Photo: Adam Dowling for New York Magazine
On a rainy Sunday evening in May, the mood inside Brooklyn Steel was, like the candidate, jubilant and young. Around 1,500 people had gathered for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign rally for mayor of New York City. This was a congregation of true believers, the evangelists who not only plan to vote for the 33-year-old democratic socialist and three-term Queens assemblyman but are trying to convince everyone else to do so. The evening’s roster was a concentration of power and cool and changing winds. Before the event began, Julian Casablancas dropped by to say hello with his kids. Ella Emhoff and Councilmember Chi Ossé did a joint endorsement video on the step-and-repeat. Family friend Kal Penn emceed, and Jaboukie Young-White told some jokes. State Senator and “work BFF” Jabari Brisport led the audience in a rousing call-and-response of what has been the lodestone of Mamdani’s pitch: Freeze the … Rent! Make Buses Fast and … Free! Universal … Child Care!
When Mamdani entered the race in October, most wrote him off as just another hat in the ring. He was a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate with a short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy — qualities that were seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race. (Less than a million people voted in the Democratic primary Eric Adams won.) In the intervening six months, however, he’s transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi. His campaign videos are stylish, fun, direct, and in the language of the internet. The first of his to pop came this past fall, after the general election, when he interviewed Trump supporters in the Bronx and Queens, laying out the argument that Democrats had lost touch with the reality of everyday life. On New Year’s Day, he did a polar plunge, diving headfirst into the ocean in a full suit and yelling, “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City!” He’s done the rounds with the tastemakers of the dirtbag left (Hasan Piker, Crackhead Barney, Chapo Trap House) and become a media darling with the politically allergic (Vogue, GQ). He hung out at a “friendraiser” with Alison Roman’s baby. More than anyone else in the race, he looks like he’s having fun.
Mamdani has a genial presence — he is energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a “Who’s your brother’s friend?” kind of way. He has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country and looking for someone with real fight, showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back — and then posting it all on Instagram. The other serious contenders — Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — have failed to break through in a meaningful way. On March 24, Mamdani became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined. More compellingly, his campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls. Recent polls have him at around 20 percent with most of the other ten candidates stagnating in the single digits (or less). The primary will employ a ranked-choice ballot, and many progressives have been hedging their bets by endorsing a slate of candidates. But the rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday — that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former governor Andrew Cuomo.
Though the odds of that happening are not good. Despite his ignominious resignation in the wake of sexual-harassment allegations and the fact that everyone in Albany hated him, Cuomo’s near-universal name recognition had him polling at 22 percent before he even entered the race. He still commands a double-digit lead in first-round votes. Their respective campaigns are striking foils: Cuomo, who at 67 would become the oldest incoming mayor of New York City ever, has stayed out of the public eye while racking up endorsements from major labor unions. When he does appear, he’s working the Black church circuit. He knows that the path to the Democratic nomination has historically gone through Black and Latino voters, mostly in Southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn. In one simulation, Cuomo is winning those communities by 91 percent and 72 percent by the final round, respectively. To the ire of white liberals, he has a broad multi-racial coalition. While Mamdani is seemingly everywhere in the city, running from protests to rallies to galas, his base is largely white college-educated Brooklynites, with much of his early efforts going toward activating South Asian and Muslim voters, who have traditionally been ignored. “Zohran is Cuomo’s wet-dream opponent,” says one anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist. “Supported by online kids, on the record for ‘defund,’ on the record about Palestine, and little support in Black or Latino communities.”
Mamdani’s detractors think his campaign is more of a vanity project that has gotten out of control. Critics point to his performance in Albany, arguing that he’s someone drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes, and that his biggest achievement — the fare-free-bus pilot program in the 2023 budget — may not be the unqualified success he claims it was. “He’s such a talented communicator, and that’s quite a gift,” says a fellow Democratic legislator. “Yet it doesn’t suffice when it comes to moving legislation or getting something done in the budget process.”
But momentum is its own irrevocable force. Mamdani supporters have had a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left. At the rally, some party members were beginning to fall in line. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who just a week before had named Brad Lander as his first choice, welcomed Mamdani to the stage as “the next mayor of New York City.” Mamdani came out, smile wide, right dimple weaponized. He delivered his stump speech in a tight ten minutes, reciting his policy promises: to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department to handle mental-health crises. How he would actually do all of this was unclear, but tonight, he was selling the dream of a socialist New York.
