Zohran Mamdani and the Future of American Politics

It was the primary fight that changed the course of the Democratic Party. A craggy-faced master of insider politics squared off against a suave and handsome upstart, whose youth and relative inexperience masked the fact that he had a very hard-nosed understanding of machine politics. The older man was confident. He sat back and quietly logged support from party dons, donors, insiders. He would step in when the moment was right.

The younger man campaigned at a pace that seemed to test his physical limits. He and his network of supporters badgered every ward heeler and union boss who would listen, often with a simple request that they agree to meet the candidate. Because if you met the candidate, you would be charmed, sure, but you would also learn that he was very serious about this thing, that he intended to win, and that he had plans for what he’d do when he did. He also had a fervent base of support from a bloc of poor immigrants whose values and religion had long been seen as dangerous, alien, and simply un-American. Then he transcended that base. By the time the general election came around, it was hard to imagine that anyone else could have been the nominee. It was 1960, the year Lyndon Baines Johnson lost the Democratic presidential primary to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

“Oh, no. Oh MY God.”

Late this past August, Zohran Mamdani took in a service at the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, a Black church on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The congregation moved into its current location not long after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a year that looks in retrospect like the high-water mark of American liberalism, before the riots of ’68, the spiraling of the New Left into radical terrorism, Reagan and the shattering of the Democratic coalition, Trump and a new turn among conservatives against the philosophy of liberalism itself.

The Democratic Party has been chasing the high of the ’60s ever since. It was the last time that liberals with big dreams were able to win real mass support from the “multiracial working class,” as Mamdani would describe it, to enact a sweeping new policy vision—or to advance virtually any truly new policy vision. The party is still dominated by baby boomers who came of age during this time. And in all this time there has only been a handful, if that, of politicians who have inspired as much hope for a new Democratic vision as Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani pronounces his first name with a slightly aspirated h and emphasis on the second syllable. It’s a pronunciation he came to favor over the more casual “Zoh-ran” amid a long process of becoming “confident in who I am and where I come from,” as he would put it, which shapes much of his story. He has, like many very good politicians, a visible hunger to be liked. But in his struggle to fit in, which he references frequently, he came to learn he would prefer to stand out. And a desire to stand out is very rare in today’s Democratic Party. It’s a combination that makes for a special mix.

When Mamdani spoke at the church that day, the young Reverend Rashad Raymond Moore gave a nod to the long history of “distrust,” as he would later call it, between parts of the Black community and smooth lefty candidates with big plans like Mamdani. It is the tension that has bedeviled Democratic hopes of a mass coalition for generations now. But he said that Mamdani had been texting him for months and pursued him in person when they crossed paths in Albany. “I was like, Okay, you want to come speak at the church?” Moore recalled. “So I gave him a couple minutes. And quite frankly he left an impression.”

“I’m not a nepo baby. My parents are both teachers. I was supporting myself to find that it’s a rich person’s playground, which has happened to a lot of amazing cities in the world,” said Emily Ratajkowski. “And I don’t want my son to live in that New York.”

After Mamdani’s first visit to Moore’s church, the reverend decided to tag along to a rally. “I walked away like, ‘Oh my God. I have not felt like that in a very long time.’ ”

Mamdani has only won a primary race, and for a position notoriously hamstrung by state oversight and local power bases. But to see him out in public is to witness a phenomenon. I had never seen someone’s jaw drop until I saw a young woman who passed us walking in Queens lose control of her face—her mouth hung slack and her eyes locked on him, then she began to run, tripping over her high-heeled boots in a frantic race to catch up. I saw someone leap from a moving bike and another guy leave a motorcycle running on the sidewalk, all of them running to ask for one of the selfies that Mamdani takes endlessly, with virtually anyone who asks, smiling every time. “I went to college in Boston,” Michael Lange, a Mamdani friend and political analyst, told me. “Where every Irish family has John Kennedy’s picture on the wall. And I just know that in two-family homes in Parkchester and Jamaica Hills, they will have pictures of Zohran Mamdani now and into the future.”

The question is why. Mamdani gives the carefully honed impression of someone who is not a radical champion, just a guy who plays one on TikTok. He was born in Uganda, where he lived until he was seven years old, and he can’t run for president. He once promised to “tax the rich, heal the sick, house the poor & build a socialist New York,” but his program today is less radical than either his supporters or his detractors tend to admit. He rose in politics by working to activate a disaffected and disparate Muslim population in New York, but he tends to avoid talking too much about the cultural issues that have riven the country in recent years and has remained “relentlessly focused on affordability,” to borrow what has become a stock phrase in media coverage of the race.

This is part of what makes him so popular. He has celebrity at his back: Lorde, Emily Ratajkowski, and Morgan Spector are some of his most notable pop-culture surrogates. “I was really shocked when I first moved here. I’m not a nepo baby. My parents are both teachers. I was supporting myself to find that it’s a rich person’s playground, which has happened to a lot of amazing cities in the world,” Ratajkowski, who twice worked with the Bernie Sanders campaign, told me. “And I don’t want my son to live in that New York. I want my son to live in a New York where there’s good public transportation, where the masses of different backgrounds, even just financially, are able to live together. So for me, it’s really that simple.”

