David Remnick: Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It has to cross your mind. I'm 33 years old. I'm running 20 points ahead. The guy that's right behind me has the likability factor of a traffic jam. It's very likely that you're going to be the next mayor of this city with a $115 billion budget, a president that calls you a Communist half the time, and he's threatening the city in many different ways. When you go home at night and you're thinking about this emotionally, and people are questioning your experience as well, naturally, simply on the basis of age, when you're staring at the ceiling at 3 o'clock in the morning, as you must do. No?

Zohran Mamdani: I have to be honest with you, I don't have trouble sleeping.

David Remnick: At all.

Zohran Mamdani: I don't.

David Remnick: Because you're walking across the city half the day.

Zohran Mamdani: Because I'm quite tired when I get to bed.

David Remnick: Zohran Mamdani is running to be mayor of New York City, and the polls have him at least 15 points ahead of Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani is 33, he serves in the State assembly, and he's a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. A year ago, almost nobody had heard his name, but doubt never enters your mind. A lack of what if I let them down never enters your mind.

Zohran Mamdani: The weight of that hope is one that I do wrestle with and the responsibility of living up to it, but doubt, I wouldn't say.

David Remnick: In the Democratic primary in June, Mamdani pulled off a huge upset, not unlike Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did when she ran for Congress as a young Democratic socialist herself. Mamdani beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback. Cuomo is still in the race as an independent, and the Republican, Curtis Sliwa, trails long in the distance.

It seems, on one hand, like an astonishing launch for a guy who would be New York's youngest mayor in generations and the first Muslim to hold the office, but this has not been an easy run, not by any stretch. Mamdani's message of affordability clearly resonates with voters, but his call for more taxes on the rich has spooked the state's governor, Kathy Hochul. In Congress, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have balked at even endorsing Mamdani. Donald Trump threatens to withhold federal funds if New Yorkers elect him, calling such a vote a rebellion.

Donald Trump: He's a Communist. We're going to go to a communistic city. That's so bad for New York, but the rest of the country is revolting against it.

David Remnick: Zohran Mamdani is clearly very good at this, very good at politics, at connecting to people. Last week, I went to his busy campaign office in midtown Manhattan. He was just four weeks out from election Day.

Zohran Mamdani: How are you?

David Remnick: How are you?

Zohran Mamdani: I'm fine.

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David Remnick: You did a very interesting video early on, you've done many videos, but one of the most interesting is you went around the city and asked people why they may have voted for Trump. You got a range of answers, and then you talk to them further and some of them resolve the conversation by saying, "I'll vote for you." What's your overall impression of why so many New Yorkers voted for Trump? Why would they abandon them, in a sense, ideologically, and vote for a guy from the DSA?

Zohran Mamdani: I specifically went to two of the neighborhoods that had the largest swings towards Trump. Some of the largest swings were taking place in the hearts of immigrant New York. I went to Fordham Road in the Bronx, I went to Hillside Avenue in Queens. I wanted to ask New Yorkers a question and to listen to them. When you ask a New Yorker an open-ended question, you do not know where it will take them.

What I was struck by is the focus of two things at once. One, the inability to afford life today in this city, and the sense that that which was so difficult to purchase today, be it groceries, be it childcare, be it public transit, be it rent, was far more within reach four years ago. A message of a cost-of-living crisis, a message of cheaper groceries, a message of a more affordable life, very much spoke to the crisis that people were living through.

Amidst this, a diminishing faith in the ideal of democracy, the value of democracy, in part because of its inability to deliver on these material concerns, but also because, amidst being told that there wasn't enough money for so much of this kind of an agenda here, there were billions of dollars being sent for wars abroad.

It really stayed with me in that for many of those New Yorkers, and I would argue for many Americans across the country, it's not necessarily a question of making a decision by virtue of the ideological commitments of the candidate in front of you or what organization they consider their political home or their journey at large, it's a question of do you see yourself in their agenda?

David Remnick: You, in a sense, are the first major politician to get the vote of and recognize a huge proportion of our city's population, which is people who are Muslim and or Asian from South Asian countries, as immigrants or children of immigrants. That was a kind of unrecognized thing. We've never had a mayor from that background.

At the same time, you've had your troubles with the Black vote. You've been in Black churches, you've taken on more advisors to help you with this, but what accounts for your difficulty with Black voters in this city, and will that change?

