It won’t be official until next week, but Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist endorsed by progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has toppled the scandal-plagued former governor and Democratic establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo and won New York City’s mayoral primary.
A New York state assemblyman based in Queens since 2020, Mamdani ran for mayor on a campaign emphasizing making the city more affordable — promoting free city buses, apartment rent freezes, 200,000 more affordable housing units, city-owned grocery stores and public child care.
While Cuomo seemed to have shaken off a sexual harassment scandal and led in polling for much of the campaign, Mamdani surged ahead in recent weeks, appealing to young, working class and left-of-center voters, who got to know him through savvy social media posts, some featuring Bollywood style antics in the streets of the city reflecting his multinational background.
Born in Kampala, Uganda, Mamdani is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a central African anthropologist and political scientist of Indian origin, and Mira Nair, a prominent Indian filmmaker. His father chose his middle name, Kwame, to honor Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first post-independence president.
Mamdani spent the first seven years of his life in Africa, including in Cape Town, South Africa, where his father (now a professor at Columbia University) worked as an African studies professor.
At age 7 he moved with his family to New York, where he grew up on the Upper West Side. After graduating from the private Bank Street School in 8th grade, he attended Bronx High School of Science, then in 2014 earned a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine.
He was naturalized as an American citizen in 2018.
Before he got involved in politics, Mamdani worked as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor, helping low-income, mostly non-white homeowners in Queens fight off eviction and stay in their homes. He says it was this job that led him to run for office.
“After having spent every day negotiating with banks that valued profits over people,” Mamdani said, he “came face-to-face with the reality that this housing crisis – one which predated this pandemic – was not natural to our lives, but instead a choice … that was the consequence of decades of pro-corporate policies enacted across our country as well as our state.”
He has advocated for public housing reform as a state representative and co-sponsored a bill to create the Social Housing Development Authority that would work to increase the supply of permanently affordable housing in the state through building new homes and rehabilitating existing properties.
Mamdani was also an aspiring hip-hop musician in his 20s. In 2016, under the rap moniker Young Cardamom, he collaborated with Ugandan rapper HAB on an EP titled “Sidda Mukyaalo,” which is Luganda for “No going back to the village,” reported OkayAfrica.
In 2019, he released a single titled “Nani” under the moniker Mr. Cardamom to honor his grandmother, a social worker and influential mentor. It features veteran actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey (then in her late 80s) rapping across New York City while acting as his grandmother, at one point playfully slapping him for being impudent.
Some of those videos resurfaced during the campaign, delighting voters and social media commentators, such as Eric Hovagim, who credits Mamdani for winning over the city’s international residents by speaking in both Spanish and Urdu about kitchen table issues, as well as for his tongue-in-cheek, Bollywood-style political ads explaining how ranked choice voting works and why people should vote for him.
In one video, Mamdani explored “halalflation,” or the rise in the cost of a plate of halal chicken and rice at street vendor kiosks, caused by skyrocketing permit fees for vendors. He pledged to work with the city council to on a package of street vendor reform bills.
Mamdani also made the rounds on influential radio shows such as “The Breakfast Club” with Charlamagne Tha God, where he made the case for defeating Cuomo, the heir of a political dynasty “whose [$25 million] Super PAC is funded in large part by the super billionaires who put Donald Trump back in the White House.”
Warning that Trump will use federal funds “as leverage over New York City,” Mamdani said he planned to raise $10 billion by increasing corporate taxes “to pay for our economic agenda and to start to Trump-proof our city.” He also proposed taxing the top 1 percent of New Yorkers, those making $1 million or more.
He said his plan to curb crime and reform the police department would not defund the police but shift funds in a way to allow police officers now straining from forced overtime shifts “to focus on the job they signed up for,” not the additional jobs they’re asked to do, such as serving as mental health professionals and social workers.
Mamdani has also courted some controversy with his unapologetically pro-Palestinian stance, which has included criticizing Israel for engaging in war crimes and genocide against Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas terror attacks in Israel in 2023.
Cuomo and Republican allies of Trump have accused him of anti-Semitism, but Mamdani has emphatically denied those accusations. He has been defended by a long list of Jewish supporters, including Brad Lander, the city comptroller and the other progressive candidate in the mayoral race, who cross-endorsed Mamdani in the primary, The New York Times reported.
Mamdani also won the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, who told The New York Times, “Assemblymember Mamdani has demonstrated a real ability on the ground to put together a coalition of working-class New Yorkers that is strongest to lead the pack. In the final stretch of the race, we need to get very real about that.”
Earliest this month he got the nod from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has been pulling in huge crowds across the country along with Ocasio-Cortez during their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Sanders said in a statement that Mamdani was running an “inspirational” campaign and was a “visionary” leader, and praised his plan to tax the wealthy
With 93 percent of polls reporting, Gothamist reported on Thursday that Mamdani had won 44 percent of ballots to Cuomo’s 36 percent in the first round of counting in the city’s ranked-choice vote, all but guaranteeing his upset victory in the nation’s most populous city.
Without a majority of votes, the contest still must be decided by the ranked-choice tally on July 1. But Cuomo conceded the primary race on Tuesday, telling his supporters that he’d called Mamdani to congratulate him.
Mamdani declared victory just after midnight, telling a raucous crowd of supporters at his Long Island City watch party, “Tonight, we made history. In the words of Nelson Mandela: ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’”
“We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford,” he continued, “a city where they can do more than just struggle, where hard work is repaid with a stable life, where eight hours on the factory floor or behind the wheel of a cab is enough to pay the mortgage, is enough to keep the lights on, is enough to send your kids to school. … And it’s where the mayor will use their power to reject Donald Trump’s fascism, to stop mass ICE agents from deporting our neighbors and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.”
If elected in November, Mamdani would be the first Muslim and Asian American mayor.
He’ll be running against the embattled incumbent, Mayor Eric Adams, whose political career was revived by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice decision in February to drop corruption charges against him. Adams is running as an independent, as is Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor. The general election will also include Republican Curtis Sliwa, a longtime New York City radio broadcaster and social activist.
Cuomo could also jump back into the race as a wild-card candidate, having qualified to run as an independent in the general election, though he has not confirmed he will do so.
