--:-- Shumita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shamita Basu. Today, how Zahran Mamdani's bid for New York mayor has already changed politics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Zahran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, is currently leading the race by a double-digit margin. We believe in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest nation, in the history of the world, that working people deserve a dignified life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Just a few months ago, Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, was a little-known New York state assemblyman. Then, in June, he stunned New York politics by defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a win that catapulted him onto the national stage.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now Mamdani is back up against Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican making his second run for mayor. Mamdani has created a campaign centered on affordability, promising to freeze rents, make buses fast and free, and make child care free for babies as young as six weeks.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And since his primary win, his campaign's energy has only gathered more momentum. There's a certain level of Beatlemania moving around the city with this guy now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Eric Latch. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently profiled Mamdani for the magazine, spending time with him at campaign events and at home, delving into his background and trying to answer the question, if he gets elected, what's his path to delivering on his campaign promises?
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is a huge job. The city of New York employs 300,000 public workers. These agencies are enormous. The budget is $116 billion. There's a lot of decision making, a lot of stuff that's going to have to get hashed out. And that's what's in front of him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not only New Yorkers who are paying attention to this election. A recent YouGov survey found that over 70% of Americans say they've heard at least a little about this race. And 70% also said what happens in New York is very or somewhat important to the United States as a whole.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This idea of how a city functions, what to expect of a city, questions of cost of living, questions of mass transit and cars, questions of remote work and office buildings. What happens here and the political decisions that get made here do end up reverberating out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We started by talking about Mamdani's unique biography and how his life has shaped his political platform. Mamdani is the son of a renowned and quite influential scholar of African colonial and post-colonial politics, that's his father, Mahmoud Mamdani, and also the son of a renowned and quite influential filmmaker, Mira Nair.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Then Zoran, he's born in Kampala, spends his first five years in Uganda. And then when Zoran is five, the family moves to South Africa where his dad is teaching. They spent two years in post-apartheid South Africa, which makes a huge impression on Zoran.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, you know, Nelson Mandela is a hero at an incredibly impressionable age. Yeah, he evokes him often. He evokes him often, you know, and we see that in the campaign. He cites him a lot and relies on him.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When he won the primary in June, the win was, you know, came as a shock to everyone. And he spends, I mean, I was there at the campaign's victory party. Mamdani, the candidate and his team disappear for like an hour and a half to sort of furiously try to figure out what to say, you know, to try to meet this moment.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And when they come out, one of the things they come out with is this Mandela quote. In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Which is also sort of, you know, not just evoking Mandela, but also something Bernie Sanders often said when he was running for president in 2016 and 2020. And Sanders is the sort of other kind of big political hero for Zoran.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So he's trying to sort of wed all these kind of threads together. You know, Mamdani is an interesting candidate in that he both has this background that you just described, his upbringing, living in multiple countries before coming to New York.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He's a Muslim. He's talked about his Muslim faith. He would be New York City's first Muslim mayor if elected. And yet at the same time, it seems like he really redirects away from identity-based questions when asked.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How would you describe how he talks about himself, how he positions himself as a candidate? I think it's a double move.
--:-- Eric Latch: I pushed back a little bit on the idea that he shies away from it, because I think he does two things. One is he does this move that I think he learned watching Bernie Sanders run for president, which is something I've come to think of as the Bernie pivot, which is talking in public, giving speeches, giving interviews.
--:-- Eric Latch: He doesn't want to be knocked off his message. Like he, you know, it's tough to get him to talk for any length of time without him going back to the campaign rhetoric that he's now made famous, where he wants to freeze the rent in the city's rent-stabilized apartments.
--:-- Eric Latch: He wants to make the city's buses free. He wants to provide universal childcare and then sort of on down the list of the things that he's put at the center of his campaign, which are about governing expectations and promises.
--:-- Eric Latch: But I think the thing that he's done, I mean, this is something I covered Sanders' 2020 presidential race a little bit. And Bernie was like allergic to telling a story about himself, of like kind of weaving himself into the narrative, in contrast to somebody like Barack Obama, you know, who made his sort of life story and America's story a kind of twinned thing.
--:-- Eric Latch: And Mamdani has done that, I think, a little bit. And especially when it comes to New York. You know, I think Mamdani has told a story of being an immigrant in New York and somebody who kind of learns New York consciously.
