On the menu today: On paper, incoming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and outgoing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz don’t have much in common beyond being Democratic elected officials. But Walz, who announced yesterday that he was ending his campaign for a third term, has enjoyed the title Mamdani is enjoying right now — the status of being the Next Big Thing™ in Democratic Party politics. And the fact that it all came crashing down for Walz is a warning to the new mayor.
New York City’s New Mayor Should Take Heed
Zohran Mamdani has been on the job as mayor for six days, after being sworn in on a Koran and thanking “the man whose leadership I seek most to emulate, who I am so grateful to be sworn in by today — Senator Bernie Sanders.”
In that time, Mamdani has called President Trump to register his displeasure with the U.S. operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, contending it is “a violation of federal international law,” and revoked his predecessor Eric Adams’s decrees that restricted boycotts of Israel and prohibited mayoral appointees from issuing contracts “that discriminate against the State of Israel, Israeli citizens, or those associated.”
During a press conference Monday, Mamdani said he does not yet have a federal security clearance. “I’m in the process of applying for that clearance.” During that same press conference, Mamdani reiterated his “opposition to the use of dynamic pricing here for the soon-to-come World Cup.” (During the campaign, he pledged to make World Cup tickets more affordable, even though none of the games will be played in New York City; MetLife stadium is in East Rutherford, N.J.)
Mamdani has established a city “office of mass engagement” and created the office of “deputy mayor for economic justice.”
On the campaign trail, the mayor pledged free bus fares; on January 4, the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority went ahead with a previously approved hike in bus and subway fares from a minimum fare of $2.90 to $3.
Before January 1, the biggest thing that the 34-year-old Mamdani had ever run was a state assembly office and his own campaign. The New York State Assembly meets for 61 days per year in its legislative session, and the state pays assemblymen $142,000. Mamdani ran for reelection unopposed in 2022 and 2024.
The mayor of New York City oversees more than 306,000 employees, according to the last headcount — more than 143,000 employed by the city’s schools, more than 48,000 in the New York Police Department, more than 17,000 in the Fire Department of New York, and more than 10,000 in the sanitation department.
On any given day, the mayor must deal with a five-alarm fire, or traffic accident snarling a major artery into the city, or a racially charged police shooting, or a Wall Street downturn, or a bank robbery that turns into a hostage situation, or any of the other sudden crises that make up the typical plot of a CBS prime-time cop drama. God willing, the next four years will not bring a terrorist attack, but New York City obviously ranks among the world’s preeminent targets for terrorism.
As you likely recall, Mamdani campaigned on affordability in a city that has been one of the most expensive places to live in the entire country for most of its history. The state ranks dead last in tax competitiveness, and New York City residents already “enjoy” one of the highest tax burdens in the country. On January 1, the city’s minimum wage increased from $16.50 to $17 per hour. The city government has 152 union contracts that cover 95 percent of all city employees. The city provides health insurance coverage to employees, retirees, and dependents at no charge to them, costing $8 billion. For perspective, the entire city budget of San Diego last year was $5.82 billion.
In his inaugural address, Mamdani pledged to “make the words ‘City Hall’ synonymous with both resolve and results.”
The X personality known as the Coddled Affluent Professional observed a couple days ago that Mamdani is “an elite who spent his formative years loafing around, living in a million dollar Chelsea condo, with his life in NYC subsidized by his mother.”
It is possible that a year from now, Mamdani will indeed be widely seen as the radical revolutionary that his critics feared he would be, enacting policies that turn the city’s economic, legal, and political establishments upside down and alter the city permanently.
But it is just as likely that a year or two from now, Mamdani will be seen by his socialist or communist fan base as a giant disappointment, too easily distracted by the opportunity to weigh in on national and international issues and something of a dilettante, unprepared for the day-to-day work of running the city government. Managing the byzantine New York City government and dealing with the endless cavalcade of crises exhausts and dispirits even the most ambitious, striving men. Both of Mamdani’s most recent predecessors wore out their welcome quickly. Bill de Blasio grew sick of the job and decided to run for president. Eric Adams preferred the city’s nightlife.
You might doubt that Democrats could change their opinions of a figure like Zohran Mamdani so quickly; you could fairly contend that Democrats are too emotionally invested in the notion of Mamdani as the Next Big Thing™ in their party’s politics.
I would point to the recent history of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and how in the summer of 2024, Democrats talked themselves into believing that Walz was the Next Big Thing™.
I have been somewhat gleefully pointing out that the first thing I ever wrote about Walz, on July 29, 2024, was a declaration that he was extremely unlikely to be selected by Kamala Harris as her running mate because he was loaded with baggage from state government fraud scandals on his watch:
This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor. . . .
The dirty, not-so-little not-so-secret about Walz is that he’s not a good manager. On his watch, the Minnesota government has endured one embarrassing scandal after another entailing mismanagement, fraud, waste, and abuse. . . .
