What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power

Zohran Mamdani is thirty-three years old—young enough that, despite not regularly working out, he has run the New York City Marathon twice in the past three years. In 2022, his second year in the New York State Assembly, he ran wearing a T-shirt that read “Eric Adams Raised My Rent!” and finished in six hours and four minutes. Few spectators paid him any mind. Last year, less than a month after launching his mayoral campaign, he trotted through the city at a 12:54-per-mile pace, wearing the same T-shirt, with “Zohran Will Freeze It!” added to the back. Again, he caught barely anyone’s attention. This year, Marathon Sunday falls two days before the New York mayoral election. Polls have Mamdani fifteen points ahead of his nearest competitor, the former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s aides say that he’s not running the course this time, though it wouldn’t be out of character. His instinct is to be on the move, out in the city, where people can see him.

To walk through New York with Mamdani this spring and summer has been to watch a star being born, a process that is as spectacular and gaseous on earth as it is in Heaven. On the morning of the primary, in June, Mamdani crisscrossed the city as fast as his new security detail could drive him. Giddy commuters on a subway platform in Jackson Heights missed their trains just to show him their “I Voted” stickers. Aboveground, he dispatched an aide to a nearby Indian restaurant, to pick him up paan, a betel-leaf wrap, which he chewed daintily, careful not to spill any of the filling on the dark suit and tie that he has adopted as his political uniform. In Inwood, even a pair of volunteers for Cuomo sheepishly stopped him for selfies.

At a moment when the country is consumed with nativist fervor and New York appears a nest of cynical cronyism—eight months ago, Mayor Eric Adams agreed to go along with President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation program, to save himself from corruption charges—Mamdani is running a campaign that embraces the city as a beacon for immigrants like him. His win in the primary was a shock to the political establishment, and the powerful began to slink in his direction. Barack Obama gave him a call the next day. After a chilly summer courtship, Governor Kathy Hochul, a hypercautious moderate, warmly endorsed him. The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has not endorsed Mamdani or any other candidate, recently told me, “He has had the best entry into citywide politics of any candidate I have seen, probably, in my life.”

In certain ideological precincts, Mamdani’s name has become totemic—shorthand for everything wrong with New York, which itself is shorthand for everything wrong with America. Trump has called him a “100% Communist Lunatic” on Truth Social. Jeff Blau, the C.E.O. of the real-estate giant Related Companies, and his wife, the investor Lisa Blau, recently called for an emergency breakfast meeting of the wealthy. “If we fail to mobilize, the financial capital of the world risks being handed over to a socialist this November,” the invitation read. A real-estate lobbyist told me that he does not know anyone who is leaving the city because of Mamdani, though he does know “several who may pied-à-terre.” John Catsimatidis, a supermarket mogul and a Trump confidant, said, “Fidel Castro had the same smile.”

Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries have held off on endorsing Mamdani, reportedly in part because of his criticism of Israel. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the city’s political class is jostling for position around him. Kathryn Wylde, the longtime head of the Partnership for New York City—a lobby group representing the city’s business leaders—brokered meetings this summer between Mamdani and her members; many remained skeptical, but some left with a strange new respect for the kid. “After I did the meetings with, say, three hundred executives, somebody asked me, ‘How would you rate their reactions on a scale of one to ten?’ ” Wylde told me. “I said, ‘One to ten.’ ” Patrick Gaspard, an Obama Administration official and the former president of the Center for American Progress, has been quietly advising Mamdani since last fall. He describes Mamdani as a prototype for a new generation of American politicians, forged in the Palestinian-rights movement. “He’s the first to arrive on the shore, but, just over the horizon, you can see more ships coming in,” Gaspard said.

In person, Mamdani is as self-possessed and quick to a punch line as he is in his campaign videos, which regularly go viral. He is also tactical and shrewd, careful with his words. From Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 Presidential race inspired him to embrace socialist politics, Mamdani has learned how to pivot relentlessly back to his economic agenda, and it’s rare for him to speak for more than a few minutes without returning to his pledges to freeze the rent in the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, make buses free and faster, and provide universal care for kids starting at six weeks of age. But unlike Sanders, who loathes talking about himself—“Zohran doesn’t need any political advice from me,” the senator told me, in September—Mamdani has found power in telling his story.

I met Mamdani in person for the first time in late March, at Qahwah House, a Yemeni coffee shop in Morningside Heights. It was the morning after the end of Ramadan, and polling in the primary showed him in the teens—in second place, but well behind Cuomo. He ordered a pot of Adeni chai for us to share, and, if the guy behind the register clocked him, he didn’t show it in his face. The previous day, Mamdani had been in Bay Ridge, Kensington, and Jamaica—home to large Muslim communities in Brooklyn and Queens—for Eid prayers, addressing some twenty-five thousand people. He expressed polite incredulity at the press’s lack of interest in those numbers. “That’s where I feel a sense of confidence,” he told me.

Mamdani has a solicitous, animated way of speaking that can verge on TED talk. He gestures prolifically, displaying the thick silver rings he wears, and likes to pull quotations from Nelson Mandela, F.D.R., Toni Morrison, Aristotle. Sipping his chai, he spoke with precision, not just about what he’d do as mayor but about the voters who were going to help him win—Muslims and South Asians, renters, young people, Democrats who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza. When prodded about the inevitable backlash to his more expensive proposals, Mamdani shrugged. “I am not afraid of my own ideas,” he said. When I mentioned the difficulty of what he hoped to pull off, he smiled: “I think for far too long we’ve tried not to lose, as opposed to figuring out how to win.”

