How’s Mamdani Doing?

“How’m I doing?” was Mayor Ed Koch’s perennial question to New Yorkers, but his latest successor at Gracie Mansion, Zohran Mamdani, seems to prefer boasting of his purported achievements. “With what we’ve accomplished in 14 weeks, imagine what we can do together in four years,” crowed Hizzoner at a rally on Sunday. That prospect, though, has already led three of the four agencies that rate the city’s credit to warn of impending debt downgrades. That could be among the reasons why some 59 percent of New Yorkers are worried that the city is on the wrong track, according to a poll from Emerson College and Pix 11. The concern over the city’s future is fueled in part by dissatisfaction with the local economy, which 82 percent of Hispanics, and 79 percent of blacks, rated as fair or poor. Overall, Emerson found, 43 percent of survey respondents voiced approval of the job Mr. Mamdani is doing.A poll by Marist University, meanwhile, found that 48 percent of New Yorkers approved of Mr. Mamdani’s job performance. By contrast, the same pollster in 2022 found that, 100 days into Mayor Eric Adams’s tenure, 61 percent approved of his work at City Hall. The lower level of support for Mr. Mamdani is partly the result of the new mayor’s unpopularity among Jewish New Yorkers, 55 percent of whom have an unfavorable view of the new mayor.That said, the pollsters at Marist report that 56 percent of New Yorkers think the city is “moving in the right direction,” versus 43 percent who think otherwise. That suggests a higher level of optimism over the city’s future than was detected by the Emerson pollsters. Both of these recent surveys, though, reflect plenty of doubt over the track New York City is following under its Marxist mayor. Economic jitters are doubtless animating the discontent. Mr. Mamdani himself conceded, in comments to the Times, that when it comes to job growth, “we are facing some troubling numbers.” While the mayor touted “the highest demand for Manhattan office space in over a decade” as a harbinger of an upturn, the Times wrote of an “uncertain economy” and the city’s “loss of private-sector jobs” as “among the more serious problems facing” the new mayor.The trouble is signaled by the state’s labor department, which reports that New York City lost almost 20,000 jobs last year. This “stood in contrast to other areas of the state that enjoyed job growth,” the Times reported, while in August “job growth in New York City fell to its slowest pace since 2003,” aside from “the pandemic and the Great Recession.” It speaks to a need for lower taxes and less regulation — the opposite of Mr. Mamdani’s plans.To be sure, the city’s anemic job growth, an issue tracked by these columns, predates Mr. Mamdani’s tenure. Yet his policies risk exacerbating the problem. The nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, the Citizens Budget Commission, has warned that the mayor’s plan to raise taxes would harm the city’s growth prospects by “undermining its competitiveness” and “placing additional burdens on residents and businesses.”Mr. Mamdani, for his part, seems oblivious to the economic consequences of his left-leaning policies. Yesterday, he even invoked Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip — “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” — in a curious attempt to justify his stewardship. Quoth Mr. Mamdani: “If anything, my friends, it seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess.”

How’s Mamdani Doing?

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