This article was featured in New York’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here.

It was a little more than 24 hours after Zohran Mamdani had declared victory in a thunderous speech at the Brooklyn Paramount — one in which he mocked Andrew Cuomo and lit into Donald Trump and all the forces of reaction that had kept New Yorkers paying too much for too little and in which he declared himself a proud Muslim, a proud immigrant, and a proud democratic socialist; quoted Eugene V. Debs and Jawaharlal Nehru; and spoke untranslated Arabic — that the newly minted mayor-elect was found wedged into an economy-class window seat on the 10:30 a.m. JetBlue flight from JFK to San Juan. Around him were Elle Bisgaard-Church, his closest aide, and two beefy members of his security detail.

The plane was filled with lobbyists, operatives, members of the City Council, and local political bosses, all clogging the aisle to greet Mamdani. The occasion was Somos, a conference that every year kicks off the morning after Election Day, bringing in the entire New York Democratic Establishment for five days of imbibing, schmoozing, and back-room deal-making on the beaches of Puerto Rico. Ostensibly designed to deepen the long-standing connections between New York and the island territory, it is the kind of event where aspiring members of Congress can be seen buttonholing politicos at the bar of the Caribe Hilton, hoping to land an endorsement; where high-ranking government officials are spotted stumblingly drunk at the end of an evening at the Fairmont El San Juan; where two lawmakers can be glimpsed grinding on the dance floor.

It was not surprising when, four years ago, Eric Adams arrived in San Juan on a private jet owned by Brock Pierce, the crypto tycoon and Mighty Ducks star. Mamdani’s attendance was a bit surprising, though. Some of his allies on the left have avoided Somos for its air of influence-peddling and insider networking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has never gone, and the coalition that helped Mamdani win the Democratic primary included almost no one who attends Somos, and Mamdani’s campaign did not announce that he was going until a few days prior.

Then again, it was not his first visit. He attended a year ago, when the mood was drown-your-sorrows-in-a-coquito grim. Kamala Harris had lost to Donald Trump in an election that saw even deep-blue New York City swing right, and Democrats fretted over the possibility that the party had drifted too far left to ever regain power. Mamdani, trying to launch a long-shot mayoral run from the left fringe, was willfully ignored, unable to get into receptions, and forced to plead with advocacy organizations for a meeting. He mostly hung around the stairs in the lobby, grabbing anyone who would talk.

“I was blending into the walls,” Mamdani told me at this year’s Somos. “My definition of success was getting on a panel.” We were sitting on a fire escape overlooking a dumpster-filled alley and a freeway beyond. It was the only place Mamdani could go to get away from the well-wishers clamoring for selfies, a throng so intense that he had taken to running through the halls just so he was more difficult to stop. A dedicated press corps followed his every move, and loud cheers erupted in every room he entered. He even brought his political-superhero act south with him: On the third day of the conference, he intervened to help secure a contract for workers at the hotel where the event was taking place.

As he soaked up the Establishment’s plaudits, though, he sent signals that his administration was going to be different. While in San Juan, Mamdani visited a mosque, where the female reporters had to wait outside and where the imam, with the mayor-elect in the second row, heralded during Friday prayers the change that Mamdani’s election meant for perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Once you start shifting and looking the other way, away from the billionaires and the trillionaires and the people that are controlling the media and the people that are controlling your day-to-day, how you live, you’re an outcast,” the imam said. “I see what’s coming down after 75 years of oppression.” Not standard fare at a gathering of political insiders.

Mamdani’s star wattage was so bright that Governor Kathy Hochul had planned to address a reception for a city-workers union by taking the stage in front of the ocean just as the sun was setting, but because Mamdani was delayed, she moved her speech back several hours into the nighttime. More galling still, Hochul was heckled by chants of “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” She had met with a similar chant when she rallied for Mamdani on the weekend before the election, but these weren’t lefty activists at a get-out-the-vote rally: This was a reception of lobbyists and government staffers — her people — adopting the language of the left to harangue the incumbent governor. “I hear you,” Hochul said before warning the crowd to knock it off. “I’m the type of person the more you push me, the less I’m going to do what you want.”