--:-- Eric Latch: You know, because he gets here and he's seven or eight and he's still a kid. And that's also sort of reflected a lot in the way that he talks about both the city and what it needs, but also about himself.
--:-- Eric Latch: And so I think it's those two moves that sort of make up his pitch to voters and to his audiences. I mean, some of that fluency, of course, it feels like hard to talk about his candidacy without talking about his online presence.
--:-- Eric Latch: But his use of social media in this campaign has been particularly effective at reaching people. Can you describe, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people now, not just in the New York area, have happened upon, scrolled upon some kind of Mamdani campaign content online.
--:-- Eric Latch: Yes. It is also kind of amazing that in 2025, that politicians can continue to be shocked by the power of organizing on the Internet. And that like, you know, that that can continue to yield surprise is sort of like, you know, it's kind of one of the more I hate to speak for him.
--:-- Eric Latch: But I in this one case, I do think that he thinks that this is almost stupid how easy it was for him to have like the Internet all to himself. I think he was the only one doing anything interesting there. And that's where the people are.
--:-- Eric Latch: That's not about being lefty or ideological commitment. That's just like the world right now. And so he, you know, made a series of videos over the course of the campaign that regularly went viral.
--:-- Eric Latch: The first one to sort of hit was just after Trump won re-election in November 2024. He went out, Momdani, and it was like a sort of man on the street interview video where He was just asking folks in the Bronx and in Queens, in neighborhoods that are broadly sort of black or brown or immigrant communities, working class communities.
--:-- Eric Latch: And these are places where, you know, in the aftermath of the election, there was a lot of talk in New York about how relatively well Trump had done in these districts. And Mamdani just went out and just to talk to people on the street, you know, it was like, what's going on here? Why do you think this happened?
--:-- Eric Latch: Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday Yes And who did you vote for Trump Ah the million dollar question Trump Donald Trump Donald Trump Well actually the early voter I voted for Trump Honestly I didn vote Oh she voted for Trump I voted for Trump. I voted for Trump.
--:-- Eric Latch: And got responses that ranged from, I'm concerned about cost-of-living issues that I didn't feel like Democrats were addressing, or I'm concerned about the war in Gaza was something that, like, people talked to him a lot about, or I'm just kind of tuned out, or I'm sick of this all.
--:-- Eric Latch: The swing is because people want lower prices. They probably believe that Trump would give them that. Market pressure. Energy. Gas. La comida. Food. Most of these people are working families. They're working one to two, three jobs. And rent is expensive. Foods are going up. Utility bills are up.
--:-- Eric Latch: And then he sort of goes on to make these videos where he's trying to hold attention talking about wonky political stuff, you know? And so he's willing to sort of make himself a bit of a clown in the pursuit of that.
--:-- Eric Latch: So he jumps into the ocean off of Coney Island on January 1st, polar bear plunge, talk about freezing the rent. I'm freezing your rent as the next mayor of New York City. Let's plunge into the details.
--:-- Eric Latch: He is, you know, pokes his head into like halal carts all over town to talk about the price of chicken and rice and inflation. Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8? $8. $8. I think $8 is the way to go. If I was the mayor, I'd be working with city council from day one to make halal eight bucks again.
--:-- Eric Latch: Mumdani, the trick that he's doing is that he is playing in the space, but at some point in these silly videos, makes the Bernie pivot and talks about freezing the rent or making the buses free or early childhood. It goes back to the repeated message. It goes back to this policy agenda, which is what he's selling, what he's asking people to buy into.
--:-- Eric Latch: Let's talk about some of those campaign promises and some of the messaging that he keeps returning to and talk a little bit about feasibility. We don't need to get into the super nuts and bolts of how city politics works, but this gets at some of the criticisms of him also as a candidate that some people have in terms of feasibility.
--:-- Eric Latch: And we've seen this happen before historically with New York City mayors who come in and they're ready to go. It's not a proud lineage, New York City mayors. It's not. Yeah. But, you know, it is a very high-profile lineage, right, on the national stage. It's a big job.
--:-- Eric Latch: Let's start with rent freezes. Yeah. Feasibility. What are the barriers to freezing rent? Yeah. How likely is it that he could get that done? Yeah. So forgive me, I'm going to put my wonk hat on here for as brief a time as I can, and then I'll take it off.