About a month after Mamdani won the primary, he woke up at 3 A.M. in Kampala, Uganda, to an urgent call from Morris Katz, one of his closest aides. It was evening in New York, and there had been a mass shooting in an office building on Park Avenue. Mamdani was in Uganda to belatedly celebrate his wedding, a trip that would give him and his wife, Rama Duwaji, a chance to say goodbye to private life. (The couple had eloped at the city clerk’s office in February.) Four victims and the shooter were dead. Early, sketchily sourced posts on social media suggested that someone had yelled “Free Palestine!” in the vicinity of the violence. One of the victims was an off-duty N.Y.P.D. officer. The shooting was already being described as a leadership test for Mamdani. Private life was over.

New Yorkers can be unforgiving when a mayor is caught out of town at the wrong time. (In 2011, Michael Bloomberg was nearly done in when he was rumored to be in Bermuda during a New York snowstorm.) Mamdani got on the next flight out of Entebbe, but the trip took twenty-two hours. While he was in the air, his opponents pounced. Cuomo, who is now running as an Independent, started calling reporters to slam Mamdani’s views on policing. The Times, which in both its news and opinion coverage has been overtly skeptical of Mamdani’s fitness to be mayor, speculated that the shooting “may lead some to further scrutinize” him. Laura Loomer, the Trump ally and far-right troll, suggested that the State Department ban Mamdani from reëntering the country—a scenario that his aides took seriously enough to run by lawyers.

But when Mamdani arrived at J.F.K., at 7 A.M., he breezed through customs. The N.Y.P.D. had confirmed that the Park Avenue shooter wasn’t motivated by pro-Palestinian sentiment; he was a casino worker from Las Vegas who had sustained brain injuries while playing football in high school, and his target had been the N.F.L.’s headquarters, in the same building. From the airport, Mamdani was whisked into a waiting S.U.V. and driven straight to the home of the deceased N.Y.P.D. officer, Didarul Islam. A Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant who’d been working a side gig as a security guard at the office building to help pay his family’s mortgage, Islam was the kind of New Yorker who Mamdani had recognized was often overlooked in the city’s politics. At Islam’s home, in the Bronx, Mamdani was received by the officer’s parents, his pregnant widow, his children, and other grieving relatives. He wept with them for a few minutes. Then, with Bangladeshi hospitality, the family served the candidate breakfast.

On the morning of Islam’s funeral, the streets of Parkchester, a neighborhood of brick row houses and big-box stores, were blocked off on both sides of the expressway. In front of the mosque, the Parkchester Jame Masjid, thousands of officers watched silently as hundreds of men and boys prayed on mats unfurled on the streets and sidewalks. Helicopters flew low overhead. It wasn’t so long ago that the N.Y.P.D. treated many Muslim communities like fronts in the war on terror, yet more Muslims are joining the force every year, for largely the same reason that the Irish did a hundred and fifty years ago—the N.Y.P.D. is one of the only big employers in town where working-class immigrants can reasonably hope for advancement.

Officer Islam, by department custom, was promoted to detective first grade at his funeral. Inside the mosque, Adams, Hochul, and other invited officials sat in chairs close to the front, dressed in dark suits. Mamdani sat on the other side of the room, on the floor among the mourners. During the primary campaign, Mamdani had visited the mosque on three separate occasions, and he has continued to visit Islam’s family since the funeral. “He was the one who would cut his father’s beard,” Mamdani told me.

“I apologize for the wait. What kind of silverware would you like?”

Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap

Policing is an awkward subject for Mamdani, who if elected will be in charge of a department that he was once in favor of defunding. In June, 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests, he tweeted, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.” Much like his comments on Israel, Mamdani’s past statements on the police have been obsessively picked apart by his detractors—a key difference is that managing the cops is an everyday part of the mayor’s job.

The legacy of every New York mayor in recent history has been shaped by the N.Y.P.D. Bloomberg’s accomplishments running the city will always be stacked against his support of stop-and-frisk policing. Bill de Blasio, who was in office during the early days of Black Lives Matter, never forgot watching hundreds of officers turn their backs on him at the funerals of two cops who were killed on the job. Eric Adams, who started his career as a transit cop, was undone in part by his dealings with corrupt old friends from the department. During the campaign, Mamdani abandoned the language of “defund”; he recently pledged to work with the N.Y.P.D. if elected. He told me that he now believes policing is a public good, in that it is “a critical part of how we deliver public safety.” But he has struggled to explain why he changed his mind, apart from the fact that he is running for mayor.

One of Mamdani’s more poetic campaign motifs is “public excellence”—the idea that socialists need not compromise on quality-of-life concerns. In the past few months, Mamdani has attempted to reframe his suspicion of police as a human-resources issue, an obstacle to excellence: rank-and-file cops are regularly asked to handle distressing situations outside their skill set, such as dealing with the homeless and the mentally ill. He hopes to take those tasks off their hands by creating a Department of Community Safety, though, by his own admission, some of the details are “still to be determined.” At the prompting of a Times interviewer, in September, Mamdani half-apologized for his old tweets about the N.Y.P.D., but he rejects the notion that his views have evolved. “The principles remain the same,” he told me. “There are also lessons that you learn along the way.”

No small number of Mamdani’s detractors wonder if someone of his age and experience will be capable of running the biggest city in the country. New York has a hundred-and-sixteen-billion-dollar budget, three hundred thousand employees, and a police department larger than the Belgian Army. For more than a century, people have wondered if the city is ungovernable; with the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who had New Deal money raining down on him, every idealistic leader who has been elected mayor has left City Hall in some way battered by it. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good’ . . . or the people become disgusted,” the muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1903. A City Hall veteran recently told me, “You’re constantly making bad decisions that you know are bad decisions. You’re presented with two bad options, and you’ve got to pick one, and that’s your day.”

