The New York World

Max Rivlin-Nadler, interviewed by Daniel Drake ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

The weekend before the thirty-three-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani stunned Andrew Cuomo and the city of New York by winning a decisive victory in the mayoral primary race, the NYR Online published an assessment by Max Rivlin-Nadler of the powerful coalition that Mamdani drew together: “people who love New York City but struggle to keep living here.” Unlike the kind of future promised by Cuomo and incumbent Eric Adams—“a cop in every subway car, a rent hike every year,” as Rivlin-Nadler characterizes their platforms—Mamdani’s “groundswell of support signifies a shift in the city’s politics…. [His policies], predicated on increasing state capacity to stave off the worst effects of capitalism,…clearly command broader and more energetic support than modest, procedural reforms do.” Max Rivlin-Nadler Born and raised in Queens, Rivlin-Nadler is a journalist and investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Republic, and NPR. After a stint writing about border politics from San Diego, in 2022 he joined a small group of writers to found Hell Gate, a worker-owned New York news website that covers city politics and culture with the spirit of an alternative paper.  This week I e-mailed Rivlin-Nadler to ask him about the hurdles Mamdani still has to clear, Adams’s decisive unpopularity, Cuomo’s prickly campaign, and the characters who are NYC’s lifeblood.   Daniel Drake: Do you think Zohran can beat whatever coalition Cuomo, Adams, and Sliwa pull together in the general election? Will it proceed like the 2023 Chicago mayoral election, with progressive Brandon Johnson eking out a victory over both a widely disliked incumbent and a center-right Democrat supported by the business community? Or like the Buffalo mayoral election you write about, in which the incumbent conservative Democrat loses the primary but wins the general? What obstacles do you think he might encounter? Max Rivlin-Nadler: I think it is very clearly Mamdani’s race to lose at this point. With unions closing ranks behind him and the decisiveness of his victory, even factoring in the results from ranked-choice-voting (12 points! Mandate!), I don’t think it will be close. Right now billionaires are lining up behind the current mayor, Eric Adams. New Yorkers do not like Eric Adams. They firmly believe he sold the city out to the Trump administration in order to have his federal corruption charges dropped; at this point he holds the lowest approval rating of a sitting mayor in the city’s history. They’re not going to reconsider him all of a sudden just because they might have reservations about a city-run grocery story pilot. At Hell Gate we’ve spoken to voters all year long, and while they might have been torn between the candidates in the primary, they were united in one position—fuck that guy! That the business community seems poised to back him anyway tells you all you need to know. The business community also freaked out about Bill de Blasio starting back in 2013—and what happened in NYC during his two terms? Money was made! There will be a five-alarm freakout from now until well into Mamdani’s first term (and beyond), but winning the Democratic primary by 12 points with Trump in the White House means you are going to be mayor of New York City, even if you’re a thirty-three-year-old Muslim socialist with millions being spent to smear you. Them’s the breaks. Anyone who doesn’t see this right now is in denial, and some time into burning another pile of cash on negative ads, they’ll probably see the light. It’s not going to work.  Speaking of Brandon Johnson, my inexpert impression is that his current widespread unpopularity in Chicago is owed in part to his struggle to manage and negotiate among city agencies, and his failure to get his signature initiative—a tax on $1 million-plus home sales to fund housing vouchers—passed by a Democratic city council. I suspect these kinds of struggles are what people mean when they worry that Mamdani is not experienced enough. What’s your sense of how prepared he is to negotiate with the city council and horse-trade and excite the public and so forth in order to further his legislative agenda? Put another way, how might you advise candidate Mamdani to translate his electoral enthusiasm into actual achievements? This is going to be a fascinating time at City Hall! He’ll have real legislative battles at the city and state levels, and I think his ability to actually mobilize tons of his supporters is going to give him leverage that other mayors simply didn’t have (especially at the state level). On top of that, because of the weird circumstances of his election—the fact that Eric Adams will likely only serve one term while most of the City Council will continue to their second terms—he’ll take office with city council leaders who have already been in office for four years. There’s a real learning curve for new city councils that has already happened, and he’ll have allies in leadership positions, like Tiffany Cabán, Alexa Aviles, and Chi Ossé. While the new city council speaker will most likely be more conservative than them, this council has really coalesced around a lot of priorities that have been stymied by Eric Adams: expanded housing vouchers, actually closing Rikers, ending solitary confinement, more street vendor licenses, more supportive housing, and so on.  