“Today is his night,” Andrew Cuomo was forced to say. The front-runner in the Democratic primary race has conceded defeat. With 93% of the vote counted in the first round of the New York City primary, Zohran Mamdani has 43.5% of the vote, while Cuomo has 36.4%.
A millennial, Muslim, born in Uganda, with critical views towards Israel for the Palestinian cause, Zohran Mamdani has transformed in a few months from a political outsider into a promising politician who is very likely to become the next mayor of the most populous city in the United States.
While the winner of the primary is not guaranteed to become the 111th mayor of New York City, it is highly likely in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans and is traditionally a Democratic stronghold.
The incumbent, Eric Adams, who won the 2021 election as a Democrat but is running as an independent this year, is deeply unpopular in the city. Adams was indicted on bribery and accepting foreign campaign contributions, but the charges were dropped in April after the Trump administration intervened.
The “impressive political upset” came when 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani defied the odds by running a highly targeted social media campaign.
Zohran Mamdani’s Valuable Allies
While Andrew Cuomo relied on millions of dollars from donors like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman, Zohran Mamdani relied on his base, dedicated volunteers, and young activists from the Democratic Socialists.
By correctly analyzing the “x-ray” of the electorate, he and his associates built a modern campaign, recognizing that a large portion of them shape their opinions through social media.
Mamdani’s campaign raised $7 million from thousands of individual donors and mobilized an army of volunteers. He even characterized Cuomo’s campaign as “the latest example of billionaires and corporations trying to buy elections.”
At the same time, Andrew Cuomo, who had previously been accused of a series of scandals (including sexual harassment allegations, which he denies), declared that Donald Trump would go over Mamdani “like a hot knife through butter”.
Mamdani secured the support of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders and the United Auto Workers union.
“This race is not only symbolic for the future of New York, this race is symbolic for the future of our country”, declared Ocasio-Cortez during a campaign rally with more than 2,000 supporters a week before the election.
“For so long, we’ve had a political leadership, including the Democratic Party, that just wanted to play it safe. Young people have to save this country.”
Our Revolution, the political organization Sanders founded in 2016, said it mobilized its members in all five districts and sent more than 60,000 emails and texts to get voters out to the polls on behalf of Mamdani and Brad Lander, another Democratic candidate in the race.
“Zohran has run an extraordinary campaign. He’s taken on the entire establishment,” Sanders said hours before the polls opened, urging voters not to be discouraged by the heat and go out to vote.
The Who’s Who of Zohran Mamdani
Zohran Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda, and initially grew up in Cape Town, South Africa.
He moved with his family to New York City at the age of 7. He is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a distinguished professor of post-colonial studies at Columbia University, and Mira Nair, an Indian director whose work includes “Mississippi Masala” and “Monsoon Wedding.”
His middle name, Kwame, was named after the revolutionary and first prime minister of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. He attended Bank Street School for Children and Bronx High School of Science.
He majored in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, where he co-founded the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and participated in anti-imperialist and social justice movements. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018.
Before entering politics, he worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor, helping low-income homeowners avoid evictions. This experience exposed him to systemic inequalities in the housing market and led him to politics.
Mamdani is a hip-hop music enthusiast and rapper. In 2016, under the stage name “Young Cardamom,” he collaborated with rapper HAB, and in 2019, he released a single titled “Nani” under the new alias “Mr. Cardamom.”
Mamdani defeated a four-term incumbent in a close 2020 State Assembly primary. He joined a small group of Albany legislators who belonged to the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Before his mayoral campaign, he made national headlines in 2021 when he joined a 15-day hunger strike by New York City taxi drivers, demanding relief from excessive debt.
During the campaign, he spoke at length about the introduction of free public bus rides, which he helped launch. The pilot program lasted a year and was not renewed.
Nevertheless, his colleagues had to admit that his ideas helped shift the ideological center of the Assembly to the left.
He has a program
Mamdani, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, has adopted an agenda focused on cutting costs that, he says, “crushes workers.”
He has advocated for freezing rent costs for tenants (freezing rents on 1 million apartments), free transportation on city buses, providing public childcare for children under six, and creating municipal grocery stores that would buy and sell at wholesale prices.
He has also supported raising the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030. He says he will pay for his plans by raising the corporate tax rate to 11.5% and taxing New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million a year at a flat rate of 2%.
Mamdani will face persistent opposition from the New York establishment, led by Governor Kathy Hochul, who has already rejected his proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy.
Also, the idea of free city buses requires congressional approval, which shows how difficult it will be to implement his program.
He did not shy away from big ideas and unabashedly identified himself as a democratic socialist, even as national Democrats tried to adopt more moderate positions on various issues.
And instead of getting bogged down in complex political concepts, he presented understandable ideas, even if his opponents derided them as sky-high: Rents would be frozen. Buses would be free.
Taxes on the wealthy would increase and the cost of child care would be reduced to zero.
The simplicity of these ideas belies their difficulty in implementing them. Even so, they resonated with New Yorkers who were looking for a politician who truly understood what it was like to live in cramped apartments and take long subway rides to get to work.”
His views on Israel and Gaza
Zohran Mamdani has long been a vocal critic of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians. In 2023, he introduced a bill to end the tax-exempt status of New York charities with ties to Israeli settlements that violate international human rights law.
The bill was deemed “unworkable” by the Assembly leadership and went nowhere.
He has been a vocal critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza and has expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. He has also stated that he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested.
He has also stated that there is no place for anti-Semitism in New York, adding that if elected, he would increase funding to combat hate crimes.
New York City’s first Muslim mayor?
If elected in the fall, Mamdani would become New York City’s first Muslim mayor, with his campaign finding fertile ground among the city’s roughly one million Muslims.
The candidate regularly visited mosques and made his faith a central theme of his campaign.
The focus on his background also became a way to emphasize the multicultural nature of his coalition and the city he hoped to lead.
“We know that standing out publicly as a Muslim also means sacrificing the safety that we can sometimes find in the shadows,” he said in an interview.
Zohran Mamdani addressed his constituents minutes after the results were announced.