If Mamdani is elected, the N.Y.P.D. may well continue to sweep up homeless encampments and forcibly remove protesters who block bridges or roads; he hasn’t yet ruled these things out. (“His administration will not seek to criminalize peaceful protest or poverty,” a Mamdani aide said.) At a recent forum on public safety sponsored by the policy journal Vital City, he was asked about police involuntarily detaining the mentally ill. “It is a last resort,” Mamdani said. “It is something that—if nothing else can work, then it’s there.”

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. This was the same year that his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, released “Mississippi Masala,” about a romance between a spunky Indian Ugandan exile (Sarita Choudhury) and a straitlaced Black carpet cleaner (Denzel Washington) in small-town Mississippi. While scouting for a location to set the scenes of her protagonist’s childhood in Uganda, Nair found an airy hilltop property in Kampala, overlooking Lake Victoria. The home appeared in the movie, and Nair and her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, bought it. Zohran spent his first five years there, playing in the lush gardens under jacaranda trees. In a Profile of Nair from 2002, John Lahr wrote that the director’s “talkative doe-eyed son” was known by “dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani.” (Mamdani’s staff today still call him Z, though recently some have started, winkingly, to address him as Sir.)

Nair met Mahmood while she was researching “Mississippi Masala.” The daughter of a stern, high-ranking Indian state official, she studied at Harvard, and by her thirties had garnered attention for films that examined life on the margins of Indian society: among cabaret dancers, street children, visiting emigrants. Mahmood was born in Bombay in 1946 and grew up in Uganda, part of the Indian diaspora that emerged in East Africa during the British colonial period. In 1962, the year Uganda became independent, Mahmood was awarded one of twenty-three scholarships to study in America which were offered to the new country’s brightest students. (Barack Obama’s father had come to study in the U.S., three years earlier, under a similar program for Kenyan students.) He returned home after his studies abroad, and, like the protagonist Nair later imagined for “Mississippi Masala,” was exiled in Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion of some sixty thousand Asians from the country. The event became a focus of Mahmood’s writing on the pains of decolonization; for Nair, it became the backdrop for a love story. “He’s some kind of lefty,” Nair told her collaborator, Sooni Taraporevala, the day they planned to meet Mahmood for an interview.

In 1996, Mahmood published his breakthrough work, “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism,” which described the persistence of colonial structures in independent African nations. He dedicated it to Nair and to Zohran, who, he wrote, “daily takes us on the trail that is his discovery of life.” Three years after the book was published, Columbia offered Mahmood a tenured professorship. The family moved to New York, into a faculty apartment in Morningside Heights, where they often had Edward and Mariam Said and Rashid and Mona Khalidi over for dinner. “For Zohran, they were ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties,’ ” Mahmood told me in an e-mail.

During the fall of 1999, Mamdani’s parents enrolled him at the Bank Street School for Children, a private school. The first year, he felt singled out—“being told again and again that I was very articulate with my English,” Mamdani recalled. Eventually, though, he settled into a typical Upper West Side childhood: Absolute Bagels, soccer in Riverside Park, listening to Jay-Z and Eiffel 65 on his Walkman on the way to school. In 2004, Mahmood took a sabbatical, and the family returned to Kampala for a year. One day, Mahmood went to Zohran’s school, to see how his son was adjusting. “He is doing well except that I do not always understand him,” Zohran’s teacher told him. On orders from the headmaster, the teacher had asked all the Indian students to raise their hands. Zohran had kept his down, and, when prodded, he’d protested, “I am not Indian! I am Ugandan!”

On a Saturday morning this summer, I met Mamdani outside the Bronx High School of Science, his alma mater, to walk around with one of his favorite old teachers, Marc Kagan, who happens to be the brother of Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice. Kagan, the author of “Take Back the Power”—a firsthand account of his years as a radical organizer in the city’s transit union—taught social studies at Bronx Science for ten years. He inspired fervent admiration in his students, some of whom (Mamdani included) called themselves Kaganites. In his classes, Kagan talked about how race, gender, and class had shaped world events. “We got away from the great-man theory of history,” Kagan, a bespectacled, gray-bearded guy in his late sixties, said as we crossed the school’s sunken courtyard. Mamdani caught my eye and mugged. “There’s just one,” he said, nodding toward Kagan.

Mamdani sat down on some steps and looked up at Kagan, relieved to slip into a comfortable old dynamic. Kagan recounted a parent-teacher conference with Mahmood during Zohran’s freshman year. “I didn’t know who your father was—I just figured him as one of these striving parents,” he said. “He was grumping about your grade.” Mamdani tensed up. “He wasn’t grumping, like, ‘Why aren’t you giving my son a better grade?’ It was, like, ‘Zohran should be able to do better.’ And I said, ‘Never mind the grade, because the wheels are spinning in your son’s head.’ And he just floated out of the room.”

Mamdani credits Kagan with showing him how to command an audience. He remembered the start of class one day during his senior spring, when moods were light and attentions were drifting:“Everybody’s talking, having a great time, and then you just hear the sound of this machete hit a desk.” Kagan had chopped a stalk of sugarcane in half. “And he says, ‘Sugarcane was one of the most valuable crops in the New World,’ ” Mamdani said. Kagan handed out slices of the sugarcane, so that his students could touch and taste it.

The world of Bronx Science—a selective public school of some three thousand students, many of them the children of working-class immigrants—differed dramatically from the affluent intellectual milieu of Mamdani’s childhood. He remembers seeing students of color rehearsing in a jazz combo during his tour of the school. “It was almost a level of parody how aware we were of race,” Mamdani told me. “There would be, like, Ultimate Frisbee games where the two teams were ‘immigration nation’ and ‘white nation.’ With no malice. Simply, these were the two teams.” On a 2016 episode of the podcast “Encompassed,” an oral history of Bronx Science, a twenty-four-year-old Mamdani joked about a teacher who had chased him down the hall for stealing hall-pass forms. “Keep in mind, this guy is a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces,” he said. “He’s tailed brown guys for a long time.”

