Zohran Mamdani sits alone in a small holding room, the pages of his speech spread out on a low table. Mamdani seems, surprisingly, on edge. Maybe it’s because an at-capacity audience of some 2,000 people, the biggest crowd Mamdani has drawn during his mayoral campaign, is on the other side of the wall inside Brooklyn Steel, a venue where the headliners are usually acts like LCD Soundsystem and Samia. Maybe it’s because his mother, director Mira Nair, is circulating among the backstage throng.
Most likely, though, it’s because Election Day is rapidly closing in. In the six months since declaring his candidacy, Mamdani has gone from obscure 33-year-old socialist state assemblyman to the biggest story in the battle for City Hall—and a threat to universally known former governor and front-runner Andrew Cuomo. “Zohran is far and away the most talented candidate in the race,” a veteran New York political strategist says.
Comedian Jaboukie Young-White and actor Kal Penn do their best to keep the crowd—which includes Ella Emhoff, stepdaughter of former vice president Kamala Harris—energized during the wait for Mamdani. The mood is festive but wonky: People wearing “Eric Adams Raised My Rent” T-shirts discuss housing development tax policy and read novels to kill time. Finally, after a series of windy politicians and union leaders speak, Mamdani takes the stage, wearing a dark suit and tie set off by a white shirt. Wisely, he keeps his speech to a tight 11 minutes, hopping from signature proposals (“I believe we can freeze the rent for more than 2 million tenants!”) to red meat, like calling President Donald Trump “a wannabe king,” and building to an adrenalized finish. “What we have dreamt in the night, we will build in the dawn,” Mamdani shouts. “The sun is starting to rise, and together, New York, on June 24, we are going to win!”
The crowd roars and chants “Zoh-ran! Zoh-ran!” Yet in the background, if you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the calamitous thresher that is tabloid-stoked city politics whirring to life. This morning, after Mamdani exited a breakfast hosted by a Jewish organization in Brooklyn, a fellow state assemblyman, Kalman Yeger, went to the podium and denounced Mamdani as “one of the most vile antisemites” holding elected office in New York. Just less than two weeks later, Politico will run a story highlighting how Mamdani declined to cosponsor two ceremonial legislative resolutions, one celebrating the anniversary of Israel’s founding and another condemning the Holocaust, though Mamdani says he voted for the second edict.
This is the flip side of Mamdani’s unexpected success: The political press and his opponents are now taking him seriously and inspecting his record. Cuomo, early in his run, declared antisemitism to be “the most serious and the most important issue” in the campaign—a dubious assessment considering the issues facing New York as a whole, but an astute calculation in a Democratic primary. Jewish voters are one of the city’s most reliable voting demographics. Orthodox Jewish voters are an even more prized bloc, and many in that community were unhappy with Cuomo’s quarantine orders during the pandemic. The ex-governor is finding Mamdani’s history a highly useful foil: Mamdani has long been a vocal advocate for Palestinians; he has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a “genocide”; and he has backed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.
One week after the Brooklyn Steel rally, sitting at a table inside Ricky’s Café in polyglot Jackson Heights, Mamdani rejects being labeled antisemitic. “What underpins my politics is a universalism, a belief in human rights that have to be applicable to all people, and that is why I extend these notions of freedom and justice and safety to also apply to Palestinians,” he tells me. “A very real crisis of antisemitism is occurring within our city, and we do it a disservice by allowing politicians like Andrew Cuomo to weaponize it for their own ends.” Mamdani says that, if elected, he would propose creating a department of community safety and increasing funding for hate-violence prevention programs by 800%.
The recent attacks, while based in Albany arcana, have nonetheless put Mamdani on the defensive. His campaign’s initial responses to the stories about the Israel and Holocaust resolutions were clumsy, allowing the controversy to fester. “Well, he’s a two-term assemblyman. It’s not like he has some massive operation in place to help handle these things,” a Mamdani ally says. “The infrastructure is, I think, being built as they go.”
Mamdani’s rise has indeed been rapid. An only child, he was born in Kampala, Uganda, where his father, a professor and expert on colonialism, taught. The family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, when Mamdani was five, and to Manhattan when he was seven. “When I was younger, I tended to be consumed by this frustration of what it meant to be a minority wherever I was from,” Mamdani says. “That in Uganda, I was Indian; in India, I was Muslim; in New York City, I was all of these things, and it felt as if I was living in the second half of a commercial about a new medicine, with all of the terms and conditions applying to the life that I was seeking to live.” His father, Mamdani adds, once told him that the beauty of being a minority is seeing the truth of a place, not just its promise. “It helped me move beyond this chip-on-my-shoulder mentality about the world and instead see the responsibility I had to help create a new one.”
After graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine, Mamdani worked as a housing-foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens while also trying to sell mixtapes of himself as the rapper Mr. Cardamom. A career in public policy soon seemed the wiser choice. In 2018, Mamdani became an American citizen; two years later, running as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he achieved an upset victory in a primary race for a New York State Assembly seat, defeating an incumbent Democrat by riding the local Queens progressive wave that had sent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. Mamdani has scored some modest wins during his two terms in Albany, including the implementation of a pilot program for free city buses. But he has also honed his ability to draw attention, as seen when he went on a 15-day hunger strike to push for better working conditions for city taxi drivers. “I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s been a straight shooter and has been an effective partner when we work together on issues,” says Mike Gianaris, the State Senate’s deputy Democratic leader and a fellow Queens politician. “What he brings to the table is the ability to galvanize public opinion from people who are not normally involved in politics.”
