The City Politic: David Freedlander

Someone Has to Fold Inside the well-funded, likely doomed plan to stop Mamdani.

- The City Politic: David Freedlander

BEFORE LAUNCHING IN EARLY July what he promised would be an all-out effort, one he would see “through the end, to the final day,” to keep Zohran Mamdani from winning the mayor's office, Republican political megadonor John Catsimatidis had a phone call with the Democratic nominee himself.

“I said to him, ‘Look, you're a very nice guy and, you know, a very smart guy,” the 76-year-old billionaire owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain told me. “And he says to me, ‘Oh, when you get to know me, you might like me.” Catsimatidis had called me from D.C., where he was attending the Senate confirmation hearing for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s nomination as ambassador to his beloved Greece. “I try to be a very civilized person. I've hired company executives for 40, 50 years, and, you know, he’s a nice kid, but he’s 33 years old. He's not qualified. He’s a great debater and a great orator, but can he run the city?”

The fear that he cannot is shared by Establishment politicians, financiers, and real-estate developers, among others. It’s true that Mamdani would be the youngest mayor in a century. Most political and business elites are at best uncomfortable with the idea of turning the city's reins over to a democratic socialist whose leadership experience, prior to a scant three terms in the State Assembly, consists of co-founding the Bowdoin branch of Students for Justice in Palestine. The greater fear, however, may be that Mamdani could succeed in running the city how he's promised, which, in the eyes of the oligarchs, would mean letting criminals run as free as the buses, welcoming in terrorists, and garnishing Wall Street Christmas bonuses to fund collectivized farming.