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In a tremendously positive sign for New York City’s future, the city’s No. 1 business group, the Partnership for New York City, looks determined to stand up vigorously to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s agenda.
Contrary to a nasty hit piece in New York magazine, this is not a repudiation of Kathy Wylde’s decades of strong leadership of the Partnership, but simply a recognition that the local political community has taken a toxic turn.
Indeed, we expect the group will work smoothly with the City Council under Speaker Julie Menin to promote a positive agenda for Gotham’s economy.
For a host of reasons, the Partnership — a coalition of over 300 major employers: corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms — and other biz groups have long avoided confronting the rise of hard-left politics in the city.
But the rise of Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists — following on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s misbegotten eight years in City Hall, the killer blow of COVID and the de Blasio-Cuomo lockdowns, then the uneven mayoralty of Eric Adams — shows the need for a new approach.
Progressive de Blasio and “moderate” Gov. Andrew Cuomo both played rope-a-dope with the private sector, demanding it fund their political machines in return for being (mostly) left alone.
Adams sought a reboot with a pro-business, pro-growth agenda, but the left’s dominance in the Legislature and the City Council under then-Speaker Adrienne Adams, plus the chaos of the migrant chaos that President Joe Biden imposed on New York, largely frustrated those hopes.
And that Gov. Kathy Hochul has now embraced Adrienne Adams as her running mate suggests that business can’t hope for much if any help from Albany if Hochul wins re-election in November.
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Again, Wylde’s quiet “inside game” of trying to work with the political powers-that-be made perfect sense in the Giuliani-Bloomberg era, but times have changed.
The challenge for Wylde’s successor, former Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, will be keeping the business coalition’s hawks and doves together to hold a firm middle ground that doesn’t get the private sector mauled by Mamdani and his hard-left base.
Early signs show Fulop gets it: “New York City is a very fragile environment right now, and I think it’s important for us to be engaged,” he explained in a recent CNBC interview; he has launched an ambitious political-action committee to push public safety and other core priorities for the private sector.
A reinvigorated Partnership standing up to naive efforts to build “socialism in one city” will be vital to getting Gotham through the Mamdani era.
New York’s private sector is going to prove a lot more resilient than the progressives’ neo-Marxist theories predict.