We know the how. Zohran Mamdani ran an astonishingly powerful and effective campaign. Against a field of aging hacks, earnest nerds, and Paperboy Love Prince, he emerged as New York City’s hipster prom king, dominating TikTok and sparking a grassroots youth movement that knocked on more than 1 million doors across the five boroughs, from charming bungalows in Queens to tiny walk-up apartments in Washington Heights to chic Brooklyn brownstones.
Yes, one could say that the artist formerly known as Young Cardamom is a bourgeois bohemian failson who—until now!—accomplished virtually nothing in his first 33 years on this planet. But you can’t deny that Mamdani built an army of savvy political operatives; raised so much money under the city’s Byzantine campaign finance rules that he had his cadres donate to other campaigns; seduced the Abundance Bros; convinced his more experienced rival Brad Lander to become his hype man; and outhustled and out-strategized his more experienced opponents every single day.
That still doesn’t explain why Mamdani—a self-described socialist who wants the government to run grocery stores—was the first choice of over 430,000 voters in the city’s ranked-choice Democratic mayoral primary, most of whom came to the polls in the midst of a historic heat wave. By way of comparison, there were 437,517 ballots cast in the city’s 2017 Democratic primary for all of the candidates combined. It also doesn’t explain why so many New Yorkers who see native son Donald Trump as a loudmouthed snake-oil salesman rallied behind a bombastic publicity-hound populist who promised them the moon.
Getting the why right is crucial. If you’re hoping a Mamdani mayoral victory is the first step on the road to building Havana-on-the-Hudson, you should be careful not to get too high on your own supply. And if you believe Mamdani is wildly unfit to take on what former mayor John Lindsay dubbed “the second toughest job in America,” you need to understand the hopes, anxieties, and resentments driving his coalition.
Here are some of the reasons behind Mamdani’s stunning success.