Probably the most important member of that group was New York state governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul, a centrist who is up for reelection this year, strongly encouraged Mamdani to retain the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch; when he agreed, Hochul saw it as a sign of Mamdani’s pragmatism on fighting crime and of his desire to reach out to political moderates.
The governor is highly interested in finding common ground with Mamdani on his push for universal day care. How to pay the multi-billion-dollar tab for such a plan, though, will be the tricky part, and may be where her differences with Mamdani come to a head. “We will deliver universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few!” the mayor declared in his speech, drawing one of his biggest ovations. Hochul, though, has repeatedly taken a hard line against raising personal income taxes. “The last thing she wants to do is raise taxes on anybody. And we do tax the rich already,” a Hochul insider told me in advance of Mamdani’s inauguration. “It doesn’t mean that there’s not room for an ongoing conversation.”
Mamdani intends to raise the volume of that conversation by incorporating the voices of the people who were standing on Broadway today. He has spoken with Barack Obama about how the former president’s “Obama for America” organization did not translate campaign momentum into governing momentum. Mamdani doesn’t plan to make the same mistake, and a key ally is already on the case. The Democratic Socialists of America were crucial to Mamdani’s upset campaign win, organizing a door-knocking army of nearly 100,000 volunteers. “We’re mounting a massive campaign to raise revenue,” says Grace Mausser, a co-chair of DSA’s New York City chapter. “One of the days it snowed pretty heavily in December, we knocked on 15,000 doors. We’re asking them to call their legislators, their assembly members, and their state senators and tell them that they want to tax the rich to fund child-care.”