It’s not just that he’s a leftist. He’s an incompetent leftist.
Harris obviously did pick Walz; according to the former vice president’s memoir of her campaign, she and Walz just hit it off personally in a way that she did not with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. Walz was an unorthodox pick, drastically underqualified and likely riding a perfectly timed wave of buzz for calling President Trump and JD Vance “weird” on MSNBC. Those are terrible criteria for picking a running mate and potentially putting someone a heartbeat away from the presidency.
But Democrats in the summer of 2024 needed to believe that Walz was a dynamite pick, and as my colleague Brittany Bernstein laid out this week, the mainstream media played along:
In 2024, Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times, asking, “Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?” Another Times opinion article by journalist Sarah Smarsh declared “Tim Walz Is an Absolute Balm for My Country Heart,” and said, “the Minnesota governor fills a decades-long geographic messaging gap for the party.”
The Guardian said Walz “comes across as what he is: a straight-talking teacher, America’s youth football coach.” At the same time, the Associated Press declared, “It would be hard to find a more vivid representative of the American heartland than Walz.”
It was like the Tinkerbell scene in Peter Pan; if Democrats believed in Tim Walz hard enough, and clapped loudly enough, he would somehow rise to the occasion. Of course, he couldn’t. He was who he was, coasting on his alleged folksiness and handwaving away his inaccurate statements about his past by shrugging that he was a “knucklehead” sometimes. According to the post-campaign books, Walz was reportedly so nervous about his debate with Vance that he couldn’t eat, a sign that he himself recognized he was in over his head, further affirmed by that deer-in-the-headlights look on the debate stage.
A few weeks ago, I noted that Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor released the results of its audit of the offices of Governor Walz and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, covering the period from July 1, 2022, through December 31, 2024. The audit found that Walz’s office had a terrible record of keeping track of everything from receipts, timesheets, holiday, leave payments, inventory, reimbursements to employees and payments to vendors, and purchasing cards. Now, some might argue that stuff isn’t that important, but if you’re a governor, one of the few things you can absolutely control is how your own office operates. Republicans aren’t preventing Walz’s employees from filling out their time sheets correctly. Fox News isn’t stopping his employees from submitting receipts for expenses. Donald Trump isn’t messing around with the paperwork in Walz’s office.
Tim Walz and his top staff literally couldn’t take care of the basics, the sort of thing you probably do on a regular basis in your job. And if he and Lieutenant Governor Flanagan, now running for the U.S. Senate, couldn’t properly oversee their own office budgets, who could believe they had properly overseen the state budget?
Walz had been sold to the party and the country as something he was not; Harris’s book makes clear she found his debate performance infuriating and disappointing. Walz wasn’t the only reason Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, but he certainly didn’t help, not even in his home state. The Harris-Walz ticket performed worse in Minnesota in 2024 than the Biden-Harris ticket had performed in 2020.
During his vice-presidential campaign, Walz was halfway through his second term as governor. He could have easily announced he would not seek reelection and enjoyed the standard high-profile Democratic officeholder retirement package — the book deal, the part-time teaching gig at a university, the cable news contributor gig. Instead, Walz announced he would seek a third term — not completely unprecedented, but it hadn’t been done since the 1950s, and back then Minnesota governors were elected to two-year terms.
He started his reelection bid with a job approval of 47 percent, pretty “meh” for a Democratic governor in a traditionally heavily Democratic-leaning state. Minnesotans were evenly split on whether Walz should run for a third term. And then in the last few months, social media sleuths and a painfully detailed New York Times piece revealed that the state fraud scandals — you know, the first thing I ever wrote about regarding Walz, and that I thought was the most revealing aspect of his time as governor — were even bigger, more expensive, and more shameless than everyone thought.
Monday, Walz announced he would not be seeking a third term as governor. You must look far and wide to find any Democrat who’s all that sad about it; Minnesota Democrats are largely sighing with relief that they don’t have to try to drag his political deadweight across the finish line this year. This morning, the Washington Post editorial board — where I write a column but don’t contribute to editorials, in case you’re wondering — concluded, “Turns out being the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024 was the worst thing that ever happened to Walz’s political career. . . . Walz has insisted that he was focused all along on cleaning up fraud. If that’s true, he’s really bad at cleaning up fraud.”
In a bit more than a year, Tim Walz went from universally beloved by Democrats to a joke, widely perceived as hapless and hopeless.
So recognize that the clock is ticking, Mayor Mamdani.
ADDENDUM: From yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast:
Greg Corombos: Tim Walz, fading away. Kamala Harris, probably not running [in 2028]. Joe Biden, pretty much out of public life. Man, everybody who was on the national Democratic scene in 2024 pretty much heading to exit stage left.
Me: And in a couple years, Greg, they’re going to treat it like the fifth Die Hard movie. Didn’t happen. Doesn’t exist. Erased from history.