JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has broken ranks with his fellow New York business leaders to “offer to help” Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani if he wins Tuesday’s election to City Hall.
As residents of the Big Apple go to the polls, the young progressive looks on course to secure a victory over independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
However, there has been considerable conservative resistance towards Mamdani’s affordability agenda, with President Donald Trump coming forward Monday to urge citizens of his old hometown to reject his “communist” platform and back Cuomo, prompting the Democrat to accuse Trump in turn of feeling “threatened” by his campaign.
While some business leaders have gone as far as to warn they could leave the city if Mamdani wins, Dimon has said he would “call him and offer my help” if the 34-year-old Queens assemblyman does indeed come out on top.
The influential bank boss told Fortune last month with a shrug: “If he becomes mayor, so be it.”
Characterizing Mamdani as “more Marxist than socialist,” he observed that the candidate has been “talking to a lot of people, he’s convinced a lot of people he’s going to change, he wants to learn… You know, some people are what they are, they’re not going to change.”
Asked about the candidate’s prospects of delivering on his ambitious promises, Dimon said, “I would hope for the best of this case, and New York will survive. You know, we survived Bill de Blasio.
“If he becomes mayor, I will call him and offer my help. We will help them. You know, I am a patriot. I help governors, mayors, presidents. We help people around the world.”
Dimon raised eyebrows with his frankness in July when he made light of Democrats for “falling all over themselves” to support Mamdani’s policies, which he called “ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.”
“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots,” he continued: “I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed.”
He subsequently repeated that criticism, saying “a lot of the things [Mamdani] prescribes have never worked before,” before adding, “We’ll see,” and making the promise he “would still try and help him do the best job he can.”
Regarded as a sage voice on Wall Street, Dimon has frequently been turned to this year for his thoughts on Trump’s tariffs and the likelihood of the president’s trade aggressions driving the United States into recession.
He put the chance of that happening at 30 percent within two years during an interview with the BBC last month.
“I am far more worried about that than others,” he said. “Now, I’m talking about probabilities. I would give it a higher probability than I think is probably priced in the market and by others. So, if the market’s pricing in 10 percent, I would price in, I would say, it’s more like 30 percent.
“The amount of uncertainty – and I put geopolitics in that category, fiscal spending in that category, politics in that category, the remilitarization of the world in that category – all of these things coincide.
“A lot of issues that we don’t know how they’re gonna sort out. So I say the level of uncertainty should be higher in most people’s minds than what I call normal.”
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