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Mayor Mamdani has a favorite phrase. We counted him saying it 80 times.
By
Ryan Kost
Published Jul 4, 2026
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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
By
Ryan Kost
Published Jul 4, 2026
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“For too long,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a recent news conference about workplace heat standards, “working New Yorkers have been overlooked when it comes to heat protections.”
When he released his budget in May, the mayor noted that “For too long, New Yorkers have been told that ambition must give way to austerity, that government can either be fiscally responsible or invest in people, but never both.”
And a month earlier, on Earth Day, he celebrated new heat pumps for NYCHA buildings: “For too long, the sun has risen and set on New Yorkers living in apartments without reliable heat or warmed by inefficient fossil fuel-guzzling boilers.”
Listen to enough of Mamdani’s speeches and you’ll start to notice just how many things have been going on “for too long.” He’s invoked the phrase to argue for more public restrooms, to lament decades of underinvestment in parks and to describe being Muslim in New York. He’s used it while talking about special education settlement payouts, the plight of taxi drivers and slow buses.
“For too long” appeared four times in his Jan. 1 inaugural address and again, the day after, in his announcement of the Office of Mass Engagement.
The pattern isn't strictly anecdotal.
An archive cataloging the mayor’s official events indicates he has used the phrases “for too long” or “for far too long” at least 80 times since taking office.
The phrase has become recognizable enough that even the conservative satire site Babylon Bee spoofed it, imagining the mayor declaring that “Baseball has for too long been a system where a small number of teams hoard runs while others, specifically the Mets, are left struggling to meet even their most basic scoring needs.”
A City Hall spokesperson declined to make the mayor’s speechwriter available for an interview to discuss the phrase’s frequency.
Many speakers develop recurring verbal habits, according to David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama. The former president was known to pepper his speeches with the phrase “Let me be clear” — often enough that White House speechwriters stopped writing it into drafts, Litt said. These sorts of phrases are helpful, Litt said, because they give the audience a moment to reset. “It’s telling the audience, ‘Hey, listen to this,’” he said.
But “for too long” is more than a verbal habit. It also serves as an opening line for the political story Mamdani likes to tell about New York.
Litt described it this way: “This idea that things were run the same way for a very long time, everything was kinda ossified, nothing was working, no one was really fighting on people's behalf, and now Mamdani comes into office and everything's changing.”
Josh Greenman, the managing editor of Vital City and a former speechwriter himself, built the website that tracks Mamdani’s language. He arrived at much the same conclusion.
“I think it's consistent with his belief that he is changing history and that he is reorienting city government in very profound ways,” Greenman said.
More often than not, the phrase establishes that the old order has endured for, well, too long before introducing the change represented by Mamdani and his administration.
“For too long,” the mayor said during a joint legislative budget hearing in February, “the relationship between City Hall and the state has been defined by pettiness instead of partnership, power struggles instead of problem-solving.”
And then again, less than 20 minutes later: “I think that for too long we’ve treated the pie as if it can only ever remain the same, and what we’re also talking about is increasing revenues by taxing the wealthiest that little bit more.”
Right or wrong, the phrase assumes its premise rather than arguing for it.
“He wants to paint city government as having been skewed systematically in favor of the moneyed interests of wealthy people, of the establishment in New York and of always short-changing the poor and the working class,” Greenman said. Though he added that he would argue that narrative oversimplifies the city's history.
Litt noted the phrase serves another political purpose: “It's a very handy way of criticizing his fellow Democrats … without directly saying, ‘Hey, I'm going after you guys.’”
The phrase is only one feature of a broader speaking style that both Litt and Greenman described as unusually old-school.
“He sounds more rhetorical — or maybe oratorical,” Litt said. “Even when he's talking about the Knicks, he is kind of speaking in this sort of on-the-steps-of-the-Lincoln-Memorial style.”
“When he’s giving a speech, he's giving a speech with a capital S,” Greenman said. “I think that is related to the idea that he is making history.”
Mamdani fills his speeches with alliteration (“ambition must give way to austerity”) and parallelism (“pettiness instead of partnership, power struggles instead of problem-solving”). He weaves in quotes from socialist heavyweights like Thomas Sankara alongside decidedly less lofty source material. During his Earth Day announcement about heat pumps, he quoted Val Kilmer’s character in the movie “Heat.”
The way he speaks, Greenman said, is something of a departure for the office.
“The job of mayor is frequently thought of as not only, but largely a management job,” he said. “Mayors often like to speak plainly.”
But while Mamdani “believes that it's super important for government to work well, particularly because he has big ambitions to expand government … he doesn't see the role as stopping there,” Greenman added.
Greenman sits on the independent New York Editorial Board. He remembers interviewing Mamdani in February 2025. “I think at its core, a mayor is a messenger, a delegate, a liaison,” Mamdani said at the time.
“He didn't use the word manager,” Greenman said. “So he sees the role as multifaceted, and he really does not shy away from the piece of the role that is philosophical, political messenger.”
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new york city
Ryan Kost
Ryan Kost is a reporter on the day-of news desk, where he covers breaking news and writes enterprise stories about jails, courts, prosecutors and government accountability. His work focuses on the public institutions that shape life in New York. Before joining the newsroom, he lead a multi-part investigation with Columbia Journalism Investigations and New York Focus into how New York prosecutors handle wrongful conviction claims. He's also been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, The Associated Press and The Oregonian. Got a tip? Signal: ryankost.20
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