Zohran Mamdani’s strong start

Zohran Mamdani’s approval ratings in New York City and New York State seem to have improved substantially between when he won the election and his inauguration last week.

I don’t live in New York, but I am part of the “warming to Mamdani” trend. A bit before the first round of the mayoral primary, I said I was dismayed that a field that featured several genuinely good candidates was winnowing to a choice between a bad option (Andrew Cuomo) and a potentially catastrophic one (Mamdani). But by the second Cuomo-Mamdani matchup in the general election, Mamdani had convinced me he was the better choice. And during the transition, he mostly made good reassuring moves.

My preferred path forward for American politics would be for politicians who I like to take over the Democratic Party on an explicit program of moderation. But a plausible second-best scenario is one in which self-identified progressive factionalists take over and then become ruthlessly pragmatic because they want power. There are sporadic hints of this in things that Bernie Sanders and A.O.C. say and do, and I think Mamdani has been on this trajectory ever since it became clear that victory was within his grasp.

Genuinely the worst of all worlds, I think, is a continuation of the Hillary/Biden trajectory in which establishment figures with moderate roots are so terrified of losing power to the left that they abandon the substance of moderate politics. I think it’s quite clear that policy moderation helps you win elections, but I don’t think voters care about meta-discourse on ideology or are impressed by dog-whistle forms of moderation.

Mamdani did not make himself over as a “moderate” or abandon his brand as a leftist outsider. But he has moved to address the substantive concern that he is soft on crime, has aggressively courted the YIMBY/abundance-minded set of economic moderates, has tried to avoid making any alarming moves on education, is attempting transactional outreach to small-business owners, and is trying to build bridges to moderate Democrats in state and federal politics (for example, by crushing Chi Ossi’s abortive primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries).

Along the way, he has remained uncompromisingly progressive on Palestine — an issue that seems to be very close to his heart and on which public opinion has genuinely moved significantly left — in a way that keeps him distinctive. He of course cannot liberate Palestine as the ...