--:-- Eric Latch: So basically, the proposal here is New York has these fairly unique rent control laws on the books. And so in large apartment buildings, which are buildings with more than six units, built before 1973, stay with me, please, how much a landlord can increase the rents in those apartments is determined by this board called the Rent Guidelines Board, the members of which are appointed by the mayor.
--:-- Eric Latch: And so if the mayor essentially wants to sort of telegraph to everybody that he wants the rents frozen, it's very likely that the board will be responsive to that. Mamdani's predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who was the mayor two mayors ago in New York, effectively froze the rent in these apartments, which make up about a million units and which is about a quarter of the overall housing stock in the city.
--:-- Eric Latch: So it's a pretty giant pot. And it's also sort of one of the last kind of refuges of the city's shrinking middle classes. And so the counter arguments to this from the landlords is that these buildings are expensive to maintain because of the way the law is written.
--:-- Eric Latch: These are older apartment buildings, which undeniably, you know, the city's housing stock is old and crumbling. No one disputes that. And, you know, what the landlords and their representatives say is that if you freeze the rent, the costs on the building don't get frozen. And so the landlord's going to get squeezed and it becomes harder to make repairs on the building and sort of keep the building going.
--:-- Eric Latch: And what Mamdani has basically said is that he's committed to freezing the rent for four years, just the mayor's term in New York City. But he insists, you know, that he's not trying to punish landlords. And sort of where this seems to be going is that this is all going to be part of like a larger debate about how to tackle, how to address the overall housing crisis in New York City.
--:-- Eric Latch: Because I think the thing that Mamdani figured out and which was very effective is that this is a part of the debate where the mayor holds cards, has cards to play. And now he's sort of in a conversation in a sort of wider game about who holds which other cards and how that's going to play out.
--:-- Eric Latch: Right. So feasible has been done before. He will have to decide how exactly he wants to chart the path forward. What about free buses? That's something he talks about a lot, too. Yeah, free buses is, again, you know, New York is the largest city in the country, certainly one of the centers of global finance and global wealth and power.
--:-- Eric Latch: But the odd thing, and this has been true for centuries in New York, is that New York doesn't control all of New York. You know, the power of New York is sort of carved up. So New York controls some things locally, and then the state government in Albany controls other things about New York, and then the federal government in Washington, D.C. controls other things about New York.
--:-- Eric Latch: And the public transit system is more or less controlled by a state entity called the MTA, but it's New York's buses. So New York makes demands. And again, this gets down to, this is politics. This is about argument and power and decision making.
--:-- Eric Latch: And so can a mayor by himself make the city's buses free? No. Could the MTA just stop collecting the fares on the buses? Yeah. Yeah. The MTA, the public transit system overall, relies on the money from those fairs to fund itself.
--:-- Eric Latch: And so if the money doesn't come from there, it has to come from somewhere else. And then you sort of, again, you're talking about math. You know, City Hall veterans who I've spoken to, who have evaluated some of these proposals, you know, to your question of feasibility, they're not like, it's impossible. Just it would be a choice and there would be trade-offs to that choice.
--:-- Eric Latch: Right. I imagine the answer is going to be similar to something like free childcare, which he's talked about. Well, you know, but free child care is, I think, a much more complex subject because free child care doesn't just involve money. It involves labor.
--:-- Eric Latch: And who does the free child care? Right. In New York City, you know, going back again to Mayors to Bill de Blasio, de Blasio's marquee policy initiative was universal pre-K. So this was school for young kids. Which is child care relief for parents, basically, in a huge way.
--:-- Eric Latch: It is, but with universal child care, it starts from Momdani's proposal starting from the age of six weeks, I believe. And that involves rules and regulations about how many teachers you need per classroom. It's quite a job to recruit and staff and get that done.
--:-- Eric Latch: He would have to put a lot of muscle and follow through behind it that would be beyond just the kind of politics of who he pisses off to get that done. That's a tall order. And, you know, I do think that there's a difference.
--:-- Eric Latch: It's a helpful kind of difference between the free buses and free child care. Like, actually, free means different things in different contexts. Yeah, sure. It means subsidized in certain senses, or it means otherwise funded, which begs the question, how is it funded?
