Is New York City ready for a socialist mayor? Zohran Mamdani bets yes

Nothing makes a person seem so small as the 407-foot-tall mass of brick and glass that hovered behind Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York City. But the luxury apartment complex in the Upper East Side — named “Oriana," Latin for “gold” or “sunrise” — served as a helpful if unwieldy prop for Mamdani, who held a press conference on the sidewalk that cloudy Friday morning to ferret out Andrew Cuomo, its most famous resident and now his chief political rival.

“Ever since he moved back to New York City in October after decades of living in Westchester and the Hamptons or in Albany, New Yorkers have been desperate for answers about his record. What they’ve found instead is evasion time and time again,” Mamdani, a three-term state assembly member, told a cluster of reporters, one curious Oriana tenant and her baby. “We're having this press conference next to his supposed residence to make it easy for him to come downstairs and address any of those questions." 

Mamdani listed off the ways in which the former governor allegedly betrayed working class New Yorkers in favor of corporate (and often Republican) donors, before then laying out his own vision for tackling the city's affordability crisis. There was, of course, no delusion about his rival's appetite for a fight (Cuomo never did emerge); the taunting invite outside the Oriana was a rhetorical exercise. He always refers to the frontrunner as "disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo," name and disparaging title melded easily by Mamdani's coolly assertive cadence.

Mamdani — the only child of Mahmood Mamdani, a renowned Indian-born postcolonial historian, and Mira Nair, the award-winning Indian filmmaker behind "Mississippi Masala" — was born in Kampala, Uganda, living there and in South Africa until his family moved to New York City when he was seven. His and his family's experiences of being Indian, Ugandan and American, he said, taught him what it means to be a minority within those contexts.

"My father told me from a young age that to be a minority is also to understand not simply the promise of a place, but also the limitations," he told me after the press conference. "It is quite terrifying to see the political situations of the place where I was born, the place where my family came from and the place that I call my home, all at once, showcasing a trend towards the far-right politics, where civil liberties are to be trampled upon and profit is the only thing to be made."

No translation

In a city seething with discontent over a spiraling affordability crisis, Mamdani is seeking to deliver an unapologetically left-wing message that identifies, in plain terms, what (and who) is the cause of their distress and how he will provide the kind of relief that for-profit interests would never countenance. Only a bold vision in sharp relief with corporate-friendly austerity politics, he argues, can bring a political behemoth like Cuomo back down to street level.

“This campaign is about a politics that requires no translation, one that speaks directly to people's lives. They need not wonder about how a policy impacts them, because they understand it from the moment you state it," he said while striding down Second Avenue, away from the Oriana’s gaze. “While there may not be an ideological majority in New York City, there is a majority of people who feel left behind by this mayor’s economic policies.”

If there is any New York politician more reviled by progressives than Cuomo, it’s incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, now running for re-election as an independent, apparently feeling vindicated after narrowly escaping a corruption trial. Mamdani has insisted that he is hardly concerned by the gamble; if he faces Adams in the general election instead of a primary, the contrast will still be the same. Mamdani’s also running on a platform that has captured online attention and helped propel him to being the most visible alternative to Cuomo or Adams.

The campaign videos Mamdani's team produces eschew heavily seasoned graphics, corny slideshows and melodramatic voiceovers in favor of highlighting their own candidate, who seems to be everywhere. There’s Mamdani on a Coney Island beach, telling New Yorkers that he’s “freezing… their rent” before running into the frigid waters, clad in a $30 business suit from Steinway Thrift Shop. There’s Mamdani near Bryant Park, asking halal cart vendors how much they’d sell their $10 chicken-over-rice plates if they weren’t getting fleeced by permit farmers hoarding licenses from the city. All of them say they’d knock down the price to $8 and still make a profit. “New York City has a crisis, and it’s called halal-flation. If I was the mayor, I’d work with City Council from day one to make halal eight bucks again,” he declares, finger jabbing towards the camera, as the graphics for various stalled legislative proposals flash next to him in the style of electronic highway traffic messages.

