Brandon Johnson's Chicago Is a Preview of Zohran Mamdani's New York
Big city mayors' progressive ambitions are on a collision course with fiscal reality.
Progressives were elated when Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani won an upset victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democrats' New York mayoral primary this past June. The 33-year-old self-described socialist's win "sends a clear message," gushed Jared Abbott in Jacobin. "A bold populist campaign and a laser-like focus on economic issues can break through to voters, even when insiders, billionaires, and the party establishment line up in opposition."
Conservatives' equally vociferous denunciations of Mamdani as a "public menace" pushing a platform of "dangerous radicalism" is evidence that they too think he'll be a transformative figure.
And yet, amongst all the gloating and gloom, one has to wonder if Mamdani is the dog that caught the car.
New York City's government is on the eve of a major fiscal contraction. The city's era of overbudgeted spending supported by surplus tax revenues and pandemic-era federal aid is coming to an end. Within a few weeks of taking office, the next mayor of New York will be legally required to propose a balanced budget in the face of a multi-billion-dollar budget gap.
If he triumphs in the general election—a race he's currently favored to win—Mamdani's first decisions in office will involve deciding which expensive promises he'll abandon first as he tries to plug this fiscal hole.
This isn't the starting position an aspiringly transformative left-wing politician would pick. Indeed, it's more or less the situation that confronted Brandon Johnson, Chicago's wildly unpopular mayor, when he took office in 2023.
Like Mamdani, Johnson is a former left-wing activist who won a long-shot election by promising a raft of progressive spending to be paid for by new taxes on the rich. In office, the Democratic mayor has been confronted by the challenges of budgets that need balancing as the city slowly bleeds both businesses and residents.
Johnson's attempts to cope with those problems while fulfilling his campaign promises have generally ended in disaster. Add a botched response to the city's migrant surge and some lingering COVID-era crime concerns, and his approval ratings barely crack the double digits.
For all the hype about his meteoric rise, Mamdani could end up just another failed big-city progressive mayor.
To be sure, Mamdani has some advantages that the hapless, union-dominated Johnson doesn't. His personal charisma and lack of indebtedness to traditional interest groups could give him more freedom to chart an independent policy course and convince voters it's the right one. And some of his statements in this election cycle suggest a degree of pragmatism on policy and appointments. A few of his comments sound almost "abundance agenda"–coded.
It's possible that fiscal reality will convince Mamdani to abandon the hardcore version of his agenda and instead spend his tenure enacting pro-growth "good government" reforms that liberals, leftists, and even a few libertarians will agree on.
Or maybe he'll stick to his radical guns and go out in a blaze of ideological fire.
Either way, the socialist revolution that the primary allegedly heralded has already failed.
Brandon Johnson 2.0?
Like Mamdani, Johnson began his political career as an activist. Specifically, he was an organizer with the left-wing caucus of the already left-wing Chicago Teachers Union.
His narrow 2023 victory in the Chicago mayor's race kicked off something a lot like today's Mamdani-mania, with progressives hoping he'd make good on his promises to tax rich corporations, take a less punitive approach to crime, and spend much more money on schools and housing.
The left-wing outlet In These Times even saw in his victory the emergence of a "new Chicago school" that would take back the city from the acolytes of the old Chicago School of the free market economist Milton Friedman. (Whether Friedmanites were actually running Chicago before Johnson, or what the mayor might do to disprove MV=PY, are questions for another time.)
Unfortunately for Johnson, his efforts to patch over Chicago's budget problems led to a lot of bruising, reputation-damaging political fights. That has made it much harder to implement many of his original priorities.
After running a campaign to not use property tax increases and one-off budgetary gimmicks to balance the city's books, last year he proposed a budget that did just that. For his trouble, the Chicago City Council voted unanimously to reject his proposed $300 million property tax hike.
While Johnson ran on taxing big corporations, his budget balancing has instead involved a lot of tax hikes on ordinary consumer spending. The 2025 Chicago budget increases taxes on digital streaming services, grocery bags, and rideshare trips.
