Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens, has jumped into the New York City mayor’s race with the backing of the same group that engineered the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress.

“Now is the time for us to get to work to replace our corrupt, autocratic mayor with a proven socialist,” the Democratic Socialists of America declared.

And Israel-hater, they forgot to mention.

With Mayor Adams facing legal woes, Mamdani is the just the latest of several far-left candidates to declare plans to run for his job. 

But even if a moderate candidate defeats these leftists, putting a new leader in City Hall will not be enough to reverse the city’s rapid deterioration. 

Because the problem doesn’t lie in the mayor’s office alone, but down the hall in the City Council.

Adams was handicapped from Day 1 — long before the corruption charges — by an ideologically extreme council that treats him like a piñata.

And New Yorkers crying out for a city government with a common-sense agenda — safe subway rides, good schools, order instead of chaos on the streets — have themselves, in part, to blame.

In last year’s local elections, when all 51 council seats were up for grabs, voter turnout was a dismal 7.2% for the primaries and 12.8% in the general election. 

The number of New Yorkers who went to the polls (578,877) barely exceeded the number who voted with their feet (546,146) and moved out of the city over the previous three years.

And now we’re all paying the price.

The City Council is willfully destroying public safety and quality of life, even affirming that sleeping on the street is a “right” — the impact on your neighborhood be damned.

The council defeated Adams’ attempts to restrain spending and prioritize crime-fighting. Its budget agreement, finalized in June, spends 18.3% more than former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final budget — and de Blasio was a reckless spendthrift — with none of the increased spending devoted to increasing manpower at the NYPD, where headcount is disastrously low.

In another attack on crime-fighting, the council enacted the How Many Stops Act, which forces cops to fill out complicated paperwork every time they interact with anyone, whether a suspect or not. 

The mayor vetoed it, but the council had the votes to override him.

What’s next? Proposed legislation would muzzle the NYPD from criticizing council members on social media.

The council wants to halt freedom of expression for cops, but increase it for accused criminals.

Councilwoman Crystal Hudson (D-Brooklyn) says sex accessories like prosthetic penises and wigs for transgender Rikers Island inmates “should be our priority.”

Forget about public safety and economic prosperity. Most council members don’t even pay lip service to those goals.

Worse, the extremist majority is plotting a power grab.

Speaker Adrienne Adams is proposing a Charter Revision Commission under her control, not the mayor’s. The new commission’s recommendations would appear on the ballot in 2025 or 2026.   

One likely revision would give the City Council “advice and consent” over mayoral appointees to run the NYPD and most agencies — a change that would destroy mayoral accountability and allow the council to, for example, push an anti-policing candidate into the police commissioner’s office.

The council showed it’s unfit to give “advice and consent” with its shameful grilling last month of lawyer Randy Mastro, Adams’ choice for corporation counsel. Mastro was asked accusatory questions like “Why do you feel comfortable . . . as a white man to replace a woman of color?”

But all is not lost, New Yorkers. It is possible to elect a common-sense City Council. 

Take, for example, Kristy Marmorato, who this year became the first Republican to represent The Bronx in 40 years, even though only 14% of voters in her district belong to the GOP.

She ran in 2023 on quality-of-life issues like crime and affordable housing that matter to all her neighbors, Latino and black voters included.

But the Republican Party is falling down on its job.

All too many Democratic council candidates have run unopposed, or have even received the Republicans’ cross-endorsement — 33% of them in 2023 — offering voters zero reason to turn out on Election Day at all.

Where is the GOP in the city’s time of crisis?

Ever since the days of Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, political parties have identified candidates, supported them and brought out the vote.

But that two-party system is missing in New York City, except on Staten Island and a handful of exceptional districts in Queens and Brooklyn.  

Whoever runs for mayor pledging to rescue the city from decline will need to simultaneously campaign for City Council allies who will wrest control from the lunatics. New York’s future depends on it. 

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.