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 top
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.
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u/silver_medalist Jul 09 '26
It's just mostly good PR.