Such visions play a role in any administration, but there’s also the work of actual city governance. When Mamdani and Bloomberg met in September, for a conversation that the longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson called “definitely cordial,” they reportedly spoke about hiring and retaining talent. Mamdani, like Bloomberg before him, arrives at City Hall relatively unencumbered by the tangle of obligations and relationships that accumulate over a long career in public service. Like Bloomberg, he is poised to hire with commitments beyond political favor-trading. “Mike was talent, talent, talent,” Bradley Tusk, who served in Bloomberg’s administration and managed his 2009 campaign, told me. “The thing he did best by far was convince a lot of talented people to come work in city government.” Mamdani’s appointment to his transition team of the former Federal Trade Commission head Lina Khan, a bugbear of business élites, suggests a flair for attracting eye-catching national figures (even if what role such a figure might play in his actual administration remains undetermined). In late November, Mamdani’s team reported that more than seventy thousand people had submitted online applications for jobs in his administration; his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, has expressed interest in improving the city’s civil-service hiring process.
Bloomberg had a reputation for endowing appointees with remarkable independence: when Elizabeth Kolbert profiled the then mayor for this magazine, in 2002, one commissioner told her that Bloomberg’s instructions upon giving him the office amounted to “It’s your agency—don’t screw it up.” It isn’t impossible to imagine that Mamdani’s clear need for expertise, and his campaign-trail discipline in discussing only a select handful of policy proposals, might lead him to empower his own administrators with meaningful autonomy. What will it actually take to make those city buses fast and free? And what’s the plan for schools? “Someone described Zohran to me as a socialist technocrat,” Tusk recalled, adding that, when it came to city government, he didn’t see much difference between a capitalist technocrat and a socialist one. “If he’s a technocrat like Mike was, he’ll be a good mayor.” Of course, not all Bloomberg associates agree. “The key to Mike’s success as mayor was world-class management,” Wolfson told me. “He knew how to attract and retain talent and how to meet a bottom line because he had been doing those things for years. I’m not sure what the appropriate comparison would be here.”
The 2025 mayoral race was, among other things, a battle between money and attention. Cuomo received $28.4 million from Super PACs in the general election—“the most money ever spent to support a single candidate in New York City by Super PACs,” as the good-government group Citizens Union wrote in a report last month. “In fact,” they added, “the only comparison we can make is to Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed, dollar-busting mayoral campaigns in the 2000s.” Money has been Bloomberg’s defining feature for as long as he’s been in public life: money made him mayor, money shaped his mayoralty, and money continues to announce his political will. But, if Bloomberg commands capital, Mamdani—with his eleven million Instagram followers and reliable virality—commands attention, a variety of capital whose political potency Donald Trump has proven in the course of the past decade. And, in this mayoral election, attention came out the undisputed winner.
In the wake of Mamdani’s success, it has sometimes seemed as though the only lesson that would be learned is that more candidates should get better at making short-form videos. But this undersells Mamdani’s achievement, and the qualities of his that enabled it—including a capacity for connection that feels far more natural and less sweaty than what often passes for personal appeal among politicians. The Bloomberg model of intimate engagement with the city was counting pieces of trash outside the window of his chauffeured car. So far, Mamdani has cultivated a more hands-on ideal of participation, both for himself and for his supporters. Attention, after all, is not strictly a matter of passive digital consumption; it can also be deployed actively. The experience of volunteering for Mamdani attracted young New Yorkers in search of connection, one of whom told the Times, “The people I go to dinner with, the folks I go to concerts with—my day to day is organized around Mamdani.”