While “halal-flation” neatly illustrates the link between neglectful administration and the city's soaring costs of living, its demand for people’s money seems ultimately trivial compared to that of rent, which eats up at least 30% of most New Yorkers’ income — and for 1 in 5 households, as much as 50%. More than 2 million people have found refuge in precious rent-stabilized apartments, where they depend on the mercy of the city’s Rent Guidelines Board to block landlords from raising prices. But the board, heeding landlords who argue that inflation is sucking their accounts dry, voted for rent hikes for three consecutive years, from 2022 to 2024, provoking outrage among tenants and their advocates.

This was Adams’ dirty work, Mamdani said. The board members who voted for the hikes were indeed all handpicked by the mayor and continued to receive his vocal support in the face of widespread backlash. If Mamdani is elected to replace Adams, he’ll have the power to make his own board and through them enact his proposed rent freeze. Real estate owners are doing just fine, he argues, pointing to a report released by Adams’ board, which found that landlord revenue actually increased by 12% across the city last year. Working class New Yorkers, on the other hand, “are being pushed out of the city that they built and call home, but can no longer afford.” Lest any disillusioned Adams supporters turn to Cuomo hoping for a savior, Mamdani added that the former governor, now feeling remorse over approving a popular tenant protection bill written by the state legislature in 2019, will be no better.

While mayoral candidates are divided over a rent freeze, virtually everyone in the race has embraced some form of housing expansion to ease, or at least control, the escalating price — a step that has often been thwarted by zoning restrictions and suburban residents determined to uphold them.

In December, the city council passed Adams' “City of Yes” proposal to reform city zoning and pave the way for the construction of 80,000 affordable housing units, over the objections of many outer neighborhoods that formed the bedrock of his 2021 coalition. Political observers at the time suggested that it was Adams’ most impactful legacy to date and a boon for his reputation; some of his allies framed it as an act of political bravery. Others, like City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation to the mayor), seemed to imply that the proposal passed in spite of Adams rather than because of his efforts; Mamdani, for his part, says it doesn’t go far enough because it includes too many carve-outs for favored low-density neighborhoods. He has vowed to pass a more comprehensive version of the plan that would fill in those gaps.

As we entered Slate Café in Midtown East, Mamdani checked his Casio watch, a gift from his wife  — it was already 10:34 — and quickly dropped any more talk of Adams and Cuomo outside the door. He was more eager now to discuss other policies that form the core of his platform, like making the city’s struggling bus system fast and free, delivering universal childcare to all New Yorkers, building 200,000 new union-built and rent-stabilized housing units, raising the city's minimum wage to $30 and opening a government-managed store in each of the five boroughs to help lower the price of groceries. While many of those proposals have polled highly with Democratic primary and general election voters alike, some opponents have already vented to the local right-wing tabloid, claiming that such interventions would cost too much money and destroy private competition.

“Socialist mayoral wannabe Zohran Mamdani’s scheme to bring government-owned-and-operated grocery stores to the Big Apple is a ‘Soviet’ style disaster-in-waiting,” the New York Post declared, pairing the story with a picture of a crowded Moscow supermarket. “It’s a socialist move that goes against the American Dream,” said Nallely De Jesus, vice president of a company that runs five supermarkets in the Bronx. "It’s also not just about cheaper prices; it’s about making sure customers are getting the products they want."

The socialist accusation is one that Mamdani does not dispute. In fact, the red-baiting seems to puzzle him more than anything else. “This isn't revealing a secret. I’ve been clear from the beginning about what I stand for, and that’s making sure people can live a dignified life in this city rather than letting the market pick and choose who deserves access to even the most basic human needs,” he said. 

