Zohran Mamdani faced questions about his short resume in government at every step leading up to his upset victory in last Tuesday's Democratic primary for mayor — with nearly everyone from his DSA-aligned colleagues to the media and his competition doubting him at some point.
Everyone except transit advocates. In fact, longtime advocates and MTA insiders frickin' love the guy, who spent his initial years as a state assemblyman cultivating relationships in and around the state's largest public authority while crafting the vision for "fast and free buses" that became a cornerstone of his juggernaut mayoral campaign.
"As someone who works in government, I see a person who isn't just throwing things at the wall," said one senior MTA official who met with Mamdani as he studied up on the MTA and transit policy during his second year in office. "I didn't get the impression that he was not open to changing his mind. And that's a characteristic that's important in someone who's in public office."
That 2022 transit listening tour consisted of hundreds of hours of meetings, according to Mamdani's office. Afterwards, the freshman socialist legislator emerged as a driving force in Albany on transit policy, spearheading a pair of campaigns vital to the MTA: First, his 2023 "Fix the MTA" plan to fully fund the MTA as it stared down a fiscal cliff, which included an initial pilot of free buses on one route per borough. Second, a push in 2024 for service increases ahead of the launch of congestion pricing with a package Mamdani and allies dubbed "Get Congestion Pricing Right."
Mamdani hadn't planned to come to Albany as a champion of public transit, according to his team. But once he got there, he recognized opportunity to make an impact: He engrossed himself into the nitty-gritty details of the MTA and transit advocacy and worked across the political spectrum to promote an agenda that reflected both the MTA's needs and his own socialist vision.
"Zohran's real strength as a politician has been understanding that effective political action is watching, readying and intervening at the right moment," said Elle Bisgaard-Church, who ran Mamdani's mayoral campaign and served as chief of staff at the time of the MTA listening tour.
"You maintain your ultimate values, but seize the right moment," Bisgaard-Church explained. "The MTA's fiscal cliff presented a moment to intervene with a progressive vision for the MTA — not just to resolve the fiscal cliff but to improve MTA service and accessibility for riders and he leapt at it."
Successfully getting some of that agenda through didn't involve passing bills with his name on them — Andrew Cuomo repeatedly attacked Mamdani on the trail this year for only sponsoring three successful bills — but according to the people who were there at the time, it did involve massive amounts of research, legislative relationship building and a public-facing campaign, all things that the several people who participated in the process and spoke to Streetsblog believe he would bring to a mayoral administration.
The "Fix the MTA" package included as its centerpieces proposals to establish free bus service, freeze fares and fund more frequent subway and bus service. It also addressed more granular issues like bus lane enforcement, funding questions around utility relocations during MTA capital projects, how to improve an obscure office that oversees public authorities and the make-up of the MTA Board.
The package came together after Mamdani and his staff undertook a deep dive into the inner workings of the MTA, done via hundreds of hours of interviews across the spectrum of people involved with the agency including reporters, outside analysts, labor leaders and agency leadership itself (Full disclosure: Mamdani picked this reporter's brain. We will leave it up to readers to decide whether or not that is a mark of wisdom.)
The people Mamdani spoke to all had similar stories of an elected official willing and eager to dive into the gritty details of a sprawling bureaucracy and willing to listen dig in even on issues that didn't grab headlines.
"There's this bill in the in the state legislature about utility relocation that has never come up to a vote, it's been kicking around for many years," said Eric Goldwyn, a researcher with NYU's Transit Costs Project. "When we talked they were very excited about it, but it's not sexy in the conventional way."
"What it showed me about this young Assembly member was he approached this as 'I've got to learn some stuff and get my arms around these complicated issues. And the best way to do that is to talk to as many people as I can, and that will better equip me going forward,'" Goldwyn said.
Mamdani was just as eager to listen as he was to talk, according to one former MTA official.
"You could also tell that he was serious about actually effectuating his vision in a way that maybe belied the stereotypes or the caricature that gets thrown around about movement leftists," said Andrei Berman, a former MTA press officer who met with Mamdani after he had left the agency. "His questions really cut to the core of the stuff we were talking about. And that's really what you need in a good executive of a 300,000-person bureaucracy. You need to have enough granular understanding, but also know what the right questions to ask are."
