Zohran Mamdani’s Win Prompted a Complete Freak-out Among NYC’s Power Brokers

Within 24 hours of Zohran Mamdani’’s Democratic-primary win, New York City’s ruling class was engaged in a collective freak-out. “The sky is falling, feels like the vibe,” an adviser to one billionaire told me on June 25, as the city awoke to the likely prospect of a 33-year-old socialist mayor. By lunch that day, the Partnership for New York City, a group made up of CEOs, big landlords, and other people who think they own the city, was throwing together an emergency Zoom meeting. With rare uniformity, these interests had coalesced in the primary to support and fund Andrew Cuomo’s muscle-car campaign. Now their chosen vehicle was wrecked, and they were desperately looking for another ride.

It was not so much Mamdani’s specific proposals that seemed so objectionable: A stabilized rent freeze would hurt some landlords but not others; free bus service was something Michael Bloomberg once tried to implement; tax increases on the wealthy could be killed off in Albany. But the city’s financial and political elites — a group often referred to collectively as “the machers” — are used to being able to dictate the course of events, either via direct monetary transactions or the more amorphous influence of consultants and discourse-defining civic groups. Mamdani ran against those people and their system as much as he campaigned to defeat Cuomo. A political whisperer I know — one of those expensive consultants who understands the city — told me a billionaire had called her up wondering what to do next. She thought to herself, What do you think your options are? You are obviously not in control.

It was a humiliating new reality: What is a macher who can’t make things happen? After spending a couple of days united in horror, they all began to fragment into camps, splitting up as they considered potential plans of action. Option No. 1 was to stick with Cuomo, who had prepared by setting up a third-party ballot line for the general election — a course his father took back in 1977 — and who spent the days after his landslide loss musing about his next steps, choosing to ignore the legal deadline to withdraw his name from the ballot. His backers circulated a poll that showed Cuomo tied with Mamdani in a four-way general-election race with incumbent Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. Of course, polls had also shown him winning the primary and it was hard for even his most die-hard supporters to see how they could shovel any more money to a candidate who squandered some $30 million in a blowout.

This meant Adams, despite his dubiously dismissed indictment and his Trump collaboration and his record-low job-approval rating, was getting a second look.

What were his alleged sins, again? Free upgrades? At least he took their calls and advertised his openness to doing business in his “City of Yes.” The night after the primary, a group of major donors, including hedge-fund manager Dan Loeb, reportedly convened to hear Adams make his comeback pitch. (Earlier that day, Loeb had taken to X to declare it “officially hot commie summer,” seemingly oblivious that he might as well have been writing ad copy for Mamdani.) “There are definitely people in the real-estate world who have convinced themselves that this was a fluke and Eric Adams can be resuscitated with $100 million,” one adviser to a former mayor told me. “A mass psychosis has taken hold, and that is what they believe.”

Real-estate developer Scott Rechler has called on his industry to resist Mamdani and rally around a centrist candidate who “could energize the broader New Yorkers out there to look at his extreme ideology and commentary on Israel and the antisemitic undertones of some of his statements.” Rechler disavowed speculation that he may want to be that candidate himself and said he is considering backing Adams. “He’s good at retail politics,” Rechler said. “Some of the management issues, hopefully those were learning lessons.”

In text chains and on social media, some players tried to draw up triple bank shots. Could Cuomo hand over his line to someone like NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch, who could draw on her family hotel fortune? (She has shown no interest in running.) Could Sliwa, the talk-radio vigilante and Republican nominee, be bribed or bullied into making way for someone more viable? A rumor made the rounds that John Catsimatidis, the grocery magnate who owns WABC — the radio station from which Sliwa took a hiatus to run — had offered the nominee $2 million to vacate the GOP party line (which technically may require him to move out of the city). Catsimatidis denied it to me, but he said that Sliwa “has a contract with WABC forever” and “has to do what’s right for him,” stressing the importance of finding someone strong enough to beat Mamdani. “The one thing that 95 percent of the people I talk to agree on is that this ‘Z-man’ doesn’t have the capability of being mayor,” Catsimatidis said. (Sliwa has vowed to stay in the race “unless they figure out a way to put me in a pine box.”)

In a missive on X, hedge-fund blowhard Bill Ackman proposed his own galaxy-brain idea: a write-in campaign, which would be simple if only “a superhero” stepped forward. And if fighting failed, he raised a second option: flight. Ackman calculated that if “100 or so of the highest taxpayers in my industry” were to move, it would cost the city billions in tax revenue. The power of blackmail, though, has been diminished by repetition. The super-wealthy bluffed about fleeing the city following Bill de Blasio’s election in 2013 and again during the COVID pandemic. But they keep sticking around, and the city is flusher than ever with tax revenue. For all the talk of a millionaire exodus, personal-income-tax collections have increased without significant interruption since the pandemic. This year, they are projected to surpass $18 billion, double the amount of income tax collected during the last year of Bloomberg’s tenure.

“The business community freaks out about everything,” says one macher who was with Cuomo in the primary but sounded as if he was edging cautiously in the direction of a third camp — those who favor conciliation with Mamdani. “Many of them are purely transactional. They’re going to suck up to whoever is in there.” The real-estate industry, which can’t pick up and move its buildings elsewhere, has to cut deals with City Hall no matter who occupies it, and the math at the moment suggests that Mamdani will be moving in whether they like it or not. Real-estate people are particularly terrified by Mamdani’s “freeze the rent” policy, which they contend will devastate the owners of rent-stabilized buildings, which are already plummeting in value. But the realistic ones recognize the power of the message and the undeniable talent of the messenger.

“The election was, in a way, a huge virtue signal to young people around the country that New York is still the place to come to,” says Ken Fisher, a former city councilman from Brooklyn who is now a land-use lawyer. When I called Fisher two days after the election, he was just logging off what he described as a “cathartic” Zoom call with a group of friends in politics and business who were coming to grips with the idea of Mayor Mamdani. Maybe, as rumored, he would bring Brad Lander in as his deputy. Maybe he would move to the center and cool it with the anti-Zionist rhetoric. Maybe he wasn’t the end of New York. “When I talk about a spectrum, it’s where people are on the stages of grief,” Fisher said. “They’ve gone through denial, anger. Some of them have moved on to bargaining. Not too many of them are in acceptance — but some.”