A Young Socialist Wants to Run NYC. Could He Win?By Olivia Reingold
https://www.thefp.com/p/socialist-mayor-new-york-zohran-mamdani?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Zohran Mamdani vows to spend billions subsidizing buses, housing, and grocery stores. He says he’ll arrest the Israeli PM if he ever steps foot in NYC. And he’s surging in the polls.
Unless you follow New York politics like a hawk, chances are you’ve never heard of Zohran Kwame Mamdani. The 33-year-old socialist is one of the youngest candidates to ever seek the mayorship of New York City. If he wins, he wants to turn the Big Apple into a Havana on the Hudson with free buses, government-run grocery stores, and no more rent hikes for millions.
“It is socialism that we are fighting for,” he told an online audience in 2021.
In a city where 61 percent of residents say they’re struggling to meet their basic needs, Mamdani is gaining traction by vowing to “lower the cost of living” in New York City. His housing plan, one of his ideas on how to make New York more affordable, costs $100 billion, only slightly less than the entire size of this year’s city budget. That’s on top of the $7 billion his other agenda items would cost, including $800 million for free buses, $1.1 billion to build a new Department of Community Safety, and $5 billion funding free childcare for all kids ages 6 weeks to 5 years.
Mamdani is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that advocates abolishing prisons, granting voting rights to some “noncitizens,” ending “Israeli apartheid,” and establishing “a democratic secular state, from the river to the sea.” He has even said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister ever stepped foot in New York to prove “our values are in line with international law.”
Mamdani has also attended rallies held by Within Our Lifetime, a radical anti-Israel group that has been denounced by other progressives, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for protesting an exhibit dedicated to victims of October 7, 2023, the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead. As the group reportedly chanted “kill another Zionist now” outside the exhibit, survivors inside gave testimony about the horror.
When asked twice to clarify his relationship to the group, the Mamdani campaign did not provide comment to The Free Press.
Six years ago, Mamdani was a total unknown, working as a foreclosure prevention counselor for Chhaya, a nonprofit focused on the “well-being of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City.” That year, only one year after moving to Astoria, Queens, from the Upper West Side, he decided to run in the 2020 election for his new neighborhood’s seat in the New York State Assembly.
“It was definitely a bit of a radicalizing experience, although I was already kind of a radical by that point,” Mamdani said about working as a housing counselor.
In July 2020, after an internal tally showed him winning the Democratic primary for the assembly seat by more than 300 votes, he posted a victory message on X: “Socialism won.”
As a state assemblymember he has focused on penalizing charities “engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement” in the West Bank and ensuring Middle Eastern and North African people are no longer characterized as “white” in New York state data—the kind of niche issues that speak to a narrow constituency, not a winning message for governing the 8.5 million people of New York City.
“You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.” —Zohran Mamdani, on being hired by his mother, award-winning director Mira Nair, to work on her film “Queen of Katwe”
Normally, he’d be a kind of “curiosity” candidate, like the guy who said, “The rent is too damn high.” But Mamdani is currently polling in second place after former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He has also outraised all the competition, Cuomo included, and recently announced he is the first mayoral candidate to reach the $8 million cap. A longtime Democratic strategist, noting Mamdani’s charisma and knack for going viral, recently told me: “I think he’s going to win.”
Trip Yang, a top Democratic strategist, said Mamdani is “tracking toward a top two finish,” meaning first or second place.
“For a 33-year-old assemblymember to do that well, even if he loses the mayor’s race, he’s still won,” Yang said, adding that the race will only increase his name recognition and fundraising power.
If that’s true, I figured I should find out who Mamdani really is. So I spent a week speaking to at least a dozen of his former classmates, roommates, and professors to learn about his past, his current positions—and how he might change New York’s future.
As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani styles himself as a man of the people. When he threw his hat in the race last October, he told an audience that New York City is now the “wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” adding that it had become “unlivable for the working class who built it.”
“We all want more money in our pocket, more dignity in our lives,” he told the crowd.
As a 2020 candidate for the New York State Assembly, he declared on his campaign website that he spent “more than half of my paycheck on rent, just like a quarter of my neighbors.”
“Yet our landlords can refuse to renew our leases, evict us without good cause, and raise our rents whenever they like, to prices we can’t afford to pay,” he wrote on his site.
But, while blasting the richest of the rich, Mamdani himself is also a product of privilege who spouts the luxury beliefs of the upper crust.
Born in Uganda, Mamdani moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of 7 and became a U.S. citizen in 2018. The son of a Columbia University scholar and an award-winning film director, he grew up in a faculty apartment in an elegant building on Riverside Drive, and attended the hyper-progressive Bank Street School for Children, a pre-K through eighth grade institution that currently charges as much as $66,147 per year in tuition and has taught that white students are born racist. Although he describes himself as a “graduate of the NYC public school system,” he didn’t attend any old public high school. His alma mater is the Bronx High School of Science, an elite institution that tens of thousands of students vie to get into each year. In 2014, he graduated from Bowdoin College, an $86,000-a-year private school, with a degree in Africana Studies.