There’s a huge opportunity for the council to use their experience—and their frustration with the past four years—to pass or finally deploy some of this far-reaching legislation. Mamdani himself won’t really even need to expend political capital on it, because they’ve been champing at the bit to do it themselves. He won’t find a recalcitrant council, he’ll find a bunch of term-limited legislators ready to put their mark on the city (who might be looking for a job in City Hall come 2029). He should puff them up and let them go nuts.  One of the major hurdles Mamdani faced in the primary, as you wrote in your article, was to appeal to voters in Adams’s and Cuomo’s bloc. While his margin of victory was ultimately surprisingly large, much of that seemed to come from younger voters, rather than his having successfully courted the, as you put it, “outerborough Black homeowners, pro-police Soviet émigrés, right-wing Asian Americans, Orthodox Jewish communities,” as well as Cuomo’s friends in business. How do you think a young, socialist candidate might make inroads with this bloc?             Probably by doing what he’s been doing and getting himself out there. I think the results of the election show that people connect with his message, regardless of background, and the more they see his earnestness about issues that actually impact them, the more they tend to like him. Being mayor is hard as hell—you have to eat a lot of shit, you have to place homeless shelters, you have to react to a lot of things out of your control that you get blamed for. But New Yorkers tend to like people who are cutting it up and in the mix.  I asked Mamdani, while he was walking the length of Manhattan on one of the last days of the primary campaign, whether he would walk the city again as mayor, and he said he would: New Yorkers should see their mayor; they should be able to say hey, take a selfie, and curse them out if need be. He’s an outerborough mayor (like Adams and de Blasio), and I think you’ll see him a lot in places like Gravesend, Jamaica, and the South Bronx—he’s aware of the need to expand his base to get his agenda through, and he seems determined to be everywhere at once. The benefits of a young mayor! What’s the best anecdote you’ve stumbled across in covering the mayoral campaign so far? If this is the end of the road for Cuomo, I won’t miss his team in the least, but they really were like characters on Veep. After the second debate, each candidate did a basketball-player-in-locker-room presser with the media to talk about how they did and so on. But Cuomo, of course, didn’t show up. Instead he sent a hatchet man to essentially scream at the press corps about what a good governor Andrew Cuomo was, and the entire media was just screaming back at him “who are you? Where’s Andrew Cuomo???” And then the person kept yelling at us for not asking questions about Cuomo that weren’t “where’s Cuomo???” Then the hatchet man stormed off to the side and began acting like a member of the press and shouting questions at other candidates. That was the vibe of their campaign. Weird that they lost.  You cofounded Hell Gate four years ago, in the face of one of the worst media markets in the city’s history, and the site is already something of a fixture in New York media. What choices do you think you and your cofounders made at the beginning that helped the publication succeed in its mission to cover local news? What challenges do you still face? Trust your instincts as a reporter. I think a lot of new media startups try to reverse-engineer their audiences, to figure out what people want and need and then write that. We suspected that a bunch of journalists with decades of experience writing and reporting about the city have a pretty firm grasp of what makes a good story—so we trusted ourselves, and people responded really well. Also, we decided to go big! Take risks, do cool projects, have fun. Don’t be a chore to read.  It remains a challenge to grow Hell Gate in a way that’s sustainable but also meets the moment. We want to be where people get their city news and culture reporting, and we’re very much still building up and trying to make sure we don’t flame out. Maybe that means it takes a little longer to build something that fulfills our grand vision, but that’s okay. It’s better to survive another day than to blow up what we’ve worked so hard to build.  What are your favorite New York City stories to write? Politricks are fun and all, but I love just writing about other New Yorkers—I’m endlessly fascinated. So when we get a chance to write about something like Guinean migrants bringing the biggest Guinean pop stars over to do a concert, or a long-term scam like the Plus Pool—a still-in-development and wildly overfinanced plus-sign-shaped swimming pool that is to float in the middle of the East River—it rules. That’s what local alternative media is there for, and I think we’ve found a formula for keeping it alive. If you love stories about New York told with a deep well of humanity for the beautiful flawed people who scurry on and below our streets, subscribe!   More by Max Rivlin-Nadler at nybooks.com The Mamdani Coalition “In one sense this year’s mayoral campaign...epitomizes a phenomenon of the past decade: the Democratic Party’s perverse determination, in the face of record-low approval ratings, to self-immolate rather than empower its youngest members and constituencies.” Out of Sight, Out of Mind Eric Adams’s involuntary hospitalization plan was the culmination of a year spent demonizing those on the lowest rung of New York City’s ladder.     For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.     Special Offer Subscribe for just $1 an issue Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review. Update your address or preferences View this newsletter online The New York Review of Books 207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305   Preferences  |  Unsubscribe