--:-- Eric Latch: Let's talk a little bit about Mamdani and how he would plug in with a player like Governor Kathy Hochul, or just how someone who sits in the New York City mayoral level has to plug in with state-level players or even national players.
--:-- Eric Latch: So, yeah, that's a helpful sort of way out of the wonky thicket that I just navigated us into. So the flip side of these proposals, you know, Momdani has said that the way he'll fund it, the way he's answered the question of like, well, how are you going to pay for it has been, well, we're going to raise taxes on the wealthy. We're going to raise taxes on corporations.
--:-- Eric Latch: But again, this gets back to this question of like New York doesn't just control all of New York. To raise those taxes he would need Albany to do that And so that leads to the door of the governor Kathy Hochul who I mean Mumdani you know is a leftist politician He a member of the Democratic Socialists of America Kathy Hochul is not those things She is a moderate and quite cautious mainstream Democratic politician.
--:-- Eric Latch: And she isn't behind raising taxes. She's got a reelection campaign herself next year, 2026. She's up for reelection. But they have spent the summer, Mamdani and Hochul, in this delicate approach between the two of them. And they've both said nice things about each other.
--:-- Eric Latch: I'm excited to welcome Governor Hochul to our movement and to show the partnership at hand between City Hall and Albany. I've had major differences with the candidate, with Orin Mondani on many issues, but I believe he's touched a nerve. He's created an energy around the will to just focus on what'll make New York City even more exceptional, and that is to make it more affordable.
--:-- Eric Latch: And Hochul, to your point about childcare, one of the things that she has sort of expressed more receptivity towards is Mondani's childcare proposals sort of fit very neatly into her political identity and the things that she wants to sort of champion. as governor.
--:-- Eric Latch: And so they've had a kind of gingerly productive summer of kind of trying to figure out where, at least publicly, where they think that they can work together. You know, one point of criticism of Mamdani is his lack of experience, his youth.
--:-- Eric Latch: He just turned 34 in the past couple of weeks. He's been a state assembly member in New York for several years now. If he wins, he would be the youngest mayor that New York City has seen in over a century. Yes. What have you heard of those criticisms? How has Mamdani tried to counter them?
--:-- Eric Latch: Yeah, I mean, it's a big open question. It's kind of like, how will he govern if he does become mayor here in a couple of months? Because he hasn't been an active, invisible participant in quite a number of big, major policy issue areas and fights that he's going to inevitably run into as mayor.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, like the big one is managing the police department. You know, like that's just, you know, he, as a slightly younger man, you know, at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, was actively posting online in support of the defund the police movement and making really strident arguments about the function of police in society and essentially arguing that the police were bad.
--:-- Eric Latch: You know, we're sort of a detriment to public safety, I think is one of the things that he said at the time. And now he's had to change that positioning and the language that he uses to talk about the police. My statements in 2020 were ones made amidst a frustration that many New Yorkers held at the murder of George Floyd and the inability to deliver on what Eric Adams of all people described as the right for all of us to be able to enjoy safety and justice that we need not choose between the two.
--:-- Eric Latch: He's pledged to work with the police. He says he no longer supports defunding the police. And he says that policing is, he believes now, is a critical component of achieving public safety. And yet, you know, if he becomes mayor, he's going to on January 1st be in charge of, as I write in the article, you know, a police department larger than the Belgian army.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, it's a gigantic, complex, huge load-bearing element of the city infrastructure and bureaucracy and government. And every mayor going back decades has had their time in office defined by their relationship to the police department. So the idea that this is just going to be a side issue, I think, is naive.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, you know, it's like that's just not the way the job of mayor works in New York. and he's going to have to make all sorts of decisions about how he wants the police to police protests, how he wants the police to deal with homeless encampments, how he wants the police to deal with crime on the subway and, you know, reports of gruesome murders and violence that even if they are not part of statistically some overwhelming crime spike do sort of seize into not just the imaginations of like Americans in general consuming national news, but New Yorkers at the neighborhood and block level.
--:-- Eric Latch: And because of his youth, I think New Yorkers and everybody else is just going to be in a position of just watching somebody wrestle with these things and have to sort of make decisions in real time in a way that, you know, that's just a function of like he's new. You know, he's just at the very beginnings of a career here.
