This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m honored to be joined by Peter Sterne. He’s the state editor at City & State New York, which is a publication that covers, as you can guess from the title, state and city politics in New York. And Peter, thanks for joining me.
Peter Sterne: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.
Bacon: So what I want to talk to you about today is kind of Zohran Mamdani’s first month as the mayor of New York. He been celebrated, covered extensively. The campaign was so extensively covered. So I want to get into what’s happening since he’s actually taken over one of the most important jobs in the U.S. and in politics particularly.
I guess the first thing is [to] talk about the staffing of the administration. It’s not as if his staff and the administration’s full of, I’ll say, wide-eyed 23-year-old socialists. The staff is a mix of people with experience, people with less experience. Talk about the staff that he’s assembled so far.
Sterne: Yeah, so I’d say a lot of the people he has turned to [to] staff his administration are veterans of the city government in particular. You have a lot of people coming from the de Blasio administration. These are people who were in power when New York last had a very progressive—albeit not a socialist—mayor, who were out of power over the last four years.
When Eric Adams came in, he’s more of a moderate, more conservative. And now as Zohran is looking for people to staff his administration, he’s looking for people who are ideologically aligned with him, but who actually have experience running the government.
And so the best example of that is, of course, his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who was in charge of running the government, and especially budget matters, during the de Blasio administration. He had a long career in Albany working on the budget, and then he worked as de Blasio’s first deputy mayor. And so I think you’ve seen a lot of those same kinds of hires that he’s making.
As you mentioned, it has been a mix. He has hired some people from the Democratic Socialists of America, which is his political home, into positions. But generally speaking, he’s not hiring DSA people to be, like, first deputy mayor or head of Intergovernmental Affairs, or like at the commissioner level or even the deputy mayor level.
So he hired Cea Weaver to be the head of the new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, which is a new office that he started. That is more of a kind of activist role. It’s going and trying to get tenants to report on if they’re having issues with their landlords. She’s not the head of Housing Preservation and Development or the Department of Buildings in the same way.
He hired Van Auken, who was his field director and had previously run volunteer canvassing operations for other DSA candidates, to head the new Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, which again, is focused on ensuring that the mayor’s office can reach out to ordinary New Yorkers and let them know what is going on and get feedback from them. But it’s not really the kind of thing where you’re actually running the government.
Bacon: So Lina Khan who is a person well known to people in Washington, people nationally from her term running the FTC, I guess. She’s been advising him or was advising before. Does she have a formal role? What is her role now?
Sterne: No, she does not have a formal role in the administration, but some of her acolytes do. So Sam Levine, for instance, who worked closely with Lina Khan in D.C., is now the head of the Department of Worker and Consumer Protection, and he has been out in front on a lot of initiatives that Mamdani has been doing in terms of things that was similar to what Lina Khan tried to do in D.C.—going after junk fees and going after unscrupulous businesses in New York City.
While Lina Khan does not formally have a role in the administration, I’d say that her brand of politics is very clearly being expressed. You also have Julie Su, who was the Department of Labor under Biden, who is now a deputy mayor in the Mamdani administration. So you can see that he’s really pulling from people who had prominent roles under de Blasio and under Biden to staff what is, I think, the most exciting and closely watched progressive administration in the country.
Bacon: Talk about his political role a little bit. I don’t remember everybody Eric Adams or de Blasio or Bloomberg endorsed, but early on it seems like he got involved even before he started to encourage DSA not to support a candidate against Jeffries.
This week he’s decided to endorse the governor, who’s a more moderate figure. He’s gotten involved in a lot of House races in the city to endorse candidates including some who the outgoing incumbent didn’t want. So [there are] two questions: just talk about what he’s trying to do politically, and if you can, first of all, talk about how unprecedented—or not unprecedented—his political role has been in these sort of endorsements so far.
Sterne: Absolutely. I think when you look at the first month—and even before he got into office—many mayors, you would only judge them based on the policies that they’re trying to implement. But Mamdani has really made an effort to be not just a figure focused on policy, but on politics as well. He is at heart a political organizer.
And so while he certainly wants to accomplish his agenda, his campaign promises—which everyone knows because he made it the core of his campaign: freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, taxing the rich to pay for universal child care, and having fast and fair free buses—those are things that he’s working on.
But in addition to trying to get his agenda [passed], [he is supporting a] sort of slate of candidates that DSA and aligned organizations are pushing through.
Obviously there have been some cases in which he has gone against what some of his com[rades] in DSA wanted. He spoke against DSA endorsing Chi Ossé, who is a very popular, very well-liked young city council member who actually lives in House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ district and was considering challenging him from the left—a Zohran-style campaign.
