What Are Zohran Mamdani's Flaws?

Have at it.

https://mamdanitimes.com/

Hasn't become mayor yet.

He gives off a short-guy vibe. But plenty of mayors are short. I think he'll be a good mayor of NYC, and everyone who hates him (thus far) is a gaping asshole. That can't be a coincidence.

sharp knees

Let's save this for when he becomes and Mayor and calls in the cops anyway...

I can’t wait for the titch-off when he meets Sadiq Khan.

NYC mayor's effectiveness, for better or worse, is reversely proportional to their height, so maybe that's for the best.

convinced his mom to not direct a harry potter film, potentially costing her life-changing money.

then again, he was probably playing 4d chess and already thinking about fending off nepo baby allegations

He's never once appeared nude.

November seems like a long ways off, but that isn’t his fault.

OR IS IT

😂

not my husband

Let's save this for when he becomes and Mayor and calls in the cops anyway...

This is the real answer — Mamdani's biggest flaw is that he's running for mayor of a gigantic city, and that job comes with built-in constraints. He will absolutely still use the police for a lot of things, even if he manages to create his Department of Community Safety and disband the protest-response squad (both of which he's promised). A lot of people want the cops to come when they call. You can argue that they shouldn't want that, but a lot of them do.

Also of course NYPD will try to make his life miserable. That's not a flaw, but it's a reality.

Textbook example being the full-fledged riot led by Rudy Giuliani against Dinkins.

Gives off a bit of a Lin Manuel Miranda vibe

too handsome.

max read had a quote in one of his recent newsletters about the police issue from a Matthew Guariglia:

THERE ARE A FEW LESSONS that Mamdani can learn from how the NYPD stymied de Blasio. People on the right are going to blast him for being soft on crime no matter what he does. But Mamdani has the ability to flip the script on them. Advocates of the status quo, unwilling to try innovative methods of community safety and crime prevention, are the ones who permit the persistence of crime. After all, the failed ways of “fighting crime” are about putting people in jail after committing crimes. A new public-safety paradigm centers on preventing it in the first place.
Mamdani can also emphasize officer well-being and workloads by creating agencies willing to take some of the “burden” away by taking on tasks armed police should not be doing in the first place. He can be proactive about copaganda: police will be eager to link crime to a progressive mayor even if they have to manufacture a “crime wave” to do it. The future mayor’s office should be constantly vocal about how low crime is, what the city is doing to make people feel safe and prevent crime, and should not be afraid to say when police are engaged in creating a politically-motivated narrative of fear.
Another lesson is for New Yorkers, not Mamdani. That's to refuse to panic.

I think making it a value proposition for the police is canny, but it's an uphill battle and this analysis is mostly right. It's not that left-wing policies are causing supposed crime waves, it's selective policing done in the purpose of discrediting a mayor that the police union views as their adversary. Maybe getting ahead of that helps, maybe it backfires and the PD demands you kiss the ring and continue giving them unlimited overtime pay. This problem isn't specific to large cities, and I feel like that levy has to break at some point.

if you just execute one cop in front of the rest of them theyll fall in line

They are scavenging his twitter and its truth nukes day and night back in the day.

The West is defined by its most powerful while the rest by our most vulnerable. This shit pisses me off.

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) July 16, 2014

that's my guy

I want to marry him

will this doom his chances

https://t.co/SWOuKnn88O pic.twitter.com/ad7zvamviE

— Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) July 8, 2025

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:kypbxp7rhw7q2dfa4fr7f6i6/bafkreihscsqidkzsbrmzrlx3qpdg5ck2rqmcwyhe42ptxml4phzulzhvky@jpeg

tough out there

So weird!

So basically the problem is that they're are too many rock solid, logical reasons why people should vote for him and not one of the brazenly corrupt assholes that are running against him.

