The 2025 New York mayoral election is happening at a time when the city’s political system is breaking apart under the weight of its own contradictions. The usual party machinery has faltered, the incumbent mayor is mired in scandal, the old establishment figures are circling for one more shot at power, and the voters are being asked to choose between more of the same dysfunction or something radically different. That “something different” is Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, a state legislator, and in every sense of the word, an outlier.
To understand why his candidacy matters, you have to realise that the Mayor of New York has far greater executive power than his London counterpart, managing schools, police, housing, and a city budget larger than many nations. He oversees the entire city, including the police, public transport, sanitation, education budgets, and emergency services. He is responsible for a population of over eight million people and a budget that exceeds that of some countries. The person who holds this office shapes the everyday lives of New Yorkers more directly than almost any national leader. In this race, then, you are not looking at a symbolic protest vote or a media stunt; you are looking at a potential reshaping of urban governance in one of the world’s most watched cities.
Mamdani is running in a landscape that has already been shattered. The current mayor, Eric Adams, elected on a law-and-order platform in 2021, has been under federal investigation for corruption, including alleged foreign campaign donations and misuse of office. Though charges were dropped under questionable political conditions, the damage to his credibility and to the office of mayor is done. His withdrawal from the Democratic primary didn’t come with accountability or reflection, just a last-minute independent run that collapsed soon after.
His replacement in the mainstream Democratic camp is former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was driven out of office in 2021 over multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power. He has returned now under a new “independent” party banner, claiming redemption but bringing the same network of donor-class influence, party discipline, and insider politics that made him governor in the first place. His candidacy is less a comeback than a reminder of how few rules exist for the political elite in America, and how broken the party system has become if a disgraced governor can immediately reposition himself as the adult in the room.
On the Republican side, the candidate is Curtis Sliwa, who has not held public office but remains a media figure and founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group. His candidacy does not reflect any viable Republican base in New York; it simply rounds out the list of names on the ballot. The real contest is between Mamdani and Cuomo, though the establishment would prefer it be framed otherwise.
Mamdani’s platform is openly confrontational to the assumptions that have governed New York for decades. He wants to make public buses free, establish city-owned grocery stores to address price-gouging and food access, freeze rents on stabilised housing, expand childcare, and increase taxes on corporations and high earners. He does not position these ideas as utopian or symbolic. He argues they are functional responses to a city in material decline. The issue for many voters is not whether they agree with the ideals, it’s whether they believe any of it can be funded, managed, and sustained without collapsing under its own ambition.
That is where the opposition to Mamdani has been focused. Business leaders and finance figures have accused him of economic recklessness. Political opponents, particularly Trump-aligned Republicans, have gone further, labelling him a radical, invoking fear of extremism, and recycling post-9/11 imagery to suggest he poses a threat to national security. Even more centrist critics argue that his earlier statements against the police disqualify him from leadership, despite the fact he has since walked back those comments and outlined a more nuanced position on policing.
Mamdani’s response to these attacks has not been to apologise into oblivion. He has clarified, adjusted, and then kept going. He has held interviews on networks like Fox News not to win them over, but to confront them directly. He has released detailed policy outlines to address criticisms of vagueness. He has even met with business leaders to explain his tax plans. Whether these moves signal pragmatism or political repositioning is debated, but the effect is clear: he is not running to make a point, he is running to win.
This election is not just a test of whether New York is ready for a socialist mayor. It is a test of whether the party system has lost so much credibility that a candidate outside of it can offer something more coherent. In Britain, the lesson is not that we should adopt his policies, but that we should study what happens when political decay becomes so visible that a candidate like Mamdani, with almost no establishment backing and constant attacks from both right and centre, can become the front-runner. The fact that Cuomo is still seen by some as a safe pair of hands says more about the system’s desperation than Mamdani’s threat to it.
Mamdani’s campaign is forcing a reckoning with how cities are governed, who they are governed for, and what legitimacy looks like in a broken system. If he wins, he will face an entrenched bureaucracy, a hostile press, and likely sabotage from within city agencies. If he loses, it will be because the city was too afraid to break its habits, even when those habits have clearly failed. Either way, his candidacy is not a blip. It is the logical result of years of crisis, corruption, and policy drift.
For British observers, this is a reminder that when political systems collapse, they do not always produce revolutionaries. Sometimes they just create space for someone who points out, clearly and without apology, that the old way no longer works, and then forces everyone to decide whether they will cling to it anyway. Mamdani is not the protest vote in this election. He is the functional candidate in a field full of decay. That makes him both the outlier and the most serious contender on the ballot.