When Johnson pressured Chicago's much-indebted school system to take on even more debt to cover a more generous teachers' union contract, the entire school board resigned in protest.
Johnson's reputation also took a huge hit from his botched handling of the migrant crisis. Among other scandals, his administration spent $1 million on a never-opened shelter camp and paid out-of-state contractors obscene fees to staff shelters.
City voters had to watch this waste play out even as their own taxes were going up. It's little wonder that, when a referendum gave them a chance, they voted down one of Johnson's key priorities: a $1 billion "mansion tax" to fund vaguely defined affordable housing and homelessness programs.
By February 2025, some polls showed a mere 6 percent of the city holding a favorable opinion of Johnson. His approval ratings have since recovered somewhat, but are a still-dismal 26 percent.
Checking the Till
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher liked to say that the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money. Mamdani is in the awkward position of having run out of other people's money before even being elected.
Come January 16, the mayor is required to propose a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year. The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog group, estimates that this budget will have to plug a roughly $6 billion to $8 billion gap between tax revenues and expenditures.
"The city has built up spending to an unsustainable level," says Ana Champeny, the group's vice president for research. "Even if the revenue estimates are too low and you take into account underspending, you're still facing a good $6 billion hole you need to fill before you think about anything new."
Already, the city has a budget gap of about $3 billion, which it has been able to cover only by prepaying for city services with accumulated surplus tax revenue from the pandemic years, when outsized Wall Street profits filled city coffers.
But those surplus funds are quickly being drawn down, even as tax revenues continue to grow. Meanwhile, lingering pandemic-era federal aid is also running out, and the Republican president and Congress are exceedingly unlikely to give the city more money anytime soon.
Under less optimistic scenarios, Champeny says New York's fiscal hole will be $8 billion in the coming fiscal year and close to $10 billion after that.
Mamdani has proposed raising $10 billion in new revenue, most of which would come from huge new taxes on corporations and millionaires. Theoretically, this would be enough to pay for the $10 billion in new spending he's proposed, which includes fare-free buses; free, universal child care; city-owned grocery stores; new affordable housing; and more.
But given the legal requirement to balance the city budget, every dollar Mamdani manages to squeeze out of new taxes must first go to shoring up the city's existing programs. In order to pay for the new programs he wants, he'll actually need to raise $18 billion to $20 billion in new revenue.
There are many, many policy arguments to be made against fare-free buses and city-run grocery stores. Reason has published quite a few of these arguments. Making buses fare-free would require spending $800 million a year. When surveyed, low-income transit riders say they'd prefer better service over reduced fares. If city-run grocery stores in New York work as well as they do in the other cities where they've been tried, one can anticipate empty shelves. Any affordable housing construction blitz would be undermined by the incredibly high per-unit construction costs of subsidized housing.
These policy arguments are almost beside the point, however.
Under the city's current fiscal constraints, Mamdani almost certainly won't be able to pay for new programs. Indeed, the odds are high that he'll have to slash current spending to balance the city's budget.
And there's worse news for New York's socialists: Any progressive tax increases will have to be approved by skeptical politicians in Albany.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has already said that she would not support Mamdani's proposed tax hikes, saying in a press conference that she's "not raising taxes at a time where affordability is the big issue."
Even if the governor softens her stance, New York state itself has structural budget imbalances it needs to shore up. That makes state officials even less willing to raise taxes to pay for someone else's budget problems.
Machine vs. Reform
While Johnson and Mamdani have similar worldviews, there is an important political difference between them. Johnson is a traditional "machine" candidate who had to rely on the support of vested interest groups (in his case, unions) to get elected. Mamdani is a "reform" candidate who eschewed traditional coalition building and made a direct appeal to voters; his appeal rests much more on his personality than on any endorsements or powerful backers.
"They are really different politicians," says David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School. "In Chicago, the mayor is a member of an interest group. He was a literal employee of the teacher's union. Mamdani isn't an anything."