But the Democratic Party has been tearing itself apart in search of a vision, even as Donald Trump has set out to unmake the security and trading systems underpinning the world order as we have known it. Mamdani’s most fervent supporters—not least the ones looking on from outside New York—see a man whose true vision is much more sweeping, a man who beat, in Andrew Cuomo, a walking embodiment of the Democratic establishment. When I ask Mamdani, days after Eric Adams withdraws from the race, what he would say to a voter who is still undecided in the matchup between Cuomo and himself, he texts me, “I’d say listen to what Eric Adams said: ‘Andrew Cuomo is a liar and a snake.’”

Mamdani’s detractors see something similar. To them, his proposals to raise state corporate and local income taxes are radical in their own right, virtually certain to set off capital flight and create a “doom loop” of a declining tax base and decaying services. On a deeper level, he represents a country that has thrown its doors “wide open to foreigners,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, who “profess insane socialist” views and hold no allegiance to America.

Behind all this is a man who has ­clearly struggled to find his place in the world. Behind that there is a family story and a background that are inescapably enmeshed with a sort of thought that is radically critical of the vision most Americans still hold of the country. Behind that there is Palestine, the issue that some of the people who know him call “formative.”

Now, he is only running for mayor of New York City. But the wider noise of what he represents and the weight of potential historical significance always trails him. There at Moore’s church, speaking to an audience that was still far more skeptical than their pastor, he gave a slightly stilted speech, nodding to his signature proposals to offer free buses and free childcare, and to “freeze the rent,” at least for the New York rentals that are subject to rent stabilization.

He quoted both Shirley Chisholm and Malcolm X. “Oh, no,” the woman in front of me said to the first quote. “Oh my God,” she said to the second. She turned and gave me a look that would take a whole library devoted to the history of race and left-wing politics in America to fully unpack.

I tried to talk about this moment with a guy in Mamdani’s entourage later. He looked at me. “Today,” he said, after a pause, “we’re going to be relentlessly focused on affordability.”

“Fucking Commie!”

Around noon the next day, Mamdani posted on Instagram that he was going to do “something free” later that afternoon at an undisclosed location. He invited people who wanted to come to DM a reply, and the first 25 to respond got put in a group chat and told the time and place. It turned out to be the US Open.

I had been under the impression I was going to be sitting down with him at the new campaign headquarters in a sprawling and sunny Chelsea office space. “He just gets these ideas,” his senior adviser Zara Rahim, a former Vogue staffer, told me. “Something is always popping up in his head.” And so I headed off to Flushing Meadows.

I found Mamdani and friends at Court 11 by following the crowd of people who had heard he was there and were trying to stay quiet as they dashed to get a picture. There was free entry to watch the qualifying tournament, during which lower-ranked players vie to earn their way into the tournament proper. He was very intently watching a match in which a blond 15-year-old, Kristina Penickova, was being absolutely demolished by a player from Japan. I heard a gawking young woman behind me whisper that no one else was watching the game. Mamdani’s eyes followed the tennis even as he would lean back and smile broadly to take a selfie with anyone brave enough to tap him on the shoulder.

He moved in a scrum. At the break in the sets, his retinue of burly security guides and fashionable aides—all of them women and all of them millennial or younger—trailed by reporters, moved up into the bleachers where they could block off space for everyone to sit together. Mamdani told a New Yorker reporter that he’d started walking in cemeteries because they were the only places he could now go without being stopped by anyone. “Fucking commie!” I heard a guy yell as we moved. This happened at least twice that afternoon.

The scene in the bleachers was uncannily calm, with the strictures of tennis etiquette preventing anyone from jostling or talking over anyone else to try to get time with him. He sat between an older guy with gray hair and a woman who couldn’t have been more than 20 who didn’t understand tennis scoring or why Mamdani was suddenly getting excited. When Penickova made an improbable turnaround, he got very amped. I touched his back to get his attention and ask if there was any particular reason he was rooting for her. I could be wrong, but it looked like he had reflexively prepped himself to lean and smile for a selfie. “Oh,” he said and shrugged. “She’s a hometown girl!” he said. (Penickova is a Floridian by way of California.) “And I think her dad’s here?”

“So that’s back to deuce,” he said, turning again to the young woman next to him. “That means she’s got to win two points now to get the game.”

A Badly Poured Guinness

Penickova lost after a third-set tiebreaker. Mamdani had to meet a group of union workers, most of them young and Black or Hispanic, who were staffing the event.

As we headed to the exit, another young woman sat and took her boots off so she would better be able to run to catch up with him. But he was moving quickly, as he always does, and there were too many people. As we neared the private entrance where the tennis pros checked in, I saw a player hand his racket to a member of his entourage and peel off to try to get to Mamdani. I tried to help the woman, but he walked fast and I would have lost him too if I lagged behind. “Please,” she said, trying to elbow past another woman following him. “I just want to catch up.”

It was all a neatly condensed picture of how much bigger than free buses this whole thing is. In the heady days after Mamdani’s polling in June, the leftist magazine Jacobin ran a retrospective piece with the headline “In Zohran Mamdani’s Win, Socialism Beat the Status Quo.” That echoed Mamdani’s own “two-word summation of his political base,” as The New York Times put it, after he won his first state assembly race, in 2020, at age 28: “Socialism won,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.

The call to “tax the rich,” as Mamdani and his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America had come to rally around at this time, was never really a serious proposal for addressing the fact that our whole economy is oriented in the interests of asset holders.