Cartoon by Adam Sacks

In 2008, Mamdani played on the school’s cricket team, which was mostly made up of other South Asian kids. It was the first year that the Department of Education oversaw a cricket league, and many of the other teams were from Queens, where Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and other South Asian immigrant communities were growing. “My social circles shifted,” he told me. “By the time I graduated, my closest friends lived in Bath Beach, Glen Oaks.”

For college, Mamdani went to Bowdoin, a bucolic liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine. (Columbia, where his father taught, rejected him.) Though Bowdoin was whiter and preppier than Bronx Science, Mamdani found his way. The writer Erica Berry, a close friend from college, said, “Walking through the dining hall with him would take longer than with other people, because he’d be stopping at random tables, giving high fives.” In chatty columns for the school paper, the Bowdoin Orient, Mamdani regularly sounded off on the topics of the day. On relations between athletes and non-athletes: “I propose . . . we start a process of integration.” On dance-floor etiquette: “Whether it’s grinding, the placement of your hands or leaning in for a kiss, you need to get consent.” On the “horrible choice of pump-up music” at the student gym: “How can I be expected to pump five-pound weights with Enya as my soundtrack?”

In time, his columns looked beyond life on campus. “I had arrived in a society where privilege was a different color,” Mamdani wrote, in 2013, about spending the summer studying Arabic in Cairo, as Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the Egyptian military. “Gone was the image of the white Christian male that I had grown accustomed to, and in its place was a darker, more familiar picture—one that, for the first time, I fit: brown skin, black hair, and a Muslim name.” The focus of the piece was Mamdani’s decision to grow a beard, which had started as a “symbolic middle finger” to the bearded-terrorist stereotype in America but acquired a different meaning during his time abroad: “Many of my Egyptian friends—first jokingly and then more seriously—told me that I looked ikhwani, like a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Mamdani majored in Africana studies and wrote his thesis on the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Berry remembers him holding court in the dining hall about Israel and Palestine—an unusual sight at Bowdoin, a fairly apolitical school. Matthew Miles Goodrich, who was a year behind Mamdani, and who became a founding member of the Sunrise Movement, told me, “We had a professor who liked to say that Bowdoin was a hotbed of social rest.”

As a junior, Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which only a handful of his classmates joined. The following year, he exchanged public statements with Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills, over Mills’s rejection of a call to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Mills characterized the demand as an infringement on academic freedom. Mamdani and a co-writer countered that Mills was “ignoring how the boycott has instead served as the catalyst for greater discussion of Israel’s human rights abuses.”

The occupation of Palestine was a formative moral and political issue for Mamdani. He says that his views were shaped by two years that his family spent in South Africa before moving to New York. “Hearing the words of Mandela about the interconnectedness of the struggle for freedom with the struggle for Palestinian human rights, and then coming here and seeing the very different way in which that same conversation was being had,” Mamdani told me, “there was a glaring exception to the supposedly universal beliefs when it came to applying them to Palestinians.” In an e-mail, Mahmood recalled discussions with his colleagues in Cape Town about “whether particular strategies for combatting apartheid—such as the global boycott of apartheid South Africa—were relevant for the struggle to decolonize or dezionize Israel.” He added,“Zohran was a listener. . . . I doubt that he remained unaffected by the exchange on these issues.”

Two weeks before the primary, Mamdani was invited to appear on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” alongside Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, who was polling third in the race. Taking advantage of the city’s ranked-choice primary voting system, Mamdani and Lander had recently cross-endorsed each other as part of an anti-Cuomo strategy pushed by the Working Families Party and other progressive groups. The pair’s appearance wouldn’t come with an endorsement from the host, but it would air the night before the election. Cuomo was counting on high turnout in wealthy, Colbert-watching neighborhoods.

A few days before the taping, Colbert’s producers held a prep call with the candidates and their aides. The sample questions covered basic political topics, such as the meaning of democratic socialism. Right before the candidates went onstage, the producers appeared in the greenroom and said that they wanted to go over a few more questions. Earlier that day, a group of prominent Jewish figures, including Elisha Wiesel, the son of Elie Wiesel, had sent a letter to Colbert demanding that he grill Mamdani on his views of Israel. According to people who were in the room, one of the producers suggested a “thumbs-up or thumbs-down” segment: “Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: Hamas. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: a Palestinian state.”

Mamdani’s face dropped. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” he told me. “That a genocide could be distilled into a late-night game.” His aides were incensed. “You have the first Muslim candidate for mayor in the history of New York,” Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to Mamdani, told one of the producers. “You don’t want to ask him a question about that?” (CBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In the end, the game didn’t happen, but Colbert did ask Mamdani whether he believed that Israel had the right to exist. “Yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist,” he said. “And a responsibility also to uphold international law.”

Mamdani got this question so many times during the campaign that he came to feel besieged by it. “It’s Islamophobia, the way it’s posed and repeated,” a prominent Muslim leader in the city, who has talked to Mamdani about this, told me. Cuomo, who, as part of his return to political life last year, joined the legal team defending Benjamin Netanyahu in the International Criminal Court, hoped to make Mamdani’s criticisms of Israel the defining issue of the election. “It’s very simple: anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” the former governor declared, shortly after entering the race. A pro-Cuomo super PAC mocked up a mailer claiming that Mamdani “Rejects Jewish Rights.” It included a photo altered to make his beard look darker and bushier.

