June 24, 2025 — Down the home stretch — well, the initial home stretch; we have more than four months of a likely intense, high-spending, deeply negative general-election campaign ahead — some attention is belatedly being paid to the question of how the leading candidates would govern, and some attention has even just been given to the long-ignored question of how former Governor Andrew Cuomo did govern (generally poorly, with his record of having failed to reform the many dysfunctional New York State agencies that were under his command still unexplored).
We have a better sense that the bases of at least a couple of Zohran Mamdani’s signature promises — permission from Albany to raise taxes and to raise New York City’s borrowing cap — have either been rejected (taxes) or have come to be widely understood not to be in the cards (upping the debt limit).
We know, or think we know, that Mamdani has the potential of attracting knowledgeable and thoughtful people into his administration and that Cuomo likely does not (just remember the limits of the talent that Cuomo attracted as Governor and the fact that he tended to drive away the most talented of the lot).
But two fundamental aspects of how much a mayor can get done — will he have majority City Council support to push through his initiatives, and will he have have 18 Council Members at his side (one-third plus one) to sustain a veto of measures he wants blocked? — have not been anyone’s focus. (It’s not surprising; I’m not claiming this is intuitively scintillating stuff — the nitty-gritty of what does and doesn’t get done seldom is.)
Remember: it was just six months ago that a scaled-down version of Mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” zoning liberalization proposal was enacted by the City Council by vote of 31 to 20, with that final margin obscuring the fact that the original plan needed to be scaled back to win approval, with requirements like a parking mandate maintained in lower-density neighborhoods that traditionally have not seen affordable housing development (many of which remain highly residentially segregated).
If a Mayor Cuomo retained those 20 “no” votes, he’d be able, for example, to keep his pledge to protect those exclusionary low-density neighborhoods from change, regardless of what a majority of Council Members wanted to do. Note that Cuomo’s potential allies within the Council are not only those with whom he is ideologically aligned, it also includes those who, true to historical form, he would be able to intimidate and bully on the one hand, plus transactional loyalists to whom he would offer goodies on the other.
Taking advantage of a Legislature either formally or effectively split was, of course, what powered Cuomo through most of his tenure as Governor (you’ll recall that the “Independent Democratic Caucus” had yielded GOP control of the State Senate as a practical matter from 2011 to 2018). It is true that, faced with real Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature in 2019, Cuomo felt forced to accept a slew of progressive legislation (including legislation far more favorable to tenants than any Cuomo had ever before accepted, let alone pushed for).
But 2026 won’t be 2019. Back then, Cuomo was in the burnishing-of-progressive-credentials business. Next year — whether ahead of a 2028 presidential run, or simply as part of his explicit desire to be a national leader in the Democratic Party — we’ll be seeing him trying to demonstrate that he is the “responsible adult” in the room. As such, again depending on how the Council results play out, it would be a very tough road for far-reaching progressive legislation.
If a Cuomo mayoralty portends not much change and few initiatives, the opposite is promised in a Mamdani mayoralty. Leaving aside the many policies that rely on Albany, one could see things like better funding for 3-K and afterschool programs getting through, but how many other transformational things a majority of the Council (26 members) will be willing to do is unclear. (Further tweaking the curriculum so that students “see themselves” more is hardly transformational.)
The fate of something like Mamdani’s proposal for a Department of Community Safety — calling, among other things, for fewer circumstances where the police lead emergency response, for more preventive services, and for greater reliance on mental health providers to respond to emergencies — is, I think, a close call, depending on who wins the few contested Council races.
Ironically, the area of substance in which a Mayor Mamdani would be most likely to rally sufficient Council support is in ramping up New York City’s so-called “sanctuary” laws to resist federal immigration-enforcement efforts even further. I say ironically because this is an area where, despite local rhetoric, the federal government’s power is at its peak and local power is at its nadir (and that is even before the GOP Congress gets around to toughening existing laws barring interference with federal agents).
The likely outcome of a successful Mamdani push on this is for the Trump administration ultimately to get a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court that such laws are barred both on statutory grounds and on constitutional federal-supremacy grounds.
I’d say there are three takeaways here:
- It will behoove voters and observers to take the Council part of the equation into account when evaluating “how much promise does this candidate offer” and “how much risk does this candidate pose.
- The current Council — where there continues to be good legislation languishing due to the Speaker’s red light — should be of a mind to take care of as much business as it can over the next six months. The overwhelming majority of members will be, post-primary, assured of general-election victory; the lame-ducks (generally those who are term-limited) should feel more freedom of action.
- Thank goodness for the Charter Revision Commission! On key issues like easing the path to affordable housing development and creating an open-primary system where any registered voter can participate in a unified primary (as opposed to only registered Democrats in the Democratic primary, etc.), it may well submit proposals to voters that the Council never would.