In that race, waged on the terms of the politics of 2020, when Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez had just pioneered a path to power for leftists running as insurgents within the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders had just made a credible presidential run, and the Black Lives Matter protests turned into a massive mobilization, Mamdani gave a picture of a campaign that was only one component of a larger movement. He told an elegant story of how his time doing practical work as a home foreclosure prevention counselor had taught him that the city’s spiraling housing problem was not a simple story of gentrification or of greedy landlords hiking rents: “What I’ve seen in my work is, it’s not tenant versus homeowner,” he told an interviewer from Africa Is a Country, a Jacobin-­affiliated outlet where he’d once penned a slightly searching articulation of the identity questions he wrestled with in a verse from his rap persona, “Young Cardamom.”

The affordability crisis, he said, was much bigger, and systemic: “tenant and homeowner versus financial speculator and investment bank portfolio.” The logic behind this realization is that small-scale local solutions can only nibble at the margins of a problem fueled in great measure by national-level policy decisions that have created huge amounts of cheap money. The real project would be to advance a new vision of how the state should function in American society.

The call to “tax the rich,” as Mamdani and his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America had come to rally around at this time, was never really a serious proposal for addressing the fact that our whole economy is oriented in the interests of asset holders. It was a message about reordering priorities in a disordered system, which now resembles a badly poured Guinness, with the froth of financial activity and spiraling values of assets like stocks and housing filling much of the glass, with little room left for the real beer of a productive economy.

The Democratic Party’s leadership had grown so bound up with the interests that created this situation that they now barely even thought about it, or imagined that it could be changed through political means. The democratic socialist project would have to be above all one to force a new generation, listening to new people, into leadership.

“The Scene of It All”

But New York is also America’s great immigrant center, and Mamdani’s rise came out of a parallel political project.

When I interviewed Mamdani at his new campaign office, an all-white loft in Chelsea, the place still had the air of an artists’ studio, and staffers hadn’t yet filled it out. “You have to lodge that hand sanitizer,” he told a confused aide showing us into a conference room, which had bare walls and looked like it had yet to host a conference. He gestured to a box of Purell on the floor. “It has to sit right next to the door so it doesn’t open.”

He relaxed in one of the dark tailored suits he favors and told a story of a kid who had been much less radical, in some ways much less cool, than the celebrity image of him often has it. “My goal was to climb the ladder” at the college newspaper, he said, as he’d started out wanting to be a journalist at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. “I was taking the right first steps.” He dipped his toe into politics cofounding a chapter of what is now the highly controversial group Students for Justice in Palestine.

“I was not privy to the scene of it all,” he told me, referring to the inward-facing social and intellectual universe of the left. But Mamdani, like many other lefty candidates who have won office in New York in recent years, had another base. This was the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, which he joined in 2015, just after he left college. Participating in the MDCNY, still in his early 20s, brought him to political meetings around the city, introducing him to a New York that few people from his sort of elite Upper West Side and private liberal arts college background engage with much. He learned the mechanics of media and organizing and money that go into campaigning, and about the “inner workings of city politics,” he said, a subject in which he is notably fluent today. It was here that he closely observed the “relationship between many Muslims, up and coming, in New York City politics with politicians and with the institutions.”

Some of his aides, friends, and closest supporters talk about this more readily than Mamdani does now. But many of his fans around the country have remained ignorant of what in many ways is the big story of his success—his role in helping organize New York’s Muslims as a bloc with political self-consciousness and electoral power—formed out of religious solidarity, a migrant experience, and support for the Palestinian cause.

Mamdani’s victory was part of a much larger organizing effort, which would have been much less effective if the Israel-​Palestine conflict were not such an electric issue, reflected nationally. Across continents, the Palestinian issue has helped draw Muslim candidates and voters into left-wing politics, in part as the only plausible path to upend political establishments that remain uncompromisingly pro-Israel. Palestine is now rapidly becoming, like Vietnam before it, the key issue for a wider antiestablishment left-wing movement.

The MDCNY was cofounded in 2013 by (among others) the Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour and the election attorney Ali Najmi, whose unsuccessful 2015 run for city council was the first race Mamdani worked on, and which drew a whole roster of now prominent young New York Muslims into electoral politics. “Zohran’s ascension is the culmination of a bunch of people losing, myself included,” Najmi told amNewYork. “There’s institutional knowledge that was passed.”

To follow Mamdani’s primary race, even casually, was to get a glimpse of these politics at work—the whole thing was colored by a certain “halal style,” as Mamdani has jokingly put it. He uses the word uncle constantly and a bit performatively, playing on common Arabic usage for an older man. He ate rice with his hands in a TikTok video, which outraged some conservatives. “Why Won’t Zohran Mamdani Use a Fork?” went the title of a Charlie Kirk podcast episode, which argued that the spot was “gross” and a coded display of “Third Worldism”—the leftist ideology that colors American capitalism and military power as the root of most, if not all, evil in the world.

But Mamdani seems to have always been more interested in a hard-nosed local politics. Lange, the Mamdani friend and political analyst, described an intersection in which the DSA and the MDCNY had become twin “anchors” for Mamdani, who cut through with a victory of monumental proportions.

