Mamdani: Pick Your Issue. Give it Everything.

I asked the NYC Mayor what more we should demand from our city halls

Mayor Zohran Mamdani met his wife on Hinge. I met mine on Bumble, and she messaged me first, which is how Bumble works. The Mayor clocked that immediately.

“Well, she took the first step, right?”

She did. I’m the lucky one.

As we stood beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Lower Manhattan last week, I joked that we should launch an initiative to make dating more affordable because I don’t envy what young people are going through. He playfully agreed. Even our jokes bend toward the cost of living.

The radical idea

I put it to him this way: the summer midterms have revealed that “government should actually work for everybody, not just the wealthy and the well-connected” is what passes for a radical idea in this country.

“Yes. Right?” he said. “Nowadays.”

Millions of people, parents among them, are watching this city and experiencing an awakening. They wonder what more they should demand of their own city hall. What is his advice?

He started by validating the feeling.

“What they are feeling, that is right,” he told me. “Politics is not something that should happen to them. It’s something that they should also do.”

For most of our lives we have been treated as subjects of politics. Our one choice was how much attention to pay. The Mayor argues that this framing was always a con. You can shape the politics. You always could.

You can have the same thing

“If you like what you’re seeing in New York City and you live somewhere else, you can have the same thing,” Mamdani said. “As much as I believe that New York is exceptional, which it is, and I think we’re the greatest city in the world, a lot of what we’re talking about, these are the struggles of Americans no matter where they live.”

He named the list without notes: the climate crisis, the cost of housing, childcare, public transit, groceries. “Americans feel that no matter what party they belong to and no matter what part of the country they live in.”

A government that treats affordability as its job is available to any city where people demand it. Start with the one you have.

Working people win when politics is about working people

The Mayor’s theory of change fits in one sentence: “What we’ve seen time and again is when working people become the focus of our politics, those same working people start to win.”

He has receipts. The New Deal under FDR. Fiorello La Guardia in New York. This happened before, within our grandparents’ memory, because people fought for it.

“We can have that again, but we have to fight for it,” he said. “Because without it, instead of a New Deal, we’re gonna be having to explain why we have to accept a raw deal. And those days have to come to an end.”

Pick your issue. Give it everything.

My follow-up came from experience. There is a real paralysis in seeing so many things worth fighting for and having to pick one. Press freedom, healthcare access, public education, housing, transit, climate. Where do you start?

He answered by invoking Mariame Kaba.

“Mariame Kaba is an organizer here in New York City, and she has shared a number of reflections on what it means to organize,” he said. “One of them that really stuck with me was, pick an issue and give all of yourself to it. Don’t try and be everything to everyone. If you can find that focus, then you can also find that fulfillment.”

Kaba is a New York City native who spent two decades organizing in Chicago before coming home in 2016. She founded Project NIA, a grassroots group working to end youth incarceration, and wrote a New York Times bestseller, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, on what organizing asks of the people who do it. Her advice carries the weight of someone who picked her issue three decades ago and held on.

You do not have to fit yourself into housing or public transit because those are the issues on cable news. If flood prevention is what you care about, flood prevention is your issue. The Mayor said as much.

So here’s your homework, from him and from me.

Find ways to stay in the fight. Pick the one thing your city is getting wrong for working families, the one that keeps you up at night, and give yourself to it. Show up to the council meeting. Learn the budget line. Bring two neighbors with you.

Politics is not something that happens to you. It’s something you do.

And if a dating app can find you the love of your life, your city hall can find you an issue worth fighting for.

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The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way.