What Zohran Mamdani and Michael Bloomberg Have in Common
"As mayors, the socialist and the plutocrat each embody outsized ideas of the city—and distinct forms of capital.
Illustration by Chantal Jahchan
Watching Zohran Mamdani run for mayor often felt like watching an athlete in peak form—the vicarious jolt of seeing a candidate defy gravity during an astonishing political ascent. The conventional wisdom that his résumé—a state assemblyman for five years, a democratic socialist, a vocal critic of Israel—represented a list of liabilities seemed to wilt in the presence of the man himself. There he was, thirty-three and then thirty-four years old, smiling in a dark suit, dapping up strangers across the five boroughs. In interviews, he sounded like he genuinely believed what he was saying and also like he was genuinely interested in listening. His platform was clear and attuned to voters’ mood; his social-media operation and field organizing were expert; his charisma was unremitting. Not all skeptics have been won over to Mamdani’s agenda, but few now would dispute his political skill.
Today, Mamdani takes office as mayor. Twenty-four years ago, the city inaugurated another neophyte politician as its chief executive. Michael Bloomberg, then fifty-nine, was the billionaire co-founder and C.E.O. of a financial-technology and media company before becoming a three-term mayor who described New York as “a luxury product” and meant that as a good thing. Mamdani, meanwhile, took the opposite assumption as his campaign’s premise: that people ought to be able to afford living here. The plutocrat and the socialist could not be called allies; in the 2025 mayoral election, Bloomberg endorsed Andrew Cuomo and spent some nine and a half million dollars to defeat Mamdani. Yet, for all the mayors who composed the backdrop of Mamdani’s campaign—Bill de Blasio (whom Mamdani has called “the best mayor of [his] lifetime”), Fiorello La Guardia (to whom he gestured in his victory speech), John Lindsay (whose idealistic glamour provides a cautionary tale)—it may be Bloomberg who offers the most instructive parallel. I was surprised the first time someone mentioned the former mayor to me in the context of Mamdani’s upcoming term, but maybe I shouldn’t have been; in recent conversations with close observers of New York City politics, Bloomberg’s name kept coming up.
The two men share, for one thing, an outsized symbolic power: each is a figure who embodies an instantly legible idea about the city. During Bloomberg’s pursuit of office, a 1990 booklet in which business colleagues had compiled his witticisms surfaced. It came under scrutiny for its casual misogyny, but it also contained a moment of telling provincialism. “We live in Manhattan,” he is quoted as saying, “so we don’t have to go anyplace else.” As mayor, Bloomberg developed a finance guy’s vision of what Manhattan and the rest of the city should be—respectively, “fancy” and “more like Manhattan.” Brooklyn got a glassy-high-rise makeover; Manhattan got Hudson Yards and the High Line. Bloomberg’s unapologetically expensive, homogeneously commercial, and aggressively policed post-9/11 New York is the one in which Mamdani came of age and into an adolescent’s political consciousness. It can hardly be a surprise that the new mayor’s vision (what my colleague Eric Lach has called “the Mamdani Cinematic Universe”) often sounds like a reaction against that model—a place defined instead by diverse outer boroughs, scrappy small businesses, and moments of camaraderie during long subway rides. He is a son of the Upper West Side who made his home in Astoria.
Such visions play a role in any administration, but there’s also the work of actual city governance. When Mamdani and Bloomberg met in September, for a conversation that the longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson called “definitely cordial,” they reportedly spoke about hiring and retaining talent. Mamdani, like Bloomberg before him, arrives at City Hall relatively unencumbered by the tangle of obligations and relationships that accumulate over a long career in public service. Like Bloomberg, he is poised to hire with commitments beyond political favor-trading. “Mike was talent, talent, talent,” Bradley Tusk, who served in Bloomberg’s administration and managed his 2009 campaign, told me. “The thing he did best by far was convince a lot of talented people to come work in city government.” Mamdani’s appointment to his transition team of the former Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, a bugbear of business élites, suggests a flair for attracting eye-catching national figures (even if what role such a figure might play in his actual administration remains undetermined). In late November, Mamdani’s team reported that more than seventy thousand people had submitted online applications for jobs in his administration; his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has expressed interest in improving the city’s civil-service hiring process.
