It was the hottest day in New York City in over a decade on June 24. Yet the streets everywhere — from Jamaica and Jackson Heights in Queens to Kensington and Park Slope in Brooklyn — were lined with campaign workers, volunteers and even elected officials urging voters to cast their ballots, up until five minutes before the polls closed at 9 p.m. Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist and state assembly member from Astoria, Queens, was poised to challenge Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York and candidate of the Democratic Party establishment. Cuomo had been the front-runner for most of the race, but in the final days, polls showed Mamdani narrowing the lead down to a 1% margin.
Despite an unprecedented spike in early voting — the number of voters across Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan who cast their ballots before election day more than doubled compared to the city’s last mayoral election in 2021 — media outlets and pundits on social media were busy downplaying expectations by emphasizing that it could take days, possibly until July 1, for the results to be revealed.
Yet it was barely 90 minutes after the polls had closed when Cuomo — whom The New York Times had predicted up until last week would win the election by 10 points — conceded to Mamdani. It was a moment many in New York (and beyond) were waiting for, but that no one knew would come so quickly. “Is he really going to win?” seemed the unifying sentiment for many New Yorkers, both online and in real life.
Mamdani did not take the stage at his watch party in Long Island City, Queens, until well after midnight. In a 20-minute victory speech, he reaffirmed his promise to provide a stable life to all New Yorkers and vowed to “reject Donald Trump’s fascism [and] to stop masked ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents from deporting our neighbors.”
Mamdani’s grassroots campaign, which was powered by close to 50,000 volunteers who knocked on 1.5 million doors in New York City over eight months — many of them woke at dawn to arrive at polling sites before they opened their doors at 6 a.m. and stayed there until after 9 p.m., braving the 100-degree heat — defied the odds and achieved what until recently was deemed impossible.
Except, if you followed the campaign closely, it became increasingly clear, especially over the last few days, that Mamdani was going to win this race. Whether in the reactions of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to get a single photo with him; the endorsement by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that came at just the right time in early June, when the campaign had begun to peak; the nod from Sen. Bernie Sanders that followed soon after; the hypnotic clarity of Mamdani’s speeches and their effect on crowds; or the electric charge he carried with him wherever he went, one thing became impossible to miss: This was someone with undeniable star power.
Even as his main opponent, Cuomo, strained to maintain an unflappable exterior, his press conferences with blown-up images of Mamdani’s tweets from 2020 and efforts to discredit polls that showed Mamdani in the lead did not exactly project the confidence of someone who saw himself winning. Mamdani, by contrast, who talked repeatedly about “being days away from making history,” did.
I attended a watch party for another candidate in the primary, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He was in the middle of a speech in which he had, moments earlier, said, “good fucking riddance” to Cuomo when a staffer came and whispered the news into his ear. Although he had already hinted at the likelihood of a Mamdani win, when he uttered the words “Andrew Cuomo has conceded,” the room erupted in raucous cheers, despite the fact that their candidate, Lander, had not won the election. Lander then left to attend the victory party for Mamdani.
It would be unusual for the watch party of a third-place candidate to be as joyful and celebratory as it was, with genuine euphoria in the room, if Lander had not run the campaign that he had for the past several months. Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani on June 13 (a peculiar feature of ranked-choice voting — both candidates asked their voters to rank the other at number two), gained massive visibility late in the race after making national headlines on June 17 when ICE officers arrested him at the federal court in Brooklyn for linking arms with an immigrant who was being arrested, refusing to let go while asking for a judicial warrant. Days later, Lander received a resounding boost when a panel of 15 New York Times opinion experts picked him as their top choice to run the city.
It became evident that Lander, who had run on a strong “No Cuomo” message, had made a calculation that would lead him to support Mamdani’s candidacy even above his own. In the final stretch, the Lander campaign ran ads about Cuomo cutting funding for Medicaid and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and sexually harassing multiple women, without mentioning Lander’s own name until the end. Another mayoral candidate, Zellnor Myrie, spent $100,000 on similar ads on Black radio stations that ran twice per hour on the day of the election.
In Mamdani and Lander’s recent joint appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Lander made a case for Mamdani on national television while Mamdani acknowledged Lander’s contribution as a principled and progressive leader in the city. When Islamophobic attacks on New York City’s first Muslim and South Asian mayoral candidate surged in the days leading up to the election, Lander not only condemned them forcefully but also shielded Mamdani from charges of antisemitism by stressing Jewish and Muslim unity. “I’m proud as a Jewish New Yorker to be on that slate alongside a Muslim New Yorker,” Lander said at a rally of the Working Families Party, which had endorsed both Mamdani and Lander for mayor. “Jewish New Yorkers and Muslim New Yorkers are not going to be divided,” Lander said in a statement that he repeated in his watch party speech.
As numbers from ranked-choice voting continue to trickle in over the next few days, the bump from Lander’s second-choice voters will become clearer. But an election that was predicted to stretch over days instead wrapped up in less than two hours, because Mamdani ran the kind of campaign unseen in the recent history of New York City.
