On a frigid night in January, Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker running for mayor, climbed into a halal cart in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for a plate of chicken and rice.
With cameras rolling, the fresh-faced Democrat mainlined a takeout container as he explained in simple terms how the city’s arcane permitting process was squeezing vendors and driving “halalflation.”
The 90-second video went viral, but it also offered a more direct sign of the candidate’s growing reach. Mahmoud Mousa, the Egyptian-born vendor next to him onscreen, said that his Brooklyn neighbors, friends and family inundated him with questions about the 33-year-old candidate in a suit and tie.
“Politicians never care about the problems we have,” he said in an interview last week. “But he is saying he is going to take care of how I live.”
Six months later, the episode illustrates how Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, broke New York’s political mold and pulled off a seismic upset to claim the Democratic nomination for mayor over far more seasoned rivals, including former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
The victory sent shock waves through American politics, electrifying progressives, alarming some party leaders and handing Republicans fresh fodder to attack Democrats. It also set the stage for a pitched general election battle against Mayor Eric Adams, as Mr. Mamdani now confronts an antagonistic business class and many Jewish New Yorkers alarmed by his stark criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza.
But all of that has obscured a foundational question: How did a virtually unknown Muslim immigrant with the thinnest of résumés rise from 1 percent in the polls to defeat a Democratic titan?
The answer certainly has something to do with Mr. Mamdani’s easy charisma, youthful good looks and exuberant style. Other key factors included his decision to ignore early doubts from close allies, Mr. Cuomo’s listless campaign and the alliance that Mr. Mamdani fostered among his progressive rivals, who improbably chose to unite against Mr. Cuomo instead of cannibalizing each other’s support.
Yet interviews with Mr. Mamdani, fellow candidates, campaign strategists and Democratic voters suggest that the unorthodox blueprint of his success was already evident that night in the halal cart.
Where Mr. Cuomo lectured from a distance, Mr. Mamdani took his campaign to the streets and asked questions. When other progressives traded 10-point plans, Mr. Mamdani offered simple, concrete ideas for a city buckling under spiraling costs: free buses, child care and a rent freeze. He may have been outspent on TV and dismissed by newspaper editorial boards, but he turned his candidacy into something closer to a movement that jumped from social media to an army of volunteers.
Patrick Gaspard, an adviser to mayors and presidents who quietly helped guide Mr. Mamdani, said the wellspring of support reminded him of the response to David N. Dinkins’s campaign to be New York’s first Black mayor.
“This is the first campaign since 1989 in New York where I saw actual living and breathing unpaid volunteers who were consistently going out and engaging with their neighbors,” he said.
“Democrats generally come off as scolds these days, and he was a kinetic listener,” Mr. Gaspard added. “People located themselves in the aspiration. People said, ‘Yes, this person is asking the right questions.’”
In the end, the scale of his victory caught even Mr. Mamdani by surprise. As polls closed on primary night, he was prepared for days of vote counting. Instead, he and his aides spent 90 minutes crash-rewriting a victory speech that would begin with a quote from Nelson Mandela.
“It always seems impossible,” Mr. Mamdani declared on a Queens rooftop on primary night, “until it is done.”
‘A ceiling of maybe 20 percent’
Some campaigns begin with an air of inevitability. But when it started out last October, Mr. Mamdani’s looked more like a curiosity.
The son of a renowned Indian filmmaker and a Columbia University professor, he had earned a reputation as a creative messenger in Albany. He launched a 15-day hunger strike to help secure debt relief for taxi drivers and made waves introducing legislation to clamp down on nonprofits supporting Israeli settlements.
But after two terms, he had little power and was barely known outside his Queens district. Even some of Mr. Mamdani’s closest allies privately worried that his campaign could be a spoiler for Brad Lander, the progressive city comptroller seen as the most viable challenger to Mr. Adams at the time.
Mr. Mamdani was barely in the race before tensions boiled over in the Democratic Socialists of America, the small but influential group known for kick-starting the career of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York chapter eventually voted to endorse him, but some of its most prominent elected members, including Tiffany Cabán, a city councilwoman, and Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, feared his run would be an embarrassment and siphon resources from down-ballot contests.
Mr. Mamdani was not waiting around to be anointed.
With a small clutch of aides almost as young as he was — including his chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church; Ms. Gallagher’s former chief of staff, Andrew Epstein; and Morris Katz, an operative fresh off Dan Osborn’s independent Senate campaign in Nebraska — Mr. Mamdani wanted to build a race that disregarded sacrosanct rules of New York politics.
“We were running to win, not just running to run,” Ms. Bisgaard-Church said. “But we knew that if we did it the right way, we could actually start to build a healthy left.”