Zohran Mamdani: I started this race polling at 1%, and that's being charitable and perhaps rounding up. In fact, at that point, to be included in a poll was in itself a success. And I remember many of my early conversations in speaking to pastors, trying to get in front of a congregation, and it took quite a few months. Our first church that I spoke in front of was--

David Remnick: Because they told you they were with Eric Adams, or were we with Cuomo?

Zohran Mamdani: Some of it was that some of it was, who are you?

David Remnick: A reasonable question.

Zohran Mamdani: A reasonable question for a State assembly member from Western Queens, for whom most New Yorkers had no idea. The first church that I got into, a church in Crown Heights, was because I had been following up with that pastor, Reverend Rashad Raymond Moore. I had called, I had texted, and then he happened to come to speak in Albany at the Governor's state of the State. I ran down the stairs at the end of that ceremony, and I said, "Reverend, how are you?

Please, I'd love to." We set up a meeting. Then I went and I spoke at the church. Then from that moment on, this is maybe about February, I would average probably about a church a weekend, and then by the end of it, two churches every Sunday. At this point, it's multiple churches on a Sunday and also Seventh Day Adventist Church on a Saturday. I remember sitting with another pastor in Queens who had endorsed Cuomo in the primary, this is in the spring.

I asked, "Why did you endorse Cuomo?" He said, "I endorsed Mario's son. I endorsed him because Mario was good to us." Part of the reason I don't begrudge the journey that I've been on, the initial response that many have had is because I'm not just running against Andrew Cuomo. I'm also running against a legacy of his name and his last name specifically, and what that means to someone.

David Remnick: But you have to be of a certain generation to have any in with Mario Cuomo.

Zohran Mamdani: I think that also tells the story that has often been told as if it's a story of race, when I think it's actually more a story of generation. Part of the reason we won the primary is because we won young Black voters. That was part of us winning young voters across the city. Now the work is to earn every single vote beyond that. This focus on affordability is a focus that seeks to build on the work of so many incredible Black leaders in this country, but also in the city.

Just this past Sunday, I spoke at a church where Dr. King had actually recuperated in the parsonage of after he was stabbed in 1958. I stood in that same church and spoke of his quote that he said decades ago, which is, "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?"

David Remnick: I'm going to ask you a question, inevitably-

Zohran Mamdani: Please.

David Remnick: -about socialism. Whenever you're asked this question, you quote Dr. King.

Zohran Mamdani: Yes, I do.

David Remnick: Yes, you do. It's 1961, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children. Fine. However, [laughs] however, sir, socialism means something. To be a social Democrat is different from being a Democratic socialist.

It's not an academic thing. You know this as well as I do. To be a Democratic socialist means you're for Democratic means of achieving socialism, but socialism, by any definition, means, at least to some degree, the state ownership of enterprises to some degree. That can vary depending on if you're Edward Bernstein or Karl Marx or whoever you have in. Why do you gravitate toward socialism?

Zohran Mamdani: My journey into calling myself a Democratic socialist begins with Bernie's run in 2016. His campaign was a formative one for me and for many across this country, both in giving us that language, but also in explaining the core tenet of it, which to me continues to be a belief in dignity as the cornerstone of politics, and that I think that every New Yorker should have whatever they need to live a dignified life.

What I mean by a dignified life is that that which they need is not then something that they can be priced out of. The focus of our campaign has been on housing, it's been on childcare, it's been on public transit. In some senses--

David Remnick: Forgive me for interrupting, so what you're saying is anything that's a necessity, housing, food, education, should not ever be given over to market instability or prices. It has to be there. It has to be free.

Zohran Mamdani: No, I think that it has to be a fixture in each and every person's life. My landmark policy on housing in this race is about freezing the rent for rent-stabilized tenants. We live in--

David Remnick: Which has been done previously by non socialist.

Zohran Mamdani: Yes, it has. We have a city of eight and a half million people. About two and a half million live in rent-stabilized housing. The city determines the rate of the rent increase, or lack thereof, of that housing through the Rent Guidelines Board, of which the mayor appoints all nine members. If I believe that housing is a human right, then it is incumbent upon me to use every tool I can to ensure that it is as affordable as possible. Here we have an example of where the city has a direct means by which to ensure that affordability.

David Remnick: How is it being a Democratic socialist, in your view, different from being a social Democrat or a particularly liberal member of the Democratic Party?

Zohran Mamdani: It often comes back to whether you're willing to fight for these ideals that you hold. There are many people who will say housing is a human right, and yet it oftentimes seems as if it is relegated simply to the use of it as a slogan as opposed to it being something.

David Remnick: By your definition, you'll fight harder for it than others.

