Zohran Mamdani: A Mayor in the Making in New York City
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.”
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Campaign Moments
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.
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.
Personality and Background
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.
Personal Reflections and Background
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.
Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, and Zohran in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. Photograph courtesy Mira Nair
Family and Early Life
Born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991, Zohran Mamdani is the son of filmmaker Mira Nair and scholar Mahmood Mamdani. His early childhood was spent in Uganda’s lush gardens, as Nair’s film "Mississippi Masala" depicted a romance amid the Indian diaspora. As a child, Mamdani was known for his curiosity, nicknamed “Z” and “Nonstop Mamdani.”
His family’s history includes Mahmood Mamdani’s exile from Uganda during Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in 1972, and later academic achievements, including a tenure at Columbia University. Nair met Mahmood during her research for her film about Uganda and India, and their family’s story weaves through revolutionary ideas and personal resilience spanning continents and cultures.
Education and Childhood
Mamdani attended the Bank Street School for Children in New York. A typical childhood included visits to Riverside Park and listening to popular music. During a family trip to Uganda in 2004, he defied stereotypes, protesting his identity at school and asserting his Ugandan roots. His college years at Bowdoin College in Maine featured active engagement in political debates, including advocating for integration and student rights, as well as studies on post-colonial Africa, the Enlightenment, and indigenous issues.
He co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and engaged in debates about Israeli policies. His views on Palestine, shaped by family history and personal experience, became central to his moral outlook, especially after studying and living in South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement. Mamdani’s college years also included cultural exchanges, learning about the interconnectedness of global struggles for justice.
His childhood and educational background laid a foundation for his political activism, which now seeks to address issues of housing, equality, and immigrant rights in New York City.