Mamdani has made a concerted effort to build Muslim political power in the city, which has itself taken on a visible bit of halal style—with late-night Yemeni coffee shops proliferating and bustling in a city where the kids are drinking less, and the nightlife has suffered from changing post-COVID habits and from the simple fact that many people can’t really afford to go out and have fun these days. The recent migrant wave has brought pockets of often-young Muslims to new areas of the city. A whole generation of young people with brown skin has now come of age, shaped in large measure by the experience of growing up in post-9/11 New York.

Mamdani, who says he is “from” both Uganda and India, has been able to appeal to New York’s Muslim and South Asian communities—“two circles where there is a good overlap,” as Lange put it to me.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, I want to expand the electorate,’ ” Lange said. “ ‘I know that there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims in New York. Some are not registered, but many are, right? And we’re going to meet them in their neighborhoods.’ ” Mamdani made videos in which he spoke Urdu and Bangla along with the Spanish appeals that politicians often make these days. I asked Lange if Mamdani actually spoke Urdu, which seemed vaguely plausible. Lange didn’t know—but that, he said, was the point. “He’s like, ‘I care enough to learn and not fucking butcher it for a video.’ ”

“We have close to a million Muslims across these five boroughs,” Mamdani said in a 2020 campaign video, noting, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

What Mamdani represents is a more subtle, and potentially much more significant, break with the worldview of the baby boomer Democrats. He shares a worldview with a whole generation of young leftists who tend to see issues, from immigration to policing to foreign policy, as one interlinked struggle to succor the oppressed.

A while after he spoke at the church, I followed Mamdani down to Prospect Park, where the campaign was hosting an event to kick off its general election canvassing effort. It was a big crowd, dotted with the stock characters familiar to anyone with experience of the New York left—the grad students in horn-rimmed glasses, the old Trotskyists from the Upper West Side with buttons on their tote bags, the part-time anarchists with their faded metal-band T-shirts, the Puerto Rican liberationists and the bike lane supremacists. But it was very young and notably browner than most lefty crowds, and the obvious lefties were outnumbered by people who, as a group, would have been indistinguishable from any random sampling of other people who’d come to the park on that sunny Sunday. It was a cross section of the so-called “Mamdani coalition.”

He gave a short speech in which he said his success had never been about him and was really a movement of all 52,000 people who had volunteered in some form or another for the campaign. And then he was gone, heading off to do a very—almost astonishingly—brief press gaggle on the far side of the gazebo. He took a question from Ross Barkan, the lefty journalist and author of an Andrew Cuomo biography. Barkan had run for state Senate in 2018, when Mamdani was only 26, and he had hired Mamdani as his campaign manager.

“How is your strategy in the general going to be different from the primary?” he asked. It would not change, Mamdani told him, only grow. A reporter for the leftist paper The Indypendent, a slightly haggard older guy who seemed to want to speak for all the people who had lived through the endless losses and infighting and chaos and disappointment of leftist politics in America, asked how Mamdani’s supporters, who had been “with you all along,” would know they hadn’t been sold out as he moved on to try to win and govern citywide.

“What I’ve loved about this campaign,” Mamdani said, “is that when New Yorkers approach me, they often say the policy that we’re fighting for back to me.” He repeated the three campaign planks he’d just shouted out: rent freezes, free buses, free childcare. “And as we expand this coalition, we do so without giving an inch on any of these commitments.”

It was very smooth. A relentless focus on affordability. He wasn’t going to speak to all the purity testing and infighting and the heartbreak that came out of the divisions and failures that had colored the left-wing project for so long. So far this has worked out pretty well, though all the reporters there would have remembered the meltdown over police funding that caused the Progressive Caucus in the New York City Council to rip apart in 2023.

“So would your NYPD continue to arrest sex workers?” someone called out. But Mamdani was already off again, striding across Eastern Parkway while a group of Black teenagers weaved on Lime scooters through traffic after him, hoping for their selfies. From afar I saw one of his security guys tap him on the shoulder and point. He stopped and turned with open arms as they ran up. Three pictures, then off again.

“It Is a Genocide”

The Palestinian cause has served as an uneasy bridge between Western leftists and the Muslim world since the 1970s, when the most intense radicals went off to join the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine at their training camps in communist-run South Yemen, and the Middle East became the emblematic focus of what activists saw as a worldwide struggle for “liberation” from capitalism and white Western imperialism, reaching from South Africa to Northern Ireland to South LA.

I lingered in the park and watched as a young woman in glasses spoke to a circle of volunteers. She said she’d been friends with Mamdani since they had both been “baby organizers” working together on Najmi’s failed council campaign.

The woman turned out to be Shahana Hanif, a 34-year-old Bangladeshi American, socialist, and vocally pro-Palestinian city councilwoman for a South Brooklyn district covering Kensington, Windsor Terrace, and Carroll Gardens. I waited to speak with her and watched as she hugged a woman who appeared to be college-aged.

“It’s really cool to see an elected official that’s actually pro-Palestine in public,” she said. She was very emotional and seemed to be tearing up. “A lot of us were worried,” Hanif said. “Back in the days after October 7th, we all got arrested in front of Gillibrand’s office. We’ve been calling for a ceasefire since week one. And a lot of people were upset at that, but it’s good to have people across leadership—”

The girl stopped her. “But it’s like the whole world now.”