*there are

https://archive.ph/sYAOl

New Data for Progress poll:

Mamdani 40
Cuomo 24
Adams 15
Sliwa 14

https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2025/7/dfp_nyc_mayoral_ge_traditional_crosstabs.pdf

Sickos.jpg

Even Trump’s team was smart enough to realize he had to co-opt RFK jr. in order not to split his vote.

not excited to see how low the Democratic Party is willing to go to sideline Mamdani

incredible opportunity to tee off on the very unpopular dem establishment send this nasty old man to hell

Cuomo said he would make affordability a cornerstone of his general-election campaign but would run on the notion that he will actually be able to make the city more affordable while Mamdani will only talk about it. “It’s about not just connecting with the perception of the problem. It’s finding the real solution and then having the ability to do it. You don’t want someone who just connects. That’s step one. What you really want is the problem-solver, and I can actually do that.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/nyc-mayor-race-andrew-cuomo-on-rematch-with-zohran-mamdani.html

No means no, amirite

A "No Means No, Andrew" campaign is a good thought. Instead of engaging with him directly, just brand him as a loser who also happens to be a sex pest.

The ads the Cuomo campaign used to recruit the actors used in the ad are already showing up on social media.

The Democratic Party always reminds me of Brecht’s joke after some East German apparatchik said the government had lost confidence in the people: “we should dissolve the people and elect another, then.”

When I was in Chicago, I tried to do a news story on Scott Waguespack for my school. This would've been my first time writing a political news story and he was running against Theodore Matlak, a complete waste of space hand-picked by Mayor Daley for the 32nd ward. These were both white males, but nonetheless the dynamic had strong similarities to Mamdani vs. Cuomo. A faculty member helping me out showed me how to look up campaign finances, and he immediately said "oh man, this poor guy's going to get creamed" when the data came up because Matlak had an enormous amount of money compared to Waguespack. Matlak was supposed to have a safe seat but this was a year when a lot of people had enough - Waguespack was clearly the grass roots upstart, so Daley's machine quickly put together the kind of campaign you're seeing with Cuomo, albeit circa 2007 (i.e. before technology re-shaped the tactics). I could go more into details but it was a sobering, thorough lesson in how unrepentantly corrupt local politics can be, in the way they operated and the way they campaigned. It wasn't even that sophisticated, so much of it was stupidly and blatantly dishonest, and the attitude was sort of "yeah, it's obvious, but it works." Anyway, I eventually went to Matlak's office, which had some of the nicest and sweetest people working there, all in their early 20's (visually not unlike Obama's campaign which was defined by youthful optimism) and I was naive to think "man, these people may actually believe in this guy and I'm actually working on a story about his blatant dishonesty." The "interview" turned out to be shit - after making cordial, pleasant conversation with the campaign manager, as soon as I started recording, she turned into a fucking robot and would only repeat pre-scripted lines trying to push the same false information they put out in a press release (that Waguespack was under investigation) and completely ignoring any question I asked. When I left, a campaign worked offered to give me a ride, and during our chat, it turned out everyone in that office was hired virtually overnight to work in that office - none of them had any personal connection to Matlak, they were all hired from a firm that just does these things. It was a stark contrast to people I spoke to campaigning for Waguespack who were clearly neighborhood locals who would be directly impacted by the election. The guy who told me this was just really green about what he was doing - he was still figuring out what to do after college and took this job with the firm to make some money in the interim. (FWIW, the investigation scam worked like this: Matlak had strong ties to someone on Berwyn's city council, and Waguepsack had been the city administrator and chief of staff to Berwyn. To open an investigation, or really initiate a process to determine whether an investigation was needed, the council just needs one person to put that motion forward, not vote or explanation needed - you can guess who put that motion forward. When I asked him for more details, he went into ridiculous circles, and I just flat out said, "tbh, it doesn't sound like there's anything going on here" to which he replied with a straight face "that's why we need an investigation!")

The happy ending I didn't expect: Waguespack won, by a measly 121 votes, a reflection of how bad things were for Daley that year, relatively speaking. Waguespack's still there today and still the guy you expect him to be - he was actually one of the very few people who vote against that shitty parking deal that was Daley's parting shot to the city.

*no vote or explanation needed

Should add one important detail: I never got the story published because I couldn't get an interview with Waguespack's campaign, even though the story was clearly in their favor. I'm guessing it was because they had a small operation that was stretched very thin (again, they had very little money compared to Matlak's campaign) and granting an interview with a school newspaper wasn't considered a good use of their time, but it was frustrating as hell. They kept referring to a statement they already put out a week prior, thinking that was enough - I think I got only 2, maybe 3 emails from them and they amounted to one sentence each - but I kept explaining it wasn't.

