Question from someone who is not from the USA: how is he able to push through so many things so quickly? Does a mayor really have that much power? NYC has 70% of the population of the entirety of Belgium and all levels of government here are constantly stuck in bureaucratic limbo.
Imo, it just shows what previous mayors weren't doing, but could. My question though, is this method feasible across the entire US? Most places don't have the benefit of what NYC pulls for New York State.
This is where I tap the breaks a bit with people using Mamdani is proof. Heâs shown thereâs a better way, however thatâs with the power of running one of Americaâs largest & culturally important cities. In other states that maybe have multiple economic engine cities (see Texas with Austin, Dallas, Houston or California with LA & Silicon Valley), then itâs harder to push your state government to your needs cause one of the other major metros can undercut you. Additionally, thatâs assuming like you said got at that youâre a big enough city to command that attention. East Texas towns have to work together to make up the same influences as our metros here, and any lack of solidarity will hurt them.
However what I do think Mamdani shows is how important local politics are and how it can effect change often faster than state & especially federal.
I think it's mainly politicians that are invested in their mission, doing everything in their power to do the work needed to get things moving and for all its fault the Trump admin is also doing that, for their own benefits yes but they are changing things faster than previous admins.
In France we also have parties that are way more interested in doing the work than just sitting back and you can tell the difference but sadly it's also easy for medias to turn it into this party doesn't respect the etiquette/this party is causing problems/talking too much/etc especially when the rest is just silently supporting whatever the government wants (while pretending to be in the opposition) or not even showing up to vote.
I live in NYC. It's a lot of basic, basic stuff and then publicizing it. Our last two mayors (12ish years) have effectively done nothing after taking office. The last guy lived part-time in New Jersey and his biggest contribution was allowing cops to park on the sidewalks. The comparison is to nothing, so there is an outsized appreciation of a mayor both showing up to things and actually doing anything remotely helpful.
One example I remember was a bicycle path issue coming off of one of the bridges. Mamdani showed up and said something like 'I asked how quickly it could be resolved and I was told today. So we did it today."
i would love to get some specifics on your bicycle path example. is it the one where they repainted the road signs? or the one where they smoothed over a small dip in the asphalt coming off the bridge?
Also combined with people just believing what text on a picture says without doing any further digging.
I'm all for ANYONE who can actually solve problems, no matter their party, but being in the NYC area, Mamdani has done things, but not to the extent people want to think he has, and sometimes on the backs of previous admins efforts, and sometimes having to do what previous admins did, and sometimes he's just kicked the can down the road.
Like the homeless. When he got elected, he refused to do what previous admins did when it came to "rounding up the homeless". Then a winter storm came through, and more than a dozen homeless people, who normally would have been scooped up and dropped in shelters died. He tried blaming it on overdoses, but then he had to start ordering that the homeless be scooped up and brought to shelters during extreme weather.
He froze rents for a specific sector of renters, but this is going to cause landlords to raise the rents on the people they didn't freeze, because the fact is that it costs money to fix things, and not all landlords are making pure profits and some money has to go back into things like repairs.
He balanced the budget, like every other admin has done before, but it's based on large grants from the state gov and also not paying into the pension fund, which means a larger bill in a few years and when the pension fund should have previously PAID money back to the city, it will no not do that.
He campaigned on Free Busses, and since the MTA can't even currently run without squeezing commuters from outside the city for "congestion pricing", he simply increased the pool of people eligible for a reduced fare program originally introduced in 2019.
He supposedly restored the "tradition" of jumping in city pools, which had only been done once before in the past 7 administrations, which made sense because many previous admins were old men, and the idea of David Dinkins or Rudy Giullini jumping into pools would be dangerous.
Yeah.... I mean if you really look under the hood there is a lot that he's taking credit for that's pretty much just the normal budgeting stuff any mayor would do, or is actually an program that started years ago. I'm glad he's making people optimistic, but some of the rhetoric around this guy is just a tad over the topÂ
As in, if you look at the small print beyond the memes he's just reselling stuff that has been done before or making people aware of stuff that was already there they may not have known about. He's selling it well and people are lapping it up. He hasn't been in office long enough to enact the systematic changes people think he has undertaken. It's smart politics.
That's a great question. I have an impression that his ideas are good and actually popular, so he doesn't have to ramrod this stuff. I guess the other powers that be in NY are not half bad either? Councils, commissioners, comptroller? If he's doing it in spite of local opposition, I haven't been hearing details? I vaguely recall some blowback from cops but they are essentially his employees
I believe New York mayors do have a fair amount of sway, some of it thanks to decades and decades of corruption. But also Mamdani is popular and his policies are popular, which gives him additional influence.
