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A life in politics may have seemed inevitable for Zohran Mamdani. His parents—the renowned scholar Mahmood Mamdani and the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair—always treated politics as a natural and celebrated part of life. Zohran once attended one of his father’s academic debates, telling his classmates that he was at a “rock concert.” His own place within the political landscape, though, would be years in the making.
Upon graduating from Bowdoin College in 2014, Mamdani returned to New York City, where his family had made a home after living in Uganda and South Africa. One day, he opened the Village Voice to read that one of his favorite rappers, Heems, was endorsing his childhood friend, Ali Najmi, for City Council. Mamdani, who was excited about the prospect of both “representation and political kinship,” immediately began knocking on doors and making calls on behalf of the hopeful.
A year later, Bernie Sanders’s paradigm-shifting run for president in 2016 gave Mamdani the political language for his principles and an introduction to Democratic Socialism, as it did for thousands of others. He went to work on a series of socialist campaigns, including that of the Palestinian Lutheran Minister Khader El-Yateem, a City Council run he marks as “the beginning of Muslim and Arab people establishing themselves in the political fabric of the city,” before deciding to run for an Assembly seat himself. In 2020, he won, becoming the first South Asian, alongside Jenifer Rajkumar, to represent New York City in the state legislature.
Now fluent in the politics of fighting for the working class, Mamdani is bringing a career-long commitment to socialist principles to his run for mayor of New York City. His platform includes a number of ambitious policies, like rent freezes for the rent stabilized, fast and free buses, city-owned grocery stores, free childcare, and a $30 minimum wage. He also hopes to use his “pulpit” to relay a clear, consistent, and courageous approach to politics.
“I’m excited at the prospect of us using that platform in New York City to showcase what it looks like to fight for working people,” he told me at a canvassing event on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library in January, attended by some 400 volunteers. On the campaign trail, he draws a stark contrast between himself and the current occupant of Gracie Mansion. Eric Adams, he said, “fearmonger[s] at every possible opportunity, and pit[s] working-class people against themselves, while absolving any of the individuals and institutions that are making an incredible amount of money over that same despair.”
The volunteers at the canvassing event told me they were drawn to Mamdani’s honesty and pragmatism. Ramzi Saud, a Palestinian and Brooklyn resident, said he came out to knock on doors for him because “he’s the only pro-Palestine candidate on the mayoral ticket in New York,” and because of his position on freezing rent for the rent-stabilized. “What will it hurt to at least give someone who is at least outspoken a chance?”
In a race now crowded with Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, and more, Mamdani is the only candidate with a clear record of fighting for Palestine. As a college student, Mamdani founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. As an assembly member, he introduced the Not On Our Dime! Act, intended to prohibit New York nonprofits—like One Israel Fund, which provides settler militias with combat gear in the West Bank—from funding illegal Israeli settlements. And Mamdani has the potential, within his jurisdiction as New York mayor, to contribute to a positive sea change for the Palestine movement in America.
“We’ve had a mayor who has used his platform and his policies to deny humanity to not just Palestinians, but also New Yorkers who empathize with Palestinians, and who has used that platform to justify the killing of children, to deny calls for a ceasefire, and send a militarized police force on to institutions of higher education,” said Mamdani, speaking of Adams’s and the New York Police Department’s response to the pro-Palestine university encampments this past spring.
As a candidate endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Mamdani is running on the Democratic ticket. With this, he faces another challenge: winning back those who have lost hope in the electoral process. The Israeli genocide in Gaza ostracized many Americans from their Democratic representatives who, in their eyes, failed to sufficiently combat Zionist policies once in office.
In the months and years after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 run for president, a handful of congressional candidates appeared, carrying forward the progressive fervor and running on a “Democratic Socialists” platform. Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and other leftist PACs led endorsements and canvassing efforts across the country, turning toward electoral politics to establish a left faction and promote a socialist agenda within the Democratic Party. In the following congressional election in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib were elected, and more, like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, followed in later elections. The new class of progressive left candidates came to be known as the Squad.
In “Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics,” a 2019 report from Jacobin, Haymarket Books, and Verso Books, the authors had a soberingly realistic analysis of the Squad’s electoral wins: “The benefits of pro-Palestinian candidates being elected in the U.S. are likely to be more gradual, symbolic, and subterranean in terms of their international impact,” wrote Sumaya Awad, Sofia Arias, and Bill Mullen on the elections of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar. “The political shift in the U.S. is important but remains fragile and could be reversed if another uptick in struggle is not met with strong organization and sustained mobilization.” Still, it was a hopeful moment, in which politicians at that level of office could identify as socialist and pro-Palestine.
But that hope slowly waned. In a speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, almost a year into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that had killed more than 40,000 Palestinians and saw the United States send at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, Ocasio-Cortez made only one brief mention of Gaza—a regurgitation of Kamala Harris’s unsubstantiated claim that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.”
