Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani surrounded himself with powerful interest groups and anti-Israel activists who helped him win — and who are now determined to keep him “accountable” and focused on their issues when he takes office in January.
“When you take money for people in politics, if you let them down, they’re going to come get you,” said political strategist Hank Sheinkopf of the incoming administration. “If he doesn’t deliver, they are going to remember.”
Here are the people who will have Mamdani’s ear — and who he could owe favors once sworn in as mayor.
Linda Sarsour
Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour has been described as a mentor and friend to Mamdani. Last month, she was seen in a video telling CAIR conference attendees that she will hold him “accountable” and won’t let him “do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.”
Sarsour, a former organizer of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington in 2017 to protest President Trump’s first term, left that organization amid allegations of antisemitism in 2019 — including when she excluded Jewish marchers, saying, “One cannot be a feminist and a Zionist at the same time.”
She announced in 2018 that Muslims shouldn’t humanize Israelis because they’re the enemy and has praised notorious Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Sarsour has also already lashed out against Mamdani signaling he could work with NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch: “I wasn’t really happy about the news that he was going to keep Tisch on for the NYPD.”
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and CAIR Action
The Muslim civil rights group has “deep ties to terrorist organizations,” according to Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has demanded an investigation into the nonprofit — which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2007 terrorist funding case that linked it to Hamas.
Political action committees connected to the group donated more than $140,000 to Mamdani’s PAC.
And CAIR Action, an advocacy group led by former CAIR California executive director Basim Elkarra, helped to mobilize the Muslim vote to steer Mamdani to victory during June’s Democratic primary.
In a 2013 social media post, Elkarra, an anti-Israel activist, supported terrorist Rasmea Yousef Odeh. A military operative with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group, Odeh was convicted for the murder of two university students in a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 and deported from the US in 2017 after lying on her citizenship application.
Democratic Socialists of America
Mamdani has been a member of the DSA since 2017. The radical group’s leadership, whose backing was instrumental in the rise of New York City Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, unendorsed her last year because they felt she was not sufficiently critical of Israel.
Its international wing has called for lifting travel restrictions on North Korea and condemned President Trump’s brokered ceasefire in Gaza last month.
“A conditional ceasefire agreement does not wash the hands of the ruling class that touted their legal obligation to intervene and instead, continued to fuel and arm genocide while stoking regional war,” the group says on its website.
As The Post reported in August, key proposals spelled out in the NYC-DSA’s agenda include calls for the decriminalization of all drugs, sex work and petty crimes, such as trespassing, disorderly conduct and fare jumping.
At the time, Mamdani’s campaign said on background that the NYPD will enforce all misdemeanor crimes if he’s elected, but refused to respond on other issues.
United Federation of Teachers
The sprawling union, representing some 200,000 education workers, endorsed Mamdani for mayor in July — and received pushback from a group representing Jewish teachers and NYC Public Schools Alliance, who are battling antisemitism in city schools.
Mamdani appeared alongside union leadership last month, pledging $12 million to hire 1,000 new teachers a year and providing $12,000 in tuition assistance to prospective teachers in exchange for a commitment to work in the city’s schools for three years.
The increase in teachers is necessary after the union backed a controversial state law to reduce class sizes by the 2027-28 school year.
Incumbent mayor Eric Adams and other critics — including many who support smaller classes — blasted the law as a budget-busting unfunded mandate forced upon the city that would cost at least $1.6 billion annually, according to an Independent Budget Office analysis.
Working Families Party
When Mamdani voted for himself Tuesday, it was not as a Democrat but on the Working Families Party ballot line. The party endorsed him in March, giving an important boost to the campaign.
Despite Mamdani’s rhetoric against billionaires, progressive billionaire George Soros indirectly donated $37 million to the Working Families Party and nine other leftwing groups that backed Mamdani’s campaign.
Since 2016, the party has pocketed $23.7 million from Soros through its nonprofit fundraising arm, Working Families Organization Inc.
The party advocates for free healthcare for all, criminal justice reform and “environmental justice.”
Mahmood Mamdani
In an interview after he became a New York State Assemblyman in 2021, Mamdani said his parents are responsible for “not simply the person that I am, but the thoughts that I have.” He repeated the sentiment in his victory speech Tuesday, saying, “To my parents, mama and baba: You have made me into the man I am today.”
Many of his anti-Israel and socialist views have their roots in his father Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship.
A radical socialist and emeritus professor at Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology, Mahmood in 1981 founded the Uganda-Korea Friendship Society, a group connected to North Korea. In his 2020 book “Neither Settler Nor Native,” an academic treatise on settler colonialism around the world, he argues that “Zionist settlers in Israel forcibly exiled and concentrated non-Jews, an ongoing process.”
The elder Mamdani also occupies an advisory position on the Gaza Tribunal, an international group calling for “Israeli perpetrators and Western enablers” to face consequences over their actions in the Gaza Strip.
Patrick Gaspard
The Democratic operative is a former executive for the Democratic National Committee and was also former president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations. An informal advisor to Mamdani’s campaign, he introduced the mayor-elect to some of New York City’s biggest power players.
And he has been instrumental in helping choose Mamdani’s transition team — including co-chair Lina Khan, the controversial former head of the Federal Trade Commission.
The former leader of the Center for American Progress — a progressive think tank — Gaspard is also virulently anti-Trump. After polls closed in the mayoral election Tuesday, he posted on X: “Tonight Dems from the center to the left will beat back the Trump authoritarian movement that’s bankrupting the US . . .”
In his victory speech, Mamdani taunted President Trump, telling him to “Turn the volume up.”
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