Throughout the primary, Mamdani was steady in his support of Palestinian rights, though he did hone the language that he used to talk about Israel. Whereas he once made jokes about the I.D.F., he adopted a more solemn tone this year, emphasizing a sense of shared humanity. He often quotes prominent Israelis, such as the Holocaust historian Amos Goldberg, who has described Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a genocide, and the former Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert, who has condemned the war as cruel and criminal. Mamdani tends to focus on Israel’s violations of international law, which are the basis of his pledge to arrest Netanyahu, in deference to a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, if Netanyahu comes to New York. (This is arguably his most tough-on-crime policy.) He emphasizes that New Yorkers don’t have to share his views on foreign policy to think he’d be a good mayor. When asked about how he’ll win over Zionist voters, he’s partial to a line from Ed Koch: “If you agree with me on nine out of twelve issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on twelve out of twelve, see a psychiatrist.”

One of the few times Mamdani got tripped up was in June, when he appeared on the podcast of the right-leaning publication The Bulwark. He declined to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which many supporters of Israel interpret as an incitement to anti-Jewish violence. “It’s a word that means ‘struggle,’ ” Mamdani said, referring to “intifada.” After he won the primary, performing well with Jewish voters, especially those under forty, he said that he would “discourage” his supporters from using the slogan.

Many of Mamdani’s detractors believed that his stance on Israel would sink his campaign. But Mamdani and his earliest allies, having watched Joe Biden and Kamala Harris lose support over their refusal to oppose the Netanyahu government’s destruction of Gaza, were confident that his position on the war would be a strength. In February, when Mamdani was still unknown to many voters, Álvaro López, a leader in the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, published a memo detailing a campaign strategy for him that relied in part on mainstream Democrats who had been “radicalized” by Gaza. “A big issue with the Palestinian-solidarity movement was that they were kind of two steps ahead of where the majority of working-class people were at,” López, who grew up in Brooklyn and spent ten years as a natural-wine rep before becoming a full-time union organizer, told me. “The connection wasn’t being made to, like, ‘This is why your eggs are so expensive.’ ”

That disconnect—between calls for social justice and appeals to working-class voters—was an issue for Mamdani. His base appeared to be whiter, richer, and more educated than the city as a whole. His supporters have been caricatured as striving transplants who can’t decide if they’re upwardly or downwardly mobile—denizens of what the New York City data journalist Michael Lange has termed the Commie Corridor, in gentrified Brooklyn and Queens. In the primary, Mamdani did best in neighborhoods where the median income is between fifty thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Cuomo won in rich and white neighborhoods, but also in poor and Black ones.

Conscious of this, Mamdani spent many Sundays this summer in church, courting Black congregations around the city. In August, he appeared at the First Baptist Church of Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, and read an obscure passage from the Book of Lamentations. “Even jackals offer their breasts to nurse their young,” he recited. “But my people have become heartless, like ostriches in the desert.” That drew some “all right” s and “amen”s, but the skepticism in the room was palpable. “Zohran knows by now that I will be on him,” Rashad Raymond Moore, the church’s senior pastor, said, after Mamdani finished speaking. “As soon as he won, I said, ‘Now, are the people who voted for you the same people who are pricing us out?’ He’s been in that tension.”

The summer of 2017 was known, in the New York City transit system, as the Summer of Hell. Track fires broke out regularly. Riders crammed armpit to nostril on train platforms. One in three trains ran with delays, the worst performance since the city’s near-bankruptcy in the nineteen-seventies. “Just three days ago, we literally had a train come off the tracks,” Cuomo, who was governor at the time, said in June, declaring a state of emergency in the tunnels.

Most days that summer, Mamdani, then twenty-five years old, caught the 1 train at 116th Street, a few blocks from where he lived with his parents. Then he’d brace himself for the hour-and-a-half-long, three-train commute to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he was working for the City Council campaign of the Reverend Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian Lutheran pastor and community organizer. Mamdani had struggled with claustrophobia since childhood—he avoided elevators when he could—and he came to remember that summer as the worst of it. When a train stalled in a tunnel, as often happened on the N as it left Atlantic Avenue, Mamdani would feel his anxiety rising. He began inviting strangers to talk to him, about anything. “It makes all the difference when you feel the walls closing in on you,” he recalled. “And then the train would get moving.”

Before he got involved in politics, Mamdani tried to make a career as a rapper, tutoring high-school kids to pay for studio time.He recorded multilingual songs under the name Young Cardamom, rapping in Luganda and Hindi, as well as in English, and filmed puckish, elaborate music videos. (The best one is for “Wabula Naawe,” in which Mamdani and his collaborator HAB play feuding guerrilla leaders.) But, eventually, Mamdani recalled in a podcast interview this spring,“there was a point at which my dad said, ‘I think it’s time for a real job.’ ” When I recently asked Mamdani if his mayoral run was a complex ploy to boost his Spotify streams, he shook his head. “I can tell you—they’re not up,” he assured me.

In 2015, Mamdani volunteered for the City Council campaign of a Queens lawyer named Ali Najmi, whom he learned about from a Village Voice interview with Heems, a former member of the rap trio Das Racist. Mamdani took a particular liking to canvassing. “Climbing a six-story walkup, getting to that top floor, and having a senior open their door—you see a glimpse into what it is that they live with every single day,” he said. He soon became a paid hand, working on several local campaigns in quick succession. El-Yateem’s campaign, in Bay Ridge—the sturdy, middle-class enclave immortalized in “Saturday Night Fever” as the home of John Travolta’s character—would become a template for his own.

“I don’t want to do anything for my birthday. But I want you to do a bunch of things for it.”

Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski

El-Yateem, or Father K, as many know him, was born in the West Bank town of Beit Jala in 1968. At the age of nineteen, when he was a student at Bethlehem Bible College, he was arrested by the Israeli military, tortured, interrogated, and held for fifty-seven days with no charges. Six years later, he was assigned to be a pastor at a church in Bay Ridge, where the pews, once occupied by Norwegian immigrants, were filling up with Arab Christians, many of them Palestinian exiles.