As a democratic socialist who was repeatedly dismissed by Cuomo and his supporters, and also The New York Times, for lacking “enough experience,” despite being a current state assembly member, and as a Muslim candidate who faced significant death threats throughout his campaign, not to mention the more than $25 million that pro-Cuomo super PACs and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg collectively spent to stop him, it seemed impossible until Tuesday that Mamdani would go on to win the election by a significant margin. As the race ramped up, increased threats of violence forced Mamdani to hire additional security and led the New York Police Department to launch investigations into these threats as hate crimes.
Mamdani’s win not only toppled what his supporters have called the “Cuomo dynasty” (referring to his father Mario Cuomo’s three-term reign as New York governor in the 1980s and early ’90s) but also made space for working-class New Yorkers who have been disproportionately forced to exit the city due to unaffordability and rising costs. Mamdani’s focus on affordability eclipsed Cuomo’s campaign, which seemed unbeatable until only a few weeks ago, and took the Democratic establishment, which has remained intent on dismissing any progressive policies in order to reach out to “middle-issue voters,” completely by surprise.
Much has already been written about Mamdani’s colossal volunteer-led campaign, which liberated many New Yorkers from doomscrolling and despair and offered them the community many crave, along with his social media strategy — he spoke directly to voters through slickly produced videos to keep them abreast of his campaign, often multiple times a day. Although his detractors dismissed his online efforts as “surface-level” — the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein called his messaging “tight memetic packages” and questioned the attainability of his “freeze the rent” and “fast and free buses” policies — Mamdani’s policy platform has remained consistent from the beginning.
His singular ability to tap into the individual cross sections of New York neighborhoods is also noteworthy. In the last week alone, Mamdani appeared at a gathering for Yemeni Americans in Bay Ridge, spoke at a rally in Williamsburg’s Los Sures neighborhood with Puerto Rican Rep. Nydia Velázquez and walked in uptown Manhattan with the Dominican progressive council member Carmen De La Rosa a day before the polls. Mamdani’s extensive outreach with the Hasidic Jewish community (his Yiddish-language posters were spotted in Borough Park) and in-depth interviews with Yiddish-language publications were considered unprecedented in the New York mayoral race.
When he launched his campaign in October, just days before the presidential election, Mamdani was polling at 1.1% — a detail he has repeatedly invoked over the past few days in his speeches. Cuomo was confident that he could beat Mamdani easily. At the time, Mamdani was scarcely known beyond his local district. Even until late May, when I interviewed several people, many voters did not know who he was or that he was running for election.
“We knew we would get here” has since become an axiom within the Mamdani campaign, but there were only a few South Asian and Asian American organizations, like Drum BEATS and CAAAV Voice, that believed in his campaign from day one and had endorsed it at the time of its launch in October. It was also in significant part because of the efforts of these groups that Mamdani was able to flip the heavily Asian-American districts that leaned Republican in November to vote for him on Tuesday. The Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens, which has a 31% Asian-American population and, according to The New York Times, saw a 35% increase in vote share for Trump over 2020, chose Mamdani by 51%. Meanwhile, neighboring Woodhaven, which is 20% Asian-American and saw votes for Trump increase by 46%, voted 49% for Mamdani. Similarly, in Elmhurst, which is 48% Asian and saw a 30% increase for Trump, Mamdani got 56% of the votes.
In the days leading up to the election, Mamdani also made daily appearances in many of these neighborhoods, along with other parts of the city, addressing New Yorkers in Bangla, Urdu and Punjabi at rallies and visiting faith leaders in mosques and gurdwaras (Sikh temples). If there was any indication that Mamdani would win these neighborhoods, it was that, almost everywhere he went, he received a rock star welcome, as Sikh, Pakistani and Bangladeshi New Yorkers teemed around him to take photos, many showing up disappointed long after he had left, having seen their friends post “Zohran selfies” on Instagram.
It was likely a result of this Herculean effort to traverse multiple boroughs on the same day to meet different communities across various neighborhoods that allowed voters to know him better than they had known most political candidates. The Mamdani magic was evident when, on the Friday before election day, he decided to walk the length of Manhattan, starting from Inwood in uptown Manhattan at 7 p.m. and ending at Battery Park downtown at 2:20 a.m. New Yorkers in Times Square and the Lower East Side, eating in restaurants or sitting in cars, rushed to take selfies, greet or shake hands with a candidate who, in the midst of a uniquely despondent period in the city, had managed to galvanize people with positivity, authenticity and the word that has long become anathema in political circles: hope.
At a rally in Brooklyn on Sunday, Attorney General Letitia James talked about “this level of energy and enthusiasm that I have not seen since the days of ‘change,’” referring to President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. Many others have compared Mamdani’s campaign to that of Ocasio-Cortez, who had similarly run an upstart campaign against outsize funding from the Democratic establishment to stop her congressional election in 2018.
If there is one takeaway from this race, it is that Mamdani represents a new kind of politician. He has stayed rooted in his connection with working-class voters and has not compromised on his stance on Gaza or dismissed voters who initially disagreed with him. His primary victory has already reshaped the electoral map of New York City, while signaling deeper shifts within the Democratic Party. While he still has to win the general mayoral election in November, the celebrations that have erupted all over the city since Tuesday night suggest that, for now, the politics of hope may be finding new momentum.
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