That is essentially the organizing principle of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. Last fall he looked at the field and saw a lane open to the left. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, was increasingly mired in corruption scandals. The likely challengers were mostly familiar mainstream New York Democrats, including city comptroller Brad Lander and former city comptroller Scott Stringer.
And also, eventually, the 67-year-old Cuomo, who officially joined the field in March, following Adams’s September indictment on bribery and campaign finance charges (to which he pleaded not guilty, with the charges later controversially dismissed after Trump won the presidency). Cuomo, a blunt force in New York politics since the late 1970s, was elected governor three times, only to infamously resign in August 2021 under a black cloud of sexual harassment allegations (he has denied them all) and bitterness over his handling of nursing homes during the COVID pandemic.
Mamdani has been a stark contrast to the somber, gray-haired political lifers, offering a fresh voice packaged in clever Instagram, X, and TikTok posts and touting populist ideas such as low-cost city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and rent freezes for some tenants. He believes he can build a base from younger, Muslim, and South Asian voters and has repeatedly created viral moments—none bigger than when he screamed in the face of Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations, about deportation policy. “Sometimes the only options we’re left with are the ones where you have to shout at the so-called border czar of the United States as he smirks while eating an apple walking across the state capitol,” Mamdani says.
The strategy has thus far been successful: Mamdani maxed out on legal campaign donations in March at more than $8 million—collected from more than 19,000 individual donors—and assembled a volunteer force of 20,000-plus that his campaign claims has knocked on more than 500,000 doors. All impressive yet inconclusive. Andrew Yang racked up similarly promising numbers in his bid for mayor four years ago, and was leading in some polls, but finished a distant fourth in the primary.
This time around, polling has shown Mamdani as a consistent second to Cuomo, though by a wide margin: A Marist survey released last week had him losing by 24 points. Mamdani’s advisers think they can expand his support to include older, white, conventionally liberal voters in brownstone Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side, particularly as a second or third choice in New York’s ranked-choice voting system, by emphasizing his ideas to lower the cost of living.
Cuomo is, of course, intent on blocking that crossover. He’s portraying himself as the experienced manager who can save the city from the crazy left-wing radicals. The New York Post, meanwhile, is gleefully painting Mamdani as a hypocritical poseur. Mamdani very much wants to be seen as more than just the hipster candidate who attracted R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe to one of his fundraisers, and he welcomes the skirmishing to an extent. “The record that Cuomo touts, we are seeing each and every day that it is built on a very flimsy set of facts,” he says. “He is scared of having to actually answer questions from New Yorkers that are not scripted….because to expose himself to the world that he wants to run is to admit to the fact that he spent the last few decades in suburbia and his connection to New York City is more on cable news than actually out on the street…and I think he’s also scared of our campaign.”
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi ticks off a list of the former governor’s accomplishments, including raising the state’s minimum wage and rebuilding LaGuardia Airport. “He’s got the experience and the record to put this city back on track,” Azzopardi says. “The stakes are too high to entrust this job to a 33-year-old silver spoon socialist whose short political career has been as a legislative backbencher who has no record or management experience whatsoever.”
With his raft of major endorsements, tough-guy image, and millions of dollars in ads launched by a supportive super PAC, Cuomo remains the favorite. “Progressives are not connecting with blue-collar voters, whether you measure that along racial and ethnic lines or income and education,” an analyst not affiliated with any of the campaigns says. “For Mamdani to make an upset, he would need to build some bridges beyond just the left, and the overall turnout would have to be under 600,000 voters. In 2021 the turnout was just under 1 million.”
The math is indeed very difficult. An estimated 50% of the electorate still doesn’t know who Mamdani is, something he will try to remedy with millions in ad spending down the stretch. Still, putting Mamdani in charge of New York’s $112 billion city budget and its larger-than-many-national-armies police department would require an enormous leap of faith by city voters, driven by something beyond the policy particulars he’s pushing. “I decided to run as a response to the ways in which the Adams administration had made life that much more expensive in a city that was already suffocating,” he says, “and the feeling that when the political class looked at this city after Trump won more votes in November, they were misreading despair as instead being a rightward shift.”
Whether Mamdani wins or not, his rise is significant—for what it says about the tensions between social and traditional media; as a measure of the role of progressives in the Democratic Party; as a test of whether New York’s tribal fault lines are shifting; and as an expression of the generational hunger for change. “These other people have had their chances,” says Alanna Saunders, a 33-year-old actor in the Brooklyn Steel crowd listening to Mamdani. “The only way the city gets out of its problems is by putting younger blood in charge.”
That’s an admirably hopeful view. The immediate political question, though, is whether Mamdani bumps up against the limits of both charisma and left-wing politics, even in New York City. Nimble and confident, as always, Mamdani quickly shrugs off skepticism around buzz translating into enough ballots. “This is a campaign,” he says, “that continues to eclipse every ceiling that’s been imposed upon it.”
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