El-Yateem was one of the first local candidates endorsed by the rejuvenated New York City D.S.A. after a membership boom that followed Bernie Sanders’s first run for President. Rather than advocating loudly for radical policies, El-Yateem emphasized cost-of-living issues and argued that the Democratic Party should expand its political tent by engaging the city’s Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities, which together numbered about a million people yet had few representatives in local government. “We need to be part of the decision-making,” El-Yateem told NBC News.

On Election Day, El-Yateem lost, placing second in a five-way race, with more than thirty per cent of the vote. At that time, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still a bartender at a Mexican restaurant near Union Square. El-Yateem’s showing looked to Mamdani like a breakthrough. The fact that a socialist Arab immigrant who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement could pull thirty per cent in Bay Ridge was enough to make him think that he could run for office himself. “Bernie gave me the language of democratic socialism,” Mamdani said. “Khader El-Yateem showed me that all my different politics, they had a place that they could belong.”

After the Summer of Hell, perhaps sensing that he’d one day need to keep his cool on the train, Mamdani saw a behavioral therapist, to address his claustrophobia. For their last session, Mamdani and the therapist rode the subway together. To both of their alarm, the train stopped in a dark tunnel. “The therapist was, like, ‘Did you stall this train?’ ” Mamdani told me, laughing.

Mamdani lives in a six-story, yellow-brick apartment building in Astoria, Queens. It’s an old-fashioned, H-shaped pile, built in 1929, with mostly one-bedroom apartments, and a communal laundry room. On a Sunday evening in early September, he came to his door wearing a spotless white collared shirt, a dark tie, and house slippers. “Shoes off,” he told me.

He found the apartment on StreetEasy, in 2018. It was advertised as spacious, with an eat-in kitchen. In reality, it’s tiny, what a broker might creatively call a classic three. The living room, which has a single window, is decorated with elegant vintage couches, healthy-looking houseplants, and posters for old Bollywood movies. On a bookshelf I spotted a copy of “The Power Broker,” Erica Berry’s “Wolfish,” and Kal Penn’s memoir, “You Can’t Be Serious.” (Nair has credited a teen-age Zohran with persuading her to cast Penn in her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” after he saw “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.”) “Chicken or goat?” Mamdani asked, flipping the contents of plastic takeout containers onto plates and handing one to me. An aide had run out for biryani.

After Mamdani moved to Astoria, he took a job as a foreclosure-prevention counsellor at Chhaya, a community-development organization that serves South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants. His salary was forty-seven thousand dollars; the apartment was rent-stabilized. When Mamdani signed the lease, the rent was two thousand dollars a month. Now he and Duwaji, his wife, pay twenty-three hundred. (Duwaji, an illustrator who has contributed to The New Yorker, did much of the decorating.) Sitting on a purple-and-gold sofa, Mamdani tasted his biryani and frowned. It was a little bland. “We won’t reveal where I got this,” he said. He ate with his hands—something that has become a fixation among right-wingers—and offered me a fork and knife.

Working with Chhaya clients who were facing foreclosure, Mamdani got an intimate look at the little insanities of the city’s housing crisis. Many of his clients were small landlords—immigrant owners of two-family properties who relied on tenants to stay afloat. He tried to match clients with government programs that might help them, but often there was nothing he could do. “I remember talking to this Pakistani guy, who only spoke Urdu,” he said. “I asked him, ‘Did you know that the lien on your house is about to be sold?’ And he said, ‘No, I had no idea.’ ”

From the beginning, a centerpiece of Mamdani’s campaign has been his proposal to freeze the rents for the city’s million or so rent-stabilized units—generally found in buildings of six or more apartments which were built before 1974. A mayor can do this, in effect, because the mayor appoints all nine members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which determines how much the owners of these buildings are allowed to raise the rent each year. What Mamdani and some of his allies in the tenants’-rights movement appreciated is that the board isn’t some sleepy arm of the city bureaucracy—it is full of political potential. De Blasio backed rent freezes three times in his eight years as mayor; under Adams, rent for these apartments has been allowed to increase, cumulatively, about twelve per cent. “The Rent Guidelines Board is sort of like a Swedish social-democracy institution,” Cea Weaver, a D.S.A.-aligned tenant organizer who has been advising Mamdani, said. “Organized tenants and organized landlords come together in front of a city board appointed by the mayor, who is reflective of the general populace.”

A decade and a half ago, an elaborately coiffed stunt candidate named Jimmy McMillan ran for governor of New York with the indelible catchphrase “The rent is too damn high!” At the time, the tagline got mostly laughs; Kenan Thompson played McMillan on “Saturday Night Live.” But, just a few years later, socialist candidates in the outer boroughs discovered that McMillan had been on to something. Tascha Van Auken, who managed a network of fifty thousand volunteers during Mamdani’s primary campaign, told me, “People were feeling the affordability pinch extra, extra urgently.” Van Auken, who also recently served as the artistic-direction manager for Blue Man Group, was involved with Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign and ran or helped out on several other D.S.A. races that toppled Democratic incumbents. In every local campaign she’s worked on, Van Auken said, the pain of rising rents was one of the first things people talked about when they answered their doors. Local D.S.A. politicians tried to get their neighbors to see “renter” as a political identity; Mamdani made “freeze the rent” a citywide rallying cry.

If Mamdani is elected and secures a rent freeze next year, one of his biggest opponents will be an old friend. Kenny Burgos, who was two years behind Mamdani at Bronx Science, was elected to the Assembly in 2020, and the two sat next to each other in the legislature. Burgos, a Democrat but not a D.S.A. member, shocked many in Albany last year when he gave up his seat to become the C.E.O. of the New York Apartment Association, a lobby group that represents the landlords of rent-stabilized buildings. Like Mamdani, Burgos is fluent in the new political language of social media. Earlier this year, when the N.Y.A.A. contributed two and a half million dollars to a super PAC backing Cuomo in the primary, he texted Mamdani a GIF of Wesley Snipes weeping while shooting his friend, from the movie “New Jack City.” Mamdani gave it a “HA HA” reaction.