Zohran Mamdani: I think that you mean what you say. What separates it from other styles of ideology or politics or theory, to me, in practice has been a separation also of whether you are willing to reckon with the broken nature of the system we have around us, and taking on the entrenched interests necessary to deliver these kinds of ideals in practice.

David Remnick: You reminded us that you worked for Bernie, and you were excited about Bernie.

Zohran Mamdani: I volunteered.

David Remnick: Fair enough.

Zohran Mamdani: [laughs] I was working very hard as a volunteer.

David Remnick: I think in 2012, you also did some work for Obama in Pennsylvania, am I right?

Zohran Mamdani: Yes, yes, yes. It was not 2012, I think it was actually for the first election.

David Remnick: 2008?

Zohran Mamdani: I think so, but I doorknocked for President Obama. Yes.

David Remnick: And yet, if I read your generation correctly, there is a distinct disappointment, particularly on the left side of the political spectrum, broadly speaking, with Obama. I wonder how you look back at the Obama experience. I know he called you the morning after you won. Tell me about that conversation and tell me about your sense of Obama vis-à-vis, Bernie, because it seems to me that you admire Bernie Sanders' politics a good deal more than Obama's in retrospect.

Zohran Mamdani: The call the morning after was quite a privilege to receive. What I appreciated about it so much was that the focus of it was both on the question of hope and the importance of hope in our politics, and what the transition to governance looks like. There comes a responsibility with inspiring others and with creating hope is that you must deliver on that. I think in your counterposing of Bernie and of Obama, I also think of it as different points in my own life. Obama 200, I'm sorry to say this, I'm in high school.

David Remnick: You're killing me.

Zohran Mamdani: I know. I just wanted to-

David Remnick: Absolutely.

Zohran Mamdani: -say sorry before I stabbed you.

David Remnick: That's a lot.

Zohran Mamdani: At least I did it from the front. [laughs]

David Remnick: We'll all die someday.

Zohran Mamdani: Better to know that it's coming.

David Remnick: You were in high school in 2008?

Zohran Mamdani: I was in high school 2008.

David Remnick: We're going let that slide.

Zohran Mamdani: Andrew Cuomo is probably gonna have a press conference about it tomorrow. [laughter] It's true. I was.

David Remnick: I don't know if you just gained some votes or lost a few.

Zohran Mamdani: It's always a little bit dicey. The good thing about my youth is that I grow older every day.

David Remnick: Join the club.

Zohran Mamdani: These years are the end of high school, the beginning of college, and then through the end of college. Bernie is a few years after college. I had this very interesting experience after college where I found out that organizing was a job. I didn't know you could get paid to organize. I remember when I was looking for jobs in my second semester of my senior year, the Public Interest Research Group was creating something called Change Corps.

I went to Boston for the training, and we had incredible cohort of organizers, and we really put through our paces and did a number of capsules and seminars. Then I was posted for my first posting in Seattle, and I ran MoveOn.org's Remote Phone Banking office. I took these volunteers that existed online, brought them into a physical space. We made close to 400,000 phone calls for that midterm election.

I go from MoveOn.org to the Texas Public Interest Research Group, talk about the Affordable Care Act. I then come back to Denver, and over the course of this time, I am also getting to know my cohort. We're making maybe about $750 every two weeks. The way in which we're told to make it work is we find somebody that we can just crash on their couch in whatever city that we're in.

We start to organize internally and start to put together an aspiration of a union within the organization. They don't take too well to it. When we come back to Denver for the mid-year retreat, the organizing starts to build, and one member of the cohort is fired who's seen as being particularly disruptive, perhaps particularly a leader of this organizing effort.

I was one of those who was very much invested, and I saw the writing on the wall. I give this to you as an example of what also the experience was with liberal politics and testing out the nuisance of these things.

David Remnick: Is this a morality tale to say liberalism let you down?

Zohran Mamdani: No, it's more to say that--

David Remnick: I know you were critical of Obama because of drones, for example, which was a very common critique. The most radical thing about Obama was identity. First Black president, but he was not a radical. He is not a radical. You describe yourself as a radical. You do, continually.

Zohran Mamdani: No. When have I described myself as radical?

David Remnick: There is a space between you. Describe that space.

Zohran Mamdani: I think that the point of my sharing that story is also the limits that I found within a certain kind of politics and a desire for a politics that spoke to the broken nature of a status quo that wasn't specific to Republican politics, but also a far larger status quo that also included the Democratic Party.

