How Zohran Mamdani fought the master plan | The key factor isn’t his ads or charisma — it is a public campaign finance system that can be replicated across the US

Thanks to New York City’s nearly four-decade-old clean elections system that publicly finances candidates for municipal office, Mamdani has had nearly $13 million of government funds to run a competitive campaign against tens of millions of dollars that oligarchs spent to boost disgraced Democratic former governor Andrew Cuomo.

the biggest lesson in Mamdani’s race is that — regardless of your political party or ideology — if you want candidates who come from outside the system and aren’t puppets of big donors and corrupt political machines, then you should get behind the nonpartisan movement to publicly finance the elections in your community, your state, and your country.

The idea goes back to Teddy Roosevelt who was responding to corruption in the Gilded Age:

“There is a very radical measure which would, I believe, work a substantial improvement in our system of conducting a campaign,” Roosevelt wrote in his annual message to Congress that year. “The need for collecting large campaign funds would vanish if Congress provided an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the great national parties, an appropriation ample enough to meet the necessity for thorough organization and machinery, which requires a large expenditure of money.”