How the billionaire class and wealthy landlords are conspiring against Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani has had to overcome a lot during his campaign to be New York City’s next mayor.

His age, relative lack of experience and his self-stated democratic socialism could have held him back. Yet the 33-year-old, a relative unknown 12 months ago, sailed through all challenges as he became the favorite to win the election in November.

One thing still looms over Mamdani, however: New York City’s billionaire class, and the not-unrelated real estate lobby.

Mamdani has terrified some traditional big-money Democratic donors and powerful real-estate tycoons by promising to freeze rent prices and raise taxes – slightly – on the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers.

Such promises prompted elites to spend millions during the Democratic primary, which didn’t work. Mamdani coasted past Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor – but the rich aren’t done yet.

Some of New York’s wealthiest landlords and business people gathered with Cuomo this month to “plot his path to City Hall”, with the city’s biggest developer warning that they must unite to stop Mamdani, according to the New York Times.

Among the plotters were at least two billionaires and one of New York’s biggest building developers. Days after that meeting, Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and some-time activist who has a net worth of nearly $10bn, also weighed in.

Ackman, who has donated to Democrats, but supported Donald Trump in 2024, called for Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor who, like Cuomo, is running as an independent candidate, to drop out of the race to clear the path for the former governor.

Earlier, Ackman had claimed, as have other wealthy New Yorkers, that Mamdani’s proposal to place an additional 2% tax on New Yorkers earning more than $1m would cause rich people to flee the city. He pledged to invest huge amounts in blocking Mamdani, who more than 570,000 people voted for (including ranked choice voters) in the Democratic primary.

“There are hundreds of million[s] of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight,” Ackman said in June – adding that he is “in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups”.

It was Cuomo who attracted the big money during the primary. An analysis by In These Times found that real estate donors spent $6m trying to get Cuomo elected. The New York Times reported that $250,000 alone came from the head of a Boston-based construction company planning to expand into New York.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor, spent $8.3m supporting Cuomo over the summer, and the money is continuing to pour in: less than two weeks ago Ron Lauder, a billionaire Republican donor, gave $750,000 to a super Pac backing Cuomo, in August John B Hess, head of the Hess Corporation, gave his second $500,000 donation, the investigative outlet Sludge reported.

“Since the primary they’ve been panicking and scrambling, trying to figure out how they can defeat Mamdani to keep their bottom line,” said Sumathy Kumar, managing director of the NYS Tenant Bloc, an affordable housing advocacy group.

“They’ve been holding emergency meetings trying to cohere around Cuomo. In the primary they dropped millions of dollars into the Cuomo-aligned super Pac – they’ve been trying everything they can, throwing money, and it doesn’t seem to be working.”

That much is clear, given Mamdani continues to hold a commanding lead over Cuomo. This week, a Marist poll found him winning 45% of the vote; Cuomo had 24%, the Republican Curtis Sliwa, 17% and the embattled Adams was at just 9%.

It’s polling that reflects the urgency Cuomo-backers are feeling. In recent weeks, there have been repeated calls for Sliwa and Adams to drop out of the race to consolidate anti-Mamdani donors and voters, with Trump also reportedly weighing in – there have even been reports the president’s advisers had discussed offering a job to Adams if he steps down.

Even if that happens, however, there’s little hard evidence that Cuomo would win. The Marist poll asked New Yorkers how they would vote in a hypothetical match-up between just Mamdani and Cuomo: in that scenario 49% went for Mamdani compared with 39% for his opponent, suggesting the billionaire class’s efforts may be in vain.

“It’s just not working,” Kumar said. “They’ve spent millions of dollars warning New Yorkers against a Zohran Mamdani win, and it didn’t work, because tenants want a rent freeze, they want to be able to stay in New York City.”

With early voting in the election starting in just over a month – election day is Tuesday, 4 November – the richest New Yorkers may be finding out the hard way that money can’t buy you everything.

“Many power brokers and billionaires are frustrated, and scared, because their demands are not the center piece of Zohran’s agenda and they find themselves outside of ‘the room where it happens’,” said Ana María Archila, co-state director for New York Working Families party, a progressive political party which backs Democratic candidates who align with its platform.

“Zohran has tapped into a broadly shared sentiment that something has to change, and now. He is proposing concrete solutions and that is why so many people are enthusiastically supporting his campaign.”