New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks to supporters during an election night gathering at The Greats of Craft LIC on June 24 in Queens.

With a couple of days of early voting to go before Election Day in New York City, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has maintained a significant lead in the polls over his main competitor, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, months after Mamdani’s generational upset over Cuomo in the Democratic primary.

To hear the candidate tell it, that advantage is thanks to one thing: Mamdani’s policy platform, which is laser-focused on making the city affordable for working people.

The three-term state assemblyman and democratic socialist has a stacked to-do list that includes freezing the rent on one million apartments, making buses fast and free, establishing universal child care, creating a network of five city-owned grocery stores, and spending billions of dollars to build rent-stabilized housing.

“He’s focused on affordability, and he probably has one of the most expansive services agendas that we’ve seen in decades,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit think tank.

Mamdani knows it’s an ambitious list.

“The job of city government isn’t to tinker around the edges,” he said in a campaign video about the city-owned grocery store proposal. (Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment for this story.)

Big Apple political observers agree with Mamdani that his massive policy platform distinguishes him as a candidate. But big ideas require significant amounts of money, political capital or both.

“There are very real structural, budgetary and legal limits on what the city’s chief executive can accomplish without the cooperation and support of other branches of city or state government,” wrote Carl Weisbrod, who co-chaired former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s transition team and then led the city’s planning commission.

Should Mamdani win on Tuesday, he’ll face a balancing act.

“It would be unreasonable for any mayor to think they’re going to deliver right away on every promise,” Rein said. “He’s got to make those smart choices, and in his case, they should be bold choices, because he wants to deliver progress on his agenda. But he has to be able to do that while balancing the budget, preparing for federal cuts, and protecting critical services for needy New Yorkers and quality of life for all New Yorkers.”

Despite somescepticism, Mamdani’s ideas don’t break any laws – or, arguably, any laws of political gravity. Getting them done is a matter of political will and deft maneuvering.

He would most likely be able to ‘freeze the rent’ for millions of New Yorkers

Mamdani’s big-ticket campaign item — the one that leads his website and is featured in TV ads — is “freezing the rent” for millions of city residents.

He’s talking about what are known as “rent-stabilised” apartments, for which a government board determines landlords’ maximum possible annual rent increases. There are around 1 million such units in the city, constituting almost half of all rental units and housing over 2 million people. (This reporter lives in a rent-stabilized apartment.)

Yearly rent increase maximums in rent-stabilized units are determined by the Rent Guidelines Board. The board makes rent increase (or lack thereof) decisions in June, affecting rents starting in October. The mayor appoints members of that board, who serve anywhere from two- to four-year terms, depending on their role. Mamdani has said that he would only........

© HuffPost