By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – October 20, 2025

The socialist insurgency will keep growing unless the party center stops it.

The 33-year-old Mr. Mamdani is leading in the race, having won the Democratic primary as a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Andrew Cuomo, who lost in the primary, is running as an independent and has closed the polling gap since Mayor Eric Adams left the race. But it remains double digits.

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Mr. Mamdani is a talented political performer and has benefited from his unpopular opponents. Mr. Cuomo has a Queen Mary full of baggage from his tenure as Governor, and Republican Curtis Sliwa is a political retread who seems to be in the race largely to help his radio talk show. Mr. Cuomo will have to attract Republicans away from Mr. Sliwa, who is polling about 15%, to have a chance.

Mr. Mamdani has tried to mute or mask his radical views since he won the Democratic nomination. One slippery line is that unless a policy is on his official website, it isn’t his view. But he can’t separate himself so easily from his all-too-recent past.

He wants to freeze the rent of the city’s one million rent-stabilized apartments—an incentive for owners not to invest in maintenance, much less build more. If his young voters think housing is unaffordable now, wait until there’s a rent freeze. He wants free bus rides for all, which would cost $700 million. And he wants the city to own and run grocery stores, which would hurt bodega and small shop owners.

Mr. Mamdani also wants to raise the city and state’s already astronomical income tax rate of 14.8% to 16.8%, and raise the state corporate tax rate from 7.25% to 11.5%. This would raise the combined city and state corporate rate above an astounding 21%. All of this would crash into economic and fiscal reality. About 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of the city’s income taxes. If more of them or their employers leave, the city will head toward a fiscal crisis.

The young socialist has tried to downplay his previous hostility to police, but this isn’t ancient history. In 2020 he called the NYPD “wicked and corrupt,” and he now wants to shift money from policing to a new “department of community safety” that focuses on “restorative justice” and “violence interrupters.”

He is hinting in private that he might reappoint the highly competent police commissioner Jessica Tisch. But he shows no understanding of the policies that Ms. Tisch has employed or that made the city so much safer under Rudy Giulianiand Mike Bloomberg.

Oh, and he opposes charter schools and would abandon mayoral control over schools, turning governance in practice over to the unions. His hostility to Israel and its Jewish supporters is clear as he won’t condemn the pro-Hamas phrase “globalize the intifada.” His statement on the recent Gaza peace deal said “our tax dollars have funded a genocide”—by Israel.

Some New Yorkers console themselves by saying that Mr. Mamdani would need the support of Albany to pass his agenda. But that isn’t true of policing or grocery stores. Gov. Kathy Hochul has endorsed Mr. Mamdani, and if he wins the progressives who already dominate Albany will be all the more emboldened.

Mr. Cuomo is right when he says there’s a “civil war” in the Democratic Party between the left and the centrists that is playing out in the city and across the country. If Mr. Mamdani wins, the move left will accelerate as more progressives run in primaries and cause other Democrats to shift left themselves.

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Some Republicans welcome a Mamdani victory because they think it will help them in the 2026 midterms. They may be right, especially in New York state. President Trump and the GOP will try to elevate “Commie Mamdani,” as Mr. Trump calls him, as the Democratic spokesman. Elise Stefanik, the likely GOP candidate for New York Governor, is already hammering Gov. Hochul for endorsing the socialist.

But GOP glee is short-sighted. The demise of New York as a financial center wouldn’t be good for the country, no matter how much Texas and Florida benefit. If the city heads toward bankruptcy, the pressure for a bailout from Washington will build.

The biggest risk is a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. Sooner or later the party will retake the White House, as inevitably there will be a recession or voters will simply tire of the incumbents. Remember how Jonathan Chait and other left-wingers hoped the GOP would nominate Mr. Trump in 2016 because he’d be easy to beat? The country needs a sane and centrist Democratic Party as an alternative to the GOP in the post-Trump era.

Mr. Cuomo argues that if the November electorate expands with more traditional Democrats, he can still win. The stakes are larger than who will run the city that never sleeps.

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Source: Zohran Mamdani and the Democrats – WSJ