Mamdani almost certainly benefited from the presence of a growing caucus of pro-transit legislators in Albany. It also helped to have an MTA Chairman in Janno Lieber who refers to transit as a public good and has shown a willingness to align himself with transit advocates and elected officials who may critique the agency because they want to make it better.
Praise from the MTA's top brass
MTA officials who met with Mamdani described someone interested in diving into the weeds of financial plans and farebox recovery ratios, and wanted to do more than just get the agency onto stable financial footing but to expand service and deliver more for transit riders. He's kept that reputation at the agency since.
Lieber is closely aligned with the business community but has refrained from attacking Mamdani, even when he has criticized the idea of free buses. The MTA boss last week welcomed what he called a "pro-transit Democratic nominee for mayor."
"What Mamdani's introduced is a lot of discussion on how to have more transit and more affordable transit and better transit, and he's been consistent on that," Lieber said last Wednesday. "That's what I take away from [the election]. I look forward to other candidates joining him in that conversation."
What Mamdani learned on his 2022 listening tour gave him and State Sen. Mike Gianaris (D-Queens) the bedrock on which to pass an MTA financial rescue plan a year after a similar push to get more money for transit failed, according to Gianaris.
Once he had a plan, Mamdani was able to play to his strengths as an organizer and campaign builder, Gianaris said. Rather than just writing legislation, Mamdani organized a campaign not too dissimilar to an election campaign with a website, snappy graphic design, constant progress updates and a movement of people behind it.
"[Zohran] spent several months going around, generating the kind of public buy-in that was very evident during his mayoral campaign, I think that's what he's good at," Gianaris said. "In that sense, he governs in a very unorthodox fashion. It's not just draft a bill and talk to your colleagues. It's get the public engaged and supportive in a way that moves the needle for the legislature as a whole."
Effectively spearheading a campaign was no trifle. Gov. Hochul had put forward her own idea to fill the MTA's fiscal hole at the beginning of 2023, and while that would have at least been enough to put the MTA on firm footing, agency officials today credit Mamdani with a legislative package and a campaign that won more subway service and kept the subway fare from hitting $3.
In Albany, even the most reasonable priorities can be slowed down or crushed as they’re shepherded through the budget process, which ultimately comes down to cobbling together something that the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader can all agree on and live with. Veteran observers of the budget dance came away impressed with how Mamdani navigated himself.
"It didn't necessarily have to be successful," said Transport Workers Union Local 100 Vice President JP Patafio, a longtime supporter of free buses. "You can make a couple of mistakes, you can get stuck in this, 'I'm not getting every part of what I want,' thing. But he did it, so I give him credit."
Albany wags who watched the 2023 budget process noted that by working with his fellow Astoria rep Gianaris, the second-ranking Democrat in the state Senate, the younger pol got his priorities in front of Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. And the visibility of the "Fix the MTA" campaign alone made the issue important enough for it to matter to Speaker Carl Heastie.
"Framing the campaign and demonstrating that there was significant support for it was important because it meant that Heastie couldn't ignore it," said a person familiar with the 2023 budget negotiations. "And Zohran making sure he built a powerful partnership with essentially his next door neighbor in Mike Gianaris meant that there was a senior member of the Senate conference who cared about this and and that meant that [Zohran] had two leaders' ears."
The networking didn't stop with Gianaris. U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez cut a video about free buses with Mamdani last year. She endorsed his mayoral bid in April and spoke at his election night victory party last week.
In the end, not every piece of the "Fix the MTA" package made it into the budget, nor did the entire package of bus service improvements Mamdani pushed in the "Get Congestion Pricing Right" campaign. But Mamdani was, if not a central player in the negotiations, an effective organizer and public promoter of campaigns that put the MTA on firmer financial ground and won a one-year fare-free bus pilot, more subway service and bus service, a lesser-than-expected fare hike and more power to use bus-mounted camera enforcement to speed up service.
It was a result that transit world leaders said grew from the work Mamdani put in at the start.
"Zohran was very thoughtful, he and his staff were both interested in understanding how to put forward a proposal that could work, and not just the politics, but the practicality," said Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA.
"Did we at PCAC agree with everything? We don't have to. The main focus is attention on good transit, making sure that there is equitable access to affordable transit across the city and across the region, that it's safe, frequent and reliable service. He and Sen. Gianaris really put a spotlight on that and it was wildly successful, I think. It was an effort that gained momentum to the point of really achieving things that people didn't think were was possible."
