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Zohran Mamdani Is Breaking Through

By
Liza Featherstone

The 33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani’s laser focus on affordability, smart media strategy, and undeniable charisma have made him a serious challenger for New York City mayor — and a likely fixture in New York politics for a long time to come.

New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on the subway on March 24, 2025, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

When Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a socialist state assemblyman from Queens, launched his campaign for New York City mayor, most political observers were skeptical that he’d get very far. City politics is typically dominated by real estate and finance money, and Mamdani had little name recognition.

And while the organization he is a member of, New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), has seen many of its endorsed candidates win victories in the city and state over the last seven years — the election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, plus three state senators, six state assemblymembers (including Mamdani), and two city council members, as well as policy reforms that include tenant protections and publicly funded renewable energy, all won as part of broader left-progressive coalitions — even most within DSA thought that a campaign for executive power was a heavy lift.

Yet over the last couple months, Mamdani has become a genuine political phenomenon, moving from quixotic noble effort to a transformative event in New York City politics.

His vision is dominating the mayoral primary discourse, and his canvasses are massive. He’s still very much a longshot, but it’s also not impossible that he will win. Indeed, the primary began with many contenders, but is now, as most observers are acknowledging, essentially a two-person race between Mamdani and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

In late February, one poll found that in a crowded primary field, Mamdani was at 12 percent, ahead of sitting mayor Eric Adams (who has since exited the Democratic primary in disgrace over corruption and now plans to run as an independent in November). That poll also placed Mamdani far ahead of any other Democratic contender other than Cuomo.

Also in late February, Mamdani qualified for more than $2.8 million in matching funds from the city, surpassing the haul of any other candidate. The system is set up to reward candidates for raising more campaign funds with small donors, rather than big checks from a privileged few. (The threshold to qualify is $250,000 contributions from at least a thousand discrete donors.) Through this system, candidates can potentially receive eight times the amount they raise in public dollars for their campaign.

Then, in late March, Mamdani hit $8 million in matching funds and announced that he would not be accepting any more donations. The announcement was a flex: it was the fastest any mayoral candidate had ever raised that much, with more donors than any other candidate. Mamdani then clocked in at 16 to 18 percent support in the primaries last month, depending on the poll, with the rest of the primary contestants in single digits.

That support just keeps growing: a few days ago, one poll found Mamdani at 22 percent.

Why has Mamdani broken through the chaotic information system so dramatically and decisively? The answer is a combination of the man, the message, the movement, and the moment.

The man is charismatic in every sense: attractive, funny, smart. Mamdani is earnest about the problems that plague New Yorkers, spontaneously eloquent, and ready to laugh, both at himself (a Valentine’s Day video showing him wooing the public with flowers and dinner) and at his enemies (mocking Andrew Cuomo as an out-of-touch suburbanite afraid to come to the city, even holding a press conference outside Cuomo’s supposed city residence in order, Mamdani deadpanned, to make it more convenient for the former governor to participate).

He’s also, it must be said, good-looking. Mamdani, age thirty-three, isn’t just better-looking than your average politician. He’s so handsome that he upends a popular opposition media tactic: it’s nearly impossible for the right-wing media to find an unflattering photo of him. Even the tabloids can’t manage this with Mamdani: In every New York Post photo, as well as in this new TV ad,  he looks fantastic and is smiling radiantly.

As well, like Bernie Sanders, Mamdani has a gift for speaking to New Yorkers’ material struggles, offering compelling solutions to those struggles, and staying focused on that theme no matter what else comes up.

In every interview, every interaction, every speech, he talks about the cost of living and what he will do to fix it. As the Democrats catastrophically lost a national election in large part for refusing to address or acknowledge that inflation was hurting middle- and working-class Americans, and with Donald Trump set to make matters worse with chaotic, nonsensical trade wars, Mamdani has stayed focused on making New York City affordable to working people.

