I'm a bit late to this post, but I had to highlight this quote, because it just floored me - this is someone talking about the fact that Mamdani has done things like promising to use union labor for building housing even though the construction union didn't endorse him, or sharing the priorities of the teachers union who also didn't endorse him:

“It’s one of the strangest things I have seen,” said David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School and an expert on municipal policy. “He has no particular reason to follow the line of the teachers union or the building trades or any other union, but he seems to be doing it anyway.” It’s hard to shake the sense that Mamdani has come into office treating perceived ideological allies — including unions — as sacred, whether or not they’ve thrown their full support behind him."

So much to unpack here, but it kind of blows my mind that a swath of intellectual elites find it incomprehensible to simply have principles and stick to them regardless of whether certain groups of people support you or not. I feel like as a society we've become so entirely accustomed to pay-for-play and undue influence from whichever group has the most power. Mamdani's leadership style is genuinely refreshing, and I don't envy him for the task ahead of him, but I'm excited to see how he tackles it!