Rob Henderson is wrong about Zohran Mamdani

When all you have is an axe to grind, everything looks like a luxury belief

I generally like reading Rob Henderson, and though I don’t follow him, I’m usually pleased when I see his content on my feed.

Unfortunately, that pattern did not hold today.

In this post, I’m going to dissect a couple passages from Rob’s post on Zohran Mamdani, simply titled Zohran Mamdani's Luxury Beliefs. I was going to try to respond to the whole thing, but it turned out that Rob was spreading a lot of misinformation—and correcting misinformation is much harder than I was hoping it would be.

Anyway, here goes.

Frame 1 ad hominem

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

The ad hominem attacks come out on the very first line. It's immediately obvious what Rob is trying to do here: paint Mamdani as a rich and privileged elite, claim that he has no relevant experience or qualifications for the job, and then fit him into Rob's concept of the luxury belief class. But, uh, Zohran Mamdani has been a member of the New York State Assembly for four years. And “Ivy League Hamas encampment” is clearly meant to be inflammatory and insulting language.¹

At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

Looks like I was right. It's honestly kind of difficult to analyze Rob's arguments in an honest and unbiased manner, because the way he's phrasing things immediately triggers my knee-jerk reaction to disagree with people who are obviously trying to perform a hit job. But Zohran’s career includes being a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor, along with political involvement that dates all the way back to 2015. Ignoring this reveals Rob’s insane slant on the matter.

Zohran was definitely not the most qualified candidate in the race—I think that honor would go to Brad Lander—but it’s not like he’s some nobody with zero political experience. Portraying him that way is disrespectful and disingenuous, especially when it comes from a cultural commentator without any real stake in the game.

Take, for example, Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents. Without raising rents, many landlords cannot afford to maintain their buildings, which leads to apartments becoming rundown or empty. This is one reason why, ironically, cities with rent control policies have the lowest levels of affordable housing — a policy that hurts working-class families most.

This appears to be true: on its own, rent control tends to help tenants in the short run, but in the long run "decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative spillovers on the surrounding neighborhood". I already agreed with Rob on this, but I had to go find Brookings' report on rent control to make sure we were both right, because for some reason he chose not to back this claim up with a source.

However, what Rob doesn't mention is that Zohran is not simply freezing rent: he’s promising to not raise rents on apartments that are already rent-controlled. Yes, you read that right: Zohran is not increasing the number of rent-controlled apartments in NYC.

Furthermore, Zohran's platform also states that he plans to build 200,000 units of new housing. Any knowledge of Econ 101 will tell you that increasing supply will decrease prices, given stable demand. This is admittedly less housing units than most of the other primary candidates have targeted. I'm not thrilled about this—I wish Zohran would commit to building more than just 200,000 units—but the point is that Zohran's housing policies are deeper than a rent freeze, and that the rent freeze is already in place.

Finding this information took about 3 seconds of googling and 30 seconds of reading. It's frankly embarrassing to ignore it or miss it.

My biggest blogger pet peeve: citing sources that disagree with you

Then there’s Mamdani’s push for free public buses, a plan that would cost $630 million a year. An analysis by the Transportation Research Board found that “some public transit systems that have experimented with or implemented a fare-free policy have been overwhelmed … by the presence of disruptive passengers, including loud teenagers and vagrants.” This, too, would make life harder for low-income New Yorkers who depend on public transit every day.

Despite directly quoting from this source, Rob once again chooses to not link it in his post (don't worry, I found it). This is probably because the full paragraph he is quoting from on page 2-3 of the summary also says:

However, it is important to note that most managers of fare-free transit systems did not regard disruptive passengers as a significant problem. Many noted that their bus operators prefer to deal with a few more disruptive passengers if it means that they do not have to deal with fare collection and fare disputes.

So, according to Rob’s own source, the bus operators themselves—who would in theory be most incentivized to dislike crime and disorder because they have to deal with passengers for their entire day job—prefer disruptive passengers to paying fares. Even worse, the source that Rob cites is generally pro-fare-free public transit, and acknowledges the potential increase in disorder by warning about resulting increases in costs that come from additional maintenance, security, and equipment needs. Citing sources that disagree with you is one of my biggest blogger pet peeves, and no one gets a pass—not even Rob Henderson. And this is one of the most egregious cases I’ve ever seen.

Furthermore, the report from the Transportation Research Board also states that providing fare-free public transit usually increases ridership from 20-60%. That ridership has to come from somewhere. And who is most likely to ride NYC buses? Well, according to the NYC Comptroller, disabled and lower-income New Yorkers.

Honestly, I was astounded when I first read this section of Rob's post. He didn't even comment on the price tag beyond saying the number, even though it’s probably the riskiest part of the entire proposal!² Instead, it looks like Rob had an existing bias against fare-free busing, did the bare minimum research necessary to confirm his own biases, didn't even bother to finish the summary of the report he found, cherry-picked a negative quote from said summary, and called it a day. This is an extremely intellectually dishonest way to make an argument.

Ironically, it seems like Rob's opinion on disorder—especially in public transit—is itself a luxury belief.

