In the final days before New York’s mayoral election, every politico and news junkie seems to be looking for a lesson in Zohran Mamdani’s rise. How exactly did an obscure legislator overcome the collective power of the political establishment, win New York City’s Democratic primary, and become the general-election front-runner to lead the United States’ largest city?
Those looking to replicate his success want to know: Was his secret sauce the super-slick ads? Was it his populist message spotlighting the city’s affordability crisis? Was it his uncanny ability to draw attention to himself? Or was it his sunny charisma and energetic youth in an age of decrepit gerontocracy?
All of these factors undoubtedly contributed to Mamdani’s shocking ascent, but most of those positives might never have mattered absent the most significant but least discussed factor of all: public money.
Thanks to New York City’s nearly four-decade-old clean elections system that publicly finances candidates for municipal office, Mamdani has had nearly $13 million of government funds to run a competitive campaign against tens of millions of dollars that oligarchs spent to boost disgraced Democratic former governor Andrew Cuomo.
Without that public money matching small-dollar donations to Mamdani’s campaign, he might never have had enough resources to finance his reported $5 million television and digital ad campaign that spread his message; his $1 million in mail and literature that made him a household name, and his $2 million campaign staff that organized communities and flooded the social media algorithm.
In other words, even with Mamdani’s skills and vision, without public money, it’s a good bet he never would have been able to raise enough resources to make sure voters knew who he was, saw his charisma in action, and heard about his agenda.
This inconvenient truth runs counter to the fairy tales that pundits, activists, and armchair strategists love to…
Auteur: David Sirota