After college, he pursued a career in music, going under the names Zohran Kwame, Mr. Cardamom, and Young Cardamom. One of his tracks from 2017, “Salaam,” he said, is about “being Muslim in America.”
Babies ID’d as terrorists / All a flight risk now, we suspicious, Mamdani sings in that tune.
In a radio interview from 2016 to promote his new single, “Wabula Naawe,” he spoke in what appeared to be an East African accent, claiming he was on a “worldwide tour.” In 2019, actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey performed a rap song he wrote, “Nani,” in a music video.
Mamdani’s mother is the Indian-born film director Mira Nair. For her 2016 movie, Queen of Katwe, which had a $15 million budget, Mamdani was hired as third assistant director, in addition to curating the music. During his stop in South Africa for the movie’s Johannesburg premiere, he once again appeared to mimic an African accent. And he joked about working for Katwe’s director: “I actually created a playlist for Mira, who also happens to be my mother. You know, nepotism and hard work—goes a long way.”
In June 2020, he seemed to use a South Asian accent in an interview on the Turkish American National Steering Committee’s YouTube channel. “I’ll be honest with you, brother,” he said about housing prices. “Not many people are thinking about it. But prior to this pandemic, it was on people’s minds.”
When asked about the candidate’s various accents, spokesperson Andrew Epstein replied, “When you grow up in three different countries with a parent from a fourth, this is very common.”
A former classmate of his at Bowdoin told me he used to be confused by students like Mamdani, but once he learned his backstory, it all made sense.
The former student told me that, unlike Mamdani, he had been one of the “financial aid kids” at Bowdoin. Mamdani, meanwhile, belonged to a different camp: the “very articulate people.”
“I always thought in the back of my mind, How the fuck are these kids so articulate? I don’t understand it,” said the student. “Then when you see the names of where they came from, you’re like, Oh, they probably learned it from the dinner table.”
“Most of the loudest voices on campus were not independent thinkers,” said the student. “They were the sons and daughters of very powerful people.”
(The student declined to be named in this piece, telling me, “I’m not going to be a shit-slinging dude who says this guy’s a dirtbag, because I don’t believe that to be true, but I do think there was nuance that was much overlooked to grow a career based on this stuff.”)
Mamdani’s mother, Nair, found international fame with her Indian film Monsoon Wedding, which was an American box office success in 2002. She is also a Harvard graduate whose father was a “high-ranking civil servant in charge of several ministries” in India, according to a 2000 New Yorker profile. In 2004, a New York Times Magazine reporter asked Nair if she thought the U.S. was “a force for good.”
“No,” she replied. “Islamophobia has completely raged in the Western world since 9/11.”
His father, meanwhile, is Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia professor of anthropology slated to teach a course this fall on “Settlers and Natives,” which uses Israel and Palestine as an example of “settler-native relations.” When I sat down with Mahmood in November 2023 on Columbia’s campus to discuss rising antisemitism across the Ivy League, he told me, “There’s nothing wrong” with describing October 7 as a “military action.”
In April 2024, Mahmood participated in Columbia’s notorious anti-Israel encampment, leading a teach-in for students on the “historical context from South Africa’s apartheid era and campus protests of the time,” according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
About his parents, Zohran Mamdani has said, “These are people to whom I owe everything—not simply the person that I am, but the thoughts that I have.”
That’s certainly true on the topic of Israel.
At Bowdoin, Mamdani co-founded the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel group whose national arm would later call October 7 a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Soon after, he led calls for “an academic boycott,” protesting collaboration between Bowdoin and any universities in Israel. “We can’t privilege Israeli academic freedom over Palestinian human rights,” Mamdani told The Bowdoin Orient when he was a senior in 2014.
During the 2012 war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel, a Bowdoin alumnus who was active in J Street U—a progressive pro-Israel group on campus—told me that Mamdani allowed SJP to meet with his organization for a “productive discussion.” But then Zohran and his co-founder instituted a policy of “non-normalization,” he said. In other words, all engagement with pro-Israel groups was off the table.
“We were pretty disappointed because we thought we were actually getting somewhere,” the alumnus said. “And then they axed it.”
Another former classmate told me he asked Mamdani if he would help organize a music festival between SJP and J Street U. “He was very flippantly like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ And at the time, I was like, ‘Wow, what an asshole.’ ”
When asked if he believes Israel has a right to exist, Mamdani replied via email: “My view of Israel and Palestine has always been driven by a commitment to the universal application of human rights, international law, and the freedom of all people, without exception.”
I followed up with Mamdani, asking him to answer the question of whether or not Israel has a right to exist with a simple yes or no. Instead, a spokesperson replied, “Zohran has consistently recognized the state of Israel as well as its responsibilities under international law and the laws of war.”
Later, after this story was published, I got a phone call from the campaign, with a new answer. It was: “yes.”