Ours is also a campaign that is built around a very specific set of politics that also looks to the ways in which our own politicians here in New York City have failed us, and our own politics has failed us. That that failure hasn't necessarily just been one of not enough New Yorkers being able to see themselves in it, but also the choices that have been made of what to focus on and what to ignore.

David Remnick: In terms of policy.

Zohran Mamdani: In terms of policy, in terms of people. When I went to speak to those voters on Fordham Road and on Hillside Avenue, there's a tendency to treat all of these issues that we're facing as if they were created by Donald Trump, when in fact, the most salient of them are the ones that existed prior to him that he has diagnosed, and then exploited.

[music]

David Remnick: I'm speaking with Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Now, if he wins the election next month, Mamdani would be the first immigrant in generations to serve as a mayor of a City that's now more than a third foreign born. He'd also be the first Muslim. Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents.

His father is a Columbia professor, Mahmoud Mamdani, and his mother is the filmmaker Mira Nair, who made Monsoon Wedding and other movies. Mamdani grew up in New York. He worked as a political organizer, and he dabbled some in rap music. He became a citizen in 2018, and in 2020, he won a seat in the state Assembly. He represents a district in Queens. I'll continue my conversation now with Zohran Mamdani.

You come from parents from the left, distinctly. In fact, your mother was profiled in the New Yorker years and years ago. Your father's book was just reviewed in the New Yorker by Kelefa Sanneh, and yet they sent you to a pretty expensive private school, Bank Street. You went to a high school that was public school, but it's for gifted kids who do well on a test. Then you went to Bowdoin, which an expensive private college. How do you feel about that educational legacy of your own? Would you do the same for your kids? How do you want to see this change?

Zohran Mamdani: The key is to ensure, and I would say this is true with education, but also with all public goods, that they are at such a level of excellence that all will choose to use them, not just those who cannot afford that which is being provided by the private sector. My vision for this city is one where those options that New Yorkers will choose to go to, the best ones, are within our public school system.

Bronx Science was an illustration of a glimpse of that, of the promise that that education can hold for many. Now I moved to New York city when I'm 7 years old, and I go to Bank Street, which is this very progressive middle school on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from where I live.

David Remnick: Progressive in its politics, but private and expensive.

Zohran Mamdani: In its pedagogy, in terms of its outlook. I'm both a student at Bank Street, and then there's this one period where my father goes back to Uganda to write a book on Makerere called Scholars in the Marketplace. I go back with my father for about much of that year and I enroll into the Aga Khan School in Kampala. I have gone in just a space of a few months from a school where the worst possible grade you can get is a check minus to a school where I find that corporal punishment is still very much in vogue.

David Remnick: Did you get hit?

Zohran Mamdani: I wouldn't say hit, but I did learn that if you don't underline every sentence in your homework and then get it signed by your parent, that you will have your ear rubbed together in the manner of when you're going down a rope and your hands are--

David Remnick: That sounds painful.

Zohran Mamdani: It wasn't something-

David Remnick: It's something--

Zohran Mamdani: -I'd experienced in 112th and Broadway. Part of my own childhood has been understanding that to be able to grow up without having to question whether that which I need would be that which I had is something that every child should have.

David Remnick: Ideally, of course. Of course, of course, but would you send your kid to Bank Street?

Zohran Mamdani: I would send my kid to a public school. I think part of this is that--

David Remnick: Even if you had the means and markedly the quality of it was less?

Zohran Mamdani: See, I don't. I don't think that that's the hypothetical that--

David Remnick: We're not asking hypothetical.

Zohran Mamdani: Yes, but by the time that I have a kid, I'll have been the mayor of the city.

David Remnick: And the schools will be that transformed ideally?

Zohran Mamdani: If you don't have an ambition to actually change the city around you, then I don't think you have a business in running. We allow the exceptions of systems to tell us the story of the system as a whole. I think the importance here is that how can we make our public education such that even if you have the means, it's still where you choose to go?

There is an immense amount of work to be done in doing so, and yet I also think that it is critical to the success of governance as a whole, because schools are where many New Yorkers will engage with government the most. I think part of--

David Remnick: Schools are the whole ball of wax, in a way. What confuses me when I'm thinking about these things, we have 150,000 kids in charter schools, and they're public, but they're quite different from ordinary public schools, district schools. 90% of those kids are Black and Latino, and they want to be there, and yet people are very anxious about charter schools. I think you are. You don't want to see any new ones. Why? What is--

Zohran Mamdani: I've--

David Remnick: It's a real dilemma.

