Mamdani Makes New York City History With Victory in Mayor’s Race

This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and The City.
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Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani culminated a meteoric political rise Tuesday by scoring a decisive victory in a polarizing mayoral election. At just 34 years old, he will become the youngest mayor in over a century, the first Muslim to lead New York City and one of the most prominent democratic socialists holding elected office in the country.

With a majority of ballots counted, Mamdani won 50% of the vote, leading former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent and garnered 41%. Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa trailed the field with 7%.

As of 9 p.m. more than 2 million New Yorkers had cast a ballot, according to the Board of Elections, a turnout not seen in a half century.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Democratic Comptroller nominee Mark Levine both handily won the two other citywide offices.

At Brooklyn Paramount, supporters didn’t arrive until after the polls closed at 9 p.m., as they canvassed until the last moment, campaign officials said. Mamdani celebrated his history-making triumph with thousands of jubilant supporters.

Iram Ali, who lives in Brooklyn, has a 13-month-old at home and is excited by Mamdani’s child care plan. She grew up in the borough’s Little Pakistan, and spoke about the anti-Muslim racism her neighbors experienced.

“Muslims lived in fear because of a lot of the hate we received,” Ali, 34, said.

“It’s really inspiring to see a Muslim now, 24 years later, become the mayor of New York City. It’s unfortunate he has to face some of the same anti Muslim racism we experienced at that time. It shows how far this city and this country still needs to move and shift.”

She was at the party with lecturer and grassroots organizer Marshall Ganz, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers and now teaches at Harvard University.

“I think he’s the real deal and that’s pretty scarce in politics,” the 82-year-old said.

“He actually sees people and engages with people and he’s courageous and there’s no bullshit.”

“I voted for Zohran. I feel like he’s the guy who’s gonna work for the city,” said 24-year-old Tasbih Sharir, a recent mechanical engineering grad in Kensington, Brooklyn. “I’m looking for a mayor who can really work for us, like lower middle-income people,” he said. “To be honest I don’t really care about Muslim or Christian.”

Gabriela Lira, 37, in Mamdani’s home neighborhood of Astoria, Queens, brought her young kids when she voted for Mamdani. “I want a more affordable city, especially the rent. My paycheck, almost everything goes to my rent,” she said.

Lira, who moved to Astoria from Argentina 10 years ago and works part-time as a Spanish translator at hospitals, schools and courts, said “It’s really hard to enjoy your life without enough money.”

At the Ziegfeld Ballroom where the Cuomo campaign hosted his watch party, supporters frowned and groaned over free wine and beer as the first batch of preliminary ballots showing Mamdani with a two-digit lead over Cuomo.

At least three large round tables marked as “reserved” sat empty nearly an hour after doors opened to supporters.

“The good news is that it looks like Sliwa didn’t steal that many votes away,” a supporter was overheard saying about the Republican candidate.

Mamdani’s victorious coalition stands to transform and challenge New York’s power structure. While he eventually secured endorsements from stalwart Democratic powerbrokers, like Brooklyn party leader Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Mamdani’s early and most vigorous supporters are to the left — and somewhat outside of — the Democratic party’s base in the city.

Upstart to Frontrunner

When Mamdani declared his candidacy in October 2024, he was a little-known, two-term state legislator with scant political or legislative success. Polling in the single digits, he built a following by releasing buzzy, viral videos that highlighted how unaffordable New York City had become — and his plans to make the city more livable for working- and middle-class residents.

Heading into the June primary, those extremely online efforts — and Mamdani’s constant presence on the campaign trail — garnered him a volunteer army of nearly 30,000 door-knockers. Still trailing Cuomo in nearly every poll, he shocked New York’s political establishment by resoundingly beating the former governor and political scion by 12 percentage points in the final ranked-choice tally.

Following that stunning upset, Mamdami became a nationwide standbearer and beacon of hope for the country’s left wing, at a time when the Democratic party, cast off in the political wilderness during the second Trump presidency, has been embroiled in a struggle to redefine itself.

But his affordability agenda — calling for free buses for all, government-run grocery stores and a rent freeze on regulated apartments, partly financed by stiff tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations — also provoked a fierce backlash.

And Mamdani’s repeated criticism of Israel — he has promised to have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York City — also raised alarms among many Jewish voters, who heard in his refusal to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada” an invitation to terrorist violence.

Fiscal watchdogs have warned that already strained city and state budgets, with billions of dollars of deficits projected even before federal spending cuts are felt in full force, will be hard-pressed to fulfill the full spectrum of Mamdani’s campaign platform, which includes a promise of universal child care, a $30 minimum wage and a vow to use union labor to build all affordable housing.

While many of the city’s business leaders came to accept the probability of Mamdani’s win — with some even embracing it — others unleashed a flood of money into independent expenditure committees that supported Cuomo and attacked Mamdani, some $61 million over all.

As the fall campaign came to a bitter close, Cuomo, trailing in polls, increasingly stoked anxieties about a potential Mamdani win, painting him as an existential threat to the city and even laughing along when a radio host said Mamdani would cheer on another 9/11.

Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race in September and later backed Cuomo, amplified those attacks. At a rally endorsing his erstwhile rival, Adams suggested that a Mamdani victory would put New York City in league with European countries where, he said, Islamic extremism runs amok.

And on the eve of the election, President Donald Trump himself endorsed Cuomo, calling Mamdani a “Communist” who would turn New York into a “Complete and Total Economic and Social Disaster.”

Some New Yorkers THE CITY spoke to expressed grave alarm about Mamdani’s candidacy. Voting in Park Slope, Brooklyn, 79-year-old Harvey Soss, a retired lawyer, said the mayoral election offered him “as poor a selection of candidates” as he’d ever seen.

