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Ever since Zohran Mamdani’s upset win over Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral race, the corporate media has whipped itself into a frenzy poring over every detail of Mamdani’s upstart campaign and personal life. Less attention has been paid to another surprising turn of events: On July 19, Omar Fateh secured the endorsement of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in the Minneapolis mayoral race, beating out incumbent Jacob Frey.
The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) operates only in Minnesota, but it plays a major role as the de facto Democratic Party entity within the state. Its members, who hold membership in both the statewide DFL and in the national Democratic Party, control half the state’s seats in the House of Representatives, both Senate seats, the governorship, and numerous prominent state mayoralties. Fateh’s victory, then, is no less striking than Mamdani’s ability to seize the Democratic Party nomination in New York City. Frey is now planning to file an appeal with the DFL to reconsider its endorsement of Fateh, claiming that the process was marred by delays and technical difficulties. While Fateh led the DFL endorsement count after the first round of counting, with about 44 percent of the vote compared to Frey’s 31 percent, by the time the final vote was held, after extensive delays, Frey says many of his supporters had left the endorsement convention.
Though their establishment opponents have many tricks up their sleeves, these two democratic socialists both now have an excellent chance at becoming mayor-elects of two large U.S. cities come November. If elected, they’ll collectively be representing 9 million Americans, by far the largest population ever to be directly governed by socialist electeds in U.S. history. And, while these results are by no means guaranteed, it’s worth considering what Mamdani and Fateh may be able to do once they’re in office.
Unilateral Decisionmaking
As executives in the highest seat in citywide office, there are several things that both Mamdani and Fateh could do autonomously if elected. First, they would have the sole authority to appoint people to lead the various city agencies that run day-to-day business.
For Mamdani, making an early about-face from the comparatively conservative policies of the Eric Adams administration will be critical. This process will run, at least initially, though the appointments he makes to the administration. If Mamdani is elected, among the appointments to watch closely will be those he appoints to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), the body tasked with establishing rent increase guidelines for rent-stabilized units in New York City. Rent-stabilized units make up somewhere around 40 percent of all rental units available in the city, so a tenant-friendly RGB that upholds Mamdani’s promise to freeze rent hikes on rent-stabilized units would have an immediate and sizable impact on housing affordability in the city.
Like Mamdani, Fateh would also have broad latitude to make his own appointments if he is elected. Minneapolis, like New York, is in the throes of its own housing crisis, and Fateh’s platform is focused on preventing evictions and reducing sweeps of encampments of unhoused people. While Minneapolis does not currently have rent control — in fact, a measure to implement rent control in the city is opposed by Mayor Frey — the city does have advisory committees, including one on housing, that are partially filled by mayoral appointees. These committees make recommendations to the mayor and city council including anti-eviction and rent stabilization measures.
Beyond housing issues, both Mamdani and Fateh also ran on promises of moderating the increasing militarization of their cities’ police departments. Minneapolis is, of course, the site of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, which sparked a massive Black Lives Matter uprising that summer. The city is still roiled by racial inequities in policing. Fateh and Mamdani have both promised public safety reforms that deemphasize the use of force and build up mental health and neighborhood safety programs. Much of this change could flow from the appointment of reform-minded police commissioners, who could unilaterally reorder policing priorities.
Working With City Councils
Other parts of Fateh and Mamdani’s platforms would be difficult to execute without cooperation from the city councils of Minneapolis and New York. Here, both candidates could benefit from organizing efforts that preceded their campaigns for mayor. Both New York and Minneapolis have myriad members who are either outspoken democratic socialists or aligned with other progressive grassroots organizations.
In Minneapolis, the Minneapolis for the Many slate has won a number of seats on the city council for progressive-minded candidates. Members of that slate now occupy six of 13 total city council seats. Efforts to move the council left have already paid off: In 2023, the city council narrowly passed a motion that set the stage for advancing rent control to a citywide vote. However, Mayor Frey threatened to veto that motion, and no further progress has been made in instituting rent control in Minneapolis. Mayor Frey has had a contentious, veto-driven relationship with the current city council; if Fateh were to secure the mayoralty, it could open the floodgates to passage of a great deal of progressive legislation that is currently held at bay by Frey’s veto pen.