Bloomberg had a reputation for endowing appointees with remarkable independence: when Elizabeth Kolbert profiled the then mayor for this magazine, in 2002, one commissioner told her that Bloomberg’s instructions upon giving him the office amounted to “It’s your agency—don’t screw it up.” It isn’t impossible to imagine that Mamdani’s clear need for expertise, and his campaign-trail discipline in discussing only a select handful of policy proposals, might lead him to empower his own administrators with meaningful autonomy. What will it actually take to make those city buses fast and free? And what’s the plan for schools? “Someone described Zohran to me as a socialist technocrat,” Tusk recalled, adding that, when it came to city government, he didn’t see much difference between a capitalist technocrat and a socialist one. “If he’s a technocrat like Mike was, he’ll be a good mayor.” Of course, not all Bloomberg associates agree. “The key to Mike’s success as mayor was world-class management,” Wolfson told me. “He knew how to attract and retain talent and how to meet a bottom line because he had been doing those things for years. I’m not sure what the appropriate comparison would be here.”
The 2025 mayoral race was, among other things, a battle between money and attention. Cuomo received $28.4 million from Super PACs in the general election—“the most money ever spent to support a single candidate in New York City by Super PACs,” as the good-government group Citizens Union wrote in a report last month. “In fact,” they added, “the only comparison we can make is to Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed, dollar-busting mayoral campaigns in the 2000s.” Money has been Bloomberg’s defining feature for as long as he’s been in public life: money made him mayor, money shaped his mayoralty, and money continues to announce his political will. But, if Bloomberg commands capital, Mamdani—with his eleven million Instagram followers and reliable virality—commands attention, a variety of capital whose political potency Donald Trump has proven in the course of the past decade. And, in this mayoral election, attention came out the undisputed winner.
In the wake of Mamdani’s success, it has sometimes seemed as though the only lesson that would be learned is that more candidates should get better at making short-form videos. But this undersells Mamdani’s achievement, and the qualities of his that enabled it—including a capacity for connection that feels far more natural and less sweaty than what often passes for personal appeal among politicians. The Bloomberg model of intimate engagement with the city was counting pieces of trash outside the window of his chauffeured car. So far, Mamdani has cultivated a more hands-on ideal of participation, both for himself and for his supporters. Attention, after all, is not strictly a matter of passive digital consumption; it can also be deployed actively. The experience of volunteering for Mamdani attracted young New Yorkers in search of connection, one of whom told the Times, “The people I go to dinner with, the folks I go to concerts with—my day to day is organized around Mamdani.”
In this spirit, the new mayor will celebrate his inauguration today with a public block party, “to ensure that all New Yorkers are able to take part in ushering in a new era for New York City,” as his team put it in an announcement. But connecting with constituents while explaining, say, a transit strike, or even just attending to the ordinary work of governing, will no doubt present a challenge. “The Mayor Is Listening,” last month’s twelve-hour marathon of one-on-one citizen conversations, suggests Mamdani knows as much. So does the recent launch of Our Time, a post-campaign group intended to marshal supporters on behalf of his agenda, formed by allies who will be working with Mamdani’s volunteer database but not with his direct involvement. The thing about capital, political or otherwise, is that you have to keep making more.
“There was, for a while, a very large and very famous city,” begins the 2013 book “Very Recent History,” by Choire Sicha. “For an even shorter while, the richest man in town was its mayor.” Sicha’s nonfiction account follows a collection of underpaid, mostly young New Yorkers (“c. AD 2009”) over whom “The Mayor” presides like a demigod. Sicha’s characters work in open-plan offices, just like The Mayor’s employees do; they’re always stepping outside for sneaky cigarettes, beneath the disapproving glare of Mayoral efforts to discourage public smoking. The book stretches from The Mayor’s decision to seek a third term to his attainment of this goal, which arrives as a fait accompli. “Almost everything in the City was capital,” Sicha writes, and capital’s logic bears down on his cast of broke strivers, whose only happy ending lies in going “home to be alone together while they could.” “Very Recent History” is billed as “entirely factual,” but it reads as a novelistic parable of the world view that Mamdani’s victory appeared to upend.
I am not holding my breath for a Great American Bill de Blasio Novel, but I won’t be surprised to read one revolving around the unlikely rise of Zohran Mamdani. Perhaps some of his campaign’s hundred thousand volunteers have already started writing in their post-election free time. The bookstore in my Brooklyn neighborhood (where Mamdani’s margins ran to fifty and sixty and seventy per cent) now stocks a picture book called “Zohran Walks New York.” Inspired by his pre-primary trek across the city, it features smiling cartoons drawn in bright, clear colors; the story of his time as mayor will inevitably require a bit more shading.
Bloomberg, too, became mayor in a moment of acute uncertainty. In 2002, September 11th was still an open wound, with consequences for New York and its population that had yet to fully unfold; in 2026, New York’s looming sense of external menace has more to do with the federal government, and the prospect of the National Guard or masked ICE agents on the streets. Onto center stage steps a figure who confounds expectations. No one knows quite what’s going to happen. The city is on the brink of something new. ♦"
