In 1989, David Dinkins made history as New York City’s first Black mayor. Yet four years later, voters denied him a second term, and his administration was widely and unfairly labeled a failure. Zohran Mamdani remains broadly popular among New Yorkers. However, Mamdani should study the Dinkins era because the structural pressures of governing New York will inevitably test the coalition that elected him.
Comparisons are natural between the two men because they emerged from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. However, these comparisons have limitations because Dinkins and Mamdani came from different political traditions and governed markedly different cities. Thus, Dinkins’s experience does not predict Mamdani’s fate. Instead, Dinkins’s experience demonstrates how governing requires making hard policy decisions that can fracture a broad electoral coalition.
David Dinkins won the 1989 Democratic primary and general election backed by a broad coalition promising change. This coalition was diverse, uniting African Americans, liberal Manhattan Democrats, many Hispanic voters, organized labor, reform-minded whites, and enough outer-borough Italian, Irish, and Jewish voters to secure victory. During the campaign, those groups rallied around a common desire to move beyond the Koch era.
Once in office, campaign unity gave way to the realities of governing. Dinkins failed to hold together his governing coalition, in part because he was unable to craft a universalist agenda that transcended the demands of the individual components of his coalition. The coalition frequently disagreed over policing, neighborhood investment, taxes, education, and economic development as Dinkins confronted rising crime, the crack and AIDS epidemics, and a severe recession. In 1993, Dinkins’s coalition unraveled, ushering in a generation of political leaders who took the city in a different direction.
As part of my dissertation, I interviewed Dinkins in his office at Columbia University in 2019. As I sat in a room filled with photographs of prominent late-20th-century figures, I realized that Dinkins’s election and his time in office were both historically significant and misunderstood. Dinkins admitted that his time in office was “rocky.” When I asked what he would have done differently, he joked that if he knew, he would have done it.
The Crown Heights unrest in August 1991 exposed one of the most serious fractures in Dinkins’s coalition: the deep tensions between Black and Jewish New Yorkers. Many in the Jewish community argued that Dinkins’s slow response helped allow a neighborhood crisis following a tragic car accident to develop into one of the city’s darkest episodes of antisemitism. In contrast, many Black residents viewed the crisis through longstanding grievances involving policing and unequal treatment. Dinkins was caught between two constituencies central to his coalition: reassuring either community risked intensifying the other’s distrust. His eventual successor, Rudy Giuliani, exploited that fracture in 1993, helping move Jewish and other white ethnic voters away from Dinkins.
Today, Mamdani faces a familiar political challenge: holding together a governing coalition whose members agree on the need for change but often disagree on how to achieve it.
Mamdani assembled a coalition that is as diverse as Dinkins’. It includes democratic socialists, younger progressive voters, organized labor, renters struggling with housing costs, many Muslim and South Asian New Yorkers, liberal professionals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and segments of the Jewish community drawn together by concerns over affordability and the desire for political change. Those constituencies share a desire for reform, but they do not necessarily share the same priorities.
For example, Mamdani has promised to build nearly 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade. But fulfilling that promise will affect organized labor, outer-borough homeowners, professional-class liberals, and younger progressives in different ways, potentially causing conflict within his coalition. Many New Yorkers support affordable housing in principle, but opposition often emerges when proposed developments affect their own neighborhoods.
Public safety is another issue likely to expose fault lines within Mamdani’s coalition. New Yorkers generally agree on the need for safer streets and subways. However, many disagree over how to achieve these goals. Public safety policies may expose differences between progressive activists and residents whose primary concern is crime.
Mamdani assembled a broad coalition of New Yorkers who wanted to change the city’s direction. To avoid the intra-coalition conflicts that plagued Dinkins, he must explain how his policies on housing, public safety, and affordability benefit all New Yorkers. He must also ensure that disappointed coalition members still have a place at the table.
Ultimately, the lesson of the Dinkins era is that effective governing requires a mayor to keep a coalition together, even when its members disagree about what change should mean.
James J. Barney is a professor of legal studies at American Public University System as well as the author of “A Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis” (Fordham University Press, September 2026).
