How the New York Mayoral Candidates Would Govern

For the past several months, Liena Zagare has been talking to almost every Democratic candidate for New York City mayor.

State Senator Zellnor Myrie, City Comptroller Brad Lander, State Senator Jessica Ramos, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, former comptroller Scott Stringer, and hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson all spoke with Zagare about their priorities and how they’d govern.

“Some candidates are treating City Hall as a platform for national messaging,” Zagare writes. “But cities aren’t governed in slogans. They’re managed in procurement meetings, budget negotiations, and late-night calls to overworked commissioners.”

Read what she learned about the candidates here.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

Six years ago, New York City adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV) for closed party primaries—the idea being that the new voting system would reveal the nominee who could best unify a party’s primary electorate.

But research shows that RCV doesn’t always work. For one thing, it often fails to produce a winner who earned a majority of all votes cast. And the average voter isn’t inclined to rank that many choices.

If the results of Tuesday’s Democratic primary wind up fracturing the party, the general election could also yield a splintered result. “Such a situation might build support for the current proposal from the city’s charter revision commission,” Jack Santucci writes, “which would overhaul the current system of mayoral elections.”

Read more about the proposal, and what it would mean for the city.

For those protesting ICE raids in Los Angeles earlier this month, mass deportations represent a threat not just to migrants, but to the economic fabric of the city. Indeed, unauthorized workers have long played a significant role in the labor market.

But, as Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam points out, if the “case for openness to low-skill immigration is that newcomers do the jobs that Americans won’t do, what happens when robots can do them instead?”

The real case for low-skill immigration, therefore, isn’t economic, Salam writes—it’s the cosmopolitan conviction that national borders are morally arbitrary.

Read his take on what automation will mean for the labor market in the years ahead, and how immigrants will fit into the new dynamic.

In his campaign for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has focused almost exclusively on the cost of living. His proposals—such as freezing the rent and opening city-owned grocery stores—are simplistic and imply that the mayor can solve “the ‘affordability crisis’ with a wave of the hand,” write Paul Dreyer and Christian Browne. Read their take on his policy ideas here.

New York’s fiscal crisis, which began in 1975 when banks stopped extending credit to cover the city’s deficits, still sparks debate 50 years later. Was it the banks’ fault for lending too much, or was it the city’s fault for borrowing beyond its means?

Nicole Gelinas and E. J. McMahon recently weighed in on the debate—and discussed a new documentary that features interviews with key figures from the crisis. You can read their conversation here.

In this episode, City Journal’s Charles Fain Lehman is joined by John Ketcham, Renu Mukherjee, and Jesse Arm to break down the latest from the NYC mayoral primary. They also weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti, what it means for free speech and state regulation, and how New Yorkers are navigating the heat and headlines.

“Newsom apparently asked his advisors and strategists what he could do to further mess up his political future. A wine-tasting in Napa was perfect.”

Photo credits: VINCENT ALBAN / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images