Reminds me of the infamous phrase "We don't want nobody nobody sent".

incredible opportunity to tee off on the very unpopular dem establishment send this nasty old man to hell

Cuomo said he would make affordability a cornerstone of his general-election campaign but would run on the notion that he will actually be able to make the city more affordable while Mamdani will only talk about it. “It’s about not just connecting with the perception of the problem. It’s finding the real solution and then having the ability to do it. You don’t want someone who just connects. That’s step one. What you really want is the problem-solver, and I can actually do that.”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/nyc-mayor-race-andrew-cuomo-on-rematch-with-zohran-mamdani.html🕸

realized i omitted the punchline

So what would he do on housing affordability? “There is no real answer,” he said.

A Reformer with Results

....bad ones!

our lad is on it have no fear

https://bsky.app/profile/zohrankmamdani.bsky.social/post/3ltz2bot2pc2u

My brother's union endorsed him today.

If you have IG, you can see him in this story with the hat and orange glasses.

https://www.instagram.com/stories/dc37nyc/3677482450139167667

https://i.imgur.com/DyxcBqQ.png

By the time I saw that, the parenthetical had been changed to "if You Want a Foil for Republicans." And I was like, "sure, sounds good!" Had to read the article to see that Stephens thought it was a bad thing.

if you wanna help Republicans
gotta hang with Zohran
make it last forever
friendship never ends

@ lagoon - well, maybe more like, authors pressed to do more comments engagement, and using ChatGPT to gin up responses based on their notes and previous articles.

but if theyre just replying like oh good point they dont really need ai for that right, granted i have not looked at said comments but perhaps the times is making authors engage with commenters and requiring them be nice about it and the authors are just putting in minimum effort because the whole thing is dumb

i mean, it's also worth pointing out that more likely than not they engineer these sorts of headlines / takes in order to provoke people and get them riled up

@ lagoon - the replies are generally much more elaborate/specific than that, all giving the impression that the author of the article has taken in this information and is having new thoughts based on it. it's the kind of thing that seems easy to crank out, but actually can take a lot of time and mental energy, in my experience of engaging with students' online "weekly response" type assignments.

ah i see well i hope theyre not using ai but also if theyre using ai i get it

fwiw i would have looked at the comments in order to form better opinions but i do not have times sub and they dont load on the archive site

you're not missing much tbh, I regret spending this much time even thinking about it, let alone burdening you all with it!

come on we all love these internet curios

mayors callin in the big guns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oohRn36CWhs

That's just good local politics. The fact that he sees it as a genuine problem for city residents generates goodwill -- unless he fails to visibly improve it in a reasonable time frame.

https://variety.com/2026/politics/news/zohran-mamdani-john-wilson-nyc-scaffolding-1236713279/

Thought that felt familiar

I must be the only one who thinks scaffolding is charming, and I like the shade it provides too!

you can like the shade but it is not 'charming'

https:// x.com/nycmayor/status/2044508902809628760

get 'em!

I must be the only one who thinks scaffolding is charming

what the absolute fuck

lmao

x.com/nycmayor/status/2044508902809628760

― 龜, Wednesday, April 15, 2026 5:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is so good always thought a pied a terre tax was a no brainer, of course it never happened cause the real estate industry is so powerful in ny but i guess you can just get elected and ignore them and then theyre not that powerful, crazy, one generally thinks of a pied a terre as an apartment a rich person owns and goes to sometimes and obvs those people should be taxed until they sell to someone who lives there full time, but some of these properties particularly at the extreme high end the owners never live in them they just function as a safe place to park foreign cash and maybe do a lil investment, all these new ultra tall super lux buildings are basically ghost towns cause the units are owned by saudi princes and whatnot, these buildings wouldnt exist if they needed to sell exclusively to people who would live in them, so if you can make buying those units worse investments maybe the money goes somewhere else and developers build buildings for people to actually live in, obvs theres many other issues but this is good policy and one can dream

one former ceo of a very normal company isnt feeling it, pray for linda

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:6arqeda2f5piwu7zien3b2hq/bafkreiakq5lqw5dmdd6rsav34gqimh2exdvxb4hvpuvhsbzb34vxrhmjxa