Zohran Mamdani: I've shared my skepticism on charter schools. What I've said is it's a skepticism that is in part born out of the ways in which certain students are pushed out of those schools, disproportionate rates of suspension for certain sets of students and the manner in which when I was at the heart of a fight in Albany to finally fund our public school that had been required by law in the campaign for fiscal equity, so much of the funding that we actually won, the vast majority of it went to charter schools specifically. These are questions that I've raised publicly and I've shared. They also don't preclude me from meeting with New Yorkers who feel very differently.

David Remnick: Is it a funding question? We now spend in this city $42,000 per pupil in schools? That's a lot. It's a hell of a lot. Yet wealthy parents are still plucking their kids out and sending them to private schools. Middle-class people and working-class people, if they can get their kid into a charter school, very often they'll do that. What's the level of spending, what's the level of government reform on the part of your office? You want to devolve power away from your office, which I'd like to know more about, that is going to make schools better the way you want them to be.

Zohran Mamdani: I don't think it's as simple as just a question of funding. I don't think it's that if we were to reach a certain point, then everything would be solved. I think there's also a real question of governance, of focus, of even internal reform. What I mean by that is that the Department of Education is the agency that city government spends the most on of any agency.

David Remnick: By a lot.

David Remnick: We spend about $10 billion within that department on contracts. Now, some of those contracts are ones that are individualized per school district. There is an immense amount of money that I think could be saved were we to standardize a lot of this. Some of these contracts are also ones where we are procuring curricula that is then to be taught by teachers, only to then find out later at the end of the process that the curricula that the city has already procured is not actually teachable within the context that it's being procured for.

My point here is there has also been a strange history where we have hollowed out public capacity, replaced it with the outsourcing of much of these contracts in the name of saving money, and yet what we find is an ever-ballooning amount of money that's being spent on them. We're talking about a city that's still paying McKinsey millions of dollars to design a trash can, a city where, for the first phase of construction, for the Second Avenue subway, we spent more money on consultants than construction.

I cite these examples to say that to me, it's not that I want to get the 42,000 per student to 45, and then things will be better. It's that I want to make sure that every dollar is actually going into the benefit of the classroom, because I don't think that's the case when you're spending so many dollars out of the classroom. So much of this, it's a question of inefficiency. It's also there's a real issue of patronage within our politics. In some ways, this is specific to--

David Remnick: Is the teachers' union part of that system of patronage?

Zohran Mamdani: I would say that the first place to look is what this current mayoral administration has been doing. The first place I want to go, frankly, is Tweed or Central. The upper management of the Department of Education. We're talking about the kind of apparatus that exists beyond teachers and students and the schools of this city, and the fact that there are many positions there where I couldn't quite explain to you what the job does, but I might be able to tell you who that person knows.

David Remnick: Smarter governance, more efficient governance. I have to say-

Zohran Mamdani: And an interest in governance.

David Remnick: -I've been a little bit surprised that you've seems to have taken a deep interest lately in the Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson abundance agenda. I would not have thought that of you six months ago.

Zohran Mamdani: I think that the most important thing is delivering. If that is your framework, then you have to be willing to listen to everyone who can bring you closer to that.

David Remnick: Do you think that was you a few years ago? I look at the circle that was around you a year ago. Mostly activists, that stands to reason. Now it's different. There are people from other campaigns in the Democratic Party, Patrick Gaspard. How's your relationship with Brad Lander now? Is he gonna be your deputy?

Zohran Mamdani: It's a good relationship. He's a friend.

David Remnick: Will he play an important part in your being mayor?

Zohran Mamdani: I think that's what we're continuing to talk about, about personnel and those kinds of commitments, but I would push back a little bit on your characterization.

David Remnick: Okay, go ahead.

Zohran Mamdani: In that, I moved to the city when I'm seven years old. I grew up as a young South Asian man in this city. I see one of the clearest illustrations of a betrayal of city government in the way in which it treats its taxi drivers.

David Remnick: On the medallion issue.

Zohran Mamdani: On the medallion issue. For a long time these medallions were sold by the city to largely immigrants as a surefire ticket to the middle class. In the early 2000s, the value continues to be around $200,000 or so. The city starts to sell it all the way up to $1 million. This is prior to Uber and Lyft. Even at that point, the way in which the price is outstripping the value it sets these drivers up for failure.

There are suicides after suicides of drivers taking their lives because of the weight of this crisis, and yet nothing is done. When I run for State Assembly 2019, I'm one of the first candidates to send a mailer out to constituents across the district with a focus on the taxi crisis saying that I'm going to end excessive medallion debt. When I get into office, one of the meetings I have is with Senator Schumer and Senator Schumer, with whom we don't always agree on a number of issues.

