11.11

An Emboldened Mamdani Sheds Conciliatory Tone A newly empowered Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday vowed to use his convincing victory in the New York City mayor's race as a mandate to push an ambitious progressive agenda past potential obstacles, from billionaire antagonists to Albany bureaucracy. In a shift from the mollifying tone he had used for months, Mr. Mamdani made clear that while he would govern for all New Yorkers, he was determined to deliver for those who had been agitating for structural change. "I'm also looking to be clear about the mandate that we won over the course of this election, and it is a mandate to deliver on the agenda that we ran on, " he said in a phone interview on Wednesday afternoon after a celebratory lunch with his progressive ally Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The shift in tone was most striking when it came to his plan to raise taxes on the wealthy. In recent weeks, Mr. Mamdani had conveyed an openness to finding creative ways to pay for his signature policy initiative, universal child care, indicating that he was not necessarily set on raising taxes. There was plenty of revenue in the existing budget, he suggested. On Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani said his call to tax the wealthy was also about fairness. He said that New Yorkers who had voted for him were eager for billionaires to pay more taxes. On Monday, the day before the election, droves of Mr. Mamdani's supporters marched with him over the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise, chanting, "Tax the rich!"