In a recent video recapping his primary victory in Queens, Zohran Mamdani did something almost radical for today’s political landscape: he cut through the usual Beltway euphemisms and mapped out the varied, living elements of the coalition that won.
Most postmortems stay tangled in polite code. We get anxious talk of “electability,” “swing voters,” whether the left is “too extreme.” It’s what my Money on the Left colleague Billy Saas calls “rhetorical red tape” — language that sounds prudent while quietly narrowing what’s imaginable.
Mamdani’s video blew right past that. Instead of treating voters like abstract blocs, he named them: South Asian neighborhoods in City Line, Ozone Park, and Jamaica Hills; Latino communities in Corona, Washington Heights, and Woodhaven; many of the same Chinese voters who had turned out for Trump in Flushing, Chinatown, and Bensonhurst; and young Black New Yorkers in places like Harlem and Flatbush. It wasn’t just sharper. It was an inviting kind of specificity — the sort that gives others something to riff on, remix, and grow. A coalition rendered in flexible detail, practically begging for more hands to join and expand it.
He even zoomed in on remarkable local swings: Brighton Beach, which had gone for Trump by 44 points, flipped to Mamdani by 16. College Point, a plus-11 Trump neighborhood, swung eight points to his campaign. They flipped Crown Heights by 45 points, North Corona by 33, and Jamaica by a staggering 57. It all added up to a mosaic that conventional wisdom — and most turnout models — completely missed.
The fiscal conversation needs this same generosity
So why do our fiscal debates still drown in stale, cautious language? We hear more red tape: “How will you pay for it?” “What if taxpayers flee?” “Is this fiscally responsible?” It’s all carefully coded to sound like common sense while discouraging deeper questions or bolder plans.
But what if we approached local financing like Mamdani approached his voter coalition? What if, instead of defaulting to old tropes about budgets and bond markets, we laid out the city’s diverse, adaptable capacities — in vivid, participatory detail?
Imagine short videos or posts that show:
- The 30 million square feet of city-owned buildings that could be reshaped into clinics, childcare centers, or climate hubs.
- Parks Department crews and gear, already skilled, open to new kinds of neighborhood care.
- The Health + Hospitals system, sturdy yet brimming with potential under local fiscal tools.
- Thousands of underemployed youth who could be hired to green roofs, retrofit apartments, care for elders — whatever we dream up together.
Once you see it, the question stops being “Can we afford it?” and becomes “Why aren’t we weaving this into something more ambitious?” It shifts from a cage of prudence to a field of possibilities. It arms neighbors, tenants, unions — anyone paying attention — with the raw materials to start sketching their own expansions.
Meanwhile, the right is already doing this — in covert, coercive ways
Look at Trump’s ICE expansion plan. It’s not some hazy threat; it’s meticulously mapped out: $50 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents, embed local economies in raids and removals. But notice — it’s never presented that way. There’s no campaign video laying out who stands to benefit or inviting communities to shape how these resources will be used.
Instead, it’s done by stealth and indirection, quietly tying economic relief for some to the growth of a modern gestapo. It manipulates public opinion not by openly building coalitional power, but by splintering it — making certain towns materially reliant on policing and detention, so that backlash fractures into local self-interest.
It’s a deeply demobilizing and disempowering use of fiscal power, designed precisely to prevent the kind of open, participatory strategizing that Mamdani’s coalition breakdown encourages. Where his approach lays out possibilities that anyone can join and reshape, Trump’s operates by backdoor compulsion — binding jobs and budgets to cruelty, without ever saying so outright.
A blueprint for Trump-proofing — and New York Times-proofing — New York City
That’s why Mamdani’s style of vivid coalition storytelling hints at something urgent. Imagine if his next video did for the city’s fiscal fabric what he just did for his voter base: named it, mapped it, showed how easily it could be recombined into new forms of shared work and care.
So when Albany, billionaires, or Trump try to choke off funds, New Yorkers don’t flinch. They’ve already seen what’s abundantly available in their neighborhoods — and they’re halfway to figuring out how to link it up through Blue Bonds, local payroll guarantees, or municipal swap lines.
It’s a way to Trump-proof the city, by showing we’re not stuck waiting on federal mercy to pay ourselves to do work we’re more than capable of staging together in countless ways. And it’s a way to NYT-proof the city, undercutting the familiar hand-wringing that usually sets in when local projects run up against manufactured crises. This is what Money on the Left has argued all along: money isn’t some distant pool of permission. It’s a means of weaving together the diverse, often overlooked capacities we already provision for each other. But that’s not just a technical point. It’s an invitation to cut through the old cautious scripts and replace them with stories so textured, so flexible, so participato