Burgos’s members have been making noise since 2019, when tenants’-rights groups in Albany pushed Cuomo to impose stringent regulations on them. “The 2019 rent laws systematically destroyed parts of the real-estate industry,” Jason Haber, a co-founder of the American Real Estate Association and a senior broker at Compass, who has advised an anti-Mamdani super PAC, told me. Old apartment buildings get more expensive to maintain as they age; when rents stay flat, owners can feel squeezed. (Mamdani likes to point out that the Rent Guidelines Board’s most recent data show net operating income for landlords of rent-stabilized buildings up 12.1 per cent in a single year.) Weaver, the tenant organizer, worries that a freeze will prompt landlords to engage in a “capital strike,” in which they withhold updates and repairs to their properties. “Zohran holds the political cards, but landlords are able to create the narrative that the buildings need more money,” she said. “It’s what keeps me up at night.”

Mamdani knows that a rent freeze won’t solve New York’s housing crisis: rent-stabilized units make up only about a quarter of the city’s housing stock. The median rent for an apartment on the open market has topped thirty-five hundred dollars. High-end condos in Manhattan can sell for five thousand dollars a square foot. Some hundred and forty thousand New York City schoolchildren are homeless. Part of Mamdani’s strategy has been to cast the affordability problem as one that affects everyone, even the rich. “This is a crisis that is suffocating many rungs of life,” he told me.“It’s one crisis that has varying levels of intensity, all deeply felt.”

Effectively addressing the problem will require the construction of hundreds of thousands of housing units in a city already stuffed with them, and major help from the state government in Albany, which Mamdani isn’t guaranteed to get. He’s advocated for the city to become more involved in housing construction and development, but he’s also flirted with the rhetoric of “abundance,” and expressed an openness to private development. According to the Times, Mamdani suggested at a meeting with Black executives in July that the rent freeze might not be permanent. (“He has said time and time again that the policy commitment is for four years,” an aide told me.) When I asked Mamdani what was negotiable and what wasn’t, he put up his hands, declining to rule anything out. “I’m not running to punish landlords,” he said. “We know it’s a broken system.”

Many people who knew Mamdani before his run for mayor confessed to some astonishment at the success of his campaign. “Zohran, I think, surprised himself,” Jasmine Gripper, a co-director of the Working Families Party in New York, told me. Several lawmakers who served with Mamdani in Albany have described him as more show pony than workhorse—he got only three bills passed, and one had to do with where beer could be sold within the confines of the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria. Jessica Ramos, a state senator from a nearby district, who also ran for mayor this year, has said, “I wish he was a harder worker.”

Burgos disagreed with that assessment. “He got stuff done,” he told me. Burgos mentioned the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief that Mamdani helped taxi-medallion owners win from City Hall in 2021, in part by going on a fifteen-day hunger strike, and a pilot program that made one bus route in every borough free. “Find me another new Assembly member who got tens of millions of dollars for an individual program,” Burgos said.

Burgos remembered talking to Mamdani after Adams won the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary: “He was, like, ‘Who are we going to get to run against this guy in four years?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ He said, ‘I’m too young, they won’t take me seriously.’ ” Mamdani was then becoming a prominent figure in D.S.A., which had positioned itself against the mainstream Democratic Party. In Albany, Mamdani attended weekly meetings of the Socialists in Office Committee, and he considered himself an ambassador for the organization. “For me, there’s no point in doing this without D.S.A.,” he told the leftist magazine Dissent in 2022.

Since D.S.A. started winning elections in the late twenty-tens, it’s had to confront the challenge of having allies in power. Last year, national D.S.A. leaders withdrew their endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez because she strayed from the organization’s line on Israel. Mamdani has encouraged members to put on the pressure. “It’s a good thing that the rank and file of the organization has been emboldened to make demands of elected officials,” he told Dissent. “We cannot count on our electeds going into these spaces coming out the way they were sent in.”

In the spring of 2023, Mamdani introduced the Not on Our Dime! act, a measure that would prohibit New York nonprofits from sending any money to support illegal settler activity in Gaza and the West Bank. He argued that tens of millions of dollars were passing through local groups to support “violations of international law.” “The leadership came down on it harder than any bill I’d ever seen,” a veteran Democratic state senator told me. “They said it would never get a floor vote.” Dozens of colleagues, including Burgos, signed a letter denouncing Mamdani and his co-sponsors. The bill “was only introduced to antagonize pro-Israel New Yorkers and further sow divisions within the Democratic Party,” the letter said. Burgos spoke with Mamdani shortly afterward. “He said, ‘I’ll never pass another bill in this town again,’ ” Burgos told me.

When I asked Mamdani if he’d thought his career in Albany was over at that point, he shook his head. “I lived through many ends in Albany,” he said. A few months later, the Hamas attacks of October 7th, and the ruptures they immediately produced in the U.S., gave new shape to Mamdani’s politics. On October 13th, he was arrested during a ceasefire demonstration outside Chuck Schumer’s apartment in Park Slope. He conferred with other Muslim leaders who were concerned about Islamophobic backlash in the city, and some of them became part of the brain trust of his mayoral campaign.

“Hey, I’m going to be late. They took down the scaffolding that’s been up since I moved in, and now I have no idea where I am.”

