“Uh-mazing.”
That’s how Zosia Tapp described the feeling when her dad called late Tuesday night with the news that Andrew Cuomo had just conceded the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. Tapp, 23, knew that could mean only one thing: Zohran Mamdani was now likely to win in November.
“I wish I had gone out that night to celebrate, because I’d be dancing in the streets right now,” Tapp told me late last week while sitting on a stool outside the tattoo shop where she works in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where Mamdani thumped Cuomo by 27 percentage points. Tapp said she had never voted before when she stepped into a voting booth in nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant and cast her ballot for the socialist. Mamdani, 33, won that neighborhood by 43 percentage points.
“It took someone who openly calls himself a Democratic Socialist to motivate people like me,” Tapp said. “We’re not going to vote for the party of billionaires, for the people shitting on us every day. We want someone who actually speaks for us—and he does.”
Nearly a week after Mamdani blindsided Cuomo and the New York political establishment, those who delivered the biggest political upset in the city’s history sound more determined than ever to help Mamdani triumph again. Those who have the most to lose if he becomes mayor sound just as determined to stop him.