David Remnick: Who's yet to endorse you, and Hakeem Jeffries is yet to endorse you.

Zohran Mamdani: You got to sneak it in.

David Remnick: I did.

Zohran Mamdani: Come on. We sit down and we have a conversation, and one of the things that I ask Senator Schumer is to take a ride with me in a taxi with Richard Chao, who lost his brother to suicide because of the weight of this crisis, and he agrees. I think his father-in-law was a taxi driver, and it has an immense meaning to him. We build a relationship specific to this issue of the medallion crisis. I help to build with the union, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance on the outside.

As we're doing all this organizing very much with Senator Schumer and his team who are leading the fight on the inside, these two things happening in tandem The final part of this is going on a 15-day hunger strike and doing all of it while being in close coordination with the push and pull on the inside, and building an ever expanding political coalition to come to the site of the hunger strike, to call the mayoral administration to push, and eventually we win $450 million in debt relief. We win a city back guarantee.

David Remnick: A huge victory.

Zohran Mamdani: I tell you this story because of the light pushback.

David Remnick: Fair enough.

Zohran Mamdani: The story of the things I'm most proud of are also the ones that include working with those far beyond just those who would identify their politics exactly the same as mine.

David Remnick: You've evolved. People evolve, they change. It's not just because you're running for political office, and there are hot buttons in the city. For example, your first political experience in an organizational sense was in college at Bowdoin, and you co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine. And you wrote your thesis on Frantz Fanon.

Zohran Mamdani: And Jean Jacques Rousseau.

David Remnick: Fair enough.

Zohran Mamdani: He always gets forgotten.

David Remnick: Fair enough. Now you're at a point where you've also denounced Hamas, as well as shown enormous support for the Palestinian cause, and described what's happened in the last two years as a genocide. In other words, your rhetoric and your language has shifted. Is that only because you're running for mayor or because people change?

Zohran Mamdani: This is the other part of youth is growth. It stems also from reckoning with the complexities of so many things. I think one thing that has often been brought up as an example of this is the question of my views on policing.

David Remnick: And defund the police.

Zohran Mamdani: And tweets that I sent in 2020 calling for defund and with critiques of the police department. I grew up in this city thinking often about safety and justice and time and time again, reckoning with the absence of that justice, whether it be learning about the Central Park Five or Sean Bell or Eric Garner, or reading about Michael Brown or then to 2020, the murder of George Floyd, and feeling like the distance between these notions had never felt wider in my life in this city. Reckoning with that distance, and in the time since then, also understanding that in order to deliver that justice, it still has to be intertwined with that safety.

That when you do so, you do it with a recognition that you're looking to lead, whether it be at an assembly level or it also be at a citywide level, police officers who are putting their lives on the line every day, Muslim New Yorkers in my district who had been illegally surveilled on the basis of their faith, Black and brown New Yorkers who were victims of police brutality, you lead all of them together, and you do so by understanding what it will take to deliver both of those things in tandem, and the critical nature of the relationships around all of that, that actually gets you to that point.

[music]

David Remnick: Zohran Mamdani, we'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor of New York back in 2013, he ran on a progressive message about extreme income inequality. He memorably called it, after Dickens, a Tale of Two Cities, but de Blasio's tools to make a dent in income inequality as a mayor were pretty limited. I was thinking about all that when I spoke the other day with Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani, as you know, is a young Democratic socialist with big ambitions for the people of New York, and he's very likely to be elected the next mayor. We'll finish our conversation now. You have high aspirations for the city. You have extraordinary political skills, and you've reached-

Zohran Mamdani: Thank you.

David Remnick: -loads and loads of people who were either indifferent to politics or so bummed out by politics, particularly the Trump period, and that you've brought them in. You've said, "I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this." These are not minor things. De Blasio was able to do one big thing as mayor, one big thing.

Zohran Mamdani: He did freeze the rent three times.

David Remnick: That's a little easier, but how are you going to pay for it is the big issue with you. In other words, where's it coming from? You can't just say, I'm going to move the checkers a little bit on the checkerboard of expenditures. That's not going to work. You're talking about multi-billions of dollars in which lots of costs are baked in.

Zohran Mamdani: I think first--

David Remnick: The aspirational aspect of you is going to outweigh the practical outcome, and you're setting up the city for disappointment. That's the case.

