The improbable rise of Zohran Mamdani

The presumptive Democratic nominee for New York mayor emerged from a world of privilege with radical politics and charm to spare.

Zohran Mamdani greets people after the New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate. Picture: Vincent Alban/ AP, Pool

As a high school junior, Zohran Mamdani promised free juice for students in his campaign for class vice president. He lost.

Now, Mamdani is promising much bigger things to New Yorkers — free bussing, free child care, a rent freeze — and he is on the cusp of becoming the city’s first Muslim mayor.

On Tuesday night, the 33-year-old socialist state assemblyman with light experience scored a stunning victory in the Democratic primary, upending not only a more seasoned field, including former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but an entire system. The earthquakes triggered by his triumph are now rippling in all directions.

Mamdani appears to have brought to an end one epic New York political story — Cuomo’s — while writing the opening chapter of a new one — his own. He has panicked the Democratic Party’s ageing establishment, who worry that the ground beneath their feet is shifting in the direction of a younger, more ideological wing of the party.

He has frazzled the business elite in the world capital of capitalism, who were unable to stop Mamdani’s rise despite spending millions on a barrage of attack ads portraying him as a dangerous extremist, often clad in Muslim garb. Endorsements of Cuomo by Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, labour unions and many community and faith leaders seemed to make no difference.

“We are in an emperor-has-no-clothes moment for institutions,” said Jonathan Rosen, chief executive of Orchestra, a communications and strategy consulting firm, and one-time campaign adviser to Bill de Blasio.

It turned out to be hard to demonise a charming and exuberant young man who raps about his beloved Indian grandmother, was recognised for the “Biggest Smile” at his middle school and displays an Obama-like magnetism that attracts young people. Some old ones, too.

“He’s a naturally gifted connector of people,” said Mitchell Moss, 76, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University.

Workers dismantle the stage at Andrew Cuomo’s election-night watch party after his defeat, June 24. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

Mamdani first came on Moss’s radar through his students, he recalled. Months ago, he noticed that several were sporting Mamdani campaign gear and had signed up as volunteers. He ended up meeting with the candidate and came away impressed.

“Here I am — a white, old, Jewish professor — and we had a great conversation,” Moss said. “Unlike Andrew, he’s comfortable with people.”

For other New York Jews, the triumph of a Muslim candidate who refused to disavow the phrase “globalise the intifada” has prompted doubts about their place in a city that has been a quasi homeland.

“This is the end of Jewish New York as we know it,” Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic political strategist and ordained rabbi, despaired. Many Jews would leave, he predicted, and real-estate developers, who have increasingly gravitated toward Florida in recent years, would build elsewhere.

What so galled Sheinkopf, 75 — a veteran of labour strikes, grinding union organisation drives and a multitude of party conventions — was that the untested Mamdani would even put himself forward for one of America’s most daunting governing challenges.

“What burden has he borne?” he demanded.

Eric Adams, the current mayor, who will run in the fall as an independent, has already attacked Mamdani, the son of Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, as a “nepo” baby supported by young gentrifiers as opposed to the working class.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams declares that he will run for re-election as an independent at a City Hall event on June 26. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

Boyishly handsome with a neatly cropped beard, Mamdani radiates an unjaded and unabashed love of New York City. He and his wife, Syrian artist Rama Duwaji, 27, rode the subway from Queens to their City Hall wedding earlier this year. A photo from the day taken by their friend, Kara McCurdy, shows the glowing couple standing in a subway car, surrounded by New Yorkers in mid-commute torpor.

In interviews, Mamdani has said he was inspired by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, in which “dignity” — not “growth” — was the watchword. He comes across as wonkishly fluent about the details of housing and energy policy and has promised that outcomes matter more to him than ideology.

Whatever his inexperience, even detractors acknowledge that Mamdani ran a brilliant campaign powered by an army of inspired foot soldiers. While a cautious Cuomo remained cloistered behind advisers and gatekeepers, the freewheeling Mamdani was seemingly ubiquitous in the five boroughs and on social media, where his clever, often charming clips repeatedly went viral.