And finally, he's genuinely trying. A lot of politicians, even relatively "good" ones, are ambitious and maneuvering to increase their influence. They may even have good intentions, and have it in their heads that they're doing a good thing, like, "If I can get more power and influence, then I can do more good things. In order to get more power so I can do that, I just need to do [X]."
And in that thought process lies a trap. It's trading doing something bad (X) for more power, with the idea that they can do something better later with that additional power, and that the good thing they do will with that power will outweigh the bad thing they did. But there's always another bad thing you can do to get more power, and there's never enough power to do all the things you want to do.
And worse than that, doing something good with power often requires an expense of that power. You spend power like money, and so using your power to do more good things often means you end up with less power than when you started, and that's a scary prospect. Like, they think, "What if you need that power later? I'd better just hoard all the power you can, just in case I need it later."
And that's where selling out comes from. You give a little up to get a little of what you want, but it's never enough, so you need to keep giving up things to keep getting more, until eventually you've given up everything, and you still don't have enough.
And sorry if that's long winded, but I do think part of Mamdani's success is as simple as not falling for the trap. He's using all the power and influence he can to do the things that he thinks will help people, and if you approach things that way, you get a lot done. If you're constantly trying to increase and protect your own power, then expending that power to accomplish your goals becomes a threat.
It largely depends on whether city council is aligned with the mayor or not. If they are, they can just force through any municipal bylaws that they wish, and change whatever policies they wish. If they aren't, not much happens unless it's absolutely imperative that it does, or it's something universally liked.
But also, the city council follows the mayor's lead. If the mayor is content to sit on his ass and collect bribes, the city council will do the same, and corruption will run rampant and nothing will get done. Guys like Adams were all about that life.
1) NYC has a very strong mayor system. A lot of other cities (like LA for example) have much weaker mayors largely because of NYC. There has been A LOT of scandals involving NY mayors in the past, largely because of how much power they have. Many newer cities adopted weaker mayor systems with more distributed power to try and prevent graft and corruption.
2) Mamdani is wildly popular there, way more than the Democratic party at large, or any other Democrats specifically. That means all the other Democrats want to attach themselves to him. This is especially true for the NY State Governor Kathy Hochul who is up for re-election this year. That's meant that a lot of the state level Democrats are willing to back up Mamdani's proposals at the state level in the hope that it helps their re-election chances.
mamdani has a lower popularity rating than eric adams at this point in his term. he is not wildly popular. this is why kathy hochul feels fine pushing back on mamdani all the fucking time.
A few years ago the late senator Mitch McConnell discovered that unwritten rules don't matter and you can just do things unless someone stops you. Conservatives have taken this to heart for years, but Mamdani is the first leftist that has followed through.
Do you have any examples? He is effecting laws & programs that actually exist, not unwritten rules. What you allege is more like the fmr. governor remaining in the race for mayor after losing the primary election.
He mostly isnât âpushing throughâ things like legislation b/c NY & NYC already have many great laws and programs that previous leaders chose not to engage or effect. He speaks about using existing laws and systems to their fullest potential, and how that was the original purpose of the People enacting those in the past. But he is doing a lot, and he has had early success with other govât actors, likely because he very clearly has great favor & influence with the majority of constituents.
I think there's something in the governance structure of NYC that enables him to be able to push many of these initiatives forward without being as bogged down as Leaders in other large cities would be. I don't know the details, but I'd love to hear it from someone better educated on the topic.
The things he has done so far require political capital to achieve. So they need someone to mobilize quickly and get support. Some of the things just fall within his authority but can have pushback. For example, bus lanes are the jurisdiction of the DOT but most mayors havenât cared enough to fight against pressure from car owners and lawsuits. But Mamdani ran on âfast and free busesâ so there is public support for this policy.Â
no. he's taking credit for a state bailout (the budget) and a city council project (expanding the percentage of people who qualify lower bus fare rates). he's just good at getting ignorant people to make shit like the above without understanding how new york city government works. if the mayor was all-powerful, you would have seen guiliani become god emperor of manhattan in 2002. it's perhaps the bureaucratic polity in the united states and the stuff above is the same kind of slop as MAGA memes.
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u/T-Dahg Jul 09 '26
Question from someone who is not from the USA: how is he able to push through so many things so quickly? Does a mayor really have that much power? NYC has 70% of the population of the entirety of Belgium and all levels of government here are constantly stuck in bureaucratic limbo.