Zohran Mamdani: Sometimes people treat aspiration as if it is a crime. That to dream of the city we deserve is as if to engage in a politics that has no place. My job is to earn every vote that I can over these next four weeks. There are also some New Yorkers whose votes I will only earn after being the mayor, through them seeing what I'm doing as the mayor. That is fine because I want to continue to expand this coalition.

The agenda that we've run on since October 23rd, when we launched the campaign, there are three major points. Freeze the rent for two and a half million rent-stabilized tenants. Make buses fast and free. Deliver universal childcare. The reason I was lightly pushing when you said de Blasio only did one big thing was that de Blasio froze the rent three times. That is a key part of our agenda. The other two points are the ones that require significant fiscal investment. Making buses fast and free, you know, making them free is about $700 million or so a year. Universal childcare is about--

David Remnick: How much do we lose in fares?

Zohran Mamdani: Right now buses collect around 45 to 50%.

David Remnick: How many people are paying for it as it is now?

Zohran Mamdani: That's what I mean. About 45 to 50% of people on the bus are paying for it. When the MTA did a blue ribbon study as to the nature of fare evasion, what they found is the highest rates of fare evasion are in the neighborhoods at the highest levels of poverty. To go to your point, let's say it's about 700 million on buses, 5 or 6 billion in universal child care. These are real costs, real, significant amounts of money.

I would argue a few things. The first, these are the kinds of expenditures that do happen in city and state politics. I'm running against a man who found $959 million for Elon Musk in tax credits one year in Albany. That's more money than it takes to make the bus free. We're talking about a municipal budget of 116 billion, state budget of more than 252 billion. These are not things you snap your fingers and then they're real, and here they are.

David Remnick: You're dependent on Albany?

Zohran Mamdani: Yes. You have to work with Albany. That's why you have the support of Kathy Hochul, the governor?

David Remnick: See, I do. I know You have her support on the specifics of your agenda.

Zohran Mamdani: When we spoke-

David Remnick: You're relying on that.

Zohran Mamdani: -the thing that made me most excited was that we were speaking often about the affordability agenda. Her endorsement, Carl Heastie, who's the speaker of the Assembly, State Senate Majority Leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, those are the three people described as the three people in the room. They've all endorsed the campaign and more importantly, the agenda behind the campaign of affordability.

David Remnick: The President of the United States has offered to deport you, Russell Vought, Trump's budget chief, recently canceled an $8 billion infrastructure project.

Zohran Mamdani: 18.

David Remnick: 18. Forgive me. That's I think, just for practice, that you can expect as mayor, a really full assault from Washington. What can you do about that?

Zohran Mamdani: I think that will be an inevitability. We have to treat it as such, as opposed to something that's simply just possible. This is an administration that looks at the flourishing of city life, wherever it may be across this country, as a threat to their entire political agenda. New York City looms large in their imagination.

Part of that is because it is an illustration of everything that they claim to be fighting against, and the ways in which this city should and could be the model of an alternative to a Trump style politics, but part of the issue is that for too long we've been the answer as to how we got Donald Trump as the president.

David Remnick: How do you stand up to him? What are the mechanisms and means to do so?

Zohran Mamdani: I think there are clear mechanisms in the way in which you prepare the city. We talk about Trump-proofing the city. Some of them are ensuring that you actually provide the support and the focus to a law department of the city that has a storied history of being on the front lines of fighting for civil rights, but is at this point understaffed compared to even just a few years ago.

Too often, we treat Donald Trump's pronouncements as if they are law simply by virtue of the fact that they come from his mouth, when in fact what we are often discussing are the most obvious overreaches and illegalities that we've seen in modern politics. Part of the ways in which that you actually stop that is that you're willing to fight that. I think we've seen in his first term and his second second term that what Donald Trump most often respects is strength.

It is not cowardice, it's not collaboration like we saw from Adams or coordination like we're seeing from Cuomo, it's someone who's willing to stand up and fight back. The last point, I'll just say is that we cannot allow this to become a contest between two individuals. Donald Trump suspending these kind of infrastructure grants, Donald Trump speaking about deploying the National Guard. It's not about Donald Trump versus myself.

It's about Donald Trump versus the city. That's why you need someone leading the city that can build a front of New Yorkers who have a wide variety of politics but are united on the question of this city and the importance of it and the fact the federal government shouldn't be attacking the very existence of it.

David Remnick: We live in very dark times. Political violence is now something we talk about all the time. Do you fear it for yourself? Do you fear for your life? If I can be more specific.

Zohran Mamdani: I'm fearful for those around me.

