Zohran Mamdani, whose mayoral campaign is on some basic level an effort to convert momentum into position and posters into policies while stretching the limits of what a candidate can credibly promise, isn’t yet in position to win the ranked choice Democratic primary in June let alone the most-votes-wins general election in November if he’s even on the ballot then.
But there’s no question that the 33-year-old socialist assemblyman’s campaign has gone past what seemed possible to most people — or even him —- when he launched his campaign last October with the hope of emerging from the back of the pack in the closing stretch like Bill de Blasio did in 2013.
Instead, Mamdani has been in second place for months now as the leading alternative to front-runner Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani sat down with me Friday morning at the Purity Diner in Park Slope to lay out his theory of the case with 25 days to go before the primary, and discuss the remarkably enthusiastic volunteer support his campaign has generated.
As polls show New Yorkers feel sour and pessimistic about things here, Cuomo is offering a gritted-teeth “city in crisis” appeal, building support behind closed doors from leaders afraid of ending up on his bad side while avoiding engagement with the other candidates or voters outside of tightly controlled settings and literally running red lights to escape the press.
Mamdani, by contrast, is showing up everywhere to repeat a simple message about a less stressful city full of free things: free child-care, free buses and a (stabilized) rent freeze. That’s not to mention — and perhaps he’d rather not, since they’re harder to credibly explain and dilute that messaging — his plans for a new Department of Community Safety separate from the NYPD and 200,000 new units of subsidized city-built housing.
Setting aside his Israel politics and promise to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York, if Mamdani does somehow get himself into City Hall next year the fear is he’ll end up as the dog who caught the car, having promised the moon while inheriting an already ailing city that will be severely pressured and constrained by the Trump administration.
His somewhat circular argument for how he’ll deliver on his big promises, including many that need Albany’s approval, is, in essence, “just look at how successful my campaign has been.”
Indeed, it’s generated a participatory enthusiasm New York City hasn’t seen this century, with many thousands of volunteers doing the small-d democratic work of knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors all across the city to spread his good news about building a more affordable and less stressful city.
Who wouldn’t want that?
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“We have now knocked more than 660,000 doors, more than 260,000 phone calls, and we have a volunteer base that has eclipsed 26,000 people. There are now many weeks where we are contacting more than 100,000 voters, and we are going to be able to match so much of what we’ve done over the last seven months in the next 25 days,” Mamdani said as we sat down.
Having talked to more than a dozen of those volunteers as I’ve seen them around the city, they’re interesting, engaging New Yorkers with an enthusiasm you can’t buy or fake — each with their own reasons for spending their time on behalf of his campaign.
“We are the only campaign that has sought to broaden the electorate in a significant manner, in bringing people back to the Democratic Party and also in asking why people have left the party,” Mamdani said. “The entire ethos of this campaign is seeking to have the bubble of New York City politics finally connect with the world of New York City itself.”
Just before we sat down, Politico New York published a story headlined “Mamdani and his campaign doubted viability,” about how “Six people who spoke with the candidate and those close to him said the goal of his mayoral bid was to expand the city’s DSA chapter, not win City Hall.” I asked him about that, and how he saw his bid then and now.
“The campaign is, in many ways, the same campaign from the first day, a campaign that saw the most pressing crisis in the city as one of affordability, the most expensive city in the United States of America where one in four New Yorkers were in poverty, and putting forward a relentless focus on our economic agenda. And on that day, like every day since…”
He paused there as he realized our waitress had been hovering to check on him, and I asked her who she was voting for.
“This guy!” she said, smiling. “I know the whole bit too.”
His coffee topped off, Mamdani picked up: “She said she knows the whole thing. That whole thing is freeze the rent, buses faster, deliver universal child care. It’s now become a call and response… because we are running a campaign with a clarity of message and of purpose, that we want New Yorkers to know not just who they’re voting for but what they’re voting for.”
And, Mamdani said, he’s doing this in a way previous left-wing candidates — including ones whose campaigns he’d volunteered on and who’d fallen just short — hadn’t been able to, thanks to his incredible success raising small-dollar donations from New Yorkers. That means he isn’t facing a brutal choice now between paying for field operations or mailings or TV ads. “By virtue of matching funds and the ability to raise $8 million thanks to the contributions of 20,000 or so people, you can, in fact, pursue all of these different ways.”
Stepping back, Mamdani said he’s offering “a politics that is direct, both in language and in commitment, but also that require no translation. And part of that is the power of social media, where there is no intermediary. You can speak directly to New Yorkers.
“When we speak about a crisis of democracy, we typically understand it in the context of Trump and it’s an accurate description,” he continued. “But there is also another crisis, which is New Yorkers losing faith in democracy, the diminishing participation. In 2021 26% of Democrats voted in the primary, 74% stayed home. We wanted to address that and the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for whom the election has always meant [the general election in] November, and that’s meant bringing attention to dates that were typically procedural,” like the deadline to change party registration to vote in the primary — which a lot of Bernie Sanders voters who weren’t Democrats found out about the hard way in 2016 and again in 2020.
“What has also been so exciting is so many of the people who’ve been knocking on doors, who’ve been supporting our campaign, are ones who consultants will tell you are not worth a moment of your time, because they are not triple prime voters. But part of the way you make someone a triple prime voter is that when you treat them with that same respect, when you give them that same attention, when you inform them seven times of the date of the election and the necessity of voting and why they should choose this campaign.”
Otherwise, he went on, “there is a vicious loop that occurs when someone does not vote, and therefore they are not deemed worthy of the time to get them to vote and you end up with a smaller and smaller population of a city of eight and a half million people determining the future of that entire fight for us.”
With his next meeting coming up, Mamdani concluded: “It’s a campaign that in this moment can be best characterized by momentum for going beyond the choice that New Yorkers have often faced between the past and the present and finally choosing a future. A new generation of leadership that is driven by a commitment not just to competence and excellence but also results. Those are the results we’ve shown over this race. Those are the results we’ll show in City Hall.”
I wouldn’t bet on Mamdani making it to City Hall, or think that he should be.
But I hope New Yorkers skeptical of what he’s selling or how he’s selling it read what he has to say and consider why he’s bringing new people and fresh air into the city’s often chokingly stale politics.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
