Former President Barack Obama called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Saturday, praising his campaign and offering to be a “sounding board” into the future.
The private, roughly 30-minute phone call, which has not previously been reported, was described by two people who participated or were briefed immediately on what had been said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation.
Mr. Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the election on Tuesday. They talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city, the people said.
The former president’s outreach on the eve of what has been a contentious election is notable, given how divided the Democratic establishment has been over Mr. Mamdani and the role that Mr. Obama still plays in the party.
Mr. Obama spoke admiringly about how Mr. Mamdani has run his campaign, making light of his own past political missteps and noting how few Mr. Mamdani had made under such a bright spotlight.
“Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Mamdani, according to the people.
Mr. Obama has not formally endorsed Mr. Mamdani, in keeping with his general practice of avoiding any intervention in municipal races since he left office. But the call — the second between the two men since the Democratic primary — represents an important signal of Mr. Obama’s support as other leaders in the Democratic Party have kept a palpable distance from Mr. Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist.
Mr. Obama offered to be a “sounding board” if Mr. Mamdani wins the election, and the two discussed preliminary plans to meet in person at some point in Washington, though no meeting date has been set.
Mr. Mamdani thanked the former president for the call, the people said, and told him that he had drawn inspiration for his own recent speech on Islamophobia from Mr. Obama’s speech on race during his first presidential run.
Other national Democrats have been reticent to embrace Mr. Mamdani.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, still has not said whether he will vote for Mr. Mamdani. “We’re continuing to talk,” Mr. Schumer told reporters this week. And Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, gave Mr. Mamdani his backing only on the eve of early voting after avoiding a position for months.
Republicans have promised to make Mr. Mamdani one of the faces of the Democratic Party. The House Republican’s campaign arm issued a memo this week, vowing to make him “synonymous with the Democratic Party nationwide.”
“This isn’t about one race in New York,” the memo said. “It’s a national story of a party bending the knee to socialism and the far left.”
Mr. Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman, shocked the political establishment when he handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary. Mr. Cuomo is now running as an independent in the general election along with Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.
Mr. Obama first called Mr. Mamdani in late June, shortly after his primary victory. Patrick Gaspard, an adviser to Mr. Mamdani who had also served as political director on Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his White House, said that initial call came “unsolicited, unprompted” from the former president.
“It’s something President Obama didn’t need to do,” Mr. Gaspard said in an interview this week before the most recent call occurred. “The fact that he placed that phone call to us — and then the news of that call making its way into the world — was a very important signaler to many in the political establishment, the business establishment, to average voters that helped credential Zohran Mamdani.”
Mr. Gaspard said the call in June was also “important to Zohran personally” after the primary in order to “begin to think about the kind of infrastructure he would need around him to prepare himself for governance.”
The second call with Mr. Mamdani on Saturday came as Mr. Obama headed out to spend the day campaigning alongside the Democratic candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey ahead of the election on Tuesday, once again reprising his role as the party’s most sought-after surrogate.
Television ads in California, New Jersey and Virginia have also prominently featured Mr. Obama this fall — a testament to his enduring appeal more than a decade since the former president last won an election when he was on the ballot.
But since leaving office, Mr. Obama has endorsed only a single candidate for mayor — Karen Bass in Los Angeles in 2022 — and that came at the last minute in a race where she was at risk of losing to a billionaire former Republican, Rick Caruso, who had become a Democrat ahead of the race.
Polls do not show that Mr. Mamdani’s race against Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Sliwa is anywhere near as close.
To cut into Mr. Mamdani’s advantage, Mr. Cuomo has pointed to a New York Post report that Mr. Mamdani had criticized Mr. Obama as “evil” on social media more than a decade ago. Mr. Mamdani has deflected by telling reporters that his remarks were the “stupid tweet of a college student.” Mr. Cuomo has been mentioning the remarks as he tries to win the support of Black voters with whom Mr. Obama remains popular.
Mr. Obama has long been cautious about lending his name to candidates and causes. In an interview with Marc Maron earlier this year, Mr. Obama said he saw his ideal role in the party since exiting the White House as shifting “from player to coach.”
“For the long term, what I could do that would be most helpful would be to start promoting, lifting up, shining a spotlight on those, that next generation of leadership and talent,” Mr. Obama said.
A person close to Mr. Obama, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak for him publicly, said that the former president believed Mr. Mamdani’s rise was an example of such new leaders rising up independently.
The Mamdani campaign boasts that it has attracted 90,000 volunteers. He recently held a rally with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that packed a 13,000-seat stadium.
Mr. Mamdani’s campaign has drawn comparisons from a number of former Obama officials to the former president’s 2008 race that galvanized a generation of younger voters on the promise of change.
“It brings me back to 2007 when I was young and working for Barack Obama in Iowa, and everything was ahead of us,” Tommy Vietor, a former Obama spokesman and now host of the show “Pod Save America,” told Mr. Mamdani in a recent interview. “It was all hope and excitement, and there was nothing we couldn’t do.”
“I think that with hope comes an immense responsibility to deliver on the promise of it, and I take very serious that responsibility,” Mr. Mamdani replied.
Michael Gold and Benjamin Oreskes contributed reporting.
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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