The horror. What if he let homeless people live in the empty apartments?

the rich would be posting like never before, theyd be crying live on cnbc

I have to admit, I never thought I'd see the NYT running stories like this 5 months into Mamdani's tenure:

How Mamdani and Hochul Are Solving New York City’s Budget Crisis

A generous influx of state resources from Gov. Kathy Hochul and a new tax on luxury second homes will help Mayor Zohran Mamdani balance a $125 billion budget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/nyregion/mamdani-budget-nyc.html

Sumptuary taxes that only apply to ostentatious wealth are fine, but taxes levied directly on massive personal wealth are much better.

yeah, I just mean I assumed the headlines would be like: "Does Mamdani's Failure Spell Death for Socialism?"

fortunately we'll always have mcardle, somewhere

(bezos obviously can afford to prop up the washington post for however long he wants, but i'm not certain he can constitutionally abide such a losing proposition forever)

https://i.postimg.cc/L4NrgTmy/megmc.jpg

megan mcardle's how to ruin a city hm first step let her move there haha

Ah, yes, Ms McArdle! The very wealthy are absolutely into working remotely in order to save money by moving to some city like Cinncinnati. How astute of you.

How Mamdani and Hochul Are Solving New York City’s Budget Crisis

mostly by restructuring public pensions, a risky "kick the can down the road" accounting maneuver that has blown up many city and state budgets (chicago, houston, new jersey). it's a closed schedule level repayment system (they have to pay a fixed amount per year between now and 2037) opposed to an open-ended backloaded system where the payments start low, ramp up, and aren't structured to close at a fixed date. plus the nyc pensions are only 14% "unfunded". so it might not blow up but they are doing a prudent version of a risky play. budgets will continue to be brutal, and most of the other revenue sources are one-time

https://i.ibb.co/4DxpLs5/bafkreidupitfxc3fbhisgc56fuspkf4blvnzmdzhn2x7xtq7hk2dcgfbie.webp

Player Hateration

Yeah when you're down to, "Well but most people don't really understand municipal finances," yes that is always literally true, and Mamdani is not magic. But it sure feels like a pretty big goalpost relocation from "NYC IS GOING DOWN IN FLAMES IF YOU ELECT THIS MARXIST."

you're only allowed to balance a budget by cutting social services, any other strategy is fiscally irresponsible

I dreamed that he was murdered

this fiend they call the mayor

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:zy6sn6tkic24e6p52g2yh4zn/bafkreicknc2rmfdgzitgzfhtnc3fmomiqq3fmtlxptgsyajomp5p2nupzu

looks like he's up in the nosebleed seats in that pic

yeah thats prob how much those seats were going for on the secondary market

serious question whats his approval rating going to be if the knicks win the title

wow the mayor of New York attending a sporting event involving a New York sports team in the post season, never seen anything like this before, very disappointed in zohran

you know he couldve gotten some nice seat easy

Under socialism all basketball players will be 5’ 9”.

lol this guy

BREAKING: Mayor Mamdani just signed an “executive order” to repeal bedtime so NYC kids can watch the Knicks play in the NBA Finals!

https://bsky.app/profile/luckytran.com/post/3mnajkvpec22d

Authoritarianism

Awww-thoritarianism

I'd personally prefer it if there were a mayor who gave all the kids extra homework every time the Knicks were in the finals, but I may be biased

I'd prefer a mayor who didn't know what a basketball was or how it worked.

That EO reminded me of this: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1366/format:webp/1*3tWdtMUBcGvvn56JHGz70w.png

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zydadhzbctpayxadj6jdzerz/bafkreic2bjrwx3zvqrqpk7xsqmn4siq7up7qfhj3qagaahs62dyt2wz55u

lol

Zionists fiercely googling for pictures of Nazis on bikes.

lol was going to post that here too but forgot