And Zohran believed that would be a bad idea because Ossé had very little chance of winning. And going to war with the House minority leader could make it more difficult for Zohran to get his agenda through the City Council, and particularly through Albany, such as higher taxes on the rich.
So he spoke out against that, and Chi Ossé’s planned primary challenge against Jeffries was very controversial within DSA—not because anyone in DSA supports Jeffries. They all hate him. They want him out. At the very least, they don’t want him to be the House Democratic leader.
Sterne: But they were concerned about whether or not Ossé would be able to win, and given the amount of resources and money they would need to pour into that campaign to make Ossé at all viable, that would take away from other races.
There’s at least one more and potentially two more congressional races that NYC-DSA wanted to run, and there were also, like, seven Assembly races that they wanted to run in addition to defending seven or eight incumbents. And I think Zohran and many people in DSA felt that while there could be symbolic importance to challenging the House minority leader, it wouldn’t look great if they tried to challenge the House minority leader and got destroyed in the primary.
And also it might be more important to actually elect another seven DSA members to the state legislature, where they could actually be the decisive votes in pushing Governor Hochul to increase taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and increase the corporate tax rate. So Zohran spoke out against DSA endorsing Chi Ossé, and indeed DSA narrowly voted not to endorse Ossé’s planned challenge.
And then Chi Ossé decided not to run against Jeffries. He said: I would only do this with the support of DSA, and since they did not think I should do this, I’m not going to run.
It’s very difficult. He would’ve had very little chance, even with the support of DSA, right? He would’ve had absolutely no chance without DSA.
But in terms of the House races, there was also Lander in New York 10, where Brad Lander is, again, not a socialist. I think he was a DSA member in college, but he’s clearly not aligned with the socialist project. He is a left liberal and he’s someone who progressives really like. He and Zohran cross-endorsed each other during the mayoral primary in order to try and stop former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
And Zohran had considered bringing Lander into his administration, but ultimately decided against it and instead decided to support him in New York 10, where he is challenging Congressman Dan Goldman, who is, I would say, a moderate, at least by New York standards. He’s very staunchly supportive of Israel, which obviously Zohran and much of the left has turned against in recent years following the genocide in Gaza.
So Zohran supporting Lander in New York 10 is definitely a sign of him supporting progressive primary challenges against more establishment Democrats.
But it should also be noted in that case as well: he went against DSA, because DSA had actually endorsed City Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, who is a socialist, anti-Zionist Latina who is to the left of Lander, for that seat.
But many people in kind of the progressive establishment felt that Lander—who is a former councilman for that district and had served as city comptroller for a few years—is much better known and much more supported by the kind of progressive, but non-socialist, wealthy liberals in places like Park Slope, [and] would be a much stronger challenger to Goldman.
And so Zohran—in part, I think, because of that calculus, and in part because he felt that he owed Lander something for supporting him and cross-endorsing him during the mayoral primary—decided to throw his support behind Lander and at that point Avilés, despite having the DSA endorsement, dropped out. And some people were not happy that he had endorsed this older, middle-aged white guy over an exciting Latina socialist. But ultimately, Zohran made that decision, and DSA pretty much followed it.
But it’s also really important to point out that Zohran is not only endorsing against DSA candidates. In the case of New York 7, Zohran is endorsing the DSA candidate, Assembly Member Claire Valdez, who represents a neighboring district in Western Queens to the one that he represented.
And Valdez is 37 years old. She only got elected to the Assembly a year and a half ago. She ran in 2024. She was not seen by much of the political establishment as a viable candidate. But she is a cadre DSA member. She is someone who is a labor activist. She worked with UAW and she’s been working on DSA campaigns for a while.
When she got elected to the Assembly, this was very much an example of DSA getting one of their own into the state legislature. And now DSA is very excited about the possibility of getting one of their own into Congress. If Valdez is elected, she would be in some ways the next AOC. But honestly, AOC wasn’t even a dedicated DSA member.
DSA endorsed her, but her campaign was really more of a Justice Democrat campaign. She’s aligned with DSA, but she’s not accountable to the organization in the same way that someone like Valdez is.
DSA’s top priority, I would say, is getting Valdez into Congress. And Zohran is a close ally of Valdez and endorsed her along with UAW President Shawn Fain the day after she announced her campaign.
Bacon: Let me jump in and ask about the governor.I know she endorsed him at the later stages, but does he have some agreement with her that on taxes or other policy? What is driving this decision?
Sterne: I think the main thing that’s driving the decision is that there isn’t really an alternative.
Bacon: Delgado’s running, right?