Stop implying that Mamdani is going to defund the police

Mamdani has also been a supporter of the “defund the police” movement. But a recent poll from the Manhattan Institute found that a majority (54 per cent) of New York City voters say they want to see more police officers across New York. Only 17 per cent say they want to see fewer, while 21 per cent say they want to keep the existing number as it is. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Rob’s claim here is technically true, but very misleading³. This is because his claim was true during Zohran's 2020 run for the State Assembly but no longer represents Zohran’s current opinions or those of his mayoral campaign.

In fact, Zohran's 17-page public safety plan says nothing about "defunding the police". Instead, his primary proposal is to create a Department of Community Safety, meant to free up "police resources to increase clearance rates for major crimes" by dealing with mental health crises and expanding violence interrupter programs.

To quote from the plan,

Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with our frayed social safety net — which prevents them from doing their actual jobs.

And in the final Mayoral debate, Zohran said—

I will not defund the police. I will work with the police.

I'm more than happy to discuss the merits of Zohran’s actual policies. I'm not as anti-cop as I used to be, and generally support professionalizing the police instead of defunding them. But genuine discussion does not appear to be what Rob is here for. Rob is either

1. So woefully uninformed about the mayoral election that he missed Zohran’s million claims that he is not defunding the police.⁴

2. Intentionally misleading his audience to push a preconceived narrative that fits in with Rob’s pre-existing worldview.

Oh, and also? The single largest donation in the race, a donation of $1 million from DoorDash (seriously??) went to Cuomo’s super PAC Fix the City, which also takes donations from “real estate executives and pro-Trump people like billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman”. Fix the City raised more than $8 million for Cuomo’s campaign, while Zohran’s PAC raised less than $88,000. It’s obvious which candidate was the candidate of elites.

Half truths about the “working class”

Later on in his post, Rob asserts that working class voters don’t support Mamdani, and cites a graph to back him up.

That graph is also misleading, because it collapses the entire income distribution into three buckets. Here are some more informative graphs that have more detail.

To be clear, Rob isn’t exactly wrong here. The very lowest income voters were more likely to vote for Cuomo⁵, the middle and upper-middle classes voted for Mamdani⁶, and the ultra-rich were also notably pro-Cuomo⁷. This is a genuinely interesting result, and I wish Rob had talked about it more. Even Jacobin admits that Mamdani’s support primarily came from college-educated voters, which is probably the single biggest data point in favor of Rob’s argument. Rob does point this out, but then he immediately moves past it.

So, what does Rob say next?

It’s not like Mamdani — who grew up amid privilege — would understand any of this.

Alright. We're done here.

Conclusion

Rob, if you're reading this, I hope you can take your own advice and think about which of your own beliefs are luxury beliefs. I have my disagreements with Zohran and my agreements with you, as I've laid out in this post, but the way you portrayed him is disingenuous and beneath you. You have an interesting perspective on many issues, are a competent and well-qualified professional⁸, and are a member of the intellectual elite yourself. That doesn't give you license to talk about whatever you like without doing your due diligence. Come on, man.

I don’t want to end with too much negativity, so I’m going to instead end on a constructive note. This next take comes from Paul Krugman, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, former columnist for the New York Times (for 24 years!), and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. If anyone is qualified enough to talk about this subject, it’s Krugman—so let’s close out with some parting words of wisdom from him.

Paul, take it away: what do you think about Zohran?

Will [Zohran] be a good mayor? Nobody knows.
— Paul Krugman

Dammit.

1. I personally think that pro-Palestinian activists should be explicitly anti-Hamas. I was also a part of UChicago’s encampment. There were many others who, like me, condemned the October 7 attacks as terrorism, though this was not everyone. We also understood that the Israeli occupation of Gaza systematically de-developed the region and reduced them to a welfare state, delegitimizing Palestine's governments and leaving conditions ripe for the formation of terrorist groups. But we could disagree on some of these particulars, or even when the genocide started, but what we were protesting was that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To refer to our efforts so dismissively as just another "Ivy League Hamas encampment" is a sad indictment of one’s own opinion.

2. no but seriously, where is Zohran getting the funding for this? From his taxes on the 1%? Here in Chicago, our transit agencies are facing a $770 million fiscal cliff, because our legislators in Springfield procrastinated on doing their homework. Similar cases are happening across the country.

3. and once again he chooses not to cite a source. This is probably because every source for this also states that Zohran does not support this anymore, which we’ll get into now.

4. hell, Zohran even said it on Subway Takes with Kareem. He goes out of his way to deny it at every opportunity because he knows it’s a bad look for him and/or he’s genuinely changed his mind on it (imo it’s probably both). Like him or not, it’s a good strategy that makes his opponents look like liars.

5. I suspect due to a combination of incumbency and Mamdani’s primarily digital-media based campaign strategy, as I would guess that people who Mamdani didn’t reach with his messaging probably just voted for Cuomo on the grounds of “hey I know that guy!” but I can’t say for sure

6. I’m assuming that an income of >$60,000/year makes you upper-middle class

7. probably because Mamdani wants to raise their taxes

8. I don’t want to downplay Rob’s education or credentials at all. A PhD in psychology is serious business, and definitely gives him far more credibility on culture war stuff than any of us regular people.