Mr. Mamdani courted young voters, a fickle group that often does not show up in primaries. He defended his D.S.A. affiliation and his criticism of Israel, a position that galvanized the left but risked alienating Jewish voters in the core Democratic coalition. And he unapologetically called for raising $10 billion in new taxes.
But he did not just announce his plans, he found creative — sometimes funny — ways of illustrating them to an audience that started with about 25,000 Instagram followers and mushroomed into the millions by Primary Day.
“Attention spans are a lot shorter than they used to be. You have to get straight to the point,” said Chi Ossé, a 27-year-old Brooklyn councilman. “Freeze the rent? Easy. Fast and free buses? Easy.”
In one video, he filmed himself running into the icy waters off Coney Island to talk about a rent freeze. In another, he stood on a street corner in the Bronx with a microphone in the days after Donald J. Trump won back the White House. Other politicians were trading theories about why Democrats lost so many working-class voters. Mr. Mamdani actually asked the voters.
“If there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality,” Mr. Mamdani said in the three-minute compilation. “Are those things that you’d support?”
Still, even some of his closest allies, including Jabari Brisport, a state senator and Mr. Mamdani’s Albany roommate, were skeptical he could expand beyond young voters and the left.
“I thought the notion of a socialist running for mayor had a ceiling of maybe 20 percent tops,” he said.
The power of persuasion
As the legislative session kicked off in January, Mr. Mamdani began meeting Gustavo Rivera, the type of senior state senator whose support could give him broader legitimacy, over breakfasts at a small Albany cafe, Fresh N’ Pressed.
Mr. Rivera was impressed by his colleague’s passion and intellect. Still, his priority was defeating Mr. Cuomo, a longtime enemy of progressives who was widely expected to enter the race as a front-runner, and Mr. Rivera figured others were better-positioned.
As for Mr. Mamdani, “He needed to show me he could put a campaign together,” Mr. Rivera said.
But things began to change as winter wound on. As Mr. Lander tacked toward the center to try to broaden his appeal, Mr. Mamdani’s scrappiness caught the attention of progressives searching after the fall’s election wipeout for younger leaders who were ready for a fight.
The campaign held its first major canvass on Dec. 14, unusually early for an election still six months away. Hundreds of volunteers at eight locations went door to door in the cold weather with a simple message.
“Things are really hard and no one is talking about it and life should be easier,” recalled Tascha Van Auken, who oversaw a field operation that came to include an astounding 40,000 volunteers.
In early March, after Mr. Mamdani tussled with state troopers in the Capitol to try to confront Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, he raised $250,000 in 24 hours. By the end of the month, he was the first candidate to meet the city’s campaign fund-raising limit.
In a video announcement, Mr. Mamdani sprinted toward the camera on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. “I’m about to say something to you you’ve never heard a politician say,” he said. “Please stop sending us money.”
Mr. Mamdani soon faced a paradox. The further he inched up in the polls, the more daunting his challenge became.
He would be the city’s youngest mayor in a century, and to win, he would need to convince fellow Democrats that he was up to the job of leading a city with a $116 billion budget and roughly 300,000 municipal employees at a time when Mr. Trump was seeking to bend City Hall to his will.
Most established politicians and pastors lined up behind Mr. Cuomo, presuming he would win, or Mr. Lander, who many had worked with for years.
When Mr. Mamdani first reached out in September to meet one such leader, the Rev. Rashad Moore of First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, he was promptly rebuffed — three times.
In February, Mr. Mamdani finally got two minutes to speak from the church’s pulpit. But as he described plans for opening city-run grocery stores and building 200,000 units of affordable housing, some in the pews simply shook their heads and laughed.
Some, though, were slowly won over.
In late April, Mr. Rivera became the first state lawmaker outside the D.S.A. to endorse Mr. Mamdani, telling Mr. Lander in a “rough conversation” that he believed Mr. Mamdani had built the “apparatus necessary to defeat Cuomo.”
A two-man race
Mr. Cuomo, 67, watched Mr. Mamdani rise with delight.
He had entered the race in March with that air of inevitability. Though he had resigned in a sexual harassment scandal four years earlier (he denied wrongdoing), he had a long record of accomplishments and quickly locked down the support of large business and labor groups.
Now, the former governor assumed a democratic socialist like Mr. Mamdani had a lower electoral ceiling than Mr. Lander or other rivals, and aggressively attacked his inexperience and past support for cutting Police Department funding.
“Donald Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” the former governor said. “He’s been in government 27 minutes.”
Their campaigns could hardly have been more different. Mr. Cuomo had re-emerged from political exile with warnings that New York City might be entering a death spiral of crime and homelessness and the assertion that he alone could fix it. He relied on labor unions and a $25 million super PAC funded by corporate donors to turn out voters, and made only rare public appearances.
