It was late in the afternoon on Tuesday, and Bilquees Akhtar was still at work as an assistant to the principal of EPIC High School North in Richmond Hill, Queens. Suddenly her phone exploded with text messages and DMs on Instagram and TikTok from her five adult children. Each of them had already cast a vote for Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.
“MOM, WHY ARE YOU STILL AT WORK?” Ms. Akhtar’s 24-year-old son, Humza Mehfuz, wrote to her. “YOU HAVE TO VOTE!”
While Ms. Akhtar had previously supported Mr. Mamdani’s main opponent, Andrew M. Cuomo, when he ran for governor and, years before that, had voted for his father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, she told her children to calm down. After their relentless campaign of showing her TikTok videos of Mr. Mamdani — “This kid is brilliant,” she had to admit, “and so friendly!” — she had made her decision.
“All of Cuomo’s ads tried to make Mamdani look like a terrorist,” said Ms. Akhtar, 56. “But he’s a New Yorker like me.”
By Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens, had won 43 percent of votes counted, all but clinching perhaps the greatest political upset in New York City politics in a generation. (The final tally is not expected to be completed until next week, but Mr. Cuomo conceded the race on Tuesday night.) If Mr. Mamdani were to win the general election this fall, he would be the first Muslim mayor in the history of New York, and also the first mayor of South Asian descent.
The city is home to about one million Muslims, and Mr. Mamdani strove to reach even unlikely and infrequent voters among them with a social media strategy featuring videos in which he spoke directly to the camera, said Zara Rahim, a spokeswoman for the campaign.
But the heavy rotation of TikTok and Instagram videos was made possible by Mr. Mamdani’s core strategy, Ms. Rahim said, which involved a relentless schedule of in-person campaign events in heavily Muslim and working-class neighborhoods, often addressing crowds in languages including Hindi and Spanish. “These Bangladeshi uncles and West African aunties who had never voted in a primary for a mayor,” Ms. Rahim said, “they see somebody showing up at their mosques and treating their neighborhoods like they mattered.”
Social media was critical for Mr. Mamdani to gain name recognition, especially since “this is somebody a huge part of the city didn’t know 100 days ago,” said Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur from an Indian American family who advised the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy under President Barack Obama.
Mr. Mamdani’s social media posts rarely used memes, Mr. Dash pointed out, instead featuring the candidate making policy arguments about everyday things like the cost of groceries and subway fare. This helped his younger supporters spread the word to their parents and grandparents, he said, because the content was substantive and approachable rather than niche or snarky.
“He wasn’t doing a lot of trend-chasing and jumping on hashtags,” Mr. Dash said. “That built a lot of trust,” especially with older generations.
Lina Mohamm, an 18-year-old student who grew up in Iraq and attends Baruch College, lives in an enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, known to locals as Little Palestine. Sitting in a coffee shop on Wednesday afternoon, she said she had never really paid attention to an election before, but that Mr. Mamdani’s campaign had attracted support from her entire family.
“We were really big fans,” Ms. Mohamm said.
Around the corner from the coffee shop, Dr. Habib Joudeh, who is Palestinian, sat in his office in the back of the urgent care clinic he manages. He said he had been excited to see so many young people in the neighborhood feeling inspired by a political campaign.
“Everybody’s happy,” said Dr. Joudeh, 72. “It’s not because he’s a Muslim. It’s because there is a change.”
In Jackson Heights, a dense community in Queens with many residents who are South Asian, Muslim or both, Sumya Hoque, 20, said she had followed the campaign via a group chat with more than 300 people. One recent message shared within the group was titled “NYC Mayoral Primary Challengers Cheat Sheet for Hot People.” She said she appreciated that Mr. Mamdani was young, understood Gen Z, and seemed like a positive and optimistic person. “I like his ability to captivate,” said Ms. Hoque, a student at Brooklyn College.
For all the enthusiasm for the charming young candidate in immigrant and Muslim neighborhoods, support for Mr. Mamdani was not universal. Even in a voting precinct in the commercial heart of Richmond Hill, Queens, where Mr. Mamdani had a significant lead with 58.8 percent of the vote by the end of Primary Day, in real numbers he had received just 87 votes to Mr. Cuomo’s 47.
Finding someone in the neighborhood who voted for Mr. Mamdani — or for anyone at all — proved to be a challenge on Wednesday. In brief interviews with 40 people, 39 said they had not voted.
Sandra Bacchus did vote. For Mr. Cuomo.
“I would never vote for this guy,” Ms. Bacchus, 47, said of Mr. Mamdani. “He’s a socialist. He’s got all these crazy ideas.”
But for Tanveer Malik, it was Mr. Mamdani’s focus on New York’s affordability crisis that won her over. She said she had dreams of leaving her little house in Richmond Hill and buying something closer to the suburbs, maybe in Floral Park, where there are more trees and fewer young people blasting their car stereos. She works on Wall Street for a brokerage firm, but even the less expensive homes in Floral Park start around $700,000, which she cannot afford.
That’s a big change from 18 years ago, when her father was able to buy the family’s home in Richmond Hill with just the money he earned from driving a limousine.
“I work on Wall Street, and look where I live,” said Ms. Malik, 50, as she swept candy wrappers from the concrete courtyard in front of her house. “So for this young man to run for mayor and talk about affordability, that really resonates with me.” She added that her 22-year-old daughter, Laiba Malik, had also exerted some friendly pressure.
“I never had time to go to any of his events, even the one he did here on our block,” said the younger Ms. Malik, who runs a doctor’s office when she’s not taking classes at York College. “But from everything I saw on social media, he ran a great campaign.”
Tim Balk and Ellen Yan contributed reporting.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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