Bowman, who has had a more ambiguous record on Palestine, came under heavy criticism in 2021 for a trip there funded by the liberal Zionist group J Street, and later for his approval of a billion additional dollars from Congress for Israel’s Iron Dome. In 2023, groups like the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) urged the DSA to adopt an anti-Zionist resolution in response, which imposes conditions on DSA-endorsed candidates like Bowman, including refusing relationships with Israeli lobby groups. “Despite your organization’s stated support for our cause in recent years, a number of your member-politicians have not only abused their platforms to speak out against boycotting Israel, but have played a role in advancing the material interests of Zionism,” wrote the PYM. While the National Political Committee and several local chapters adopted some form of the resolution, the New York City chapter rejected it. When I spoke to Álvaro López, the NYC-DSA’s electoral coordinator, about his opposition to the resolution, he said that such drawing of red lines amounts to “feel-good” politics and was “shortsighted” in terms of actually building a strong and lasting anti-war, pro-Palestine movement.
Despite at times attracting the ire of voters committed to the liberation of Palestine because of their lukewarm criticisms of Israel or support for continued aid, the Squad has not been spared from attacks by pro-Israel groups. Awad, Arias, and Mullen predicted that “Israel will make every effort to make sure the Democratic Party, in particular, is not pulled to the left by the new pro-Palestinian candidates. Israel and its Zionist supporters will try to smear candidates who criticize Israel in order to try and maintain current levels of support, especially the $3.8 billion in annual aid from the U.S. government.”
It was not long before their predictions were fulfilled. In the urgency of the days and months following October 7, Bowman once again found himself on the same side as the DSA, labeling Israel’s brutal onslaught on the Gaza Strip a “genocide,” and imploring the DSA to help him fight the “common enemy” of AIPAC as they amped up their attack campaigns against him. This past November, Bowman was ousted from office after AIPAC’s super PAC spent over $15 million to topple him—underscoring the difficulty of keeping leftists in office in the face of powerful lobbyists and the need to abandon infighting in order to build a wide countering coalition on the left. It seems the DSA, and Mamdani, have since internalized this lesson.
Andrew Epstein, the Mamdani campaign’s communication director, told me that they are anticipating attacks from AIPAC, and he predicts that the nature of the attacks will be similar to those deployed against Bowman: even though Israel was the “motivator for the money,” the TV ads and glossy mailers made no mention of Bowman’s record on Palestine. Instead, they attempted to paint Bowman as a “bad Democrat” for voting against Biden’s debt limit deal and supposedly putting New Yorkers “who rely on Social Security and Medicare at risk.” “We are building a campaign and infrastructure that can withstand [the attacks],” said Epstein, and Mamdani’s impressive track record and ability to “win over a room” certainly helps.
As much as Mamdani aspires to be a purveyor of consistent and moral principles, he also rejects a politics of purity. He credits his achievements as an assembly member to working “alongside many other legislators who would not call themselves socialists,” he told me. Just as he’s collaborated with leftist organizations like the PYM and Jewish Voice for Peace on the Not On Our Dime! campaign, he’s also worked with more moderate Democrats like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Chuck Schumer on winning debt relief for taxi drivers. “I believe that as the mayor, I could continue that kind of an approach, where I’m uncompromising on the political program, on the goals of it, on the substance of it, but I’m willing to work with anyone and everyone in order to achieve that actual thing,” Mamdani told me.
Mamdani put his own body on the line to fight alongside the New York Taxi Workers Alliance as an assembly member, completing a fifteen-day hunger strike that helped win roughly $400 million in debt relief for taxi drivers who had “been abandoned and betrayed by the city” during the medallion crisis. The issue, he told me, partly persisted for so long because over 90 percent of the city’s taxi drivers are immigrants.
“It’s infectious—the courage, the belief,” he told the Guardian of his hunger strike after a deal was reached. Two months after the genocide in Gaza started, Mamdani helped organize another hunger strike in Washington, D.C., to pressure President Joe Biden for a ceasefire. Most recently, after the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was detained by the Department of Homeland Security, Mamdani confronted Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan at the State Capitol. Soon after, Mamdani’s phone lines and social media were flooded with racist and Islamophobic threats.
As the Muslims and South Asians of New York gain more electoral power, they have a greater capability to resist these attacks. After 9/11, American Muslims emerged as a racialized group and major political bloc for the first time, but large swaths of the community and its leaders prioritized assimilation over agitation to avoid accusations of radicalism. Policies like the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques sowed distrust among Muslim communities toward city officials. But in the wake of the initial fervor around the war on terror, American Muslims accelerated their political power, became more vocal critics of the government, and built cross-racial solidarity with other marginalized communities. While still split in the ways they engage—American Muslims broke from their two decades of consistent support for Democrats this past election, for example, over the party’s handling of the war on Gaza—this group's diverse political participation has coalesced into the multifront movement for Palestine that we see today.
