Mamdani’s campaign, like La Guardia’s, has emerged out of a period of public upheaval in New York City and across the country. The last few months have seen massive marches protesting the Trump administration; the last two years, countless demonstrations against the war on Gaza. Although in many ways the city’s labor movement remains more quiescent than it should be, the Amazon union election victory on Staten Island, the Starbucks organizing drive, the academic labor movement, and organizing campaigns at quirky retail outlets (the Strand, gaming stores, REI) have all provided a jolt of energy. Meanwhile, the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America—which over the past seven years helped get Mamdani and five other socialists into the state legislature, and more recently played a pivotal role in Mamdani’s primary campaign —has provided a steady organizing presence. All this has created a political culture in which today’s Democratic establishment—which, as in Tammany days, expects a supine working class easily bought off with symbols and favors—cannot run the city, or even its own party, unchallenged.
ONCE LA GUARDIA TOOK OFFICE in 1934, he embarked on a remarkable expansion of the city’s physical and social infrastructure, building schools, zoos, playgrounds, health centers, highways, tunnels, an airport, City Center, and the glorious swimming pools that help New Yorkers cool down in the summers even today. He quickly moved to establish the New York City Housing Authority, the first public housing authority in the country, which would come to build and administer thousands of units of low-income housing. La Guardia pressed for more public relief, rent control, low-cost transit, and efficient, effective public services available to all; he passed a 2% sales tax increase to give the city more room to maneuver financially. He modernized and professionalized the city’s civil service, opening it to the children of immigrants who had previously been shut out—the Italian and Jewish “Depression geniuses,” as they would later become known.
All of this was intrinsically linked to his love of the city itself and his ability to tap into its frenetic energy, showing up at a fire here, a concert there, a relief office the day after. As historian Mason Williams has shown in his 2013 book City of Ambition, this ubiquitous presence, along with the public works he sponsored, helped La Guardia expand his base, in particular mobilizing working-class Black and Jewish voters, and in 1937 he won re-election with a resounding majority. Mamdani’s well-publicized social media efforts—diving into the ocean at Coney Island, walking the length of Manhattan, popping up in Morningside Heights to denounce the kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil—have demonstrated the continued power of such efforts, which in the 1930s as today create the effect of a public servant channeling or even becoming the city.