How Gen Z Is Powering the Race for New York City Mayor

People hear the name “Morris Katz” and picture a balding, 75-year-old accountant. “I get that quite frequently,” he says with a laugh. Instead, Katz is a curly-haired, baby-faced, high-energy 28-year-old political strategist and one of the masterminds of Zohran Mamdani’s surprising victory in June’s Democratic New York City mayoral primary.

To become the city’s youngest mayor since 1889, the 33-year-old Mamdani needs to win again in November’s general election, where he’s the favorite but will probably be facing three opponents and an onslaught of attacks funded by billionaires. No matter who wins, though, this year is likely to be remembered in New York politics as the Gen Z election—as in Z for Zohran, but also because of the outsized role that younger operatives and voters are playing in shaping the race.

Curtis Sliwa, the 71-year-old red-bereted Republican candidate, has put his bid in the hands of 25-year-old campaign manager Rusat Ramgopal, who in 2023 ran unsuccessfully for a Queens city council seat. “Mamdani isn’t the only one with young staffers,” Ramgopal says after accompanying Sliwa to a campaign event at a Chinese church in Flushing. Indeed, those staffers include 21-year-old college senior Ashwin Prabaharan, Sliwa’s director of youth engagement and volunteer coordinator. “In a typical campaign, I think a candidate of Curtis’s age would have been sidelined trying to relate to people my age,” Prabaharan says. “But he’s put young people front and center ever since he started his work with the Guardian Angels. So he understands exactly what affordability and public safety are supposed to be about for kids my age. And inside the campaign, we’re not just manning the phones. Kids like me have real responsibility.”

Partly that’s because the eccentric Sliwa is a longshot in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly six to one. But it’s also because the candidate thinks younger voters will determine the election. “The only way to stop [Mamdani’s] momentum,” Sliwa has said, “is go in the neighborhoods where he clobbered [Andrew] Cuomo and recruit millennials and Gen Z’ers to my point of view.”

Indeed, the primary race was defined by the striking contrast between Cuomo, the 67-year-old former governor, who held a minimal number of events and rode around in his Dodge Charger, and Mamdani, who literally dashed around city streets while making high-energy social media videos. Cuomo and the 64-year-old incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, are both planning to be on the ballot this fall as independents, and both men can point to millennials among their top advisers—including Melissa DeRosa, 43, on Cuomo’s team and Eugene Noh, Adams’s campaign manager, who is in his early thirties.

Yet the age of those staffers is less significant than the fact that most of them have spent their professional lives working in conventional, establishment New York politics—and that the personalities of their candidates are still moored to the 1980s and 1990s. Cuomo, for instance, has brought on a new social media team for the general election and has tried to convey a looser, hipper image, with sometimes awkward results, including breaking out his skills as a former tow truck driver to jump-start a stranger’s car. “Oh, I have been enjoying Cuomo’s TikTok presence,” Katz says, “but probably not for the reasons they would like someone to be enjoying it.”

“You’re not going to be able to out-Mamdani Mamdani on social media, but we’ve upped our game there too,” says Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi, though he declined to name the new members of the Cuomo social media team. “If [Mamdani] wins and, as suspected, he’s not able to achieve what he promised, all it’s going to do is disillusion this generation for a generation.”

The leadership of Mamdani’s campaign, while not purely composed of political outsiders, is steeped in the internet culture and populist politics of the past two decades. Andrew Epstein, 38, created the breakthrough videos with Mamdani. Speechwriting director Julian Gerson, 28, suggested that Mamdani walk the length of Manhattan days before the primary vote. Elle Bisgaard-Church, his 34-year-old primary campaign manager, “shares a brain” with Mamdani, says a senior campaign operative, and constructed a volunteer army of 50,000 people. Senior adviser Zara Rahim, 34, prioritized Mamdani’s outreach to Muslim and South Asian communities.

The staff’s innovative approach also shaped Mamdani’s reaction to the murders of four people in a midtown Manhattan office building last week, when he returned from a vacation in Uganda: Mamdani, in a press conference, took on claims from rivals that he’s soft on crime. “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” he said, describing himself as a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads.” Early in the primary campaign, Katz says, veteran outside advisers forcefully argued that public safety is a losing issue for progressives, so Mamdani should avoid talking about it. But Bisgaard-Church made the case for leaning into public safety with a creative proposal to vastly expand mental health services, freeing up cops to fight crime. Mamdani’s campaign believes the proposal helped defuse attacks on him as anti-police. Last week, when Cuomo invoked tweets from 2020 in which Mamdani advocated defunding the NYPD, Mamdani spun the criticism into his campaign’s larger framework, saying such attacks are “indicative of the very politics New Yorkers want to leave in the past.”

For several top members of the team, the arc of Barack Obama’s presidency and the Trump backlash to it formed their political education. They also described a feeling of precarity, fueled by having grown up with the 2008 economic meltdown or the COVID-19 pandemic. “I want to be clear: I am incredibly fortunate,” says Rahim, who at 22 worked in the White House Office of Digital Strategy under President Obama and later on the communications team for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “But I have student loan payments that I deferred, and that still come out of my bank account every single month. My parents owned a convenience store and lost the business after the financial crash. I’m Bangladeshi, and whether you’re talking about South Asians, or you’re talking about Muslims, or you’re talking about young people, we’re constantly in fear of having a rug pulled out from underneath us.”

Katz grew up in Manhattan and thought he wanted to follow the career path of his screenwriter father, David Bar Katz, whose credits include the 2022 series American Gigolo. “I remember the hope and optimism around Obama, this feeling that politics can kind of transcend,” he says. “And then I remember seeing all the cynical forces at play, whether that’s Wall Street or the military industrial complex, the realities of a corrupt and rigged political system and economy.” Trump’s win in 2016 nudged Katz toward working in politics, and in 2024, he helped Dan Osborn, an independent, nearly win a Nebraska congressional seat.

Katz and the rest of Mamdani’s team believed the youth vote would be the candidate’s base, but were surprised at their own success in motivating that group: In the primary, voters 18 to 29 led the turnout. Cuomo, in a post-primary appearance at a Long Island synagogue, blamed younger voters for “distorting” the results. Mayor Adams seemed more realistic, telling a TV interviewer that “any elected official that cannot evolve with the different ways of communication is going to fail…. We’re gonna reach those younger voters, those middle-aged voters, and those extremely dependable older adults who vote.”

The mayor has good reason to highlight seniors: When he won in 2021, the majority of primary voters were over 60. The Adams campaign operation is fairly small, and a spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment about any attempts at hiring younger staff or reaching younger voters.

In the primary, Mamdani and his team capitalized on what was supposedly their greatest weakness: Mamdani’s lack of government experience. The upside, born of youth and a generational willingness to experiment, was his campaign’s openness to doing things differently. The potential downside of youth is inexperience, and Adams and Cuomo seem intent on pressing that line of criticism up until the general election. “We had the belief that just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it is inherently bad,” Katz tells me. More than any policy proposal, that spirit landed with an electorate looking to try something new. Now, Mamdani merely has to maintain the vibe for three more months.