“There is a myth about this city, one that has persisted for far too long: It’s the lie that life has to be hard in New York,” Mamdani said to a roar of approval. “I don’t believe that for a moment.” At the end of the speech, people cheered and stamped their feet and chanted his name. Some cried. Everyone in the room seemed to share a feeling: that he reminded them of you-know-who. It was the energy, messaging, and presence. The forward-looking, slightly corny confidence that somehow convinces other people to believe, even if just for a spell, that he might be able to pull this off.
Photo: Adam Dowling for New York Magazine
A few days before the rally, Mamdani took the train to Albany. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria (rent stabilized) with his wife, Rama Duwaji, 27, an illustrator. He’d been commuting to the capital a couple of times a week as the Legislature hammered out the budget with Governor Kathy Hochul. At Moynihan Train Hall, his communications director, Andrew Epstein, filmed a couple takes on his iPhone of a promotional video for the ZetroCard, a frequent-canvasser card — eight punches and you get a poster.
Mamdani and Epstein finish shooting the video in the train’s café car. It’s the only time Mamdani exhibits the slightest bit of awkwardness, saying his lines next to a guy working on his laptop. Afterward, he settles into his seat with a bag of peanut M&M’s, a pack of Tylenol, and two phones by his side — one so he can take calls and text; the other logged into Zoom for an Assembly meeting so he can vote on the Medical Aid in Dying act, which would allow the terminally ill to end their own lives. “A right people should have, in my humble opinion,” he says.
He got personal dispensation to work remotely because that morning his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent postcolonial-studies professor at Columbia University, had his U.S. citizenship interview. Mamdani and his wife waited at a café nearby while his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, went inside the courthouse with his father. When Mamdani became a U.S. citizen in 2018, “it was a joyful occasion,” he remembers. He’s been on edge about his father’s status. Mahmood, who has lived in the U.S. since 1999, has been a vocal supporter of the pro-Palestine activism that has roiled the campus since 2023. “The uncertainty is deeply unsettling, and it’s not what we deserve after so many years of contributing to this city and country,” says Nair. After about three and a half hours, his parents emerged, his father now a citizen. “I just gave them the biggest hug I could,” says Mamdani.
Mamdani’s parentage has been a source of quiet fascination. His mother, Nair, directed canonical films about South Asians and the diaspora, including The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding. (Zohran was the one who suggested she consider Kal Penn for The Namesake; he was a fan of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.) Nair met Mahmood in 1989 in Kampala when she was doing research for her second feature, Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, which begins with an Indian family’s expulsion from Uganda. Mahmood was one of the country’s Indian minority, who were expelled from the country by President Idi Amin in 1972. Nair had read From Citizen to Refugee, a personal work Mahmood had written while living in a transit camp in London after his exile. He had since returned to the country after Amin was overthrown. She interviewed him, and they fell in love.
During location scouting for Mississippi Masala, Nair searched for a house the patriarch would long to return to for the entire film. Her hunt served a dual purpose: Mahmood was being kicked out of housing at Makerere University for student organizing and needed a place to live. They found a ramshackle cottage on Buziga Hill, just outside the city, below a barracks and riddled with bullet holes. “It was in extraordinarily bad condition but had a panoramic view of Lake Victoria,” says Nair. After production, they briefly lived in New York while Nair edited the film; that winter she learned she was pregnant, and they moved back into the house on the hill, staying there until Zohran was 5. Then they relocated to wherever academia took Mahmood: Delhi; Princeton, New Jersey; Cape Town. When Zohran was 6 years old, he remembers going to his father’s lecture on the place of African studies in post-apartheid South Africa. “The next day I went to school, and I was like, ‘I just went to the best rock concert,’” he says. “I grew up going with my parents to a lot of what it was that they did, and it helped to shape my world.”
The following year, Mahmood got a job at Columbia University, and they moved to Morningside Heights. Mamdani describes himself as an Indian Ugandan New Yorker. “My father raised me with a real sense of being African, being proud of that heritage,” he says. “I grew up with a reverence for Mandela, Desmond Tutu. They’re a significant part of informing my sense of universalism and consistency and what it means to fight for equal rights.” His middle name is Kwame, after Ghana’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah. “The multiplicity of our lives were completely integrated between New York and Kampala and Delhi,” says Nair. “There was never only one way of living.”