His proposals for doing so have been simple to explain and firmly in the realm of possibility. He says he would freeze the rent for the city’s approximately one million rent-stabilized apartments immediately, something the mayor has the power to do through the Rent Guidelines Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor. He also promises to make city buses “fast and free” — an idea he piloted on a small scale through a bill in the state legislature that made some lines free, increasing ridership and safety — and to offer universal childcare, an exciting prospect after Eric Adams’s austerity mayoralty, in which childcare was often targeted for deep cuts despite being a crippling household expense for many of the city’s working families.

In a more unusual twist, he’s also proposing the creation of a municipally owned grocery store in each of the five boroughs, to offer a public option for food that he says would be guaranteed cheaper than supermarkets at a time when grocery prices are sky-high and a major burden on families already struggling to survive.

His race also benefits from a political moment in which many are looking for leadership against Trump — and finding it on the Left. Even mainstream Democrats and some Republicans are flocking, in crowds of tens of thousands, in red states, to hear Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” which has energized the grassroots like nothing the national Democratic Party has done in years.

With Trump and Elon Musk trying hard to destroy the best of our society’s institutions, and centrist Democrats seeming to offer so little opposition, the idea that we face a choice between “socialism or barbarism” perhaps does not seem so far-fetched anymore.

That’s one reason why Mamdani has not only attracted small donors and voters, but also volunteers — another factor in his rise from dark horse to contender. Mamdani has over 10,000 volunteers who have already knocked on more than 100,000 doors before most New Yorkers have even started paying attention to the June mayoral primary.

Also fueling Mamdani’s meteoric rise has been the media. First, the mainstream media covers him, because he is interesting, stands out, and looks good. Canvassing for him, as I have been doing, one often hears voters say a version of, “Yes, I saw him on TV, and I liked what he was saying.” Even the right-wing media, like the New York Post, has not only been unable to find an ugly photo of him, they’ve even struggled to carry out their most basic function: find a negative narrative that sticks. The paper comically trawled Mamdani’s high school years and found. . . he didn’t win his school vice president election. When the right-wing tabloid reported, “Socialist mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani pitches 2% tax hike on NYC’s millionaires to raise $10B for freebie-filled agenda,” Mamdani cheerfully shared these stories as part of the positive case for his mayoralty.

Then there’s alternative media. His easy sense of humor and ability to think on his feet and get weird made him a natural on megapopular socialist streamer Hasan Piker’s Twitch channel, in which the two talked for hours about renters’ rights, socialism, and whether “Indians are the Italians of Asia.”

And when he was ambushed by Crackhead Barney, a local eccentric YouTuber famous and infamous for her aggressive ambush interviews, who asked him all kinds of questions most politicians would never want to answer unprepared (“You’re from Africa, why don’t you identify as African American?” “Where are you in the caste system?”), he stuck to his affordability message when he could and otherwise laughed genuinely at himself and along with his gonzo-journalist interlocutor.

As well, like Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Jamaal Bowman, the Mamdani campaign has excelled at making its own media. Early in the campaign, finding that some working-class zip codes swung for Trump, Mamdani went out and talked with voters on the street about why, pitching his own candidacy but also seeming to listen genuinely to their reasons.

Another video released Friday showed the candidate, dressed in a suit, as if ready for City Hall, explaining that his candidacy has caught fire because his policies are popular.

Sitting in a bus shelter, he explains that two-thirds of New Yorkers support his plan for city-owned grocery stores, while three-fourths support making buses free. Crossing the street, he recounts his accomplishment in the Assembly in winning a free bus pilot, and its success in increasing ridership and reducing rates of violence against drivers. In front of a city park blooming with daffodils, he reports that 80 percent of New Yorkers support his plan to freeze the rent.

“Politics isn’t always that complicated,” Mamdani says in the video, walking down the street, observing that his campaign is succeeding because “we’re fighting for everyday New Yorkers.”

Mamdani’s success shows that the rightward turn in New York City is nothing natural or inevitable, but that a left movement and an electorate excited about left policy ideas can be organized into being. Mamdani is beating expectations and becoming a significant force in city politics. Whatever happens in this race, their future in New York politics looks bright.