The People's Republic

While there are plenty of candidates running to the left of Cuomo and Adams, including New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, only Mamdani is part of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). In the heady years after Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign, the organization threw its backing behind several members who ran for political office across the city and won, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Bronx and north-central Queens, state Sen. Jabari Brisport from Brooklyn, and Mamdani, hailing from Astoria in northwestern Queens. If there’s a single, 2,556 acre slice of America that encapsulates the post-2016 renaissance of left-wing politics, it’s the neighborhood officially named after the country’s first recorded multimillionaire, unofficially dubbed “The People’s Republic of Astoria," and represented by avowed socialists at the municipal, state and federal levels. One of them, city council member Tiffany Cában, hired Mamdani as a field organizer for her 2019 Queens District Attorney campaign, which she lost by just 60 votes. 

But before Cabán, Ocasio-Cortez and everyone else, there was Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian Lutheran minister who ran to represent Bay Ridge in the City Council in 2017. Less than 10 years ago, NYC-DSA was reluctant to endorse candidates for fear of wasting political capital on decisive and potentially embarrassing losses. After Sanders, however, the group gingerly stepped into local electoral politics, giving only its second City Council endorsement in nearly a century to El-Yateem. At first glance, Bay Ridge, a sleepy corner of Brooklyn that voted for GOP mayors five times between 1993 and 2009 and is populated largely by middle class ethnic whites, seemed like a strange place for the NYC-DSA to probe for political relevance. But Sanders himself provided a blueprint for victory — by sweeping aside Hillary Clinton there in the 2016 primary.

El-Yateem, rallying the neighborhood's growing Arab community, progressives and an assortment of disaffected voters, came close but could not clinch victory against Justin Brannan, chief of staff to the term-limited incumbent council member. Mamdani's voice flashed as he spoke of the campaign that transformed him. "I've always been a New Yorker, but until I heard about a democratic socialist Palestinian man fighting for universal rights and the dignity of life for working class people, I did not know if my deepest-held political convictions had a place here," he said. "The 2017 campaign changed that. My campaign now can have the same effect on all New Yorkers."

For Mamdani, Bay Ridge, the site of his political epiphany, is a case study for expanding his support in places where the historical appetite for left-wing politics is limited. In a video filmed shortly after last November's election, Mamdani traveled to parts of Queens and the Bronx where voters had turned sharply right in the last three election cycles and asked anyone who would talk why they voted for Trump (or not at all). Most didn't say it was because they were sick of "woke" culture or worried about immigration or that one or both parties were too radical — the most common answer was that New York City had become unaffordable and the Democratic Party hadn't done anything about it. "I don't believe in the system anymore," one 2024 non-voter told him.

In 2018, Mamdani had another chance to practice his expansive theory of outreach. That year, he managed journalist Ross Barkan's campaign for New York Senate. Barkan was running to represent a district gerrymandered to look like some garish Art Deco necklace: pastel-blue Bay Ridge in southwestern Brooklyn strung together with Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay to the east, two areas full of nominal Democrats who voted for Trump all three times he ran but never changed their party registration. Naturally, he and Mamdani regularly found themselves face-to-face with customers who thought they wanted nothing to do with a progressive candidate.

Ostensibly hostile terrain, Barkan told Salon, was and is no deterrence to Mamdani.

"He'd go from door-to-door in all of these really conservative neighborhoods and engage with people, debate and try to persuade them, but without changing who he is and what he believes," Barkan said. "I think a lot of politicians on the left run away from the right. Zohran doesn't. As you can see with the mayoral campaign, he's very good at taking issues that might be perceived as very left-wing and making them seem like common sense, which a lot of them are."

Campaigns are punishing business, especially for long-shot candidates, but Mamdani seemed indefatigable. "I'd be on the subway at 6 a.m. and go around knocking on doors seven days a week," Barkan recalled. "If I was back in the office at 8:30 at night, he'd be like: 'What are you doing here? It's still light out. Go knock on some more doors.'"