Hanif had once retweeted a post reading “Globalize the Intifada,” a phrase that many Jews view as a call to global antisemitic violence, and one that Mamdani provoked a massive scandal for himself by refusing to denounce in a casual chat for a youth-oriented podcast from the neoconservative outlet The Bulwark.

Mamdani told me that he thought his campaign, perhaps the most significant one in American politics to take such a pro-Palestinian position, “showcased the contradictions and the hypocrisies” as he put it, “in these supposedly deeply held beliefs we have about universality.”

Hanif had deleted and apologized for the post, and as we sat on a park bench, I asked whether she’d faced competing pressures over questions like whether or not she would condemn Hamas’s shocking attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, or call it a terrorist group. “There was,” she said. “And so I didn’t early on. There was pressure from the left to not,” she said, “and then there was pressure from obviously Israelis with family members who were hostages.”

Today, many supporters of Israel and its ambitions regard Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus group Mamdani had helped organize at Bowdoin, as something like a terrorist front.

Associations like this have fed much of the establishment suspicion of Mamdani. The New York Post recently ran a “scoop” of sorts with the headline “Radical College Group Mamdani Co-Founded Wanted Justice for Terrorist Deported From US,” describing how “a Facebook account linked to Mamdani” had apparently “also ‘liked’ ” the statement defending a famous female Palestinian fighter and convicted bomber.

What Mamdani represents is a more subtle, and potentially much more significant, break with the worldview of the baby boomer Democrats like Bill Clinton—who swept in to campaign for Cuomo in the last days of the primary—or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a potential future Mamdani constituent who has, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, pointedly refused to endorse him. He shares a worldview with a whole generation of young leftists who tend to see issues, from immigration to policing to foreign policy, as one interlinked struggle to succor the oppressed.

Mamdani told me later that he thought his campaign, perhaps the most significant one in American politics to take such a pro-Palestinian position, “showcased the contradictions and the hypocrisies” as he put it, “in these supposedly deeply held beliefs we have about universality.” He meant that the issue showcased a bad-faith promise at the heart of even liberal American politics—that all lives had equal worth, no matter where those lives happen to be lived. For many people, especially those newly coming to this out of excitement over Mamdani or frustration with mainstream Democrats or because they discovered left-wing politics on Twitch or TikTok, Palestine is the issue that exposes all the falsities of American liberalism in its current form.

“It is a genocide,” he said, “that has ripped at the very fabric of so much of what so many thought about this world.”

Hanif and I talked about how growing up in the city after 9/11 had helped to politicize her and about her time as the chairwoman of the council’s immigration subcommittee. She said she feared American democracy was “shattering,” and I said that I had spent time following the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, with the exploding Waymos and Marines and National Guard on the streets. It was in some ways a more genuine and meaningful conflict than any I had seen in America before—a low-grade but real physical conflict, in which immigrant kids and leftist protesters were attempting to harass and meaningfully disrupt the efforts of federal agents. I brought this up in a phone call with Mamdani later, a week after Charlie Kirk had been assassinated, when it appeared that the nationalist and universalist ideas of America were about to harden into irreconcilable and possibly violent divisions.

Charlie Kirk and Everything After

Read more about Kirk’s assassination and the aftermath.

Arrow

The Homeland Security department had just released an estimate that 2 million people had supposedly left the country since Trump took office—a figure that, if it’s even remotely accurate, has to be considered a kind of forced population transfer and would equal the population of Gaza. I asked what he would do if Trump turned to New York with an effort like what he’d brought to LA.

Mamdani skirted the question of how this might all spiral into political violence, and why it was that so many people had come to see his own views as deeply alarming. Instead he spoke for a while in the way he often does about these kind of big-picture questions, saying a lot without exactly saying very much. “It will require a style of politics built around partnership that we saw in California,” he said. “And that kind of a partnership will be key in fighting back at these kinds of attempts taking place here in New York City, a partnership between myself, Attorney General Tish James, Governor Kathy Hochul. And then there’s also so much that has to be done separate from that.”

“We are a city where 40 percent of our population were born elsewhere in the world. And I am one of those,” he said. He estimated that 400,000 people in the city would be at “urgent risk of deportation,” but much of Mamdani’s broad appeal has been the way he has offered a sort of radical practicality—less resistance and more wonky talk. He avoids the big talk of competing visions that far more centrist politicians like Gavin Newsom seem to revel in. He talks instead about his plans to hire 200 more city lawyers.

Forever A Minority

Mamdani has a personal history that makes him an accidental embodiment of these political currents. By his own description, he had a very privileged upbringing—going back to Uganda, where he owns property and his family lives in a gated compound, every summer and spending the school year in a slice of New York high-ish society where many people are “global citizens,” with multiple passports and shifting identities. He played soccer, but more significantly he played cricket—a sport that both bound him to an immigrant community and helped him learn about the wider city. “Cricket took me around the city,” he told me, then stopped himself—“It’s funny, when I used to use it, ‘the city’ just meant Manhattan.” It took him to “games at Ferry Point Park,” he went on, “games as far as you can think. And getting through it a tour of the brown diaspora, teams of predominantly Bangladeshi students, Pakistani students, Indian students, Guyanese students, Jordanian students. It was a story of migration and of the different points at which people got to the city.”