Sterne: The current lieutenant governor—he actually hasn’t resigned. And the governor’s former running mate, Antonio Delgado... he is a former congressman. He represented a kind of purplish swing district. He was seen as, if not a moderate, then someone who is very ideologically flexible, able to win upstate. And that is why the governor tapped him to be her running mate back in 2022.
As lieutenant governor, you don’t do much. You’re basically going around the state doing like ribbon cuttings or going around the state doing like ribbon cuttings. And Delgado is an ambitious young politician, a brilliant politician—I believe he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was not happy just doing ribbon cuttings, and he felt that the governor was not taking him seriously.
And so he decided to launch a kind of long-shot primary bid against her. And he’s doing so from the left. He’s someone who has embraced a lot of leftist policy proposals. He wants to tax the rich, he wants to abolish ICE, or at least he says all those things now. But again, he’s not a socialist. He’s not someone who is ideologically committed to these policies.
But for people who are trying to push Governor Hochul to the left, they see supporting Delgado as a smart way to do that. And so that’s why you’ve seen a number of progressive groups—though not DSA—endorsing Delgado, and even two DSA-aligned lawmakers. People who are close allies of Zohran have endorsed Delgado.
Delgado’s polling is quite bad. The latest Siena College poll that came out a few weeks ago had the governor at 64 percent and Delgado at 11 percent. So I think Zohran feels that endorsing Delgado and starting a fight with the governor would be counterproductive.
Maybe if Delgado was polling 10 or 15 points below the governor, then supporting this kind of left-leaning challenger might make sense. But if the governor is winning by 50 points, then it seems like endorsing Delgado and trashing your relationship with the governor—whose support you need to pass tax increases on the rich—might not be the best course of action.
Bacon: So did he have to endorse her at all? Or could [he have] just waited?
Sterne: I think that he could have tried to wait, but... if he waited until after the primary...
Bacon: Sure.
Sterne: Then I don’t think his endorsement would matter as much. At least in this case, he can maybe go to the governor and say: Hey, you need help appealing to progressives. I can do that. You should consider taxing the rich.
Bacon: Now I want to be clear... if he’s not agreed to anything as far... like I saw she’s not agreed and the governor is still opposed to the tax increase he’s been calling for. She’s been saying for weeks...
Sterne: Absolutely. She is not budging on that. She insists that she will not. And she certainly does not seem to have agreed to any concessions. And so a lot of people are saying: Why did Zohran do this?
Bacon: And no concessions today too?
Sterne: I think the reason is because he didn’t really see an alternative. He felt that he had to endorse her before or at the same time as the Democratic State Convention, which is today.
She’s being formally nominated for reelection by the Democratic Party. The WFP—the Working Families Party, the progressive third party—is also planning to meet this weekend. And [they] will potentially endorse her or Delgado. So I think he felt that timing was... he had to do it this week. The entire New York congressional delegation also endorsed Hochul for reelection today, including at the same time as the Democratic State Convention, and that includes, of course, AOC.
So the governor’s really consolidating her support. Now, I think that Zohran felt this was the time he had to do it. Maybe he could have tried to play hardball. He refused to do it.
Bacon: Yeah. 64-11 is 64-11. That’s that number, right? To clarify the decision. Let’s talk about policy a little bit. So she has worked with him on child care. Talk about what they agreed to on child care.
Sterne: Yes. So she agreed to, I believe, $1.7 billion in additional child care funding. Although almost all of that—1.2 billion—is going towards subsidies for low-income families. It’s not going to universal child care. So it’s essentially means-tested.
But in addition to that, the governor has committed to expanding 3-K... so that would be like 3-K and then for three-year-olds, right? Across the state over the next few years. Right now there is Universal 3-K in New York City, although there are gaps, but it aspires to be universal. There’s Universal Pre-K—that is thanks to de Blasio.
And then before de Blasio left, he also tried to institute Universal 3-K, which Adams rolled back slightly. And Zohran is pushing for full universal 3-K. And then they are also starting a universal Pre-K, but for 2-year-olds. So they’re just slowly going down.
Yes. [Pre]-K is four-year-olds, right? And then 3-K is three-year-olds. And then 2-K or 2-K would be two-year-olds. And so that is a pilot program for this year. That would only be about 2,000 seats, but the hope would be that in the next year it would expand to 12,000 seats. And then by the end of Mamdani’s term, it would be universal. It would have at least 30,000 seats.
That’s not what he promised. To be clear, he promised that he would work for Universal Child Care, which would be from when babies are six weeks old all the way up to kindergarten. So it’s a while to get there, but still the fact that he was able to announce on his seventh day in office that he was taking steps and had reached this agreement with the governor to at least start to implement Universal 3-K across the state, and especially universal 2-K in New York City, was seen as a major victory.
