How Abundance Helped Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani Learn to Get Along—and Get Stronger in the Process

This piece is a guest contribution and does not necessarily reflect the views of Inclusive Abundance. Catherine Vaughan is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Abundance New York.

[Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]

In the book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson discuss historian Gary Gerstle’s work on political orders: the idea that, while historians often focus on the conflicts of a given era, a political order is defined by areas of subtle agreement. The New Deal order brought agreement around a muscular government; the neoliberal order brought consensus around individualism and vetocracy. They posit that we’re on the cusp of a new political order: one in which strange bedfellows might come together to redefine freedom and prosperity, with a focus on abundance.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the refreshing political alignment of New York’s most powerful executives: Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The two don’t agree on much. Mamdani campaigned on taxing the rich; Hochul has continued to resist state tax hikes every step of the way, even through contentious budget negotiations. Mamdani’s push for free buses has met resistance from Hochul, who is loath to see the MTA’s struggling revenues drop even further. Even their bagel orders are worlds apart (neither, it turns out, favors an “everything bagel” approach—to breakfast, at least).

But, recognizing how much each executive’s success depends on the other, Hochul and Mamdani have found specific opportunities to work together. The cosmopolitan socialist mayor and Buffalo-born boomer governor have found common ground through a shared embrace of abundance.

In recent months, the two have shared podiums to announce both the launch of universal childcare and a push to reform the state’s environmental review process. In many ways, these initiatives reflect vastly different flavors of abundance; the former would expand state-provided benefits to unlock income-earning potential for parents, while the latter is a process-oriented, technocratic reform, exempting categories of infrastructure from environmental review to shave years off the development timeline. But they both reflect a desire to unleash public and private sector capacity to deliver more of what New Yorkers need, more quickly.

The combination of these announcements feels like wish fulfillment for those who have been promoting “progressive abundance” for years. When we launched Abundance New York in June 2024, the political environment was much more uncertain for abundance advocates. The day after our launch, Governor Hochul—still stung by her narrow reelection win and worried about potential congressional losses in the suburbs—put the brakes on congestion pricing, drawing the ire of our nascent community. That summer, nearly half of New York’s Community Boards voted against the Adams administration’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal. In September, Eric Adams was indicted, diverting attention away from his pro-housing policy proposals. When a little-known assemblymember named Zohran Mamdani announced his mayoral candidacy in October, it barely made a blip.

Now the governor is polling 20 points better than her likely GOP opponent in the fall, and the mayor’s popularity is the highest it’s ever been. All it took was their shared embrace of abundance—a movement bringing together an expanding coalition of allies, a political philosophy that can complement rather than redefine their core commitments, and a practice that sharpens their policy proposals to make them more likely to deliver. It’s clearly a new day in New York, but the Mamdani-Hochul alliance suggests it may also be a new order.

This didn’t happen by accident: the rise of the abundance constituency

At a recent event we hosted on New York’s abundance agenda, former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen quipped, “Where were all you abundance people ten years ago?” Back then, Glen and other leaders inside the De Blasio administration were working to build more housing after a slew of Bloomberg-era downzonings—and facing a buzzsaw of community opposition. Today’s abundance leaders weren’t, as someone else responded, in high school; they were on the scene, working in government or in the dozens of storied advocacy and policy groups fighting for more housing, safe streets, regional planning, and more.

But between then and now, we’ve seen a coalescence of these leaders, and their communities, into a political constituency emboldened beyond single-issue advocacy. Through money, voice, and votes, this constituency can reward policymakers for making good decisions—and hold them accountable for clinging to the status quo.

That constituency came together with surprising force to oppose Hochul’s congestion pricing pause, showing the Governor that she had more to lose from making the “safe” decision than she did from taking bold action. Political commentators marveled at the strange bedfellows coming together to hold her accountable; to us, this was simply the abundance coalition.

Mamdani, who in early 2025 was steadily climbing in the polls, also saw the benefits of an abundance coalition that, in many ways, acted as a swing vote. While his initial platform had focused exclusively on government-led social housing, late in his campaign he told the New York Times he’d changed his mind on the role of market-rate development in driving housing affordability. He started speaking about abundance on the campaign trail and secured our endorsement when other publications weren’t weighing in. Abundance voters may not have been the decisive swing constituency in the 2025 primaries, but they were a significant piece of the puzzle that multiple candidates, from Brad Lander to Mamdani to Cuomo, felt the need to court.

A philosophy that can coexist alongside existing political identities

As both Hochul and Mamdani have gone from flirting with abundance to more seriously engaging with it, they have found it provides a clearer path toward the outcomes their respective bases are demanding––not a replacement for their values, but a way to actually realize them.

For a believer in big government like Mamdani, an abundance agenda is not only compatible with an affordability agenda—it’s a critical enabler of it. His embrace of abundance is a way of taking back terms—”language around bureaucracy, efficiency, waste”—from the right-wing and reinvigorating them with a progressive valence. By rooting his vision of “public excellence” in the history of sewer socialism, he can demonstrate to new audiences that he’s serious about efficiency and municipal outcomes. In highlighting property tax reform as a way of bringing down housing costs, he can target new audiences focused on efficiency and cost reduction, while still centering his base’s focus on combating inequity.

Hochul invoked abundance principles to follow through on her core political identity as a business-friendly moderate standing up to Trump. In championing environmental review (SEQRA) reform and efforts to cut government red tape, she can unlock growth and efficiency for housing developers and small businesses; in standing up to Trump on the Gateway Tunnel or offshore wind, she can deploy abundance language to show her labor and climate bona fides.

An approach that sharpens existing policy proposals

For both Mamdani and Hochul, applying an abundance lens has helped them find a stronger footing, whether in their policy proposals or political positioning. To be sure, the proof is in the pudding. It’s easy to preach abundance; it’s harder to navigate trade-offs between, say, reaching New York’s ambitious climate targets and achieving short-term energy affordability for New Yorkers (as Hochul has recently confronted)—or freezing the rent to alleviate short-term needs while ensuring a stable long-term supply of rent-stabilized units.

These are the kinds of tensions that any abundance-oriented government will have to manage. To help leaders like Mamdani and Hochul navigate those tradeoffs, we recently put out our first Abundance Agenda. The document takes the concept of “abundance” from north star to roadmap and offers policy recommendations, sourced widely from practitioners and policymakers, for how we can make it easier, cheaper, faster, and fairer to build what New Yorkers need—even on a tight budget.

If leaders as different as Hochul and Mamdani can find common ground in that agenda, New York might finally have the political coalition needed to deliver.