Now, nearly everywhere Mamdani went, he was introduced by Letitia James — the state attorney general who made his victory her central mission over the past few months — with a song: “Mammmmmdaaaaniiiii,” to the tune of “Volare.” At a private, no-media-allowed reception at Antiguo Casino, a century-old Beaux-Arts mansion in the heart of Old San Juan, James went even further, screaming into the microphone, her voice hoarse, her words echoing off the white marble walls: “We come here today to celebrate the movement that began with a young man with a bold vision for the City of New York, the mayor-elect who brought us all together, who brought out South Asians like never before, who brought out young people like never before, awakening the sleeping giant in the City of New York, joining the traditional Democratic base for a movement that will shake up New York City — Zohrannnnnn Mamdanniiiiiii!!”

As much as the political class swarmed Mamdani for photos when he was around, the politicians there (each of whom was singularly convinced that it was rightfully them who should have been mayor — or at least the shining star of the party) were less fawning in his absence: His early transition team was filled with too many retreads from the Bill de Blasio administration. His anti-Israel stance would mean that a large swath of the Democratic Party would never accede to his rise. He was hewing too close to the line of the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that played a leading role in getting him elected. He was getting high on his own supply, not listening to advice. He was woefully unprepared for what was coming his way.

The sniping certainly contained an element of envy, but it also reflected a deep uncertainty in New York’s governing class about what kind of city we were going to get under the new mayor. Would he surprise everyone, as he had when he was a candidate? Or was this the beginning of a disaster?

Mamdani decided to center his campaign on affordability rather than public safety at a meeting with his political advisers a year and a half ago in his living room. The campaign would focus on three big-ticket items, all of which feature the word free (or some variation of it). Those pledges were now so ingrained in voters’ minds that his supporters closed out his Election Night victory speech by chanting them back to him. Together, they were going to freeze the “rent!” They were going to make buses fast and “free!” And they were going to deliver free universal “child care!”

Eliminating bus fare is just an intermediate step in Mamdani’s larger agenda. His real goal is that New York become a less expensive place to live in four-to-eight years. It’s an astoundingly ambitious goal, but he is unshakable that it’s his central objective. “It is guided by that principle of, What can we do to bring down the cost of living?” he told me. “At the heart of affordability, at the heart of a focus on cost of living, is dignity. How can we ensure that dignity is a fact of life for working-class New Yorkers, right?”

I asked him and some of his advisers if there were cities that had pulled this off that New York could emulate, places that had managed to meaningfully lower the cost of living. None sprang to mind. Talk to policy experts, and they find the prospect laughable; the only cities where this has happened are ones where the quality of life dropped so dramatically that no one wanted to live there anymore.

Mamdani’s revolution, in this moment before he takes office, has two defining qualities. The first is the well-known movement-building skill of the man. Out of nowhere, he has become the center of the political universe in New York and redefined what is possible in American politics. The second is a certain sense of unreality — a tension between what he promises he will do and what the normal laws of political physics would seem to allow. It’s true of the big question: Can he really lower the cost of living in New York City? And it’s true of all the thousands of smaller ways in which he will attempt to do that and manage the city in the meantime. In our interviews, the mayor-elect conspicuously avoided acknowledging the kinds of basic trade-offs that are the DNA of the office he is about to assume. Does Mamdani want more affordable housing, or does he want affordable housing that is more expensive to build because it’s built with union labor? Does he want free infant–to–5-year-old child care, or does he want those child-care workers to be paid the $30 living wage he has proposed for the city? The answer is he wants both, he wants everything, he wants it all at once.

The two qualities — the scintillating political skill and the strangeness of a 34-year-old democratic socialist just a few years removed from a music career taking control and pledging enormous changes without meaningful compromise — exist side by side, and how they resolve will define Mamdani’s mayoralty. Can his combined charisma and talent bend the system in unlikely ways, as it did during the campaign, persuading doubters and opponents and creating win-win political solutions that other New York mayors weren’t ambitious or visionary enough to pursue? Can he harness the pragmatism and toughness he seems to possess and make good, smart policy, accept the necessary trade-offs, weather the political damage from them, and govern well anyway without being knocked off course? Or has he set a framework that is incompatible with the job — one in which, in trying to do too much while remaining bound by democratic-socialist ideology, he becomes ineffective, in which the policies look chaotic and undercooked and the........

© Daily Intelligencer