People said: There’s no way you can get universal child care. And then in seven days he was like: I talked with the governor and this is what we’re doing.
But it’s important to note that the governor is funding this through existing revenue. She has refused to tax the rich in order to fund this universal child care rollout. And many of Mamdani’s allies and Mamdani himself are saying: We need permanent revenue to fund this. It’s not enough to just say, we want to fund this for two years, and then we’ll find the revenue later. We should be taxing wealthy New Yorkers and increasing the corporate tax rate and then dedicating that money to this expansion.
But I think that Mamdani’s feeling is: Let’s at least... get this out, and then it will be much more politically difficult for the governor to say we don’t have the money to do this. We’re going to have to cancel it or not expand it.
The governor has said she does not want to tax the rich just for the purposes of taxing the rich. Sure. Only if it is necessary.
Bacon: Talk about rent and rent freezes and the other [campaign] promises? Rent freeze was a big campaign promise, child care and I’m forgetting the third one for some reason.
Sterne: The fare-free buses?
Bacon: Yes. Talk about the buses and the rent. Yes. Those are the things I wanted to... are those moving at all?
Sterne: Yeah. The rent freeze is something that will be decided later this year. Every year the Rent Guidelines Board meets; they consider: How much are costs going up for landlords? And how much is the cost going up [for tenants]?
Bacon: Adams stacked the board before he left [too]... [so] I read that correctly?
Sterne: He tried to, but I believe one of his appointees did not end up... they refused. So I believe that the Adams appointees don’t currently have a majority. So it likely will be possible for Zohran to appoint more people and have at least a slight majority, like a one-vote majority.
Now, again, whether or not all of them are going to vote to... because it’s not the case that all of the people who might support a rent freeze are Zohran appointees. The way that the board works is you have some people who are supposed to represent the interests of tenants, and some people who are supposed to represent the interests of landlords, and then some who are just supposed to represent the interests of the public.
So if you assume that the people representing the interest of tenants do, you assume, obviously, the landlord appointees are not going to support this. But if the people who have the interest of tenants do, and then the public members who are appointed by Mamdani do, then you should have at least a one-vote majority in favor of a rent freeze.
Obviously, like, by law, the Rent Guidelines Board does have to consider the economic circumstances of tenants and landlords. If they did say: We are going to vote for a rent freeze despite what the numbers say, then they likely would be sued. Either way, they likely will be sued, but, like, that could be an issue if they’re not following the law.
That is something that landlord advocates and representatives have said: If they vote on freezing the rent despite what the numbers show, then we will take them to court.
Mamdani’s argument is that the rents have increased so much over the past four years under Adams that any fair analysis of the economic conditions will show that a rent freeze is deserved. But so that is something that we’ll really see in June when they make that vote... whether or not they will actually vote [that] the rent on rent-stabilized apartment[s] should go up by 0 percent.
In terms of the fare-free buses... I don’t know if you saw, but the Trump administration is trying to limit, or I guess cut off, federal funding to large cities that have free buses. Okay. Which... it would be an issue for Mamdani. Yeah. But I also feel like the Trump administration has threatened to cut off federal funding to New York City for four or five different reasons. Everything from supposed antisemitism to being a sanctuary city and all of that.
I actually think that if the Trump administration tries to fight against [this]... in terms of the state politics, this is something that the MTA—the state transit authority—has been against. They don’t like the idea of giving up any revenue. They want to continue their Fair Fares initiative, which is essentially means-tested discount fares for low-income New Yorkers.
Mamdani wants to have fare-free buses everywhere. He believes in universal programs... in making transit a public good. Not just something you need to pay for, and then you have a means-tested discount program. That’s the difference between the socialist politics and the... liberal one.
Bacon: Liberal politics. Yeah. I guess before we close out here, talk about the snow, because that’s, like, the thing that people really care about... is, like, there’s a big... there was a big snow all over the country, including New York.
How did the administration do in terms of the snow removal? I know it is one thing [that] you would only know if you’re there. How did they do? How were they perceived as doing?
Sterne: So it’s interesting because I think in the immediate aftermath of the snowstorm, people generally felt Mamdani did a very good job, on par with previous administrations. The most important thing is that they plowed the roads. And famously, there was an incident where former Mayor John Lindsay did not plow the roads in certain neighborhoods, and he was highly criticized for that.
Mamdani did a good job of plowing the roads everywhere. What you’ve seen in the week or two since is that people are very upset that the snow is still there. Like, it’s on the curbs, which sometimes it gets pushed into bike lanes. It’s tougher to use the bike share system, Citi Bike, because many of them are snowed in. Many of the cars that were parked on the street are also snowed in because it’s not the city’s job to dig out people’s private vehicles.