There was a smiling Mamdani, nodding along beside the model Emily Ratajkowski, as she urged young people to vote for him. There he was explaining New York’s ranked-choice voting system with a glass of mango lassi. And there he was talking housing with Kareem Rahma, an influencer who interviews people while riding the subway for his Subway Takes series.

“Eric Adams is a terrible mayor, and he’s single-handedly making life more expensive for New Yorkers,” Mamdani declared.

“Hundred per cent agree,” Rahma replied. “Let’s go!”

Above all, Mamdani demonstrated discipline beyond his years in hammering home his singular issue: affordability.

In addition to free buses, he has promised to bring down costs for New Yorkers by freezing rent for two million of them and offering free child care up to age 5. He has also proposed city-run grocery stores to serve deprived areas.

“I will pay for this by taxing the 1 per cent — the billionaires and the profitable companies that Mr Cuomo cares more about than working class New Yorkers,” he said at a campaign debate earlier this month.

Comparisons between Mamdani and Obama are not inapt. Like the former president, Mamdani has some innate talent that has fast-tracked his political career. Also like Obama, his background is unusual by traditional American political standards.

Mamdani campaigns at a pizza restaurant on June 23. The freewheeling candidate was seemingly ubiquitous in the five boroughs and on social media. Photo: Adam Gray/Bloomberg News via WSJ

He was born in Kampala, Uganda, and moved to New York’s Upper West Side at age 7 when his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of postcolonial studies, joined the faculty at Columbia University.

As Sheinkopf noted, Mamdani’s youth was not the sort that produces calluses. He attended the Bank Street School for Children, where a year of kindergarten cost roughly $15,000 at the time. In 2004, he won a mock presidential election at Bank Street, campaigning on a pro-education and health care platform, according to opponent Serena Kerrigan.

“Let me just tell you, this MF was so well spoken at such a young age,” Kerrigan recalled in an Instagram video.

Mamdani moved on to the Bronx High School of Science, a magnet public school with a famously competitive admissions test, and then to Bowdoin College in Maine. There he majored in Africana Studies and co-founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

In 2014, when Mamdani was a senior, the group butted heads with the school’s president over its support of an academic boycott of Israel.

“Many people say ‘We can’t mix academia with politics. We can’t blur these lines. We can’t use the classroom to discuss political issues,’ but the problem is these classrooms in Israel are built on political issues. They’re the consequence of political ideas,” Mamdani told the Bowdoin Orient, the school newspaper.

Brian Purnell, an associate professor who taught Mamdani in several classes, recalled him as a disciplined and curious student who was fascinated by political theory, history and sociology. “He also had a wonderful sense of humour and got along with everyone,” Purnell said.

After college, Mamdani cycled through progressive campaigning and activism jobs, including as a housing counsellor for poor, mostly south Asian New Yorkers facing eviction. He also dabbled as a rapper. His moniker: Mr. Cardamom.

One of his best-known tracks is “Nani,” an homage to his grandmother. A video he made for the song would have fit well on “Saturday Night Live.” It stars Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian actress and cookbook author, strutting like a gangster granny through Indian restaurants, a vegetable market, a test-prep centre and other backdrops of Desi New York as she raps:

The video below contains explicit language. Viewer discretion is advised.

“I’m the best damn Nani that you ever done seen/

F — k top five Nanis and f — k top three.”

In 2018, Mamdani became a naturalised American citizen. It was the same year that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old bartender and democratic socialist, shocked the city’s political establishment by beating a 10-term incumbent to win a House seat representing the Bronx.

Two years later, Mamdani, then 29, won a seat representing hyper-diverse Astoria, Queens, in the state Assembly. It was the same cycle in which Jamaal Bowman, a middle-school principal from Yonkers and fellow progressive, upset Eliot Engel, one of the most senior Democrats in New York’s congressional delegation.

Mamdani did not hide his political colours in a victory post on X. “It’s official: we won. I’m going to Albany to fight to tax the rich, heal the sick, house the poor & build a socialist New York.”