But he did only fairly in school and often hints at a lost feeling he had, especially when he went up to Bowdoin. He did not get into Columbia—where, as The New York Times reported, he checked a box for African American for his race on his application, writing “Ugandan” below. He jokes about Brunswick as though it had been like Siberia. “There were many trips to Shere Punjab,” he told me. “I loved the fact that it was a college experience far from anything I knew.” It taught him, he said, “about the world outside New York City,” though it seemed to be a fairly narrow picture. “I did not know that lacrosse was a sport that was actively being played,” he said. “Least of all at prep schools across New England.”

He was more expansive with the interviewer from Going Through It, a millennial immigrant life podcast, who had shouted out “immigrant kids, second-generation hotties, people who aren’t named Tim or Steve,” at the start—a picture of a whole polyglot scene, united by this sense of being outside. “Those early years” had been a struggle, he said, “trying and failing,” as he put it, to get a sense of his place in the world. “I mean that not just racially,” he went on. “At my school there was such a big emphasis on being a member of a sports team, or having some kind of a quote, unquote tribe that you belong to. In many ways it was like a fraternity mixed with an athletic culture.”

Mamdani says that his father told him that being in the minority allowed him to see the “truth of the place,” as he put it once, saying that this outsider view was what informed his first entry into electoral politics. “If you’re always on the outside, then you have an understanding of the flaws of this society in a way that someone on the inside might not have had to grapple with personally.”

When he was younger, Mamdani told me, “I was often exasperated with forever being a minority. I remember once telling my dad, being in Uganda, being understood as Indian, being in India, being understood as Muslim, being in New York City, being understood as all of these things.” This was, I would later learn, one of the central features of a well-honed story of himself he puts forth to the world.

He describes his father’s response to this “anguish” as a formative lens through which he came to see the world. He says that his father told him that being in the minority allowed him to see the “truth of the place,” as he put it once, saying that this outsider view was what informed his first entry into electoral politics. “If you’re always on the outside, then you have an understanding of the flaws of this society in a way that someone on the inside might not have had to grapple with personally.”

In colonial East Africa, Indians often represented a second-tier elite, often as the merchants or brokers they’d been for hundreds of years already. In much of Africa this presence lingered after the European powers left—Lebanese in former French colonies, Indians in East Africa. Everywhere but Uganda, where talk had bubbled up since independence among the new Black political class to expel the well-off Indians or expropriate their wealth. In 1972 the Ugandan president Idi Amin actually went through with it and gave the country’s 70,000 or so Indians 90 days to leave the country. Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran’s father, was one of them.

Today Mahmood is a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University. In a conversation on the Empire podcast with the historians Anita Anand and William Dalrymple, Mahmood partly confirmed a long-held rumor that Amin had done this because he’d been scorned by a beautiful Indian woman.

Mahmood scoffed. The woman was real, he said. “She used to be beautiful when she was young.”

Mahmood doesn’t color Amin as the madman tyrant known to most Americans, and this is in part because the Indian expulsion that would shape his son’s life—and at least to some degree his son’s politics—was a complicated story. Tens of thousands of Ugandan Indians celebrated when it happened, because some of them had documents that would give them full British citizenship if they had nowhere else to go. The Mamdanis did not. They were allowed “two suitcases,” Mahmood told Dalrymple.

The Mamdanis knew a Black customs agent who promised he could get five crates shipped out of the country. “My father decided the first box would be a trial box,” Mahmood said, full of cooking utensils and clothing. When that first one got through and arrived in London, they felt sure enough to ship their treasured possessions, including the family jewelry. “The customs guy was smart,” Mahmood said. “He realized he must let the first box through.” The other crates were stolen.

The descendants of Indian migrants from East Africa are today one of the wealthiest and most highly educated segments of the British population, represented by some exceptionally prominent figures in politics and society—former prime minister Rishi Sunak, the current shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, and even the pop star Charli xcx all have family stories that trace, at least in part, the same history as Mamdani’s.

This has led some people to resentfully color the exile diaspora as a symbol of a dislocated globalized elite. When British prime minister Theresa May said, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere” in 2016, she wasn’t by any means speaking of British Ugandan Indians. But it was a phrase that, as much as anything Trump said during that time, heralded a populist right-wing turn in which the very approach to life that someone like the young Zohran Mamdani had been brought up into was suspect.

Mahmood had returned to Uganda by 1987, and in 1989 he met the director Mira Nair, who was in the country researching her film Mississippi Masala. Zohran was born in 1991 and raised for much of the first seven years of his life in the cloistered and slightly surreal lifestyle common to elite foreigners in poor African countries. He would wrestle for a long time about whether he was a foreigner too and what this meant.

Mahmood helped to create the discipline of African studies, and he became the world’s major figure in the interdisciplinary realm known as postcolonial studies, which offers some explanation of why his son’s political profile is so inescapably shrouded in larger political valences. Mahmood’s work is colored by his own experience of migration, exile, and displacement, which colors a whole global critique of a world system he sees as indelibly marked by the legacy of colonialism, and by the dominant position of “settler” societies, forged in bloody dispossession of native peoples and seizures of land. He describes America as “where settler colonialism triumphed” in a 2015 Edward Said lecture at Columbia: Facing up to the genocide and racism at the true heart of America’s founding “would require questioning the ethics and the politics of the very Constitution of the United States.”

