the
case. And so would we, his supporters, all. Instead, he finds himself
actively opposed by elements of just about every significant
anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As
the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this
ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over
all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more
profoundly that anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential
campaign — a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.

On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all
the stops, to try all avenues — increased rent control and housing
construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher
taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line — in an effort to
allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class,
rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer
afford to live there. On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast
of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor
siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the
over-privileged few — the billionaires who think that the city owes
it all to them — are not the saviors they think themselves to be,
but are actually part and parcel of the problem.

MORE INTERESTED IN CORPORATE CASH THAN IN THE WORKING CLASS

First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in
the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime
prevention group the Guardian Angels. Sliwa, however, is not expected
to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest
in the race is primarily represented — as it is in all things — by
our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about
arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal
funding to the city and even taking direct control of it — a threat
he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to
his taste.

Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in
the working class — unfortunately a rather large sector of the party
— along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes
Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza; two groups with significant
overlap. This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved
in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the
minority leaders of both branches of Congress — Representative
Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are Brooklyn voters. So
are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in
November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but
the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is
without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be
seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile.
Democrat Laura Gillen, Representative of a New York city-adjacent
district. for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my
constituents.”

Next we have the independent candidates themselves who have now come
to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them
is actually the current Mayor of New York. That would be Eric Adams,
elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his
party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during
his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of
conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting
campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and
accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald
Trump. The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic
Governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges
of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the
backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25
million — out of a total of $30 million spent by such committees on
all of the city offices at play in the primary — the heaviest
spending in the history of New York City politics. Cuomo has decided
that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in
not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s
all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.” His
campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke — the Florida
part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped
there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could
fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be
fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting
with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who used to be a
Republican until he decided he wanted to be mayor. Bloomberg, never
one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is — he spent over
$1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won
American Samoa) — dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort. Hedge
fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The
Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry
Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel
Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family
contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000.
Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.

And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth
and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires
— in this case for Eric Adams — including grocery (Gristedes and
D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a
former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor. As Kenneth
Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant,
keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.” At this point,
this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford
Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually
happening.

(PERSONAL DISCLOSURE: As one who was once slightly famous long ago,
when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a
self-described socialist — said to be the first since the Sacco and
Vanzetti era — I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election
night, I was literally moved to tears of joy — I did, by the way,
grow up in the South Bronx. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one
feeling envious.)

The upshot of all this? This is our race. Who’s the we in “our”?
Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way wrest control
of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Musk,
Bezos, Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones
we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting,
giving a buck — even if just that — all of us should give this
race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will
be to beat that whole crew.

_Tom Gallagher [[link removed]] is the
author of The Primary Route: How the 99% Takes On the Military
Industrial Complex._

* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City
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* Billionaires
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* corporate Democrats
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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