In the past, Mamdani has been explicit about how Palestine has shaped his understanding of U.S. politics. After spending part of his childhood in South Africa, he said it was “a shock to my system” to see the “glaring contradiction” of U.S. policy toward Palestine. “We say we care about freedom and justice and self-determination and yet for some reason we draw the line when it comes to Palestinians,” he said in a 2023 interview. “It became a driving force for me.” At Bowdoin College, he received his bachelor’s degree in Africana studies and co-founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — his first experience with political organizing.
His immediate postcollegiate years had the patchwork quality of a 20-something finding his way, with the occasional help of his famous mother. After graduation, he joined Change Corps, a one-year training program for organizers. He resigned after six months because he had been organizing a union within the program and he thought they were going to fire him anyway. When that was over, Nair brought him onto the set of her film Queen of Katwe, starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, where he picked up various jobs: in the casting department (Nair credits him for discovering Madina Nalwanga, who plays the protagonist), as the third AD, in a background role as a student, and as the co–music supervisor.
He took to the last role in particular, forming a hip-hop duo as Young -Cardamom with his childhood friend Abdul Bar Hussein, a.k.a. HAB. They had a comedic-political sensibility reminiscent of Das Racist. Their first single, “Kanda (Chap Chap),” was an ode to chapati; their EP Sidda Mukyaalo was a socially conscious hip-hop album in six different languages. Then they made an original track for Queen of Katwe called “#1 Spice” and a music video starring Nyong’o and Oyelowo, directed by his mother.
Mamdani is cautious around the subject of his parents, but their influence is apparent in the ease of his carriage. He doesn’t seem like someone who grew up with his back against the wall; he had the luxury to find himself. As a child, he attended Bank Street, a progressive private school in Morningside Heights. After 9/11, he recalls a teacher pulling him and another student out of class and telling them to speak up if they ever had any trouble. “That was the opposite experience for many Muslim kids,” he says. For a Muslim American man, there is the trap of coming off as too angry, but there is a genuine lack of bitterness to Mamdani. He understands why people are angry and frustrated, but it doesn’t seep into his being.
The way he describes the combination of the relative privilege in his own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics is to call it “engaging with contradictions.” “Sometimes the impulse is to wash your hands of the guilt, to slip away from it,” he says. “But what that assumes is that your responsibility ends because you’re not directly involved when in fact it continues, just without you.” I ask him to tell me more about his interest in politics and desire for executive power — how is he different from, say, Cuomo? “I think it’s a question of who it’s for. Power for us is for the people,” he says.
In 2015, Mamdani volunteered for Ali Najmi’s City Council campaign, which he heard about through Heems, a rapper Mamdani loved who was supporting Najmi’s candidacy. Najmi lost, but Mamdani joined his Muslim Democratic Club. (Najmi is now the election attorney on his campaign.) Like many of this generation of lefty politicians, Mamdani is a Bernie bro. The Vermont senator’s run for the Democratic-primary nomination beginning in 2015 gave him the language to call himself a democratic socialist. In 2017, he joined the DSA and worked full time for Lutheran pastor Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian American running for City Council in Bay Ridge. “That was a moment of political transformation of my life: Here I was, a Muslim South Asian New Yorker who had long known this city was my home but hadn’t known if my ideas of this city had a home,” he says. El-Yateem lost the five-way primary with 31 percent of the vote to Justin Brannan, who had 39 percent. “I remember just crying onstage,” says Mamdani, who was 25 at the time. “That campaign meant so much to so many of us because it was really the first time that we were asserting our belonging in this city in a political context and doing so without sacrificing any part of ourselves. We were fighting for people to stay in their homes as we were building our own political homes. I was so committed I had never even imagined that we could lose.”
More heartbreak would follow: He worked on Ross Barkan’s unsuccessful State Senate campaign, then volunteered for Tiffany Cabán’s nail-biter of a race for Queens DA. By the time he moved to Astoria in late 2018, he was working for Chhaya, a housing-justice organization, as a foreclosure-prevention counselor. He still had remnants of musical ambition left: As Mr. Cardamom, he released a solo single, “Nani,” a whisper-rap song and tribute to his grandmother. The music video stars the food legend Madhur Jaffrey, wearing a yellow beret, with lines like “Outlast everybody, all my fuckin’ haters / Don’t know me now, then you’ll never know me later.”
Photo: Mr. Cardamom/YouTube
In 2020, Mamdani was part of a miniwave of DSA members to unseat incumbents in Democratic primaries, alongside Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, and Emily Gallagher in the State Assembly. They represented an anger that had been coursing through the city, beginning with the claustrophobia of lockdown that gave way to the collective release of the George Floyd protests. It was a terrifying and exhilarating time when institutional reckoning seemed real. For them, that meant the Democratic Party itself. “It was a radical moment that we got elected on,” says Brisport. “People were looking for drastic changes in society.”