The following year, members of NYC-DSA’s electoral working group approached Mamdani with a suggestion: He should run for office himself. Mamdani agreed. In his first ever campaign as a candidate, Mamdani narrowly unseated an incumbent Democratic assembly member with a platform emphasizing statewide rent control, fare-free transit, ending mass incarceration and establishing single-payer health care — essentially a state legislator's version of his mayoral platform. He's too modest (or savvy) to attribute his victory to anything but his policies, but almost everyone I talk to seems to think he's also a singularly compelling messenger.

"I've watched a lot of politicians up close, and after a while you figure out very quickly if someone has what it takes to hold a room," Barkan said. "Zohran can always hold a room."

Michael Gianaris, the deputy leader in the New York State Senate and a Greek-American resident of Astoria, has a similar take. "Even though we're in a state of the world where there's so much to make us upset or angry or stressed, Zohran can withstand the pressure and is just generally a very charming guy," Gianaris told me. "We've joked more than once about whether Indian lamb is better than Greek lamb ... a lot our conversations revolve around what our neighborhood was, what our neighborhood is now and how our respective cultures approach certain parts of life."

Activism in office

Nothing seems to fluster Mamdani, but some things — a U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, Cuomo gutting the pensions of public sector workers, the extrajudicial arrests of students and asylum-seekers — anger him deeply. When Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, met GOP lawmakers in Albany just days after ICE agents abducted Columbia University PhD student Mahmoud Khalil, he marched up to a protective line of state troopers, shouting over their shoulders at Homan: "How many more New Yorkers will you detain? How many more New Yorkers, without charge? Do you believe in the First Amendment? Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Homan?" 

Mamdani had already planned for a confrontation, but he didn't anticipate how emotional he would feel until he was just a few feet away from Homan.

"He walked down that hallway with this smirk, eating an apple. That was his only answer for taking a man away from his pregnant wife and flying him off to a prison more than one thousand miles away from home," he recounted. As a video of the confrontation spread, racist death threats against the Assembly's only Muslim member flooded his office's phones, but so did campaign donations from people who admired his outrage in a time when Democrats, in general, have been criticized for not being outraged enough. Within 48 hours, the campaign had raised an additional $250,000. By the end of March, Mamdani had $8 million from 18,000 donors in his account — the maximum amount of money a municipal candidate in New York City is allowed to spend on a campaign. Please stop giving us money, Mamdani told supporters in a campaign video.

Mamdani shouting questions at Homan evokes visceral, passionate opposition, especially compared to the tepidity or outright collaboration of some other Democrats like Adams, who promised to help Trump deport immigrants from New York City. But this was neither the first nor most drastic action he has taken to protest injustice, which includes a 15-day hunger strike by the Taxi Workers Alliance in 2021 to protest the exploitation of taxi drivers by predatory lenders and then another five-day hunger strike in 2023 in response to Israel's invasion of Gaza.

A hunger strike is a battle the striker wages against their own body. After three or four days of self-deprivation, weakness creeps into fraying muscles; a few days after that come intensifying waves of headaches, abdominal cramps and dizziness. Despair and delirium, the two great adversaries of resolve, follow into the breach. By the third week, feelings of hunger give way almost entirely to pain, which has coiled itself around the whole body and melts into their perception of time, place and themselves. While the strikers can look frail, their willingness to suffer is meant to confound the state and emphasize their unshakeable commitment to a cause. In the case of the taxi drivers who owed as much as $750,000 for purchasing the medallions required for doing business in the city, "people's lives were being taken from them by debt collectors," Mamdani said. "I was prepared do whatever it took for people to get the justice they deserve."