“Having someone like his father, who’s pro-Palestine, and with his grounding, especially in the Middle East, is why his activism has been so sophisticated,” Ross Barkan told me. “That goes back to his upbringing being a child. He’s a child of intellectuals and he’s a child of people who have a very, very nuanced understanding of global affairs.”

Mamdani has described a turning point that came on a road trip he took with his father and uncle through Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda the summer before he was a junior in college. Up to this point, he had been an indifferent student of political science. But when he got back, he switched to Africana studies, his father’s discipline. The change “shifted my understanding of what it was that I was interested in and where it was that I wanted to be,” Mamdani has said.

“Palestine is the through line for Zohran,” Barkan said. He described how, when Mamdani had been Barkan’s young campaign manager, the issue had formed his approach even on the local level. “Undoubtedly that was critical,” Barkan said. “That I could be comfortable visiting mosques and interacting with the Arab community, and at the very minimum expressing solidarity with the struggles of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.” Barkan described Mamdani as someone who’d been fascinated by the mechanics of small-scale local politics from a very young age. And the truth is that if you weren’t a revolutionary at 21, it’s unlikely that you’ll emerge as one in your mid-30s.

No one is born with it

On my last day in New York, I met Mamdani on a corner outside a Mexican restaurant and a chain cosmetics store in Chelsea where a standard-size bottle of hand soap runs $46. My recorder logged the location as we started walking, and I told him that the metadata would say we’d met and talked at Aesop. “Please don’t write that,” he said, laughing but meaning it.

I told him that I’d just been reading one of his dad’s pieces in the London Review of Books, and I asked jokingly whether he would accept full personal responsibility for every controversial word his father had ever said or written. He gave a sly smile. “Yeah,” he said. “The same way he has to for me.”

As we walked I asked about the themes in his father’s work that have become so central to the left-wing worldview today. A passerby in a motorcycle helmet greeted him with a hand out as we walked.

“Hey,” Mamdani said and high-fived the passerby without so much as a pause in his gait.

The national outrage and elation he provokes seems, in some measure, inseparable from the fact that his American-ness is only incidental to his sense of self—and nonetheless he could soon become the mayor of New York City. This is, for many on the left, a very exciting prospect, and for many on the right, it really does represent a tremor.

He gave, instead of a political answer, an involved description of his identity quest. “Growing up, I was intent on the order of my hyphenated identity as being Indian Ugandan as opposed to Ugandan Indian,” he said. “ I think the distinct nature of the Indian Ugandan experience is that—”

He was interrupted again.“I love you!” a woman yelled. “Thank you,” he said.

I asked how his sense of himself as an American fit into all of this. “I mean I’m a New Yorker,” he responded. “This is not only my home and where I grew up,” he said, but it was the setting where he had “grappled,” as he said he’d had to, with his competing identities, which is in itself a very American experience.

He seemed surprised by this question, though it hints at part of why his run has taken on so much significance outside of New York. The national outrage and elation he provokes seems, in some measure, inseparable from the fact that his American-ness is only incidental to his sense of self—and nonetheless he could soon become the mayor of New York City. This is, for many on the left, a very exciting prospect, and for many on the right, it really does represent a tremor. “I think to be a New Yorker is also to be an American,” Mamdani said. “To me the city is the best of what our country has to offer. It’s a city where these identities are not necessarily in hierarchy or in contention, but where they’re all examples of what it means to belong here.”

I asked him, after we sat down, if perhaps it wasn’t fair to wonder whether mining a tax base to provide free buses, to freeze the rent on the New York apartments that are subject to rent stabilization, or to try out offering city-run grocery stores, was avoiding a conversation about the political-​economic situation that had created the crisis in the first place.

It’s hard to parse exactly what he said in response. “I met with a business leader recently,” he said, “who shared a quote with Aristotle with me before they left the meeting. The quote was, ‘Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss. It’s that we aim too low and hit,’ and the importance of an agenda, of ambition, of imagination. I know in fact many business leaders relate to that agenda because it’s also how you characterize their agenda for their company.”

He went on. “My vision of success in the city is that every single business that is here stays here, that the leaders who have helped to shape the city continue to see themselves better, and that we reckon with the fact that for so many businesses, their ability to innovate also comes from their ability to attract a workforce that oftentimes is disproportionately young, and then is therefore disproportionately impacted by how expensive we’ve made the city.”

He talks like this a lot. Raise taxes but every single business will stay. Confront power but leaders will see themselves better. It will all work out. It probably says more about the Democratic Party than it does about Mamdani that he has shaken the party’s establishment as much as he has. Many people who came to support Mamdani are simply fed up to the point that they are no longer interested in hearing dire predictions of what might happen if his tax increases drive wealthy residents to Florida. And the irony is that if this does happen—a whole genre of memes being passed around tech and finance circles these days has pictures like one of Mamdani with Bernie Sanders and AOC captioned with things like “The last thing you see before your business moves to Miami”—it may be that few of his voters actually care.

