On the last Wednesday in January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood at a lectern in City Hall’s Blue Room and announced the city was facing a dire crisis: a $12 billion budget gap, larger than the deficit during the Great Recession or COVID. “It means,” he said, “that the time has come to tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.”

It was a gauntlet laid at the feet of Governor Kathy Hochul, who sought to align with the new mayor even as his supporters hounded her with chants of “Tax the rich.” But Hochul has insisted she won’t. “I don’t believe in taxing for the sake of taxing. Never have, never will,” she said in response to Mamdani’s budget address.

The political play for a mayor in such moments is fairly straightforward: Rally your troops and run a campaign aimed at the governor’s promise to hold the line, run ads if necessary, and get legislators on your side to squeeze the person who holds the purse strings.

Instead, the mayor took a different tack. A week after calling on the governor to raise taxes, he endorsed her bid for reelection, even as she was fending off a challenge from Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who promised to raise taxes on the rich. Then the Mamdani team went further by lobbying the left-wing Working Families Party to not back Delgado, despite the fact the WFP has been pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations for years, believing that the newly emboldened left should start winning power and stop wasting resources on send-a-message-type candidates like Delgado. The party ended up making no endorsement, and a few days later, Delgado dropped his bid. A “Tax the Rich” rally, hosted not just by the WFP but by Our Time, an outfit made up of former Mamdani volunteers to harness the grassroots energy of his campaign, is scheduled for the end of February. Mamdani had signaled he wouldn’t attend, according to the New York Times.

“We all feel that the mayor can’t move forward with his affordability agenda without taxing the rich,” says Divya Sundaram, deputy director of Our Time. “Zohran has always been extremely consistent on this.”

But the........

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