--:-- Eric Latch: How do you think Democrats nationally are watching Mamdani and thinking about the party's popularity in this moment, or I should say lack of popularity in this moment on the national stage? I've heard a lot of hand-wringing and people having conversations about, you know, can Mamdani's campaign sort of provide a blueprint for Democrats elsewhere to think about how to reach voters?
--:-- Eric Latch: Clearly, he is resonating with his base in New York. Help us understand how New Yorkers look at an issue like this versus how Democrats nationally would look at a campaign like this. Yeah, I mean, you know, the relationship of New York City to the rest of the country is complicated enough, usually.
--:-- Eric Latch: And then the relationship of its politics to the politics of the rest of the country has obviously always been this kind of debate about how much does this, you know, has this map. At the federal level, you know, it just so happens that two of the most prominent and powerful Democrats in Washington are New Yorkers.
--:-- Eric Latch: Senator Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both from Brooklyn. And they have had a very different reaction to Mamdani. They have been downright cold. I mean, they have not endorsed him, and they've really expressed very little positive interest in aligning or working with or reaching some kind of understanding with the potential next mayor of New York City.
--:-- Eric Latch: And that hesitation, depending on who you talk to, has different layers to it. But the thing that comes up again and again for Democrats I've spoken to is that Momdani has been an outspoken champion of Palestinian rights and critic of the Israeli government and the Israeli government's war in Gaza.
--:-- Eric Latch: And both Schumer and Jeffries have been powerful supporters of the Israeli government. And then there's this question also of just how Momdani, quote unquote, plays nationally, because both Schumer and Jeffries are looking at this map for the midterms and the kind of politics that they feel will help them win races in the House and races for the Senate.
--:-- Eric Latch: And it's national, but it's also local because especially with the House races, there's a lot of districts in the New York City suburbs in Westchester and north in upstate New York and on Long Island where there are competitive House races that have been competitive for several cycles in a row now.
--:-- Eric Latch: And Democrats in these districts having to like sort of explain or stand for or apologize for Mamdani is so very sort of something that I think these sort of party stakeholders, quote unquote, are thinking about. Let's stop for a moment and talk some more about the issue of Israel and Gaza, because this is one of those places where the tension between Mamdani and more centrist Democrats has really come out.
--:-- Eric Latch: You know, he's been asked about it over and over again during the campaign. How has Mamdani been navigating this issue? And how is his stance on it being received by Democrats nationally? You know one of the bets that Mamdani made early on after watching both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris struggle to keep the support of Democrats who oppose the war in Gaza was to say you know during the primary this is sort of easy to forget now but like during the primary basically his opponents not just like the Andrew Cuomo of the world who are outspokenly pro-Israel, but all sorts of Democrats in New York and then observers from elsewhere felt that Momdani's position on the war would sort of bring him down eventually, that his outspoken criticism of Israel would hurt him in a city where there are around a million Jewish residents.
--:-- Eric Latch: And that like, basically that would be a wall that Mamdani would run into. And it wasn't. I mean, I think another mistake that his opponents made is thinking that like his support for Palestinian rights and his opposition to the war was somehow kind of faddish, you know, sort of part of a kind of recent movement.
--:-- Eric Latch: And Mamdani has, you know, it's like, this is a subject that is, you know, very formative to him, sort of informs how he thinks about power and how he thinks about politics generally. His dad has written extensively about the conflict in the Middle East. As a college student, Momdani founds a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, he is seeped in and informed by these. And, you know, a bet that they made early on, he and his campaign, is that, like, the Democratic Party voters who hate the war in Gaza and hate what they're seeing on their phones every day, Momdani was going to speak very clearly and very directly to them and say, I share your position and I want to be a leader for you.
--:-- Eric Latch: And the people responded to that in the way that he basically expected them to. Those ended up being like a lot of his voters. And so I think that that is one place where coming out of 2024 and this debate in the Democratic Party about the party's position to geopolitics and the government of Israel, yeah, I mean, Momdani has made a contribution to that debate.
--:-- Eric Latch: President Trump is clearly watching what's happening in New York. He has attacked Mamdani on occasion. He has questioned Mamdani's citizenship. He has threatened arrest and deportation at times. Also is kind of famously going after other big New York figures like Letitia James. If Mamdani wins, what do you think he's up against at the federal level? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.