Adams tries to take credit
As Gianaris said, Mamdani is not a traditional elected official — something his opponents in November are happy to highlight. Mayor Adams, who's running in the election as an independent, suggested Mamdani "hasn't passed one bill" in his time in Albany. In a statement that defied reality, Hizzoner even suggested that it was he who got free buses into the budget, not Mamdani.
Gianaris hopped on Twitter to disagree.
"@ZohranKMamdani and I got free buses done despite Adams, who broke the law requiring more bus lanes and blocked the Fordham Road busway. There's your real snake oil salesman." Gianaris posted.
Judging a legislator purely on how many bills they pass is hardly the only way to understand their effectiveness, and smacks of a kind of limited and outdated worldview that suggests Yandy Diaz is a better hitter than Juan Soto because Diaz has a higher career batting average. Working an idea through the budget doesn't get your name on a bill, but it still requires a skillset that Mamdani's team says he can lean on as mayor.
"The creation of and the success of those campaigns is a model for his governance, making sure that an idea is actually only as good as its implementation, with equal focus on the execution as for the idea," said Bisgaard-Church. "That requires gathering expertise, building diverse support and creating buy-in for the agenda. He showed this ability throughout his time as an Assembly member and will approach City Hall with this discipline, skill and creativity."
MTA officials who worked with Mamdani said they saw him as someone who had his own political and policy ideas, but also a strong desire to understand the facts at hand and work inside the structure of those facts to get to his preferred outcome. In that same fashion, Goldwyn reflected on his experience briefing Mamdani on a relatively obscure piece of MTA capital construction costs as an sign that Mamdani would be a mayor willing to listen to his deputies and appointees when they're subject matter experts.
"Capital construction is not affordable housing, it's not a thing that's going to win you an election. It requires a little bit of technocratic expertise, or at least recognizing that you need some of that help," Goldwyn said.
"We shouldn't expect our mayor to know the answer to every single thing like how to build affordable housing, how to fix the sewer system, pick up the garbage. He should be appointing commissioners and have deputy mayors that are in charge of the vision on those things and executing on them, and I think that he would be an empowerer of people."
'A mass movement' beats 'experience'
Patafio, the union official, acknowledged the questions about Mamdani's experience, but said the mayoral nominee's style of leadership attracts people eager to help make things happen.
"I think experience is always important, and I don't want to say this glibly, but you could hire experience. I think once he's mayor, he's going to be able to get people that have experience that he knows he could put in place to get the things that he wants done done," Patafio said. "There's a lot of talented people with experience that want to get bigger things done. They don't want the same old bullshit."
Mamdani's skill on the campaign trail and as a salesman for the "Fix the MTA" package show how to harness a movement to pass legislation,
"I think by having built this mass movement, he's going to use them, not unlike the way de Blasio did at first with the pre-K stuff, where people can actually help him and show up at these oversight meetings and the other things to actually provide a mandate," said Berman, the former MTA press official.
It's difficult to say what that movement politics will mean if Mamdani tries to get his entire agenda through Albany next year. If he wins in November, Mamdani will take offic right as Gov. Hochul gears up for another state budget, a potential primary from her left and a general election that will require her to not get totally washed out in the suburbs, presenting a left-wing mayor a simultaneous opportunity and challenge. Hochul has cast herself as a staunch opponent of raising income taxes for anybody, so the path to a tax hike even on millionaires-and-above could be a challenge, along with any other pricey piece of the Mamdani agenda.
"If you come in on this big thing of hope and change and sweeping in on an argument about fairness and what you deserve in a city and the first thing you do is essentially compromise with elites in an effort to deliver only some of what you said you were going to do, you can very quickly lose the mandate of Heaven," said the Albany veteran.
Still, advocates see in Mamdani someone who's always looking to learn, and who they think will surround himself with similarly curious people.
"He was someone who just never stopped learning. As a fellow Bronx Science graduate, I appreciate that," Daglian said. "Ultimately, the buck stops in one place, but it should go through a lot of smart people, and I think that is what he's done."
"We've seen good mayoralties where the mayors are surrounded by good, smart staff and sounding boards to enact the ideas that they have. And we've seen some that are perhaps people who think they know everything, and don't take good advice and don't get to achieve what they would should and could."
