... But when Mamdani enters office on January 1, 2026, how much of his ambitious agenda can he plausibly enact?

“The New York City mayor does have a lot of power,” Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in Manhattan, told TMD. While the city’s government is a strong mayor system—with the mayor choosing a broad range of city appointees including police commissioner, fire commissioner, school chancellor, and transportation commissioner—Bloom noted that the mayor’s power is restrained by the 51-member city council in the normal work of things like approving an annual budget.

Not only could that process prove challenging, but Mamdani’s sweeping platform will also need the backing of the New York state government. “The first challenge in reviewing Mamdani’s platform is the extent to which he’s relying [on] pretty expansive permission coming from Albany,” Ken Girardin, a Manhattan Institute fellow and former aide in the New York State Legislature, told TMD.

For example, Mamdani plans to increase both the income tax on the top 1 percent of earners and the corporate tax, which he claims would raise $9 billion to fund his various affordability initiatives. But both tax increases would have to be done at the state level and—as The Dispatch’s David Drucker has reported—there’s skepticism that Mamdani can successfully persuade the Legislature to approve the hikes.

Mamdani would pay for the free stuff he’s offering by taxing the so-called rich. But under state law, New York City cannot raise the city income tax without Albany signing off, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat up for reelection in 2026, is promising to oppose tax hikes on Big Apple residents regardless of how much money they earn. Her stance is partly a product of not wanting mobile, wealthy professionals to abandon the city for lower tax climes.

It’s a commitment the Hochul administration highlighted Monday, responding to an inquiry from The Dispatch by pointing to the governor’s remarks during a late June news conference. “I have said that I will not raise income taxes on the people of our state. I’m focused on affordability, and raising taxes on anyone does not accomplish that. I’m just making sure that people who create jobs will stay here so we can have good-paying jobs,” Hochul said.

Richard Briffault, a state and local government expert at Columbia Law School, told TMD that though the tax increases would only apply to city residents, they would have “a broader impact” on the state at large. In 2023, New York City accounted for nearly 60 percent of the state’s gross domestic product, and if “businesses leave, some of the employees are non-city residents ... it affects the overall economic climate of the state.”

Without increasing tax revenue, Mamdani will struggle to fund his wide-ranging proposals—and the state and city are already facing financial pressure.

“Imagine you are a senior official at the New York State Department of Tax and Finance,” Girardin said. “The dashboard you’re looking at now has some indicators that are already blinking yellow, if not red.”

According to the New York Citizens Budget Commission—a nonpartisan, nonprofit fiscal watchdog—the share of American millionaires living in New York state declined from 12.7 to 8.7 percent between 2010 and 2022, and the share in New York City fell from 6.5 percent to 4.2 percent. “This is a real problem of lost potential revenue,” Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein told TMD. Had the share stayed constant, the state and city governments would have collected an estimated $13 billion combined in additional tax revenue.

New York also taxes capital gains as ordinary income, and according to an October report from New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, business and personal income taxes on securities contributed $22 billion to the state’s 2024-25 annual budget and $6.7 billion to New York City’s fiscal year 2025 budget. That reliance comes with risks. “If there’s a major downturn in financial markets or a recession, you could see city [tax] receipts not just fail to grow, but fall,” Girardin said.

Additionally, federal dollars fund a sizable share of the city’s government programs. The city’s proposed operating budget for fiscal year 2026 “relies on $7.4 billion in federal government funding,” or about 6.4 percent of the city government’s total spending, DiNapoli’s office said in an April press release. On October 1, at the start of the federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump’s administration suspended $18 billion in funds for two New York City infrastructure projects. In a Monday Truth Social post, Trump wrote that, if Mamdani were to win, “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required.”

If revenue were to drop too far, the city government would not be able to afford current expenditures, much less the mayor-elect’s various campaign proposals. “[Mamdani] walks into a budget that already has a pre-existing budget gap,” Rein explained. “He will have to take action to close that gap,” adding that the mayor-elect’s team will look to “identify where he can shrink lower-impact programs, [and] where he can preserve programs that are actually helping people and run them more efficiently.”

“Both the city and the state have to think about how to pay for the old initiatives if there’s going to be a reduction in federal funding,” Briffault said. Mamdani will have to cut costs.

In June, New York City adopted a $115 billion budget for the fiscal year 2026. A quarter of that is for education spending. The next largest categories are human services, public safety and the judicial system, city employee pension funds, and debt service payments. “You can’t just sort of wave a magic wand in terms of funding, right?” Bloom said. “You have to identify sources of funding, either new ones or reallocate.” He added, “And that’s politically very difficult, because everybody believes that their … current funding is probably not enough.”

Briffault noted that Mamdani could look to implement his proposals by funding them on a “phased-in basis, so you don’t have to pay for the whole thing at once.” For example, he pointed to Mamdani’s plan to provide free child care for every child between 6 weeks and 5 years old. Briffault explained that planning a program and certifying various child care providers would take at least one year to implement, but that could give Mamdani additional time to find funding options.

Mamdani could also proceed with a more narrow, limited version of his plans and expand them later if the money becomes available. Mamdani’s platform promises “he’ll permanently eliminate the fare on every city bus.” But if that proves too costly, Briffault suggested that the city could begin by gutting bus fares for low-income riders or for specific routes. That may also help him gain approval from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s leadership, the 23-member board that oversees the city’s bus system, of which the mayor can only make four appointee recommendations to the governor.

According to Bruce Berg, a political science professor at Fordham University, Mamdani’s most valuable bargaining chip with political opponents is “his coalition and his bully pulpit.”

“It’s a large coalition,” he told TMD. State and local officials, especially those in elected positions, likely know that if Mamdani “goes out and mobilizes them, he can use them to support me, [or] he can use them to oppose me.”

Bloom believes that Mamdani’s robust online presence and support base could provide him with the necessary boost as he seeks to rally support for his ambitious executive agenda. “If he continues to kind of talk directly to people through social media,” Bloom said, “I think he could actually be very successful.”

“That might be the biggest determination [of] whether he’s able to kind of move things is” Bloom added. “Does he preserve that outlet?”