Gamaliel Ramos is a journalist who has lived and worked in Puerto Rico and New York, and is now based in New Zealand.

OPINION: As a journalist who covered American politics for nearly two decades, I developed a habit I’ve never been able to shake. When something is happening in front of me, I reach back. Scandals, past failures, forgotten successes, crises that became defining moments. Context is always there if you know where to look.

Living in New Zealand, I still do it.

I see plans to gut the public service of thousands of job and I think of Elon Musk running a chainsaw through the American federal workforce from a desk he wasn’t elected to sit at, calling it efficiency.

I see Winston Peters declaring a “war on woke” and “Make New Zealand First Again” at a party conference and I think: I know this playlist. Every track.

I see Shane Jones warning of a “butter chicken tsunami”, ACT charging migrants by the day, and Christopher Luxon telling a room of CEOs he’ll choose “social cohesion” over their bottom line on immigration — three decades of National orthodoxy abandoned to chase a culture war that polling suggests most New Zealanders aren’t actually fighting.

The playbook doesn’t just borrow MAGA’s economics. It borrows the whole wardrobe.

What I didn’t expect was how much I’d miss the counter-argument. Because right now, in the city I spent two decades covering, that counter-argument is the mayor.

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist who grew up between Kampala, Cape Town and Queens, is currently the most talked-about municipal politician on the planet and the most feared man in conservative American media.

He ran on a platform of rent freezes, free childcare, city-owned supermarkets and taxing the wealthy in the most expensive media market on earth. The sitting president called him a communist and threatened to cut federal funding if he won.

He won by 11 points.

What happened next is the part worth studying.

Mamdani didn’t collapse. He closed a budget deficit larger than anything since the Great Recession — on a $124.7 billion budget — without resorting to property tax hikes or service cuts, in part by squeezing $1.77 billion out of inefficiency.

When Trump threatened to withhold federal funds, Mamdani went to the White House and walked out with the money intact.

When his endorsed candidates ran in the congressional primaries on the same democratic socialist platform, they won, including a 32-year-old first-time candidate who knocked out a five-term incumbent.

The lesson is not that every policy will work. A pilot for his free childcare serves just 40 families. The city-run supermarkets are still renderings on a wall, though the outrage they’ve already generated from the private sector tells you something useful. The rent freeze is in place for eligible apartments, but facing legal challenge.

None of this is magic. The lesson is that he was willing to try.

He argued that public services are worth paying for and that extreme concentrations of wealth should contribute more. When the president called him a communist and threatened his city’s funding, he said our values are not bargaining chips. And the sky stayed up.

Now look at home.

New Zealand’s Government has proposed cutting 8700 public service jobs to save $2.4b, frontline social workers and border staff reportedly among them, while the NBR Rich List showed $129b held by 26 billionaires, up from 18 the year before. Rocket Lab co-founder Sir Peter Beck’s net worth went from $650 million to $11b in 12 months, a more dramatic single-year swing than anything in Mamdani’s entire budget, and nobody in Government has suggested he might want to chip in.

The supermarket fight has been pure theatre for four years. The Commerce Commission argued in 2022 that the Woolworths and Foodstuffs duopoly was pulling in $1m a day in excess profits. The response was a Grocery Commissioner that one of the Government’s own coalition partners now calls toothless.

Nicola Willis announced she was “actively looking” at structural separation for the industry. A year later: no divestment, no new chain, the same two companies holding 82% of the market, food prices still climbing.

Mamdani hasn’t opened a single grocery store yet either. The difference is he’s building one.

New Zealand has been issuing strongly worded concern since 2022 and calling it a plan.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at a rally promoting democrat socialist candidates in a congressional primary election race in June.Photo: Ryan Murphy / AP Photo/Ryan Murphy

Meanwhile, it seems it has been decided that immigration is the issue of the election. The rhetoric has, as one analyst put it, “tilted sharply toward UK and US discourse”. The Greens were blunt: after trying to tie New Zealand closer to the Trump administration, the coalition is now doing a Trump impression.

The playbook always ends the same way: working people get the blame, big business gets the spoils.

I’ve lived inside this playbook. It has a known counter.

That counter is currently mayor of the largest city in the US, the nerve centre of international capitalism and finance. While it did not invent the system, it perfected its scale.

New Zealand’s left bloc could point at New York and say: look, it’s not ideology, it’s a choice, and they survived making it.

You don’t need Mamdani’s charisma or his ability to charm a president who called him a communist. You need someone willing to point at the supermarket that isn’t even open yet and say: that’s what trying looks like.

I grew up watching a city organise its entire government around the fear of what billionaires might do if pushed. New York is proving that fear was always more useful to the people making the threat than to anyone receiving it.

The early results aren’t a miracle. They’re simply proof that the bluff can be called.