Article II of the Constitution keeps Zohran Mamdani, born in Kampala, out of the Oval Office. It says nothing about the room where the candidate is chosen, and the mayor appears to have noticed.
Mamdani has been meeting privately with union leaders to press the case for a labor-aligned or left-wing presidential candidate in 2028, Axios reported on Sunday, Nov. 8, citing four people familiar with the talks. Holly Otterbein’s scoop describes a mayor arguing that progressives cannot afford to squander their midterm momentum. It also describes a striking private admission: Mamdani is uncertain whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his closest political partner, will run for the White House at all.
The same day, on Fox News Sunday, Mamdani told Shannon Bream that he rejects parts of the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that made him. Taken together, the two stories show a mayor building a national role while trimming the positions most likely to get in its way.
The Gracie Mansion summit
According to Axios, Mamdani last month summoned Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, to Gracie Mansion to talk about 2028. He asked which possible candidates Williams liked, how the union’s endorsement process would work, and whether Williams had ever thought of running himself. Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, has also met with the mayor, Axios reported, and he plans to sit down soon with Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers.
Williams told Axios he is “absolutely supportive” of labor people running for office. “We put a freaking ironworker in Congress. We put a IUPAT member in the Senate,” he said of the midterms. He also said he is not interested in running.
One source who has spoken with the mayor told Axios that Mamdani “wants the progressive ecosystem to mobilize quickly, strategically and efficiently if a moderate candidate is clearly on the rise.” The model, by that account, is 2020 in reverse. Then, Barack Obama appeared to help Joe Biden consolidate the party against Bernie Sanders. This time the left would like to do the consolidating.
The AOC question
Everything turns on Ocasio-Cortez. Axios reports that many progressives think she is leaning toward a 2028 Senate bid rather than a presidential run; she has said she is considering both. Asked by WNYC last month whether he wanted her to run for president, Mamdani said, “I want to see AOC do whatever it is that AOC wants to do,” and called her “an inspiration,” Axios noted.
If she passes, the field on the left thins quickly. Axios names Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who is widely expected to run, and Abdul El-Sayed, the incoming senator from Michigan, as names some progressives are watching. Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation, has been talking up a labor candidate instead. “There’s no better way to do that than to run an actual worker for president, not a professional politician,” he told Axios.
Fox News Sunday
The Fox appearance was the other half of the weekend. Bream ran the mayor through a rapid-fire list of DSA positions, the New York Post reported. Mamdani said no to abolishing borders, the Supreme Court and jails. On the platform’s call to abolish the Senate, he had a one-liner ready for the week after an election his party did well in: “after last night, why would we abolish the Senate?”
Asked whether DSA would expel him, he said “No,” with a grin, per the Post. “When you go into a room and there are more than one socialist in the room, you will often find disagreement in that room,” he said. He described what unites the organization as “a belief in the dignity of working-class people.”
Bream also pressed him on promises not yet kept, among them a $30 minimum wage and free buses. “It’s difficult, but that doesn’t mean you shirk away from it,” Mamdani said, pointing to child care. “Some promises, you do day one, some of them day 365, some of them year three. You keep going.”
The case against the kingmaker
Republicans, and more than a few Democrats, have a fair objection to all this, and it deserves its strongest form. A mayor of New York has a full-time job. Under Mamdani the city is fighting a federal subpoena for shelter records, absorbing a rent freeze that lenders are pricing into mortgages, and still waiting on the fast and free buses he campaigned on. Each hour spent arranging the 2028 Democratic primary is an hour not spent on those things. Voters elected a mayor, not a national party boss.
There is a political version of the argument too. Last week, as Axios itself noted, Democrats “of all political stripes” won. The midterms do not obviously show that the left’s candidates beat moderate ones; they show that the party won. A New York mayor who organizes against a rising centrist could split his party rather than steer it. Conservative critics add that Mamdani’s distance from the DSA platform on Fox is easy to state on a Sunday show and harder to square with his past positions. The Post noted that he once questioned the purpose of prisons and backed cutting the NYPD’s budget in 2020.
His allies would answer that no one becomes a kingmaker by asking permission, and that a mayor with national reach can bring money and attention home. Fiorello La Guardia had a national profile, and so did John Lindsay. Michael Bloomberg ran for president six years after leaving City Hall. What is new is a mayor who cannot run trying to decide who will.
What to watch
The tells will be concrete. Watch whether Fain takes the meeting and what comes out of it. Watch whether Ocasio-Cortez makes her Senate-or-president choice early, and whether Mamdani is the first call. And watch the city budget. A mayor building a national coalition needs wins at home that travel, and the most portable ones, child care, buses and rents, are all still being written.
Featured image: Gracie Mansion, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted IUPAT president Jimmy Williams Jr. to talk about 2028, according to Axios. Photo by Jim.henderson via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
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