Cartoon by Ellen Liebenthal

That winter, Mamdani was invited by leaders of the Working Families Party to a series of meetings with other elected officials who were considering challenging Eric Adams in the primary. (It’s hard to remember now, but this was before Adams was indicted, before Trump got reëlected, and before Adams and Trump cut a deal.) The W.F.P. was floating the idea of having several candidates run as a collaborative slate, to avoid the infighting that they believed helped Adams win in 2021. The other candidates, for the most part, didn’t know Mamdani or trust D.S.A. “The movement against the war is growing, Zohran is at the center of it, and we thought, He needs to be at the table,” Ana María Archila, the W.F.P.’s other New York co-director, recalled. “I can’t tell you how much resistance there was to his presence.” Meanwhile, some D.S.A.-affiliated officials worried that Mamdani would look like a “spoiler” and hurt the organization’s standing with progressive Democrats. “This is unfair to our project as a whole and could be ruinous,” Emily Gallagher, an Assembly member from Brooklyn, wrote to members of the New York chapter, ahead of a vote on endorsing him.

Mamdani’s campaign began in earnest last fall, after Trump won his second term. Many people’s first encounter with him was a video he posted in November, in which he interviewed Black and brown New Yorkers in working-class neighborhoods about why Trump had done better with their cohort—and why some of them hadn’t voted at all—in 2024. Some talked about food prices and the cost of living; others talked about being demoralized by war. “I like the Democrats, but I don’t like this in Gaza—a lot of people are dying,” a bearded older man said. At a moment when Democrats appeared clueless about social media and out of touch with working-class people, Mamdani came across as curious and undaunted.

So began a campaign that fused blunt political messaging with bighearted moving images—a sensibility not unlike that of Nair’s films. In a video promoting the rent freeze, Mamdani plunged into the frigid waters of Coney Island on New Year’s Day and emerged with his suit and tie sopping; he made late-night visits to halal venders to discuss the rising costs of chicken and rice. In all his videos, an affectionate and softly romantic vision of the city came through. In May, the W.F.P. ranked Mamdani at the top of its slate of endorsements, and though his competitors kept waiting for him to slip, he only kept up his run of deft politicking.

The week before the primary, one of Mamdani’s aides, Julian Gerson, suggested that he walk the length of Manhattan, meeting voters along the way. The rest of the campaign staff thought it was impractical, but Mamdani was taken with it. That Friday night, at dusk, Mamdani set out from Inwood. The resulting video, of a young candidate striding through the city into the early-morning hours, getting cheers everywhere he went, convinced more than a few holdouts that something was happening.

In the summer of 1964, Mahmood Mamdani, then a student at the University of Pittsburgh, took a sightseeing bus trip across America. From Pittsburgh he went to Chicago, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles. He spent a night in Las Vegas and blew some cash at the slot machines. Early the next morning, he boarded a bus bound for Taos, New Mexico, and gazed out the window at the desert as the sun rose. Around noon, he approached the bus driver and asked if it would be possible to pull over for a few minutes, so that he could go outside and pray. “What kind of a religion is that?” the driver asked. “I am a Muslim,” Mahmood replied.

He recounts this story in “Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State,” his latest book on African politics, published this month by Harvard University Press. In Mahmood’s recollection, the bus driver, after being informed of his young passenger’s religion, reached for his microphone. “Folks, we have a Muslim with us,” he said. “He wants to stop for ten minutes so he can pray.”

The driver asked for a show of hands—how many on the bus would be O.K. with an unscheduled stop? Everyone raised a hand. The driver pulled over. When Mahmood got out, the other passengers followed him. They formed a circle around him and watched as he prostrated himself. Then everybody got back on the bus together.

Mahmood told me in an e-mail that he did not feel afraid when the other passengers surrounded him. “I assumed an innocent curiosity on their part,” he wrote. “No one I had met thought that Muslims are naturally inclined to terrorism. . . . The overwhelming belief was that political consciousness was learnt, and taught, through engagement and encounters. Thinking of my fellow travelers in the bus, there was nothing threatening about them, no reason for me to give it a second thought.”

Zohran Mamdani grew up in the world that has emerged since that bus trip. One of his early memories of New York is from after 9/11, when a teacher pulled him aside and said to tell her if anyone tried to make him feel bad about his religion. He was nine. This past summer, Mamdani endured death threats, racist harassment, and accusations of antisemitism. “It takes a toll,” he said, tearing up, at a press conference amid the controversy after the Bulwark podcast. “When I speak, especially when I speak with emotion, I am characterized by those same rivals as being a monster, as being at the gates—language that describes almost a barbarian looking to dismantle civilization.”

The same qualities that make Mamdani a generational figure have already made him a target. “There’s no ‘if’ about it—as soon as Zohran puts his hand on the Quran and is sworn in as the first Muslim mayor of New York, Donald Trump will start firing away,” Gaspard, formerly of the Center for American Progress, said. Bernie Sanders, practically yelling into the phone, reminded me of the repression that has historically kept socialists at the margins of American politics. “There was extraordinary opposition, illegal opposition,” Sanders said. “You know that, right?”

Mamdani spent the summer meeting with people who are trying to assess how much of a break from the past he’ll actually be. Not every Wall Street suit who met Mamdani hated him. “He’s not looking for a government takeover,” one told me, with measured optimism. “I don’t think he’s a socialist.” City Hall veterans have emphasized that, apart from Trump’s incursions, Mamdani’s ability to govern will be defined by the people he surrounds himself with—and that he may have to choose between people who are experienced and people who share his political program. “His circle is small,” a former deputy mayor told me. “He’s going to have to take chances and be prepared to be wrong.”

Mamdani has said that, until the evening of the primary, he had doubts about whether he could win. He spent an hour and a half furiously writing a victory speech after Cuomo called him early that night to concede. Sitting with Mamdani in his living room, as the single window darkened, I got the sense that the feeling of surprise had worn off. It was around 9 P.M. when he nudged me toward the door. “My brother,” he said, slapping his hands on his knees and rising from the sofa. Mamdani’s night wasn’t over. There were more calls with aides, more interviews to prepare for. He took our dishes to the kitchen and started rinsing them in the sink. He was still wearing his tie. ♦