He cast his vote for Cuomo, he said, doing so reluctantly and noting that he was embarrassed to be a member of the Democratic Party.

“The head of the clown posse wearing the little red beret will probably give us the first supporter of terrorism as a mayor,” Soss said, referencing Sliwa. Switching the subject to Mamdani, he added, “New York City, over the course of the next four years, will be considerably diminished because he will be at war with the feds, more particularly the feds will be at war with him.”

But at the ballot booths, at least a plurality of New Yorkers were apparently unconvinced by such arguments.

And at least a few were motivated by Trump’s endorsement — to vote for Mamdani.

In Park Slope, history teacher Terra Vetter wasn’t sure that she’d make it to the polls after a long day of work, but then she learned that Trump and Elon Musk endorsed Cuomo.

“That really pushed me,” Vetter said. “That made me very uncomfortable. It made me feel like Zohran needed my vote even more.”

The 46-year-old said she’s constantly worried about rent, the cost of groceries and “the $6 it takes me to get roundtrip to school everyday.” Vetter told THE CITY, saying she was aligned with Mamdani’s focus on making the city more affordable.

Once again, Mamdani’s path to victory relied on turning out new voters, and his popularity rose thanks to an army of volunteer canvassers and a snappy online presence. Sticking to a platform of a more affordable New York, he energized his supporters and brought new voters to the polls.

One of those new voters was Vladimir Guerrier, who cast his first-ever vote in New York City for Mamdani on Saturday in Canarsie, Brooklyn.

Guerrier, a 40-year-old chef, became an American citizen in March. After he heard Mamdani speak at a concert of a Haitian DJ at the Barclays Center this summer, he was excited to register to vote.

“He said he was fighting for the Haitians,” Guerrier said. “It’s time for a change in a way. It’s time for fresh blood.”

In the waning days of the race, Mamdani campaigned relentlessly. He trick-or-treated with kids Friday evening, visited six different nightclubs Saturday night, cheered on runners of the New York City marathon, watched the Knicks Sunday and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise with supporters early Monday morning.

He and his canvassers continued to court Cuomo’s voters and undecided ones up until the very last minute. He swayed one such voter in Harlem on Sunday.

Deba Young, 64, said she’d been planning to vote for Cuomo until she heard Mamdani speak at First Corinthian Baptist Church that morning.

“I love him. I felt his spirit. There’s hope,” she said. “I think that he’ll serve us well. And he reminds me of [former mayor Ed] Koch. He cares about the people. He cares about New Yorkers.”

‘About All Of Us’

Mamdani will be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, and the youngest in more than 100 years. He was born in Uganda, moved to New York City with his family as a young child and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.

Before Mamdani was elected to the state Assembly in 2020, he worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor at Queens-based nonprofit Chhaya Community Development Corporation and made rap music videos as Mr. Cardamom.

Mamdani’s win also represents the biggest victory for the New York City DSA chapter since the election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. In the course of the general campaign, Mamdani strayed from a few of DSA’s central tenets — including calls to defund the police and to end the prosecution of misdemeanors — which could lead to some friction with the group during his mayoralty.

Still, Mamdani’s affordability agenda was forged with DSA backing. Running to lower the cost of living for New Yorkers, Mamdani promised to freeze the rent on rent-regulated apartments, to deliver fast and free buses and to expand free childcare. He also promised city-owned grocery stores to decrease the cost of food, and a new Department of Community Safety, where mental-health workers would respond to mental-health incidents instead of police officers.

Many critics ridiculed his platform and expressed skepticism about how he’d achieve his goals. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani in September, has not agreed to raise taxes, even as Mamdani says he will rely on new taxes on the rich to fund parts of his agenda.

A key to Mamdani’s victory in the election was to expand the electorate, bringing newcomers — especially the under-35 set — to the polls. His campaign engaged voters with events like a scavenger hunt and soccer tournament, and oversaw a massive field organization to boost his name recognition and get out the vote for him.

More than 100,000 volunteers showed up to knock on nearly 3 million doors throughout the boroughs ahead of the general election, according to the campaign. Those canvassers helped him make inroads in neighborhoods that hadn’t supported him in the primary or were skeptical of a DSA-affiliated campaign.

That ground game, paired with his breezy and charismatic social media presence, helped cinch his win as he consistently led in opinion polls by double-digits leading up to the general election after he defeated Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary with 56% percent of the ranked-choice vote.

Soon, many top Democrats at the local, state and national level moved to endorse him even as Cuomo announced he’d be running to challenge Mamdani once again.

Although Mamdani faced a torrent of negative ads, attacks and other efforts to stop his meteoric rise, he also leveraged such moments to galvanize his supporters — both in New York and nationally.

In a dramatic moment speaking to several hundred supporters in Jamaica, Queens, on Saturday, many of Muslim and South Asian descent, Mamdani asked them to put their hands up if they’d been called a terrorist or if their names were mangled regularly. Dozens of hands shot up across the crowd. (Over the course of the entire campaign, Cuomo continuously mispronounced Mamdani’s name.)

“This is why these words offend me, because they are about all of us,” he shouted to the cheering crowd of onlookers. “No longer will we allow a politics in this city that seeks to discard those that they deem to be disposable. We are not just saying goodbye to a disgraced former governor on Tuesday. We are saying goodbye to the politics of that disgrace.”

“ And our answer to that is a vision of a city where all of us belong,” Mamdani said. “All of us.”

Additional reporting by Greg B. Smith