Mamdani's activist tactics have not been universally popular. One anonymous colleague groused to the publication City and State that he had abandoned "the politics of trying to compromise and bringing people along by logic" during the 2021 strike. "I just don't think it's the role of an assembly member to apply that kind of pressure." The strikers persisted as negotiations took place between city officials and lenders. And on the 15th day, they celebrated the passage of a debt-relief plan with an outburst of jubilation. Grabbing a microphone, Mamdani shouted, his voice ragged with emotion: "This is just the beginning of solidarity. We are going to fight together until there is nothing left in this world to win." Afterwards, he and fellow strikers, including assembly member Yuh-Line Niou, broke their fast with dates and avocados handed out by a union member. "I never had a better avocado in my life," he told me.

The deal reached by the city and Marblegate Asset Management, the largest holder of taxi loans, eliminated most of the debt owed by taxi drivers — about $450 million. Just moments after breaking his strike and eating the best avocado of his life, Mamdani was urging state lawmakers to pass additional laws that would expand prohibitions of abusive business practices and classify drivers of rideshare apps as employees, rather than contractors.

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In the state assembly, he has paired his activist approach with more conventional legislating. Mamdani, the one-time campaign manager who roamed Trump country in southern Brooklyn, can often find willing partners outside of the DSA caucus even after spending much of the late 2010s protesting against some of the people who are now his colleagues. "He's always been very fluent in the language of both mobilizing constituents and communicating with people who aren't really engaged in politics," said Gianaris, a left-leaning party leader with ties to progressive groups. "It's a whole other language to be effective at moving people who are in the center of politics [i.e. elected officials]. And so I think yes, Zohran has been adjusting over the last few years from fighting the powers that be to becoming one of the powers that can enact agenda items from the inside."

Gianaris and Mamdani both represent Astoria in their respective chambers, so they naturally work together often. In 2023, the pair successfully advocated for the Metropolitan Transit Authority to enact a free bus pilot program, which removed fares for one bus route in each of the city's boroughs. One year later, an MTA report found that the pilot drove a significant increase in ridership and reduced assaults on drivers — results that Mamdani has cited to advocate for free buses across the entire city. Unlike his proposed rent freeze, however, an expansion of the pilot program is largely in the hands of the governor, who effectively runs the MTA. For now, current management is apparently uninterested in any more fare-free buses, but it might be easier for them to say that now than if and when they're dealing with Mayor Mamdani. As things stand, the mayor is not entirely powerless — he appoints an allotted portion of MTA board members, controls the streets on which the buses run (or crawl, according to some frustrated riders) and stands atop the tallest bully pulpit in the state. He can also find sources of revenue to fund his free buses, which may cost upwards of $650 million per year — Mamdani has proposed, among other things, collecting $800 million in unpaid fines from landlords and rearranging the city's $112 billion budget — but Governor Kathy Hochul has balked at raising taxes on the state's wealthiest residents, an increase that Mamdani and other progressives have argued is long overdue.

Against the odds

Mapping out a realistic scenario in which Mamdani can get the buy-in he needs from Hochul might require some stretch of imagination, but that's part of why he's running for mayor in the first place: to expand the voters' political imagination beyond what they've long been accustomed to or believed was the limit of possibility, paving the way for socialist victories at the ballot box and victories for the people in the halls of power. Sanders opened the way for a left-wing surge in the late 2010s, but in the Biden era that momentum has stalled, with progressives like Jamaal Bowman swept away by a reaction from the right of the Democratic Party. Perhaps most disconcerting to progressives in New York was the mayoral election in 2021, in which Adams, playing up his working class roots and promising to get tough on crime, edged out his opponents after eight rounds of ranked-choice voting.

Four years later, the left is desperate for a chance at redemption, especially now that one of their own is surging in the polls. "It can always be fulfilling to help a candidate who represents your politics win or even outperform expectations," Sam McCann, a NYC-DSA member and activist against mass incarceration, told me. "Zohran's candidacy is more than that. People are..."

He paused to search for the right word, then decided on "electrified."

"The high profile of this race, for leadership of the largest city in the U.S., is obviously a part of the excitement," he continued. "But it's also that Zohran is connecting with people wanting to feel some hope, and for a candidate to have strong political convictions, in a time when both can seem hard to find."

