Mamdani is looking for his FDR

She’s got a three-letter moniker and the right politics. Could AOC be Zohran Mamdani’s FDR?

The New York City mayor has been mum – to the point of dead boring – when asked previously about whether he wants ally and democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president in 2028. While he’s signaled his support, Mamdani answers that question diplomatically, saying she’d be great at whatever she chooses to do.

But in a new interview in PBS’s “Mayors of the World” special set to air Saturday and shared in advance with City & State, Mamdani gives a little more insight into what kind of mayoral-presidential relationship he’s looking for. It’s not the stiff bromance he has going on with President Donald Trump, but the model held up by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a staunch supporter of the New Deal.

“Their relationship, also, is a North Star for what it can look like to have a federal and municipal relationship of partnership,” Mamdani said, before suggesting he’s not just looking for any Democrat in the White House. “In thinking about what comes after this federal administration, it is also a vision and ambition that is more than just not Republicans.”

The interview with PBS’s Alexander Heffner took place at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island, and so reflected heavily on the four-term president’s legacy. Heffner also questioned Mamdani about his political identity, and the fact that he is often called a communist despite being a democratic socialist. 

Pressed to define communism, Mamdani didn’t quite deliver. “Communism goes far beyond this kind of a belief,” he said after defining democratic socialism. “Communism is also a theory of our politics that extends way beyond the notion of the question of how to deliver on a dignified life.”

Mamdani also declined to posit whether Roosevelt, who was adamant in his time that he wasn’t a socialist, would define himself as a democratic socialist if he were alive today. “Regardless of how he would describe himself, he would consider what we are fighting for to be in alignment with that same movement,” Mamdani said.