David Remnick: I hear you, but do you fear for yourself as well?

Zohran Mamdani: I try not to think about it. I make sure that we can--

David Remnick: Can you manage when people come up to you and say threatening things on the street?

Zohran Mamdani: Being a New Yorker means being at ease with much of what is thrown at you. The other day, I was doing a press conference about our affordability calculator, Zohranfornyc.com/calculator.

David Remnick: That best pivot I've ever heard.

Zohran Mamdani: You stuck in a few things, I can stuck in a few things. There was a man who was biking around the press conference, calling me a terrorist and telling me to go back to where I came from. We continued on talking about rent stabilization, but what concerns me is a man from Texas who was just arraigned on charges here in Queens a few weeks ago for making death threats to me, death threats to my family, death threats to my team.

I just think about the fact that so often, the people who have to bear the brunt of these kinds of threats it's not me. It's my district staff picking up the phone thinking it might be someone from Astoria who needs help staying in their apartment instead being told that they want a bullet, an IDF bullet to go through their skull. This is the language that they hear.

David Remnick: Let's conclude by having a series, forgive me for calling it a lightning round of very short questions. Very short.

Zohran Mamdani: To work on your segues.

David Remnick: I'm trying to do that. You now live in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, what our reporter calls a classic mini 3. Are you going to move to Gracie Mansion if you win?

Zohran Mamdani: I'm definitely moving out of my apartment. This morning was spending time with the super about the sink leaking.

David Remnick: I see. Sink leaking.

Zohran Mamdani: Most of our towels are on the floor [crosstalk] right now.

David Remnick: Should AOC run for president?

Zohran Mamdani: It's been a pleasure and a privilege to be represented by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, and I think she's an inspiration not just to me but to people across the country.

David Remnick: Should AOC run for president.

Zohran Mamdani: [laughs] Habibi, you know what I'm doing, I know what you're doing.

David Remnick: I can do this [crosstalk].

[laughter]

Zohran Mamdani: I think the world of her. I'll leave the decisions to her.

David Remnick: Good Lord. My colleague Eric Lach says that you have a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which I think is distributed free to everybody on your shelf in Astoria. Does the city need more Robert Moses or more Jane Jacobs? More building or more preservation?

Zohran Mamdani: The city needs someone who can find inspiration in both.

David Remnick: They said you were good. [laughs] Top three New York restaurants. Your go to.

Zohran Mamdani: My go-tos?

David Remnick: Yes.

Zohran Mamdani: My go-to is Kebab King, Jackson Heights. You gotta go there for Biriani. It's incredible. I would say. Then finish it off with some pawn outside. Last night, my wife and I were currently in 30 minute increments watching the Mission Impossible series and we just finished Mission Impossible 30 minutes.

David Remnick: It's 30-minute increments?

Zohran Mamdani: We don't have much time so it's taken about three months to get through Mission Impossible 4. We ordered from Pie Boat in Astoria. They have a great dish I'd recommend called Goi Neua. It's like a very spicy raw beef. The third place that I would recommend I would say the lamb adana laffa at Zyara.

David Remnick: Where's that?

Zohran Mamdani: That is on Steinway. You get the mint lemonade, and then you have some hummus and some pita.

David Remnick: I don't know if you're helping these restaurants. You're going to kill them by your advertising. Now, you said you're going to move into a new apartment, but you're not committing to Gracie Mansion.

Zohran Mamdani: I'm not measuring the grapes.

David Remnick: Gracie Mansion looks a little-- it's not on brand, is it?

Zohran Mamdani: I don't think too much of brand, to be honest.

David Remnick: Would you give up your unstabilized place in Astoria? More like Ed Koch, would you hang on to the bitter end?

Zohran Mamdani: My wife and I have just talked about the fact that a one-bedroom is a little too small for us now.

David Remnick: You have any announcements in this direction?

Zohran Mamdani: No announcements.

David Remnick: Because she'd kill you if you just.--

Zohran Mamdani: Just a dream of being able to live in a larger apartment than this one.

David Remnick: Thank you so much.

Zohran Mamdani: Thank you, my friend. Thank you. Real pleasure.

[music]

David Remnick: Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York. To get a full picture of the candidate, staff writer Eric Lach has chronicled Mamdani's remarkable rise in a terrific and deeply reported profile called What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power. Eric's profile of Mamdani goes, I think, a great deal deeper than anything you've read, and you can read it now online @newyorker.com. Of course, you can also subscribe to the New Yorker on the very same site, newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Hope you enjoy the show. See you next time.

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