It’s Been 100 Days. How’s Mamdani Doing?

The mayor touts progress while scaling back his signature pledges.

Courtesy Matthew Hoen/NurPhoto via Getty Images

On Sunday evening, Zohran Mamdani held a rally in Queens to mark his first 100 days as mayor of New York City. At the event, Mamdani rattled off a series of small-bore accomplishments— and downplayed his major campaign promises. It was the continuation of a broader trend: Mamdani paired small, performative gestures accompanied by big announcements with questionable judgement about the city’s budget and economy.

With supporters and city employees surrounding him and waving signs reading “Pothole Politics” and “N.Y.C. Groceries,” Mamdani began by casting his first months in office as a success story.

“With what we’ve accomplished in 14 weeks,” he said, “imagine what we can do together in four years.”

“Accomplishments” typically mean tasks already completed. But for Mamdani, it apparently means what he’s announced. Take childcare: “We began with a promise: Universal childcare. And by day eight, we delivered it,” he said.

Parents listening may have wondered whether they missed the memo. Mamdani has not delivered universal childcare. He secured $1.2 billion from Governor Kathy Hochul to fund childcare for roughly 2,000 children in four lower-income neighborhoods beginning this fall. He anticipates the program will grow to 12,000 children by fall 2027. But if the city’s botched 3-K for All program is any guide, parents have reason to be skeptical before counting on the mayor’s promise of a seat.

Mamdani’s most memorable campaign promise—freeze the rent—has also now suddenly transformed. “I am proud of the six new members I appointed to that independent board,” he said of the Rent Guidelines Board, which determines rent increases on rent-stabilized units, “and I look forward to the decision they will come to in just a few short months.”

The mayor seems to have learned that the board is legally required to make its decisions based on a range of factors, including operating costs and tax increases—something City Journal readers have known for nine months. He has toned down the rhetoric because he’s rightly afraid of a strong legal challenge to his freeze-the-rent pledge.

Mamdani also touted his supposed public-safety gains. There have been real gains in some crime categories, but they’ve come because Mamdani has backtracked from his pledges to end homeless sweeps and has allowed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to continue doing what works. He has embraced the optics of order, in other words, while relying on the policing approach he repeatedly derided on the campaign trail.

But not all is well on the public-safety front. Felony assaults are up nearly 50 percent since 2019 and are now at 1998 levels, even as homicides have fallen to historic lows. The Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas has shown that subway violence has risen significantly during Mamdani’s term so far.

Saturday’s triple stabbing in Grand Central’s subway station is a grim reminder of what the summer crime season may bring. The mentally disturbed assailant was ultimately stopped only after a police officer on overtime duty shot him when he refused repeated orders to drop his machete. Mamdani, meanwhile, is trying to curb police overtime costs.

The mayor also leaned into “pothole politics,” asking: “How can we promise to transform our city if we can’t pave your street?” He celebrated filling more than 102,000 potholes since January.

While that is more potholes than were filled during the last several years of fairly mild winters, it also represents a return to historical norms. In 2011, the Bloomberg administration filled over 400,000 potholes, even as it had about 750 fewer workers and $200 to $300 million less in inflation-adjusted funding.

Filling potholes and addressing other basic functions of government is good, and for that Mamdani deserves credit. But there are many reasons to be concerned that the mayor and his administration won’t get the big things right. The city’s economy is softening rapidly, and his proposed tax increases would only give high earners and firms more reason to expand somewhere other than Gotham.

Mamdani also doubled down on his democratic-socialist brand by invoking “sewer socialism”—a reference to early 20th-century socialist mayors such as Milwaukee’s Daniel Hoan. Try as he might to tie himself to this legacy, Mamdani still has much to prove before he can earn the comparison. Hoan, whom Mamdani has mentioned as a model, earned his reputation by building durable infrastructure, increasing government capacity, and delivering services efficiently and at scale.

By contrast, Mamdani is celebrating “making good” on his promise to build five publicly owned grocery stores in four years, backed by what will likely amount to hundreds of millions of public dollars. The first one announced will open in East Harlem by 2029, at a cost of $30 million, over three times the typical cost to build out a private supermarket. That’s hardly comparable to building major infrastructure, especially in a city that has about 11,500 grocery stores operating on thin margins.

As the liberal commentator Matt Yglesias wrote last year, the sewer socialists’ pragmatism stood in contrast to the ideological wing of the socialist movement that wished to defeat capitalism. Mamdani seems intent on straddling both camps, speaking the language of managerial competence while indulging the impulses of redistribution and class antagonism.

He certainly hasn’t pruned his ideological zeal. The loudest cheers at the rally came not in response to his accomplishments or even his promises, but from his call to tax the rich. For his base, taxation isn’t about delivering quality public services at reasonable cost. They wish to punish their least-favored class.

There’s another reason Mamdani can’t claim the competent “sewer socialist” mantle. As Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam has pointed out, Milwaukee’s socialists a century ago did not contend with public-sector collective bargaining. They thus had a much freer hand to govern the public workforce, and their fiscal constraints forced prioritization.

So far, Mamdani has shown little appetite for taking on these entrenched interests. New York’s labor costs make up about half of the municipal budget, but Mamdani is not seeking significant labor savings in his attempt to balance the budget. He has only begrudgingly signaled, for example, that he would ask the state to delay its mandate to reduce class sizes—a policy that functions largely as a full-employment program for the city’s teachers’ union.

Governing New York City requires making hard tradeoffs. So far Mamdani seems to prefer the illusion that small gestures and big announcements can wave away the city’s problems. Record-breaking rents suggest that, in reality, he’s falling further behind his central promise to make the city more affordable.

The first 100 days suggest a mayor comfortable performing his part. He has about 1,300 left to deliver real results.