Zohran Mamdani’s Young Revolution

Zohran Mamdani projected his impending triumph when, the morning before the election, he led a line of marchers over the Brooklyn Bridge behind a banner that read “Our Time Is Now.” The coalition of voters that lifted him to victory, and whose members can now claim it is “our time,” consists of three main categories: an ethnic and religious base, the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America organization, and a powerful, widespread movement of disappointed, disaffected young professionals.

Mamdani, who plans to take his oath of office on a copy of the Quran rather than the Bible, will bring new voices and a new style to City Hall that come from — and will fully include — the city’s 760,0000 Muslims, as well as New York’s South Asian population, centered in neighborhoods with concentrations of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Sri Lankan, and Indo-Caribbean families. Ethnic succession in New York politics is nothing new: For centuries, waves of immigrant newcomers have supported their countrymen and nudged incumbents aside with Dutch and German Protestants giving way to Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, and Latino communities that demanded a seat at the table.

Admission of new tribes to the halls of political power is usually contentious and often takes longer than one might think. New York had been around for centuries before electing its first Italian mayor (Fiorello La Guardia) in 1934, its first Jewish mayor (Abraham Beame) in 1973, its first Black mayor (David Dinkins) in 1989, and we’ve yet to vote a Latino into any citywide post. We haven’t seen the last of the raw, ugly racism and Islamophobia that polluted the campaign and led to Mamdani needing political protection, but his breakthrough victory will still open the door for Muslim and South Asian candidates, strategists, fundraisers, and donors.

The second leg of Mamdani’s stool is made up of left-leaning activists, especially the 11,000 New York City members of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose coming-of-age moment follows years of painstaking efforts — many of them unsuccessful — to win local legislative offices. “For a while, it wasn’t clear what the DSA was going to do. It had been kind of like a small group that mostly did political education and maybe had folks who were interested in union organizing,” Susan Kang, a political-science professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. That changed after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 convinced many of the need to become politically active, she said. “All of a sudden, there were hundreds of people showing up to these monthly meetings. It took a minute for the DSA to figure out what to do with this bump in membership.” The group began supporting candidates for office like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a slate of state legislators and can now take credit for capturing the nation’s most high-profile urban executive post at the very heart of American capitalism.

The third leg is what ties it all together and cements Mamdani’s new political alliance: an army of young voters of every persuasion whose support for him is a reaction to a generation of soaring rent, lowball salaries, overpriced restaurants, career doors that too often turn out to be closed or nonexistent, and a political class that was corrupt, complicit, or asleep at the switch. In victory, Mamdani has become the leader and the personal embodiment of every hopeful, ambitious young graduate who arrives in New York with a heart full of hope and stars in their eyes, pleading with the city, Just give me a chance.

Shortly before winning the primary, Mamdani told me about a low point, years ago, when he was scrambling professionally, tutoring kids at a private school to make enough money to produce a rap video, and had a realization while riding on the Bx10 bus. “I remember sitting on that bus and having this feeling that I know many New Yorkers have had, where I was just like, How am I so stuck in my life? That I’m literally on the same bus I used to take in high school, but I’m going the other way — going the wrong way. Why can’t I seem to break through?” he reminisced. “This city is a city of possibility; it’s where people come to live out their dream, but it’s one where we’re making it such that you can’t even afford to take a swing, for most people, because if you don’t land it, you’ll have to leave. We can’t make it a place where failure is the end of your story.”

Andrew Cuomo, who spent much of the campaign denigrating Mamdani’s work experience (“He’s never had a job,” Cuomo frequently sneered), was raised in a privileged stratum of New York society in which failure is nearly impossible. The son of a famous governor who married into the wealthy Kennedy political clan, Cuomo was in his 30s, not much older than Mamdani is now, when President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Cuomo has continued to enjoy perks and privileges since resigning as governor: Just last year, he made nearly $5 million from a consulting company he started — but refused to disclose who is on his client list or what he has done for them (the secrecy, notes the New York Times, “makes it almost impossible for voters or watchdog groups to understand the financial and business connections of someone who could soon have sway over billions of dollars in public contracts, real estate developments and city policy”).

Mamdani has less than 60 days before taking the oath of office; the inevitably frenetic transition will give us a first look at how the mayor-elect plans to attract and place a combination of trusted experts and new faces. “He has an important and, I think, an instrumental and really a career-defining decision to make for himself, which is, Does he want to stick with those people in the DSA, or does he want to broaden his tent now and bring in other folks?” David Greenfield, a former City Council member who is now CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, told me.

How Mamdani goes about setting up his government will also be an answer to Cuomo and other anti-Mamdani pols who have filled the airwaves with lurid warnings about an “existential threat” posed by Mamdani and/or the DSA. It should soon be clear that the sky-is-falling noise is best understood as the howl of public- and private-sector elites who can’t quite believe that the young people they’ve ignored for so long are preparing to snatch the reins of leadership and take New York in a new, fairer direction.