The reality of the chamber was different. Interpersonal relationships could take precedence over actual policies. The early sessions were on Zoom, making it difficult for the freshman DSA members to network. While the Democrats had increased their supermajority in the Assembly, the new DSA cohort was just four out of 150, meaning the fight would be intraparty. “The reality is that the Democratic Party overall is hostile to the idea of primaries,” says Amanda Septimo, an assemblywoman representing the South Bronx. “And so you’re coming into this new space knowing there’s a degree of disdain in the air, and you hope that it doesn’t land on you.”
The 2021 budget negotiations became the party’s primary battleground, and a fight broke out over whether to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals by $50 billion as well as a proposed fund for undocumented workers and others who had been denied federal pandemic relief. Moderate Democrats balked, and the tension between them and the progressive wing escalated. Mitaynes went on a 15-day hunger strike. Mamdani spearheaded a sleep-out in the war room of the Capitol as a pressure tactic.
Eventually, they arrived at a $2.1 billion plan for the excluded-workers fund — short of the $3.5 billion they wanted. As the budget was coming to a floor vote, Mamdani, Mitaynes, and Forrest indicated to Speaker Carl Heastie that they would lodge a protest vote against it. While their votes didn’t matter practically — the budget would pass with or without them — Heastie warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line. (Heastie denies this.) “It was very important to show that Carl had control over the left as well as the moderates,” says one Democratic legislator. “That the Democrats were a big tent where everyone was welcome and working together.”
Mamdani was in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more? Another legislator advised him that he could publicly explain why he had changed his vote. “We started to be strong-armed into accepting what we had made very clear was too little,” Mamdani said in his speech on the floor, speaking for Mitaynes and Forrest. “And so it breaks my heart today to announce that against what I had told many, against what I had told everyone, that I and my colleagues who had previously spoken before me will be changing our votes to vote in the affirmative for this budget.” He then suggested that some of his colleagues should be primaried.
In his time as a legislator, Mamdani earned a reputation for ideological purity. He had a talent for bringing attention to causes through a combination of protest and video. In an effort to push through single-payer health care, he staged a late-night vigil on the steps of the Capitol. He also shot a spoof with Brisport in which they both play firefighters who can’t help someone because he doesn’t have the right coverage. When the New York Taxi Workers Alliance was fighting for hundreds of millions in debt relief from the city, Mamdani was one of its biggest advocates in Albany, setting up his office at the protest encampment outside City Hall. He got arrested for blocking traffic on Broadway. Eventually, he convinced Chuck Schumer to shoot a video with him while taking a ride with a taxi driver whose brother had died by suicide. “He’s just a real one,” says Bhairavi Desai, the president of NYTWA. “From that first night, he never left until we won.”
Mamdani’s biggest legislative coup came in late 2022, when he introduced a package of eight bills called Fix the MTA, which included freezing fares, instituting six-minute service on subways, and phasing in free buses over four years. He enlisted Senate deputy leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor it and spent $22,000 of his campaign money to publicize it. The initial reception from Governor Hochul and MTA leaders was lukewarm, and it wasn’t included in her 2023 budget proposal in April.
Weeks passed. The budget was overdue and momentum was stalling around free buses. In a Hail Mary pass, Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams. Earlier in the year, Adams had hosted a meeting with progressive lawmakers at Gracie Mansion. Each person would introduce themselves and discuss policy proposals they were passionate about. Before Mamdani began, Adams said, “I read your bio — you were born in Uganda. I was fascinated by Idi Amin,” referring to the leader who had expelled Mamdani’s father.
Mamdani went into his pitch about free buses. He thought Adams seemed into it but sensed that the mayor’s staff didn’t “love that he loved the idea.” Afterward, the mayor came up to him to reiterate how interesting he thought Idi Amin was. “I said, ‘Well, you know, my dad was expelled by him. He has a lot he can share,’” Mamdani recalls. Adams said, “Take my number. Let’s have dinner sometime.” (A press representative says Adams is not fascinated with the dictator and that he was solely interested in Mamdani’s father’s story.)
