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One Sign of Mamdani’s Surge: The Impersonators Are Out in Droves

October 18, 2025
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One Sign of Mamdani’s Surge: The Impersonators Are Out in Droves
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Neel Ghosh, a comedian from Brooklyn, was looking for new content to post on social media when his girlfriend told him something she’d been thinking for a while. Mr. Ghosh, a millennial with dark hair and a scruffy beard, looked a little like the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Mr. Ghosh, a 32-year-old Bengali American, ran with it. He put on a dark suit, white shirt and tie similar to the signature outfit favored by Mr. Mamdani, and together with two friends started filming fake ads that parodied the candidate’s campaign posts.

With a series of social media clips, Mr. Ghosh has managed to replicate Mr. Mamdani’s campaign vibe. In the videos, labeled with yellow and orange titles that match the campaign’s font, Mr. Ghosh proposes solutions for problems that make life difficult for ordinary New Yorkers, all delivered with a closed-mouth grin and nice-guy earnestness, reminiscent of the style that has helped catapult the real Zohran Mamdani to his wide lead going into November’s election.

In one post called “Zohran for Public Urination,” Mr. Ghosh stares at the camera and talks about creating a new citywide protocol for the benefit of all citizens: placing free-standing toilets at every tree, stop sign and corner of the city “so you can go anytime, anywhere.”

In another called “Zohran 4 Cats,” Mr. Ghosh, dressed as the candidate, leans down toward a lounging feline, explaining how he would enact policies to help the cat, who has worked for years chasing off mice from a Brooklyn bodega without labor protections.

“No union benefits. No representation,” he says in the video. “He’s a worker, a soldier in the invisible war against rodents. His reward? Precarity. No hazard pay. No collective bargaining. Just capitalism’s cold embrace.”

Mr. Ghosh is among a number of Mamdani impersonators who support the candidate and have sprung up on the campaign trail, sometimes organically and other times prompted by fund-raising groups or the campaign itself. The phenomenon is an unusual twist to an unusual campaign that has appealed to younger voters with messaging through social media.

Truth be told, some of the look-alike Mamdanis don’t resemble him all that much, including Mr. Ghosh. But they see a bit of themselves in the candidate’s background: a young and ambitious first-generation New Yorker.

In his online posts and stage appearances, Mr. Ghosh, who sometimes plays music as part of his comedy sets and is in a band called Porcelain Vivisection, has managed to capture Mr. Mamdani’s intonations and speech patterns. He copies the candidate’s particular sincerity, but is just a touch over the top. He is earnest enough for New Yorkers who maybe haven’t been paying close attention to the mayor’s race to question whether it’s really Mr. Mamdani.

At a recent comedy performance where he performed as Mr. Mamdani, a woman approached Mr. Ghosh for a selfie. He complied and then shook her hand, introducing himself as “Neel.” She looked confused and walked away.

Mr. Ghosh started making his social media Mamdani clips before the primary election, around the same time that a group called Hot Girls 4 Zohran held a Mamdani look-alike contest in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Its organizers were inspired by a look-alike contest for the actor Timothée Chalamet that went viral last year when Mr. Chalamet himself turned up.

At the Brooklyn contest, about a dozen contestants, one by one, stood before a cheering crowd and quoted campaign pledges in favor of more affordable housing and free city buses. They spelled out the candidate’s last name as Mr. Mamdani had done during a debate after his chief opponent, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, mispronounced it.

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign has embraced the look-alike phenomenon.

“There are so many people who come up to Zohran and say, ‘I never thought I’d see someone who looks like me in this level of power.’ I think that’s a big part of it,” said Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign.

Recently, the campaign tapped look-alikes to turn up at two simultaneous paper-shredding events it held in Harlem and the Bronx.

“I can’t be two places at once,” Mr. Mamdani himself said in a social media clip teasing the events. “Or can I?”

Devesh Kodnani, 25, winner of the Brooklyn look-alike contest, was one of the impersonators asked to spend the day dressed as Mr. Mamdani. He shook hands, posed for selfies and chatted with other supporters until the actual Mr. Mamdani arrived.

“I’m an Indian American, and to have someone like that be the first South Asian mayor of New York — a lot of people look at that and it’s inspiring,” he said. “There is an aspect of his persona that he is an Everyman.”

Mr. Ghosh said he saw a little of himself in Mr. Mamdani. Besides being millennials, both are first-generation immigrants as well as musicians, and both give off a class president vibe.

“You can tell he was well-liked by his teachers and probably ran for student council,” Mr. Ghosh said. “A lot of first-generation kids are from that mold. Looking like him is one thing — no one that’s looked like him has run before — but there is also a vibe to him common to first-gen brown kids. Aunties probably love Zohran.”

Mr. Ghosh spent his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where his parents moved from India for his father’s work as an oncologist and hematologist.

As a child, he tagged along on trips to Target with his mother and took advantage of her failure to grasp the explicit labeling on recordings of live performances of Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler and other comics. He was lulled to sleep listening to the comedians.

Mr. Ghosh said laughter helped him adjust to being in a community made up largely of people who did not look like him.

“I found it soothing,” he said.

His comedy is peppered with jokes about feeling out of place as a youth in the mostly white Midwest.

“I’m a brown comedian, so I’m contractually obligated to have a 9/11 joke,” he says in one of his routines before launching into a Sept. 11 bit about his family’s experience in Iowa in the aftermath.

Mr. Ghosh first learned about Mr. Mamdani a couple years ago when his friend told him the state assemblyman was at one point a rapper.

His parody videos teeter close to making fun of Mr. Mamdani, so much so that some viewers are confused.

“I’ve seen many of your videos, and I can’t tell if you’re mocking Zohran or supporting him lol,” a commenter wrote on one of his clips.

Mr. Ghosh counts himself as a supporter, largely because of Mr. Mamdani’s fight for affordability in New York, where Mr. Ghosh still can’t believe coffee can sometimes cost $7.

“He is not a geriatric candidate. He is of the age of people who are in a deep existential crisis of what it means to be in this country right now,” Mr. Ghosh said. “This is somebody I see myself in.”

Dionne Searcey is a Times reporter who writes about wealth and power in New York and beyond.

The post One Sign of Mamdani’s Surge: The Impersonators Are Out in Droves appeared first on New York Times.

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