For almost all the race, polls suggested his strategy was working. But as concerns about crime faded from the front of voters’ minds, Mr. Mamdani twisted the narrative to put Mr. Cuomo on the losing side of an argument over the future and the role of big money in politics.
When Mr. Cuomo repeatedly mispronounced his name in the final televised debate, Mr. Mamdani sensed an opening for another viral moment.
“The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I,” he said, spelling it out. “You should learn how to say it.”
A pivotal alliance
Though he was loath to admit it publicly, Mr. Mamdani’s rise had come as a painful series of disappointments for Mr. Lander.
A founder of the progressive caucus during his days on the City Council and the only sitting citywide official in the primary, Mr. Lander, 55, had entered with the expectation of being the left’s standard-bearer, only to watch his allies coalesce around Mr. Mamdani.
But with two weeks left before Primary Day, he decided to do something that is rare among self-interested politicians and that progressives had failed to do in the primary that Mr. Adams won four years earlier.
The day before the final debate, Mr. Lander and Mr. Mamdani sat down at Yara, a Lebanese restaurant in Midtown, with campaign aides and Mr. Gaspard. Over plates of fattoush, hummus and eggplant, the two candidates decided they would cross-endorse each another to defeat Mr. Cuomo.
Mr. Mamdani’s campaign had for weeks pursued a cross-endorsement with Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker, because of her base of older Black voters. The two had at least three direct calls in which he said that their partnership could be a marriage that could defeat Mr. Cuomo, but Ms. Adams had reservations.
Mr. Lander, in contrast, was all in. The two men discussed how Mr. Lander could use his campaign funds to attack Mr. Cuomo in the race’s final days, and when they took the debate stage the next day, they teamed up to highlight the allegations of sexual harassment that ended Mr. Cuomo’s governorship.
“I know how to read the polls,” Mr. Lander said in an interview. “I had made clear how important it was to defeat Andrew.”
It dovetailed with a strategy the left-leaning Working Families Party had been pushing for months urging their candidates to attack Mr. Cuomo, not each other. Ms. Adams knocked Mr. Cuomo for how he handled the Covid pandemic as governor. Michael Blake and Zellnor Myrie, two candidates who had failed to break through, spent their funds on television and radio trying to weaken Mr. Cuomo’s support among Black voters.
But Mr. Lander’s backing meant the most, sending a signal to older liberal voters and Jewish voters that Mr. Mamdani could be trusted. And that was before one final stumbling block.
A late hiccup and a long walk
Mr. Mamdani’s sharp criticism of Israel and the war of Gaza had periodically flared up on the campaign trail for months. But exactly a week before Election Day, it set off a political firestorm.
He was asked during a podcast interview if the phrase “globalize the intifada” made him uncomfortable. He declined to condemn it. Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews consider it a call to violence, invoking Palestinian resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.
By the next morning, the blowback had reached such intensity that it threatened to stall Mr. Mamdani’s momentum. The U.S. Holocaust Museum called the comments “outrageous and especially offensive.” Representative Dan Goldman, a Jewish New York Democrat, all but said Mr. Mamdani’s stance was disqualifying.
Few Democrats have won a modern New York City election without significant support from Jewish New Yorkers. Mr. Cuomo’s campaign immediately began fanning a sense of outrage.
The next morning, Mr. Mamdani held a news conference in Harlem to accept an endorsement from Maya Wiley, a 2021 mayoral candidate. He broke down in tears when discussing the growing stream of death threats he had received that referenced his Muslim faith.
“I get threats on my life, on the people that I love,” he said, before adding that he had very real concerns about antisemitism.
Mr. Lander, the city’s highest-ranking Jewish official, went to bat for Mr. Mamdani, accusing Mr. Cuomo of weaponizing antisemitism for political gain and helping quiet uneasiness among some allies.
Mr. Mamdani’s team was still on edge a few days later when Julian Gerson, his political director, suggested one final gesture to get New Yorkers’ attention: a walk the full length of Manhattan the Friday night before Primary Day.
“We’re outside because New Yorkers deserve a mayor they can see, they can hear,” Mr. Mamdani said as he set out from Inwood around 7 p.m.
Aides were worried that the candidate might be heckled or confronted on the Upper West Side, home to a large Jewish population.
But as he began making his way south, broadcasting much of the journey on social media, supporters ran up to him instead, snapping selfies, slapping him on the back, bumping fists. Some said they had registered to vote to support him.
Maya King and Jake Grovum contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief for The Times, covering Mayor Eric Adams and his administration.
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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