They met on a Saturday night at Gracie Mansion. Beforehand, Mamdani told his father, “Baba, please just humor his questions.” They talked about Uganda, New York, their respective upbringings. After a couple hours, Mamdani pulled a small poster out from under his chair that read A FREE BUS IS SAFER, FASTER BUS. He asked Adams if he could take a photo of him holding it. He said “yes.” Then he asked Adams to do a quick video in support of the free-bus program. Boom. A few days later, Mamdani posted it on Twitter and Instagram. The New York Times picked it up, and free buses were back in play. In the 2023 budget, they got a fare-free-bus pilot that began that September: Five bus lines, one in each borough, would be free for one year. It was a success. Ridership increased, particularly among low-income people, and assaults against bus drivers decreased.
For Mamdani, this was an example of his ability to work with someone, like Adams, whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally. “Sometimes the greatest potency comes from the least likely members of a coalition,” he says. “That and the grace of my father to spend two hours with the mayor.”
Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures
At the end of the yearlong bus pilot, Mamdani and Gianaris touted the victory in an op-ed in The Nation, calling it “a resounding success.” However, according to some of his colleagues, the story didn’t end there. During the 2024 budget negotiations, Mamdani had an opportunity to extend the program. This should have been a no-brainer. But he took issue with another part of the budget regarding housing — specifically an act on Individual Apartment Improvements. These, he argued, would be a way for landlords to say they were doing repairs while actually raising the rent on rent-stabilized tenants.
According to those with knowledge of the conversations, Mamdani told Heastie that he planned to vote “no” on the budget because of the IAIs. (He also filmed a video explaining his reason for his vote.) Heastie said he would pull the expansion of the free-bus pilot if he did so. Mamdani refused to budge, even though the bill would pass regardless of his support. “Zohran didn’t want to get strong-armed again, and he said, ‘I’m voting no,’” says a Democratic legislator. “And Carl said, ‘Well, if you’re voting “no,” then I’m not going to put the buses in the budget. It’s not worth it. You’re not cooperative, and you don’t know how to negotiate, so maybe this’ll teach you something.’” (Heastie and Mamdani say this never happened. Mamdani’s campaign adds that the results for the pilot program weren’t out until that September and legislators wanted to see them before they voted on whether to continue it.) As a result, the free-bus program didn’t continue after a year. “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class,” the legislator continues. “And he threw it away for a performance.”
According to Mamdani’s colleagues, he appeared to realize he’d made a mistake. During this year’s budget negotiations in March, they say, he tried to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds. Each year, assemblymembers are given funds to distribute in their districts that can go to local infrastructure projects, like building a playground or renovating the library. According to one of Mamdani’s fellow legislators, in his five years in office he had barely used his, which they say adds up to around $5 million. Instead, he tried to swap his funds for the bus pilot — if he gave them up, could he get buses in exchange? “It’s just not a real strategy at all,” the legislator says, because “it’s trying to use a currency that’s not real, like Monopoly money.” (The campaign denies that Mamdani was leveraging capital funds for the bus program but says he is planning to use them for a major capital investment happening in the district.)
In April, I asked Mamdani what he is advocating for in this year’s budget. “It’s hard to give an assessment prior to it, but this is the time in which you could find potentially $50 million for a program that could keep people in their homes,” he says, referring to the Housing Access Voucher Program sponsored by Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal and State Senator Brian Kavanagh. He didn’t mention free buses.
Buses are now one of the centerpieces of Mamdani’s campaign for mayor. In March, he posted a video with Gianaris in which he said, “If I want to make buses fast and free, I don’t have to wait until next year. I can get to work right now.” The pitch rankled some of his colleagues. “That was more related to messaging for his mayor campaign than it was to getting the thing done,” says one. “That to me demonstrates how he operates — you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things. He continues to be dishonest about the fare-free-bus pilot and how things went down.”
What some New York Democratic Party members see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps have given them pause about his ability to govern. “During some of the budget fights, we would be whipping and trying to talk to people,” says a Democratic political operative. “And he was more busy trying to figure out a video to tweet because he couldn’t call anybody, because nobody would pick up his call. He is incredibly charming, but he doesn’t know how to build.” They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse.
“I personally adore him,” says another operative. “I think he’s a sweetheart, but he’s in second place and there’s been nothing beyond just, ‘Alison Roman loves him.’ And it’s like, Okay, but he’s running for fucking mayor of New York City.”
When Mamdani decided to launch his campaign last summer, some saw it as a DSA base-building exercise, a strategy they worried could backfire and set back the left. Others think that perspective is just sour grapes — an idea spread by people who believe they’re in the trenches doing the work and Mamdani is the popular kid getting all the credit.
