Kansas City has been in the news a lot lately. The Chiefs' repeated trips to the Super Bowl and the constant updates on pop star Taylor Swift and tight end Travis Kelce’s relationship keep the growing city in the national conversation.
But there’s one area of the news cycle that many may be surprised to find Kansas City in: the New York City mayoral race.
New York City’s 2025 election has captured nationwide attention. That’s mostly thanks to candidate Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblymember and democratic socialist who leads his opponents — former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the primary election, and Republican Curtis Sliwa — by double digits in virtually every poll.
Many national news outlets, most of them conservative-leaning, have zeroed in on Mamdani’s proposals for free bus fare and government-run grocery stores. And they’re using Kansas City as a negative example of why Mamdani’s policies won’t work.
“I believe this is Kansas City's moment, and when it is your city's moment, that means that you just get a lot more eyeballs, for better or worse,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said. “I wonder, had we not been in the national spotlight from, name your issue, Super Bowls, shootings, World Cup, Taylor (Swift), would we actually get the same attention for a grocery store?”
Making Kansas City’s free fare an example
Kansas City was the first major city in the U.S. to implement free bus fare in 2020. But without a sustainable funding plan, the city plans to end that program for all but low-income riders and those already getting help from social service agencies.
The loss of Kansas City’s free fare was largely due to a budget crisis and funding feud between the city and the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, which does not have a stable regional source of funding.
In New York City, Mamdani led a fare-free bus pilot on five bus lines across each of the city’s five boroughs. Making bus fare free in New York City would require about $800 million, which comes from dedicated taxes and money from the city and state. That’s more than eight times Kansas City’s budget for buses.
The funding models, ridership levels and operations between bus systems in New York and Kansas City are vastly different.
But articles in conservative outlets like Fox News, The Free Press and the New York Post posited that the end of free fare in Kansas City meant the policy wouldn’t work in New York, where the daily bus ridership is more than double Kansas City’s population.
Julian Agyeman is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University. He studies city interventions on affordability, like food and bus policies. He said he believes Kansas City is being used as a scare tactic because there is an “absolute fear” among many voters of Mamdani winning the election and putting these policies in place.
“It's almost like pushing the ball up to the top of a hill,” Agyeman said. “It's a long journey, and it's hard to get it there. But these popular policies, and they will be popular in New York, are very difficult to dislodge once they're in place.”
'Apples and oranges' in comparing grocery stores
A Sun Fresh off of Prospect Avenue in Kansas City closed in August. Some national media picked up the story and contrasted it with Mamdani’s proposal for city-owned grocery stores.
Most of the stories mischaracterized how the store was run in Kansas City, which was a public-private partnership where the city leases a property to a grocer to run the store privately.
Fox News ran multiple articles on the grocery store, and said it serves as a “cautionary tale” for New York. The National Review, a conservative editorial magazine, said the store’s failure “raises doubts” about Mamdani’s plan. And the New York Post said the Sun Fresh “renewed skepticism of Mamdani’s signature plan.”
Lucas said he believes the national attention accelerated the closure of that store.
“I think that led to their frustration, of them throwing up their hands in connection with the grocery store investment, proving that it is fundamentally not government-run,” Lucas said. “That was not a city council choice. It wasn't us saying we can't handle it anymore.”
Unlike Mamdani’s plans for city-owned grocery stores, Kansas City’s Sun Fresh was a private grocery tenant on city-owned property. Agyeman said it’s unfair to say Mamdani’s plan won’t work in New York just because one store closed in Kansas City.
“The scale of the city of New York compared to Kansas City,” Agyeman said, “the location, the history, the demographics, the local politics, the state politics — there's so many factors afoot that are so different in each place that it’s apples and oranges. We need a very different analysis.”
Mamdani did not answer multiple requests for comment on this story. But he was asked about Kansas City’s grocery store in an interview with CNN and said, “We have to prove not only the efficacy, but the excellence of this idea.”
“For every one example that you can point to, there’s another of another municipality today considering opening a city-run grocery store,” Mamdani said in the interview. “To me, the most important thing is the outcome. This is something I believe will work. We will bring the best and brightest to deliver it.”
How this coverage could sway the vote
Even though Kansas City is not a perfect example of Mamdani’s policies, coverage of the city’s plans could still sway the vote.
Beth Vonahme studies how campaign information impacts political behavior at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She said it’s normal for people to look for examples when a politician introduces a new idea, especially if voters are on the fence.
“There's going to be some voters who are sort of on the margins of which way they want to go, and if they continuously hear negative things about these programs and policies that are similar, it certainly could have an effect on the vote,” Vonahme said.
Kansas City still runs successful public-private partnerships for other grocery stores, like Cosentino’s Market downtown and Farm Fresh Market in Red Bridge. And bus fare isn’t entirely going away.
The city subsidizes a lot of private development, too, like new roads to data centers and sweeping tax abatements for luxury apartment buildings.
Lucas said the attention Kansas City’s received has him thinking about when policies like this are considered bad by critics, and if that attention is only reserved for things that help working-class people.
“We do all of these things to subsidize models largely for private development,” Lucas said. “I think that here is this cherry picking as to when does government expenditure become socialist as a bad word, and when is it actually just doing the work that you do?”
Early voting in New York’s election has already begun, and election day is Tuesday. Only time will tell what effect, if any, the media attention on Kansas City has had during this race.
Either way, Vonahme said using Kansas City’s policies to sway New York voters away from Mamdani isn’t likely to be successful because the audience of the outlets already skews conservative.
“I think what's more challenging for the conservative outlets in terms of having an effect is that they're already speaking to these echo chambers that agree with them,” Vonahme said. “I don't think the audience for a lot of this criticism would have ever voted for Mamdani anyway.”
