Zohran Mamdani Is Showing Democrats How to Govern
Personnel is policy, and there are a lot more good picks around these days.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani only took office Jan. 1, but he clearly intends to govern with alacrity. He began by immediately rescinding every one of his predecessor Eric Adams’s executive orders issued after he was indicted for corruption, defusing several potential policy land mines at a stroke. Mamdani has already gotten New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s support for a large increase in funding for free childcare, something that former Mayor Bill de Blasio had to fight for months to achieve.
And Mamdani personally helped shovel asphalt for a fix of the infamous bump on the Williamsburg bridge bike lane – admittedly a bit of a stunt, but one indicating an intent to just wade in and get things done.
These early successes – both in his initial governance and in his shocking come-from-behind victories in the primary and general election – are reflective of Mamdani’s approach to staffing, which takes a morally inflected, yet pragmatic approach to the Democratic Party coalition. He prizes competence, ideology, and personal loyalty to roughly equal degrees, and while it would be far too early to pass judgment on his entire mayoralty, the initial results are promising.
On the one hand, as David Dayen writes at The American Prospect, there are several prominent former Biden administration officials who have worked for Mamdani. Former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan served on his transition team, Khan’s former deputy Sam Levine is leading the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, and former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su has taken a position as deputy major for economic justice.
This sounds rather surprising on two levels: Here’s a democratic socialist hiring people who not only worked for Joe “Senator from MBNA” Biden, but also former presidential administration members working for a municipal government, which would seem to be a downgrade in status. But it makes some sense – if you’re a serious liberal or progressive who wants to rack up some policy victories while Donald Trump is in office, and these folks certainly are, Mamdani is one of only a few games in town.
This makes for quite a contrast with Bernie Sanders’s previous political campaigns. Sanders tended to prioritize professed ideology and loyalty, and therefore hire trusted outsiders with not very much experience. This is understandable, as Sanders was out in the political wilderness for decades, and he didn’t have anything like, say, Hillary Clinton’s connections to the DC expert world.
But the result is that a fair number of former Sanders allies or staffers have turned out to be MAGA turncoats, cranks, or washed out of politics altogether. Most notably, Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee to support Sanders in 2016, is now Trump’s director of national intelligence. A number of other Sanders 2016 staffers led by Nick Brana formed the “People’s Party” – a sectarian groupuscule heavily shot through with LaRouchite conspiracy theories – which failed to convince Sanders to run on a third party ticket in 2020. Brana ended up as a high-level staffer in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign in 2024. Sanders’s 2020 press secretary Briahna Joy Gray is now a contrarian podcaster.
Now, it isn’t exactly fair to compare political allies to top-level staffers, and most of Sanders’s top staffers have kept fighting the good fight, like Faiz Shakir and Chuck Rocha. But the story still tends to indicate Sanders attracted a certain cohort of low-trust populists without a firm commitment to social democratic policies.
That said, in other areas Mamdani’s approach resembles Sanders or Elizabeth Warren more than Biden. While Biden was happy to hire some progressives in a few key areas, he also didn’t do so consistently. His first chief of staff, Ron Klain, worked effectively with the left, which was a core reason why Biden got so much good stuff done domestically. But Biden’s second chief of staff, Jeff Zientz, was a wealthy former financier with no such interest in bridge-building, and unsurprisingly produced mediocre results.
In foreign policy, Biden hired many more traditional members of the DC Blob, like former Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, former Obama staffer Antony Blinken as secretary of state, and even Brett McGurk, who helped run the occupation of Iraq under George W. Bush, as the National Security Council member in charge of the Middle East.
Mamdani, by contrast, has hired his fair share of lefties he can trust, like his chief of staff Elle Bisgaard-Church, who has been with him for years in Albany and is also a Democratic Socialists of America member, or chief climate officer Louise Yeung, who served former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in a similar capacity.
But once again, this reflects Mamdani’s focus on competence as well as politics. Biden, Sullivan, Blinken, and McGurk did tremendous damage to both Biden’s presidential legacy and American strategic interests by backing the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It made the US an egregious hypocrite, thereby undermining Biden’s support for arming Ukraine, and badly split the Democratic base during the 2024 campaign. These men were incompetent in addition to morally abhorrent.
At any rate, in some ways Mamdani is the beneficiary of how the Democratic staffing class has evolved over the years. Obviously he deserves much credit for making good hires, but the bench of available selections has grown greatly over the last decade, for which both Sanders and Biden deserve some credit. Sanders proved that leftist ideas could attract wide support in a Democratic presidential primary, while Biden proved they could work in practice, at least when he tried.
Indeed, in prior ages, former administration officials wouldn’t even be available to work for the New York government. Those who served under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama tended to spend their time out of office cashing in working for the industries they used to oversee. If there ever is a future Democratic presidential administration, they should reward the people who kept their nose to the government grindstone rather than wallowing in some no-show private equity gig for four years.
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the American Prospect, and the author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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He really is a beacon of hope for the US
Beg to differ on the shoveling asphalt being performative. It shows he doesn’t see himself as above the city workers. I used to do janitorial jobs when I managed a business. It let my staff know I didn’t see myself as too good or important to do the things I asked them to do. It builds incredible loyalty.