A win is a win is a win, right? Yes and no.

July 9, 2025 - Slingshot Strategies, a political consulting and polling firm, is out today with a poll on the general election race for New York City mayor. As expected, Zohran Mamdani is in the lead, with his challengers carving up a substantial majority of the vote.

The poll also reported net favorables for three candidates:

Mamdani, +4

Cuomo, -2

Adams, -34

Though the numbers for Mamdani are softer than many of his most ardent supporters may have hoped, anyone would obviously prefer to be in his electoral shoes today. He has the lead; three of his challengers (Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa) are not exactly know for having modest-sized egos, and hence are unlikely to unite the “Mamdani opposition”; and the general election is first-past-the-poll, so 35 percent, or assuming for the moment that Mamdani support does not remain flat, 40 percent, allows him to take the oath of office on January 1.

But, the size of the win is not inconsequential in terms of what Mamdani would likely be able to get accomplished. One can assert a mandate regardless of what the numbers actually say (Trump has done so even though his vote was just shy of 50 percent), but it doesn’t mean that others — the Governor, the Assembly, the State Senate, the City Council, the press, or the public — believe it.

In the short term, that wouldn’t matter on some important issues. Mayor Mamdani will be able to appoint the Chancellor of his choice to run our schools (a matter of some note given how thin on education policy his platform currently is). Likewise, changes in policing policy can be executed by Mayor Mamdani’s new (or old, depending on how he wants to play things) Police Commissioner.

Mamdani is also helped by the fact that he begins with substantial Council support, taking the projected 17 members of the Council’s Progressive Caucus as a baseline with which to build majority support on affirmative measures (26 Council Members needed), and, importantly, having all but one of the 18 votes it requires to sustain a mayoral veto of a Council enactment with which he disagrees.1

Think, though, of whether Kathy Hochul is going to reverse herself and go along with tax increases on the wealthy and on businesses in her own election year (2026), especially if a strong majority of New York City voters (55 or 60 percent) have, through candidates all of whom have rejected Mamdani’s approach, voted against Mamdani. Not happening. A similar dynamic could be expected in the State Legislature as well (the Assembly even more than the Senate).

Luckily for Mamdani on one of his crucial affordability issues, there is a larger appetite for constructing affordable housing everywhere in the city than there was even five years ago, and the new Mayor’s hand may be helped depending on whether proposals from the Charter Revision Commission to overcome decades-long resistance by some of the most racially segregated community districts (as well as other bottlenecks) are approved in November.

But, in addition to tough prospects in Albany, all of that is going to run into the large, negative impact that federal cuts in aid to New York State and New York City will begin to exert on the ability of New York City to pay for what it does now, let alone more. That entirely predictable tsunami will likely beg for painful budgetary choices to be made, but those arethe type that no candidate likes to talk about pre-election, the type that doesn’t typically build popular support after the election, and the type where the easiest thing for Council Members to do would be to retain the basic status quo and give up on major new ambitions.1

And, while the current back-and-forth between President Trump and Assemblyman Mamdani is, perhaps perversely, to both of their benefit now (Trump feeds his base the spectre of a “Communist threat”; Mamdani, each time Trump does that, makes supporters more devoted and gets some doubters to consider being in his camp), it is Trump who holds substantially more cards for concrete action come January. While Trump provides an extensive menu of lawless actions that can be effectively fought not only rhetorically but in court, there are other areas (most notably, immigration enforcement) where that which Mamdani considers wrongful or imprudent is actually within the power of the Executive branch (even before Congress supplements existing legal authority).2

In that kind of stand-off, Mamdani would need to think very carefully about where to spend political capital, and the less of a genuine mandate that he has, the less capital there is to spend.

Conversely, if Mamdani were to beat the current odds and assemble majority support, that would be a political earthquake (despite some of his proposals actually being more modest than currently described!), and he would have more room to maneuver.

On the third hand: Some of the attacks on Mamdani begin to stick, causing his to bleed at least some support and at least one of Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa gets out. Very different picture.

On the fourth hand: Every percentage point matters and, in the unbelievably unlikely scenario of Adams dropping out, wouldn’t some fraction of his supporters go to Mamdani?

Long story short: regardless of whether Mamdani’s opponents get themselves together, Mamdani himself still has a lot of work to do.