Parts of Fateh and Mamdani’s platforms would be difficult to execute without cooperation from the city councils of Minneapolis and New York.
If elected, Mamdani will also find himself with many allies on the city council, but with New York’s substantially larger population, the power of the council’s progressive bloc is somewhat more diluted. New York’s progressive caucus holds 18 out of 51 seats on the city council, and its members are not always in lockstep with one another on what constitutes progressive governing. This means that Mamdani and his allies could be forced to do a great deal more coalition building, rather than leveraging majority rule to push their agenda forward.
Like Frey, current New York mayor Eric Adams has vetoed some of the more progressive legislation that the city council has passed. Although his veto has been overridden at times, Adams remains as an obstacle to advancing progressive policy from within city council. With Mamdani in the mayor’s office, the city council would be able to more quickly advance changes to the cost of renting an apartment, how people with mental health crises are handled by the city, and child care opportunities.
Contending With National Politics
Some of Mamdani and Fateh’s policy priorities would also need approval even farther up the governmental food chain to become a reality. Two of Mamdani’s signature promises — to establish city-run grocery stores and institute free bus fare – would both need cooperation from New York’s state government to become a reality. This means that Mamdani would have to contend with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the more corporate-friendly strain of Democratic Party thinking that she represents.
Since Mamdani’s win in June, Hochul has not offered much toward him in the way of conciliation. “Obviously, there’s areas of difference in our positions, but I also think we need to have those conversations,” she said in an interview shortly after Mamdani’s primary victory. She has also played into the idea that Mamdani’s candidacy has somehow threatened New York City’s Jewish community, despite Mamdani’s overt rejection of antisemitism in public statements. Mamdani was also polling second with Jewish New Yorkers in the weeks before the election and cross-endorsed with his fellow mayoral candidate Brad Lander, who is Jewish. None of this has been enough to stop Hochul from parroting talking points from right-wing media, which has also trafficked in red-baiting and anti-Muslim racism to undermine Mamdani’s candidacy.
Whether Mamdani and Fateh encounter resistance from within their own party will tell us a great deal about the extent to which the Democratic Party is ready to incorporate its progressive wing into its big tent.
Nevertheless, if Mamdani is elected, the two will have to find ways to work together or face the spectacle of public dysfunction between the Democratic governor of one of the nation’s biggest states and the Democratic mayor of its biggest city. At a time when the Democratic Party is at pains to prove that it can serve as a reasonable and effective counterpoint to Trumpism, outward rancor between two of New York’s most prominent Democrats would be a disaster for the party’s image. In this role, Mamdani could resort to the bully pulpit that being mayor of New York City affords him to wage a PR war against Hochul and any attempts by Albany to meddle in his policymaking.
Fateh could have an easier time reconciling national political trends with his agenda as mayor of Minneapolis. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, spent a few months in the national spotlight in 2024 as the running mate of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Walz is currently in a period of public deliberation around whether he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. If he does, he’ll likely run as a pragmatic, populist-leaning progressive, as he positioned himself during his stint as the vice presidential nominee. If Fateh is elected, Walz would likely grasp that demonstrating a productive working relationship with the young, progressive mayor of his state’s largest city would be a critical component of maintaining this image. So, if Fateh called the governor’s mansion for help in increasing the statewide minimum wage, for example, he might find a more sympathetic ear than Mamdani.
If both Fateh and Mamdani succeed in capturing the mayoralty in November’s general elections, their early tenures as mayor could be fraught on two fronts. First, democratic socialists have had few opportunities to govern directly from executive roles, and members of the Democratic Party’s more conservative faction, not to mention the entire American right-wing, would be rooting for their brand of progressive policymaking to fail. With their mayoralties under a microscope, every misstep would be judged unforgivingly.
Second, though, whether Mamdani and Fateh encounter resistance from within their own party will tell us a great deal about the extent to which the Democratic Party is ready to incorporate its progressive wing into its big tent. The party has struggled mightily to rehabilitate its image after its bruising 2024 loss to Donald Trump, and candidates like Mamdani and Fateh might offer the quickest route back to relevance. Whether the party’s donor class can hold its nose and embrace their left-wing politics is still an open question.
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