In legislative terms, Mamdani’s two terms in Albany were unremarkable. His signature achievement was helping to win $450 million in debt relief for taxi drivers devastated by the rise of ride-hailing apps.

Last summer, a friend laughed when Mamdani informed him he was planning to run for mayor. Over time, though, this person said, they began to see possibilities. Both Adams and Cuomo were touched by scandal, and both were associated with the politics of the past. “There was a lane,” this person said.

While Cuomo campaigned as if the race were his to lose, largely avoiding the public, Mamdani and his volunteers were building strength while still flying beneath the radar.

“Every canvass just kept getting bigger,” said Rebecca Harshbarger, a 39-year-old Brooklynite, who joined the cause.

Harshbarger, who works in the city’s transportation department, was first attracted by Mamdani’s bus plan. Buses were free during Covid, and she recalled how that had spared working class riders the lost time and indignity of waiting for everyone to pay their fare before boarding.

She had volunteered for previous Democratic candidates. “You just go, they give you a list of doors to knock. You knock. That’s it,” Harshbarger said. “This was totally different.”

With the Mamdani campaign, she felt herself becoming swept up in a movement. Soon she was devoting most weekends to it, fanning out across the city with comrades who are now friends.

They carried “Zetro” cards — a play on the MTA’s MetroCard — urging them to “swipe in for 8 canvass shifts in 8 weeks!” For each shift, they received a “Z” sticker to attach to it. Harshbarger’s card had 12 before she ran out of space.

Democratic mayoral candidates at a June 4 debate, including Andrew Cuomo, centre, and Zohran Mamdani, third from right. Picture: AP /Yuki Iwamura, pool

Mamdani’s freshness was visible at a June 4 debate at Rockefeller Center when he stood smiling on a stage crowded with older candidates — most of them with long and complicated backstories in New York politics.

“I am Donald Trump’s worst nightmare as a progressive Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in,” he said. He also reminded the audience that, unlike Cuomo, he was not relying on billionaire backers, saying: “I don’t have to pick up the phone for Bill Ackman or Ken Langone.”

Cuomo responded by trying to rattle him. “Donald Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” the former governor said.

Mamdani won vital support from on high: Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a fellow progressive candidate, embraced his younger competitor in a kind of anti-Cuomo alliance. The fact that Lander is Jewish seemed to blunt some of the antisemitism accusations against Mamdani.

By the final weekend of early voting, some Cuomo staffers were growing nervous. They had noticed that the young Brooklyn men they had pegged as likely Mamdani voters were turning out in much higher numbers than anticipated. On election night, though, they were still cautiously optimistic.

Then came the results.

Mamdani, left with fellow candidate Comptroller Brad Lander at his primary election party. Picture: AP /Heather Khalifa

Soon after the polls closed at 9pm the first numbers showed Mamdani with an 8-point lead. “That’s when I knew,” one Cuomo staffer said. Some left even before the candidate came to the war room at the Carpenters Union in downtown Manhattan. Cuomo conceded at around 10:20pm in a speech that was uncharacteristically subdued.

In Brooklyn, meanwhile, Harshbarger was euphoric as she celebrated at L’Wren, a stylish bar that hosted one of the borough’s two Mamdani watch parties. She had spent the day campaigning in sweltering heat with two friends from the campaign — one was in her 70s, the other a college student.

“It was unbelievable,” she said. “People were ecstatic.”

By morning, pundits were gaming out the extraordinary challenges that would face a Mayor Mamdani. For all their clout and visibility, New York City mayors must still rely on the state power barons in Albany to adjust taxes. Without their support, Mamdani will be unable to fund his initiatives. There is also the looming threat of Trump, who can pull federal funding from the city, among other punishments.

As Moss warned: “Running the government of New York City is much harder than running for mayor.”

Still, for supporters like Harshbarger, all that seemed far into the future. She was grateful that there was more time for Mamdani and his movement before the burden of governing commences — if it ever does.

“I didn’t want the campaign to end,” she said. “I’m excited we get to keep doing this.”

Wall Street Journal