I spoke to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent the day after I met Mamdani. He told me that he thought the manifest unfairness of this system had opened a door for Mamdani. “They are going to come and take it,” he said, “like, if you don’t fix the way the system is built.” He did not think Mamdani’s redistributionist project would actually work. But provoking a capital flight and a crash in the real estate market might very well end up being a real way to tackle the affordability issue, not that anyone would ever exactly say this. “I kind of like Mamdani winning,” Bessent said. “Because the worst thing in a way would be when Cuomo comes back in, you just keep losing a little bit of altitude for four or eight more years, and they kind of hold it together, and more people leave. So if you could just say, ‘Okay, he’s a shock to the system, and there’s a chance you can come back from it.’ ”

In the time after, Kirk was assassinated. Americans now seem to be convinced we are at a breaking point. Mamdani doesn’t seem to see it this way. He had, in 2023, signed a letter in opposition to a Kirk event, calling him a“far-right extremist.” But Mamdani has tried to adopt the role of conciliator—Rahim, his PR person, would describe this as arising from a sense of umma, the feeling of brotherhood and unity among the Muslim faithful. He made one famous video in which he asked Trump-voting New Yorkers what had driven them to the right, and just after Kirk’s death he tied the murder to the killing of Palestinians, in a picture of the universal values that are at the core of his whole politics. “It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn,” he said. “It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all.”

This positioning is growing increasingly difficult for prominent politicians on either side of our divide, and it can be particularly difficult in radical-tinged spheres like the New York left, where so many see ideological purity as a point of pride. I asked Mamdani how he had survived the blood sport this type of politics had become during the years when he’d emerged as a political figure.“Come on,” I said.

“America deserves to know!” he laughed.

He said that he hadn’t really lived through this kind of thing. “You’ll call this careful,” he said, “but I think it’s honest and direct. When you have run a paid canvass operation, like I did for the Najmi campaign, it becomes very tempting to work backwards from the IDs you need per shift.” He’d become a political operative so young that all he knew was practical politics.

I brought up the Kennedy comparison, if only because without a base in DSA and the left to elevate him, I was curious how he’d managed to rise in politics in the first place.

“Is that where you’re gonna go?” he said, laughing, and possibly flattered. I clarified that I didn’t mean it as praise exactly. I meant the combination of the privileged background, the dash and charm, along with the realpolitik stuff of winning over unions one steward at a time, and texting influential Black preachers over and over until they agree to let you come and talk. No one is born with this network or skill set.

“I think that the fact that he’s a brown person who speaks to all these marginalized communities in a place like New York is a part of the difference between him and Bernie,” said Ratajkowski. “The appeal that the left makes to blue-collar workers and white guys and the Bernie Bros—that’s not a bad thing, but I think for Mamdani that wasn’t his path.”

He insisted he really had come up through shoe-leather politics, but had also captured a cultural moment. “My path to the Muslim Democratic Club of New York was because I listened to Heems,” he said, adumbrating a rap lyric. “I was like, Oh, this is great, I should get on the F train and go to the second to the last stop and door-knock for Ali Najmi,” he said. “I remember going with Ali on Election Day,” he said, “and going to Dunkin’ Donuts, getting doughnuts, giving them to the poll workers, and the sadness of him losing that election.” It was such a distinctly New York image—the doughnuts on a sad day, the getting into something because you heard an indie rapper talk about it, the ethnic politics. The entire Mamdani project, in fact, is idiosyncratic, and specific to the international center New York has always been. I found myself asking whether or not he is worried by the prospect of governing, now that he’s been cast as a face of the left.

“For as much as this is an immense responsibility,” Mamdani told me, “it is also an opportunity, and one that deeply excites me, the prospect of delivering on this agenda. People speak to me as if the campaign was one thing and then governing must be another. My job is to deliver on the promises that I have made. These are not anchors that I view tying my feet down. These are north stars that I will wake up every morning and head towards.”

This is just how he talks. The issue that draws him to speak unguardedly is Palestine. “This is a city that is an international city, 40 percent, as I was telling you, of its residents were born elsewhere,” he said to me. He had just announced that his NYPD would arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he set foot in New York.

“New Yorkers have watched in horror as we have seen Netanyahu orchestrate a genocide of Palestinians, and do so violating international law, and even coming here to New York City to take military decisions that kill civilians,” Mamdani told me. “And what I’ve found is that the horror that New Yorkers have for it is a horror that I have heard about, no matter which borough I’m in, no matter what age the New Yorker is that I’m speaking to, and no matter their race or religion.” People are, Mamdani said, “simply in shock as to the lack of accountability and response from so many with so much power.”

“I think that the fact that he’s a brown person who speaks to all these marginalized communities in a place like New York is a part of the difference between him and Bernie,” Ratajkowski told me. “The appeal that the left makes to blue-collar workers and white guys and the Bernie Bros—that’s not a bad thing, but I think for Mamdani that wasn’t his path. He may have brought those people in, but that wasn’t necessarily his base. That’s not where he started.”

“Donald Trump got elected because of the price of eggs, or something that is as sort of tangible as that,” she continued. “Mamdani is saying, okay, the price of rent, the price of living in New York City, is just abysmal for everyone, and I’m going to address that, and I’m going to talk about it head on.”

“I absolutely think we can reach each and every New Yorker,” Mamdani told me. “And have conversations and go out into neighborhoods where we did not win that vote, where we are engaging with skepticism and questions, if not even downright opposition.”

This is, in some sense, the grandest and most radical political vision of our whole age: that all the seemingly irreconcilable and rage-fueled divisions about where this country should be headed really could be reconciled by a simple, relentless focus on affordability.

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