By: Jason L Riley – wsj.com – September 30, 2025

It’s unclear who’ll be hurt more by the socialist’s election—New York or the Democratic Party.

In announcing his exit from the race, Mr. Adams blamed negative media coverage and the decision by the city’s campaign finance board to deny him millions of dollars in matching funds. The bigger problem is that the mayor is deeply unpopular. His administration has seen multiple corruption probes. He’s on his second schools chancellor and fourth police commissioner. Mr. Adams was slow to realize that welcoming tens of thousands of illegal immigrants—as he did—to a city that already had a significant homeless population was pure lunacy.

Mr. Adams also failed to devise a campaign message that has resonated like Mr. Mamdani’s. The socialist state lawmaker, who leads the race by a wide margin, talks nonstop about affordability. He wants to make the city more livable for people with average incomes. It’s a noble goal, but Mr. Mamdani would pursue it with policies—free transportation, government-run grocery stores, minimum-wage increases, tax hikes—that have failed repeatedly whenever and wherever they’ve been tried.

Mr. Mamdani’s housing proposals are typical of the progressive left in faulting the private sector for problems caused by government intervention. He would freeze rents for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized tenants, but rent-control policies contribute to the housing shortage he aims to address. Fewer units get built when rent costs are determined by the government rather than by supply and demand. And less housing stock means higher housing costs and less pressure on landlords to maintain and repair existing units.

It’s time to “unleash the public sector to build housing for the many,” reads Mr. Mamdani’s campaign website. “We can’t afford to wait for the private sector to solve this crisis. Zohran will triple the City’s production of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.” Yet history suggests that more rent stabilization isn’t the solution. It’s the problem.

Before the building regulations that began proliferating in the 1970s, the city was far more affordable, and supply was permitted to meet demand. Writing in the Journal of Law and Economics, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and two co-authors noted that “increases in the demand for housing need not result in large price increases. In many places, increases in the supply of housing offset increases in demand, leaving housing prices relatively unaffected.” New York used to be one of those places. As the authors explained, “tens of thousands of new units were built in Manhattan during the 1950s, while prices remained flat.” Following the types of government interventions that Mr. Mamdani advocates, the housing stock expanded at a much slower rate and housing prices soared.

Mr. Mamdani’s rivals aren’t proposing an alternative to his rent-stabilization plan so much as a watered-down version of it. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat running as an independent, would attempt to keep wealthier people out of stabilized apartments by mandating that occupants spend at least 30% of their incomes on rent. Even Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, is proposing an expansion of rent control, albeit only for “seniors, veterans, and middle-class families.”

If Messrs. Cuomo and Sliwa, who are polling a distant second and third, respectively, have gained little traction on the issue, it might be because voters don’t want someone who’s half-hearted about his socialism. Mr. Mamdani is the real deal. Give him credit for his full-throated anticapitalist honesty.

Even with Mr. Adams out of the race, Mr. Cuomo’s chances of catching the front-runner are slim to none. For those odds to improve, he’ll need Mr. Sliwa to end his bid, too, and convince Republicans and independents to hold their noses and support the former governor. The currently splintered anti-Mamdani vote almost guarantees a Mamdani victory in November.

Many on the political left will cheer that outcome, but it may not bode well in flyover country, where the Democratic Party has been bleeding working-class voters. Smarter Democrats understand that making a 30-something socialist the face of the party could undermine its national ambitions, starting with next year’s midterm elections. That’s one reason the two highest-ranking Democrats in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom are New Yorkers, have been hesitant to endorse Mr. Mamdani.

We know Democrats are united in their opposition to President Trump, but beyond that, it isn’t clear what the party stands for and how far left it’s willing to lurch. If Mr. Mamdani is elected mayor of the nation’s largest city, he’s poised to fill that void.

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Source: Eric Adams Drops Out, but That Won’t Stop Mayor Mamdani – WSJ