And there are still many people Mamdani could bring into the fold. Jackson Heights, Parkchester, and Bay Ridge—all New York City neighborhoods with large Muslim and South Asian populations—still had voter turnout rates lower than the citywide average in the 2021 primary. Mamdani hopes to bring “those very communities from the margins of electoral politics in New York City into the mainstream of it,” he told me. In the filing period from October 15 to March 17, Mamdani had the most individual donors out of all candidates in the zip codes representing Jackson Heights and Bay Ridge.
This is no coincidence. During his campaign, Mamdani has attended Jummah prayer at mosques throughout the city, worked with organizations like the Muslims Vote Project, Desis Rising Up & Moving, and the Sikh Cultural Society. He’s even stopped by the Yemeni café Qahwah House in the West Village after iftar to speak to its young patrons. “This is one of the few cities in the country where the size of these communities is significant enough that it can sway elections,” he told me. “And that result will not just occur on its own. It is one that has to be organized for, fought for, built for, and then finally won at a ballot box.”
Mamdani was incredibly successful in his grassroots fundraising—so much so that he has already reached the maximum funding limit for the June primary. And his volunteers, who aim to knock on a million doors for the campaign to win by “force of field,” are continuing to put in the legwork. López told me that a strength of the NYC-DSA is their outreach and inclusion of those who might not be as well-versed in socialist politics. “We meet people where they’re at, and that literally means, in a campaign, we knock on people’s doors and talk to them about socialist politics.”
In December, I joined Shawna Morlock, a former bartender and hairstylist turned Astoria Democratic District Leader, and Nora Reidy, a young tech worker and first-time canvasser, for Mamdani’s field launch in Astoria. Over a quick training session, Morlock told Nora to emphasize how Zohran’s campaign can directly influence these tenants’ lives, whether it be through relieving the pains of inflation or halting rent hikes, before asking for their support. For Morlock, talking to constituents about how their representatives have, and can, materially change their lives propels her political work.
“I used to go door-to-door asking people if they knew their congressperson,” she told me of her time canvassing for Ocasio-Cortez, “and all of them would say no, except for one person, who remembered Joe Crowley because he helped them with an issue they had at the post office.” Only 1 in 10 people usually open their door, she told me, but Astoria is different—they are on Ocasio-Cortez’s and Mamdani’s turf, after all, leaders who have politicized their constituents during their time in office. So it was only a little surprising when a young couple emerged from the first door we knocked on, said “We do whatever AOC and DSA tells us to do,” and donated $50 each to the campaign.
In between knocking on doors, many which remained closed, Morlock told me more about her experience with canvassing. The hardest part is having to ask independents to register as Democrats, she explained, because she understands why someone would react negatively to that request. “Democrats are not going to magically decide that they want to help working-class people; we have to force them into it,” Morlock said.
While many will likely maintain their distance from the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly, Mamdani has the unique opportunity to tap into the energy built by the pro-Palestine movement locally, and the growing population of Muslim and South Asian voters.
Just as organizers postulated that gains in electoral politics could only be sustained with continued grassroots-movement building behind it, the reverse might also be true. In an interview with Hammer & Hope, the PYM organizer Mohammed Nabulsi said, reflecting on nine months of resistance to the war on Gaza, that some of their deficiencies lay in focusing too heavily on “mass mobilization,” as well as neglecting “connections to the left, connections to other movements and to other communities.” While both the Democratic and Republican parties sustain the conditions of imperialism and fascism, he said, insurgent campaigns like that of Bernie Sanders’s “can present new political horizons and allow us to imagine outside what Democrats and Republicans think is possible.”
“To be engaged in electoral politics is not to endorse electoral politics as a whole, or to say that electoral politics is the only way we win the whole world. It’s one tool, the tool I’ve chosen to focus on; it’s a tool that has immense power,” Mamdani said, speaking to the Muslim Law Students Association at the New York Law School at a Q&A event they organized for the mayoral candidate in February. And though he understands the disillusionment around the electoral process, he hopes he can inspire enough people to reengage with politics around a simple principle. “There’s room for everyone in this coalition … It’s a campaign that asks we agree on one thing only—that New York City should be more affordable,” he said.
Despite the internal division that permeates the left, the campaign’s laser-focus on Mamdani’s priority policies is resonating with a wide group of New Yorkers. A recent poll identified Mamdani as the runner-up to Andrew Cuomo. More and more people have been stopping him on the street, shouting campaign slogans like “freeze the rent,” he said. And it feels like I can hardly walk a block without seeing his poster on a bodega window. So far, the campaign seems to be succeeding in attracting those who have never voted, or who have vowed to never vote again, those who have never heard of socialism, or are tired of hearing about it. For Mamdani, it comes down to a simple truth: “If you do not try, you will never win.”
Saliha Bayrak is an associate editor at The Drift. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Texas Monthly Magazine, and The World. She is also a freelance writer based in New York.