--:-- Eric Latch: I know he's been asked it too you know it's a great question going back to what we were talking about about the way that New York City has relied on the federal government you know at this point for a century or more which has to do with dollars you know and federal spending and federal support for everything from the city budget to big infrastructure projects to like Trump just a few days ago said he was he's canceling this Hudson River tunnel that's sort of a necessary project to keep the trains running in and out of the city and all up and down the eastern seaboard.
--:-- Eric Latch: People who have been in city government in New York, in city halls in New York, and have seen the ways that the federal government and the municipal government in New York have to, by definition, interact, are worried about this. I mean, it's a huge issue. That said, you know, it's like that there are others who are just like, yeah, I mean, there's Trump, and then there's just like staffing and administration.
--:-- Eric Latch: The job of New York City as mayor is hard enough. You know, like they can screw it up all by themselves. It doesn't necessarily need an aggressive and vengeful president to do that. If Mamdani gets elected, which looks very likely right now, but I suppose a surprise could always happen.
--:-- Eric Latch: But say he lands in office, what do you think will be his first big challenge? What people have said to me is staffing. I mean, you know, it sounds mundane, but he has a lot of decisions to make about who is going to be around him and how to staff out.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, you know, the mayor doesn't appoint all 300,000 public employees in New York City, but he does appoint the agency heads and the sub heads and the people who staff him at City Hall and advise him hundreds of decisions.
--:-- Eric Latch: And something that he's going to have to confront with each of these decisions, a choice that he's often, I think, going to have to think about is does he want to pick somebody with experience who's been in the game, who's been in the fights, but who might not necessarily share his commitment to a certain kind of politics?
--:-- Eric Latch: Or does he want kind of more people bond in to his program and who will like run into walls for that program, but who might not have the experience in some of these jobs and with some of these functions. And also because, you know, this is one of the ways that I think city government is so fascinating.
--:-- Eric Latch: I mean, this is also very relationship-based. You know, it's not just about decision-making. It's about relationships and people and sort of, you know, who knows who. The title of your piece is What Zafran Mamdani Knows About Power. What's your answer to that question? What does he know about power?
--:-- Eric Latch: I think Mamdani has had a couple of insights into how to connect some of the tools available to politicians today in terms of messaging, in terms of outreach, in terms of discourse, you know, kinds of the arguments that are being had, live arguments that are being had in this country right now with nuts and bolts, city governance.
--:-- Eric Latch: You know, I think that's what we were talking about with the rent freeze. Rent guidelines board in the wrong hands. somebody who wants to tell you about the Rent Guidelines Board could put you to sleep in like 30 seconds. You know? It's not that it's not powerful. It's not that it's not important, but this is wonky stuff.
--:-- Eric Latch: And how to turn bureaucracy and complexity into sharp-edged and grabby argument is an accomplishment. That's the rhetorical side. There's a coalition side that I think a lot of his opponents, certainly, but even the reporters, and I would even say that I even missed this in the primary.
--:-- Eric Latch: You know, one of the things that Momdani talked about is he was going to turn out new voters. He was like, I'm not going to focus as much on some of the more traditional groups that get courted at election time. Moderate Jewish voters, working class and middle class black voters in the outer boroughs.
--:-- Eric Latch: But he did say that basically that the city was underrating, underestimating just how many South Asian and Muslim residents had come to the city over the last couple of decades, how politically primed they were to engage and how under-canvassed they were in general and underappreciated they were as potential voters and as members of the city's political, not just imagination, but functioning political economy and a political sort of environment.
--:-- Eric Latch: And he was like, I'm going to go get those voters. And there was a lot of skepticism about that. And he totally did it. And I think it would be stupid for any mayor, mayoral candidate from here forward to run for mayor without a clear plan for how to attract exactly these voters.
--:-- Eric Latch: That was one of the bets that he made early on, and it 100% paid off. Governing and what comes next, huge challenge. New York City mayors in general, like we said, it's not like they've all been great successes. But if he does nothing else than bring in this like nearly million people into the city's political imagination in the way that like past waves of immigrants from the Germans to the Irish to the Jews to the Italians have been brought in.
--:-- Eric Latch: That's a real contribution already to the city's politics. Shumita Basu: Eric, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.