Like many members of the Democratic Socialists of America, which Mamdani has been involved with since at least 2017, he is highly educated, highly connected, and full of the same opinions: Israel = bad; taxes = good; landlords = bad; socialism = good.
Congressman Ritchie Torres, whose district is in the Bronx, told me that, in his quest for Gracie Mansion, Mamdani is trying to push a “sanitized version” of the DSA’s radical platform, which includes extending “voting rights to noncitizens,” “the abolition of police and prisons,” and “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure.”
In 2018, the DSA struck lightning by helping elect an unknown bartender by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the halls of Congress. Torres said the public should not “underestimate” their odds of victory again—which is why he became the first major lawmaker to endorse Cuomo last February before the ex-governor had even entered the race.
“It’s one thing to have a member of Congress elected,” Torres told me. “It’s another to have the executive office of the largest city in the United States—it’s the holy grail. The stakes are extraordinarily high.”
DSA’s New York chapter has a plan to get Zohran elected. It’s literally titled “The Strategy That Can Help Elect Zohran Mamdani Mayor.” The guide encourages readers to think of Zohran’s candidacy as an opportunity to spread their “socialist gospel of transformational change.” Part of Zohran’s “multiracial working class coalition,” according to the guide, includes “individuals radicalized by the genocide in Gaza.”
The campaign has also run a viral communications strategy that puts Cuomo—who one political strategist called a “dinosaur”—to shame. In March, Mamdani was the talk of Bluesky when he confronted Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar, in the halls of the New York State Capitol after former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE. “How many more New Yorkers will you detain?” he yelled while charging at a wall of police.
“He’s entirely anti-Israel, antisemitic, anti-development, anti-rich—and that’s pretty good for a guy who’s never had a tough day in his life.” —Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf
Mamdani has also created Valentine’s Day–themed content to encourage socialists to register as Democrats. His own valentine is his wife, Syrian illustrator and animator Rama Duwaji, an artist who produces Palestine-inspired drawings.
“I’m not going to lie, things are dark right now in NYC,” Duwaji, who previously lived in Dubai, recently told an outlet called Yung. “All I can do is use my voice to speak out about what’s happening in the U.S. and Palestine and Syria as much as I can.”
Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist once employed by former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, told me Mamdani is “perfect for the DSA.”
“He’s just their kind of guy,” he told me. “He’s everything they want. He’s entirely anti-Israel, antisemitic, anti-development, anti-rich—and that’s pretty good for a guy who’s never had a tough day in his life.”
Brian Purnell, the chair of the Africana Studies Department at Bowdoin, told me he had a “spirited discussion” about Israel and Palestine with Mamdani when he was in college, focusing on “the necessity of violence in anticolonial struggle.”
“The conversation went all over the place,” Purnell said. “We talked about the theory. Why was [Frantz] Fanon saying this, especially about the need of colonized people to liberate themselves completely?” he said, referencing the Francophone decolonialist thinker. “And then we somehow got to the topic of Israel and Palestine, and I was pushing back a bit against the wholesale endorsement of the benefits of violence.”
Purnell said the last time he saw Mamdani—before he declared his run for mayor this past October—the topic of the attacks of October 7, 2023, came up.
“We reached an impasse on where the criticism should lie,” Purnell told me. “Should the criticism be on Hamas and the actions of October 7, or should it be on Israel? I wouldn’t call it a debate, but we definitely thought differently about it.”
Purnell called October 7 a “catastrophe” and said he supports a two-state solution. He was critical of views held by students in Students for Justice in Palestine, which he briefly advised at Bowdoin.
“I never fully agreed with—how would I put it?—the direct endorsement of violence against Israelis,” Purnell told me.
Mamdani’s latest plan—yet another vision with a large sticker price—is his commitment to building a $1.1 billion “Department of Community Safety,” an alternative to policing, which is intended to prevent “hate violence from occurring” and will combat “rising antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism, anti-Asian hate crimes, and LGBTQ+ hate.” These hate prevention programs, he says, will require more cash: He is projecting a $26 million cost up from $3 million—an “800 percent” bump.
“Some would say it’s political suicide, but he’s clear, he’s honest, and he’ll articulate his position.” —Brian Purnell, who taught Mamdani at Bowdoin, on his radical stances
Purnell said he follows the Mamdani campaign’s growing online presence, and he recently caught wind of the candidate’s public safety plan.
“It’s very smart,” he said of the agency Mamdani aspires to build. And of Mamdani’s approach on potentially controversial subjects, like Palestine, Purnell said: “Some would say it’s political suicide, but he’s clear, he’s honest, and he’ll articulate his position.”
Despite their disagreements on the Middle East, Purnell recalled Mamdani fondly, calling him “charismatic,” “funny,” and “respectful” to those with differing opinions.
By this point, Purnell and I had been on the phone for nearly two hours. I asked: If he lived in New York City, would Mamdani get his vote?
Without hesitation, Purnell replied, “Yes, absolutely.”
“Zohran Mamdani could save the city.”
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