I think there’s been a lot of [criticism] of Mamdani, especially from conservatives in the week or two after the snowstorm. It wasn’t so much that he mishandled the snowstorm as it is... people are frustrated that the snow is still there, but that is a function of the weather. New York has experienced below-freezing temperatures for almost two weeks now.
There isn’t really much that the mayor can do. They’re trying to do some things, like they go around and they literally melt the snow—like they pour hot water on it to make it melt—but you can’t really do that citywide.
The other thing I’ll say about the snow—it’s not directly related to the snow, but related to the cold temperatures—is that... there’s been a lot of criticism of Mamdani over the fact that 17 homeless people have now died on the street over the course of two weeks or so. And some people have tried to tie that directly to Mamdani’s policy of no longer dismantling homeless encampments.
Under Adams, Sanitation and the NYPD would go, and if they saw a bunch of homeless people living together on the street, they would tear down their tents and throw out their personal belongings as a way of forcing them to apply for shelter.
And now Mamdani has been sending out homeless outreach workers to try to get people into shelters, sending around warming buses so that homeless people can go on the bus and at least warm up. Because obviously these very cold temperatures are a threat to people’s lives. But he is no longer going around and throwing out their personal belongings and tearing down their encampments.
And even though none of the 17 people who died actually were living in encampments, I think that some of Mamdani’s conservative critics have been seizing on this and saying that the fact that he’s no longer tearing down their encampments, and the fact that he believes homeless people have right to live on the street and not go to shelters if they feel they’re unsafe... is directly leading to these deaths. Which I think is an unfair criticism.
Bacon: So final thing: anything else, anything big that I haven’t asked about that before? We’re usually have you [for] half an hour, so anything that this big has happened this first month that is worth people nationally understanding?
Sterne: So one thing I think that’s interesting is looking at Mamdani’s relationship with the police. He is a socialist back in 2020. During the George Floyd protests, he called for abolishing the NYPD, defunding the police like many progressives.
When he then ran for mayor, he pushed... he backpedaled a bit and said that he supports the police, but he doesn’t believe they should be involved in dealing with homeless individuals and emotionally disturbed individuals. He wants to send social workers to mental health calls because there have been incidents recently in New York where the police get called because someone is mentally disturbed and having a mental health crisis, and the police fear that they are dangerous and then end up shooting them.
And what happened this month, just a few weeks ago, was a very similar situation where the police actually were called on a mental health call to a young man, a 22-year-old named Jabez Chakraborti. They went to his home and he grabbed a kitchen knife and started coming toward them, and they ended up shooting him.
And initially Mamdani released a statement—your standard statement that you’d expect from a politician—saying: There’s been an officer-involved shooting and I’m waiting to learn more information, but I’m grateful to all our first responders for what they do.
An anodyne statement. Not necessarily what you’d expect from a socialist. And many people in DSA criticized him. And then even more, I think importantly, was that DRUM—Desis Rising Up and Moving, which is a South Asian community organization—Jabez Chakraborti was Bangladeshi. DRUM was one of the first endorsers of Zohran’s campaign, and they released a statement from the Chakraborti family criticizing the police, saying: They came to our house and they shot our son without trying to get him the help that he needs.
They claimed that the NYPD had then tried to interrogate them and even asked for their immigration status, and they said: We were very disappointed that the mayor... thanked the police. And said he was grateful. Like, why is he grateful for them?
And so that, I think, was a kind of political crisis for Mamdani when you have his coalition and his supporters feeling that the NYPD is acting inappropriately and he’s now the head of the NYPD.
And so he did end up later meeting with Jabez Chakraborti, who’s in the hospital in critical condition, and with the family, and releasing a subsequent statement calling for the NYPD not to solely respond to these mental health calls, but instead to have a Department of Community Safety—which is one of the things that he had campaigned on—which would send social workers either in lieu of, or along with, the police on these calls in the hopes that hopefully you have people who are trained to actually deal with people who are going through a mental health crisis and who are not necessarily going to resort to shooting them, even if the situation seems unsafe.
Bacon: Okay. Peter, this is a great conversation. I learned a lot that I’m glad you brought a lot of depth to this conversation about a mayoral ship that I think a lot of us are following closely.
Peter Sterne... you should check out City & State if you don’t live in New York. It’s a great website, really captures a lot of... really good place to read about politics and the kind of intersection between politics and policy. Peter Sterne, thanks for joining. It’s good to see you.
Sterne: Thank you so much, Perry. Bye.