In this way, Schleicher argues, Mamdani is more like Daniel Lurie, the neophyte centrist mayor of San Francisco who won election without an appeal to the city's traditional left-wing establishment.
Mamdani's leftist supporters might bristle at that comparison. Lurie is a millionaire whose primary message on the campaign trail was taking back San Francisco's streets from vagrancy.
Yet as a matter of pure politics, Mamdani could certainly do worse than following Lurie's trajectory. In a city dissatisfied with the status quo, Lurie's independence from vested interest groups has made him incredibly popular. A July poll from the San Francisco Chronicle put his approval rating at 73 percent.
Notably, voters rank Lurie higher than they rank the city's handling of individual issues. His outsider status means people don't, or at least don't yet, see him as owning the city's problems.
Contrast that with Johnson, whose dependence on the city's unions means that voters see little daylight between him, the powers that be, and all that goes wrong in the city.
The real question, then, is how Mamdani might use the popularity and independence his reformer status affords him. One can imagine a few possibilities.
Perhaps he will try to govern as a Brandon Johnson with a better sales pitch.
In this scenario, the city's looming fiscal problems will prevent Mamdani from pushing through the most expensive parts of his agenda, and even force him to make up popular cuts, but the man himself will largely avoid any blame. That could leave him with enough popularity to force through some left-wing policies that don't directly cost the city money, such as a $30 minimum wage and a rent freeze on rent stabilized units being top of the list.
Or maybe he'll do something different.
For all his socialism, Mamdani has given some indication that he understands a rising tide lifts all boats.
As an assemblyman, he was—unlike a lot of the city's leftists—a major proponent of Mayor Eric Adams' "City of Yes" initiative that eased zoning restrictions on new housing. Indeed, he opposed efforts to water down its elimination of parking mandates.
On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly praised the performance of housing markets in Tokyo and Jersey City—two places known for their lighter-touch zoning regulations. At least one of his campaign videos is about lowering licensing fees and the burden of city regulations.
This is all evidence that he's imbibed some of the "abundance agenda" literature, even if he's far from a full convert.
Mamdani certainly could afford to alienate his original tiny base of socialist supporters, who were netting him just 7 percent in the polls as late as January. Perhaps his frustrated efforts at getting a hardline socialist agenda enacted will see him spend more time on pro-growth tweaks to city policy that he has the power to implement, that don't cost anyone anything, and that actually address his signature issue of affordability.
Not the Revolution We Needed
That New York City would benefit from such policies is hard to deny.
The city is still short almost half a million residents from its peak pre-pandemic population. Only international immigration has prevented New York City from losing residents during its anemic post-COVID recovery.
With the migrant surge now over and international immigration likely to fall under the Trump administration, New York will almost certainly lose population in the coming yearly census estimates.
Even if Mamdani could enact all the tax increases he wanted, he'd still be limited by the fact that people and jobs are leaving his city. A big tax hike is no way to convince them to stay.
"If you live in New York and you are facing the prospect of a significantly larger income tax bill, Hoboken looks significantly more attractive," says Manish Bhatt of the Tax Foundation.
This is a situation a lot of America's legacy cities have faced lately. People are moving out and taking their tax dollars with them. Budgets are consequentially strained, leaving less money for standard progressive approaches to such urban issues as housing affordability, education quality, and crime.
The silver lining is that these grim fiscal and demographic realities give stridently left-wing politicians like Mamdani or Johnson a lot less room to enact their profligate, anti-market agenda.
Nevertheless, a silver lining is still just a lining.
The consequences of electing progressive ideologues might be limited by post-pandemic budget crunches, but they're still hardly the people one wants to be setting policy.
America's largest cities would benefit handsomely from lower taxes, less spending, more choice in government services, fewer regulations on where housing can be built, and what landlords are allowed to charge.
Mamdani's socialist revolution has already been defeated by fiscal reality. There's an outside chance that, if elected, he might focus on a few productive reforms. He seems savvy enough that he might avoid the political pitfalls that Brandon Johnson has stumbled into.
But actually overcoming New York's myriad problems will require a much different candidate.