Regardless, in order to win he needs to reach outside of the young, white, college-educated voters who have formed the base of his constituency. In a ranked-choice voting system, a candidate can’t always rely on voters who will rank them at the top of their ballot. It’s the people who rank you second and third that will ultimately decide the winner. “We know this race is not going to be done in the first round,” says one Democratic legislator. “Anecdotally from people who are working on campaigns, the conversations they’re having is, ‘What’s each candidate’s ceilings for ones? For twos? And who is going to be able to consolidate more twos than anybody else out of that slate of progressive candidates? Who’s going to be able to get Zellnor Myrie’s twos and Adrienne Adams’s twos and Scott Stringer’s twos?’”
The Working Families Party has been internally divided between Mamdani and Lander. Lander has a broader base of support among institutional progressives and is largely viewed as the more experienced, if wonkish, candidate. But his campaign has struggled to catch fire — he’s polling between 6 and 10 percent. “We know him to be a very capable, experienced guy,” says one legislator. “But he’s not nearly as charismatic. So people are sitting in roundtables and trying to make sense of that.”
The biggest question for Mamdani’s campaign is whether he can make deeper inroads into Black and Latino communities, which both Adams and de Blasio won. When I asked about their strategy, his campaign manager Elle Bisgaard-Church said, “paid media will be quite huge there. We can literally select certain networks and shows that we know have more of a Black following and cut an ad and have a very specific message focused on that.” She also says Mamdani will be going to church more. “Every Sunday between now and the end of the primary, we have a goal of at least one church visit.”
We had spoken in mid-April, but the latest Marist polls, taken in early May, don’t show significant progress. In first-round choices, Mamdani had 8 percent of the Black vote compared to Cuomo’s 50 percent. (Adrienne Adams was second at 14 percent.) Voters are not as ideologically consistent as the left wishes. In a recent Siena College survey, half of Lander’s supporters were evenly split between Mamdani and Cuomo as their next choice, despite the fact that Mamdani and Lander are more closely aligned. But the polls can be fantastically non-predictive: Around this juncture in the previous mayoral race, Andrew Yang was the front-runner over Adams.
On June 4, the full slate of candidates will do a televised debate. Many expect an aggressive air war in the final stretch. There’s also a chance the race extends until the general election in November. Both Adams and Cuomo have filed to run as independents. The summer could see a four-way battle between Adams, Cuomo, perennial Republican cat guy Curtis Sliwa, and either Lander or Mamdani running on the Working Families Party line. I ask Mamdani whether he would consider doing so if he loses in June. “I’m confident that we can win on June 24,” he replies. “I’m not entertaining any questions that would assume otherwise.” Then he adds with a laugh, “You hack! How could you say it?”
On a recent spring day, Mamdani and I sat on a bench in Central Park. We’d come from a candidate forum he had left early after taking questions from youth at John Jay College; next up is the New York Communities for Change gala in Gowanus. On the walk over, several people eyed him as they passed. “Sometimes my instinct is to preempt because people aren’t quite sure how to ask you for a photo,” he said. “The fear is you preempt a person who has no idea who you are. Someone’s trying to figure out what train to take, and you say, ‘Would you like a photo?’”
As if on cue, a young woman entered our periphery. “I’m sorry, you look like someone I’ve seen on the internet a lot,” she said. “I wanted to see if you were him.” He smiled and asked her name. “I’m Zohran, and I’m running for mayor,” he said, just like in the videos. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram Story!” she said, pulling out her phone and showing us his first TV ad, which had premiered the day before during the Knicks game. “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.”
Five minutes later, someone else came up — young and wearing a Princess Diana T-shirt. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “I’m volunteering in a couple of weeks.” Mamdani, characteristically and without effort, replied, “I’ve been thinking for Halloween my wife would be Princess Di and I would be her Pakistani boyfriend,” he said.
“Oh my God, in the car with the sunglasses on and, like, a bottle in your hand?” he said, clapping. “That’d be great.”
Mamdani is in his element. The first time I met him, he told me about the word gup-shup, which means “breezy chitchat” or “gossip” in Hindi. He excels at it, and it makes him a good hang. I came away from every interaction liking him yet always feeling like we were just skimming the surface. But the appeal of his message is its simplicity and memeability. Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege: He is right and righteous. “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” one of his colleagues tells me. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.” Mamdani seems to float a few inches off the ground — the hemline never grazes the earth. What he sells through his being is inarguable: Everybody should have this life.