The NYC-DSA, often cautious in picking its electoral battles, voted overwhelmingly to endorse Mamdani for mayor last year in the face of seemingly long odds. With less than two months to go until the Democratic primary election, the organization's members are scrambling across the city to deliver the gospel to front doors, street corners, community centers and any place where votes can be found. A strong performance by Mamdani could help bring left politics to the forefront and lay the groundwork for future NYC-DSA candidates. A victory would place in City Hall a mayor who's not only part of NYC-DSA, but also a committed organizer invested in their growth.

What's good for NYC-DSA, of course, is also good for Mamdani. In an age of decline for the traditional political machine and the fragmentation of municipal politics, NYC-DSA remains one of the few groups that can swiftly mobilize volunteers across all five boroughs, and, they hope, for Mayor Mamdani's agenda.

"I think the key to a long-term movement is ensuring that New Yorkers join organizations and that they become members of something that is larger than a campaign, larger than a candidate, and instead is a sustained commitment to delivering on the same principles," Mamdani said. "We have the support of an incredible number of those kinds of organizations, and the one that has really steered me in my political life has been the NYC-DSA."

Our meeting in Slate Café took place a little more than a week before Adams, aware that he had next to no chance of winning the Democratic primary and yet curiously unaware that he has next to no chance of winning the general election either, decided to run as an independent. Cuomo, boasting universal name recognition and the sense, if not the reality, of incumbency from his 11 years as governor, is now what Barkan calls the "institutional" candidate. Since announcing his run in March, he's been collecting endorsements from local Democratic clubs, powerful lawmakers who had once called for him to resign as governor, and, much to the disappointment of progressives, a slew of labor unions. Moreover, he's maintaining a healthy advantage in the polls — in a recent survey, Cuomo leads with 45% of the vote, with Mamdani behind him at 22% and seven other named candidates not even making it to double digits. In a one-on-one matchup, Cuomo wins 64% to Mamdani's 36%. 

But behind Cuomo's projection of strength lie signs of rot, and, some observers argue, a chance for Mamdani to seize the initiative. Cuomo's name recognition advantage, which Barkan said is the primary factor behind his polling lead, may become meaningless if Mamdani can continue his momentum, surpass other not-Cuomo hopefuls and consolidate his role as the leading challenger. That's assuming Mamdani can also persuade people that Cuomo is not necessarily the "dependable" choice by virtue of his governing experience, or overcome any other advantages the former governor might have.

To help close the gap, Mamdani can look to Muslim and South Asian voters who've never had a mayoral candidate like them before. Mamdani not only shares with those voters a kindred faith and culture, but is also making his way through their neighborhoods and events with the same policy promises he's been delivering everywhere else. Though a majority of Muslim voters voted for Adams in 2021, they especially might balk at supporting Cuomo or Adams in light of, among other things, their refusal to acknowledge Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israeli state.

While union support for Cuomo is more difficult to peel off, Mamdani can take comfort in knowing that an endorsement is not a binding directive for individual union members or groups, who can still vote however they want in the end. Furthermore, their embrace of the former governor might not be as much about policy as it is about pragmatism.

"Policy issues, while important, are less important than being on the winning side when all the votes are counted," Barkan said. "Unions don't typically support insurgent or long-shot candidates. They're risk-averse, and there is considerable risk in not supporting a powerful, vindictive politician who might try to harm your members if he wins."

If Mamdani wins, the logic follows, he can expect at least some unions and city institutions to not only back a re-election bid, but also begin supporting other left-wing candidates who would at that point seem much more viable. That hope amounts to a large part of the pressure weighing on his campaign, as he works to build a coalition that encompasses anyone who yearns for change, but doesn't necessarily know in what shape that change will take. That's why Mamdani has to leave Slate Café at exactly 11am — so he can persuade yet another group of people that change they can believe in comes in the form of free healthcare, free buses and a freeze on rent.