Last Friday evening, Zohran Mamdani, sweaty and grinning, began walking south from the northern tip of Manhattan as part of a final push for votes in New York City’s fiercely contested Democratic mayoral primary.
Mr. Mamdani, a Queens-based progressive state assemblyman, strolled down from Inwood Hill to Battery Park, his campaign shooting video along the way. He hugged a bicyclist. He dapped up a man outside a bodega. He ate a slice of pizza.
In other words, he looked like a normal human being — albeit one who was on a 13-mile walk in the middle of the night.
In the months since their loss to President Trump last November, Democrats have been engaged in a prolonged period of hand-wringing and soul-searching, seeking answers for how to win back the voters who said the party had lost touch with them and catered too much to elites. Strategists and focus-group researchers proposed one seemingly simple fix more often than anything else: Just be yourself.
In New York, Mr. Mamdani embraced that strategy. Through slick social media videos and an army of thousands of volunteers, he defied conventional political wisdom about how to win a citywide race in a deep-blue city.
He has also offered national Democrats still licking their wounds after bruising losses last November a test case in re-energizing voters. The 33-year-old democratic socialist ran an unorthodox campaign that seemed to catch lightning in a bottle, surging from little-known statehouse politician to late-stage front-runner alongside a more accomplished rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
By 10:30 p.m. on primary night, Mr. Cuomo, the moderate political scion whose high name recognition and multimillion-dollar war chest powered what had appeared to be an insurmountable lead in most surveys of the Democratic primary, said he had called Mr. Mamdani to concede the race.
Mr. Mamdani’s success is “affirming for people that their instincts or their analysis of what the problem is are correct,” said Adam Bozzi, a veteran Democratic strategist. Now, he said, future Democratic campaigns around the country are likely to try to emulate some of his freewheeling style, social media prowess and grass-roots organizing skills.
“In campaigns, people repeat success,” he said. “There’s already an effort to figure out how we can do more of it and better on our side — maybe this does charge that a little bit more.”
Polls and anecdotes have repeatedly suggested that national Democrats, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, came across to voters as too canned, too cautious and too carefully scripted during the 2024 campaign — especially compared with Mr. Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip mentality and eagerness to veer off-script. This year, the buzzword for Democrats seems to be “authenticity.”
Mr. Mamdani leaned heavily into New York’s cultural and political quirks to appeal to voters and bring new supporters into the fold. One of his first campaign videos was shot in a northern Queens neighborhood that had supported both Mr. Trump and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of Mr. Mamdani’s most prominent progressive allies. He highlighted his message about rising food costs through the city’s ubiquitous halal carts, coining the term “halal-flation.” One evening, while campaigning during Ramadan, he broke his fast on the Q subway train.
He shot campaign videos in English and Spanish and explained the ranked-choice voting process in Bengali, a South Asian language also known as Bangla. As most of his opponents opted for the traditional campaign settings of union halls, church pulpits and outdoor rallies, Mr. Mamdani also took his message to mosques, Muslim community centers and Juneteenth festivals.
In a speech early Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani nodded to the diverse coalition that had powered his momentum: first-time voters, young people, Bangladeshi aunties and Gambian uncles. Precinct-level data shows that Mr. Mamdani overperformed in the city’s heavily white, Latino and Asian communities and drew explosive turnout in the racially diverse Queens neighborhoods near his Assembly district.
Still, repeating Mr. Mamdani’s success elsewhere may not be so simple for Democrats. His natural charisma is not something that can be replicated, and his campaign’s relentless focus on affordability hit home with New Yorkers facing rising housing costs but may not be as applicable in other places. (He also still faces a potentially difficult general election campaign, where his progressive policy proposals will be scrutinized and various business interests are likely to campaign against him.)
And it’s not necessarily easy to translate a campaign in a deep-blue, urban area to battleground districts around the country, said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist.
“Communicating in a Democratic primary in New York is very different from communicating in a swing district in Iowa,” he said.
But to some Democrats, both Mr. Mamdani’s apparent win and the coalition he built represented yet another jolt of reality to the party’s establishment.
“If they don’t adapt, if they don’t change, then establishment Democrats are going to continue to lose to people like Mamdani because they’re not offering the change that voters want,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic political strategist who once worked for Mr. Cuomo. “That’s a takeaway that Democrats should learn and can be applied everywhere.”
Mr. Mamdani’s rapid rise to political stardom has drawn parallels to other unabashed liberals who burst onto the scene facing uphill battles, like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who endorsed Mr. Mamdani, and Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who ran for U.S. Senate in 2018 and governor in 2022.
Chris Evans, a Democratic strategist who was Mr. O’Rourke’s communications director during his statewide runs, said he saw the similarities among the three.
None were “making a calculation like, ‘What does the polling say this far out about whether or not I should get in this race?’” he said.
“It was like, ‘I’m going to get in this race and fight for the things I care about because it’s the right thing to do,’” he added. Mr. Evans said he also saw a similar grass-roots energy among all three campaigns.
“They just want to be with people, and they want to bring people together,” he said. “I think that’s something you saw with Bernie. It’s definitely something you saw with Beto. It seems to be the case in New York.”
Mr. Mamdani’s allies see universal lessons for the party to learn from in his primary performance, regardless of the result in November.
Morris Katz, a strategist for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, said the campaign had heard from “a lot of Democrats from across the ideological spectrum” since Tuesday night, eager for advice and to capture a similar energy in their campaigns, “from City Council all the way up.”
Mr. Katz, who consulted for Dan Osborn, the independent U.S. Senate candidate in Nebraska last year, said he thought the best lesson for Democrats was to simply run candidates who had clear stances on issues, rather than those who wavered depending on what polls and focus groups suggested.
But he suggested that the Democratic establishment still had a long way to go, arguing that efforts to boost Mr. Cuomo rather than a fresh, outsider face contradicted the party’s stated goals of winning back young and working-class voters and encouraging a new generation of leaders.
“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” Mr. Katz said. “When these people are here, how do we start lifting them up instead of trying to drown them out?”
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
Maya King is a Times reporter covering New York politics.
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