This Is What You Get

The recent primary proves that the NYC business community has completely dropped the ball. What will it take to get back on track?

Unhappy with Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor? Wishing for a centrist alternative?

Well, we’re in this position for a reason. And that reason is that we — the centrists, the business community of New York City — have completely dropped the ball over the past several decades. We lulled ourselves into complacency after twenty years of competent governance by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg and we failed to take the threat from the left seriously (for example, in 2016, I formed an organization called New York City Deserves Better to recruit and run a serious candidate against Bill de Blasio. No one from the business community joined me. No one).

The far left, ranging from parties like Working Families Party (WFP) to the Democratic Socialists of America to groups like Make the Road and New York Communities for Change, has worked incredibly hard and incredibly effectively for decades building grassroots organizations, building a bench of candidates to recruit and run for office, building coalitions, operations, infrastructure.

Their work has paid off, electing a slew of candidates to not only legislative bodies like the City Council, the State Assembly and the State Senate but to City Hall (not just potentially Mamdani, but de Blasio in 2013), to the Attorney Generals office (Tish James was the first candidate elected to office solely on the WFP line) to the Public Advocate, City Comptroller and Borough Presidents.

And all of this time, what has the business community done in response? Absolutely nothing. Occasionally, we panic and throw money at a problem. But do we have any sort of central planning operation? No. Do we identify and recruit candidates for office? No. Do we have a repository of talented administrators that we can recommend to become city and state officials? No. Do we have a grassroots operation to turn out moderate voters? No. Do we have a research arm, a policy arm, a fundraising arm? No, no and no.

There are some business groups that get involved in local government but generally not electorally and generally they are very narrowly focused on their own interests and not the broader interests of the city or state as a whole. They may sometimes be effective at achieving their own legislative goals, but they are not yet capable of doing anything more than that (even policy initiatives tend to be totally ad hoc; for example, at Tusk Philanthropies over the past few years, we’ve helped pass local legislation on issues like banning brokers fees for rental apartments, reducing scaffolding, providing legal protection to New York medical professionals who prescribe abortion medication to women in red states via telemedicine and increasing eligibility for free school meals — but there’s no systematic approach to the issues we pursue).

Not only that, we do everything possible to discourage New Yorkers from voting. The mayoral primary is held in June specifically to minimize turnout. It’s held off cycle from other elections. Unlike twenty other states, we require closed primaries, which limits turnout. We do not have mail in voting. We do not have mobile voting. We do not have same day registration. We make voting difficult and inconvenient and then we act surprised when the side that has a real turnout operation wins. If we want more moderate elected officials, we need more moderate voters actually voting. And that means changing the process to make it a lot easier so people actually do it.

If we believe that socialist policies are bad for New York, if we believe that a far left ideology that opposes better schools, opposes affordable housing by insisting on endless community and environmental review and union prices, that believes that the tax base is completely inelastic and you can just indefinitely raise taxes without the highest payers leaving, that you can ignore quality of life and policing and people will just endure it forever, then you have to do more than complaining and panicking when it’s pretty much too late.

Let me be clear: I love New York. And because of that — and despite the major disagreements listed above — if he wins, I’m committed to helping Mamdani be the best mayor he can be, hiring the best people and governing for all.

And there are tangible steps we can as a business community take to fix this problem in the future. First, we can expand the electorate by making voting a lot easier, both through the reforms likely to be proposed in this year’s City Charter and, even more impactfully down the line, by allowing New Yorkers to vote on their phones.

Mamdani won the primary decisively but still with just 432,000 votes. That’s about 5% of the city’s population. For as long as the primary is controlled mainly by far left voters and special interests, far left candidates will continue to win elections. Yes, by definition, more people are moderate than extreme. But that only matters if those people actually vote.

Second, either the centrist, pro-business organizations we already have like the Partnership for New York City or the Association for a Better New York can start getting involved in elections or we need to create new organizations that can. And getting involved doesn’t mean just picking a candidate for mayor or governor and throwing fundraisers for them. It means building a full-time political operation to compete at every level of government, for every office, all of the time. It means having a constant presence in Albany and at City Hall. It means real resources, organization and relentless effort.

When we have these things, we can elect centrist candidates. It requires far more than what has happened so far. It requires action. Decisive, tangible action — action that will cost money, that may make you unpopular, that may threaten your individual interests. It’s very hard. But it’s also doable. And if you’re unhappy with the status quo, it’s the only path forward.