Zohran Mamdani, the young democratic-socialist state assemblyman who has waged a surprisingly strong campaign for mayor of New York City, hasn’t just frustrated his opponents. He’s made them jealous. “I regret not running for mayor in 2021,” State Senator Jessica Ramos said this month, during a televised Democratic primary debate, when asked if she had any regrets in her political career. “I thought I needed more experience,” she explained. “But turns out you just need to make good videos.” Someone in the audience broke out in applause. It was obvious to everyone that this was a jab at Mamdani. Standing a few feet away from Ramos, Mamdani took in the dig with—what else?—a winning, dimpled smile.
In 2025, the idea of dismissing a political candidate for “just” being good at social media is almost a joke in itself. We have known for many years now that a candidate who can to tell their story creatively on the internet is at an electoral advantage, in New York City and pretty much anywhere in the world. Social media is where many voters decide if a politician is what the Tammany Hall bosses a hundred years ago used to call “regular”—whether they can be counted on. It’s an authenticity test. A mayoral campaign today that doesn’t have a plan for “good videos”—ones in which the candidate can make their case and an implicit compact with their audience—is likely doomed. It’s not difficult to understand Mamdani’s opponents’ frustration. Most have spent years carefully plotting their mayoral runs, building their résumés, political connections, and fund-raising networks. Now the kid with the nice eyebrows is running circles around them.
When I had coffee with Mamdani a few months ago, he proudly told me that his thousands of campaign volunteers—the people he’d converted to his side, partly with “good videos”—would, before primary day, knock on a million doors on his behalf. I was skeptical. Which million, I asked. Mamdani flashed me another one of those damned smiles. At the time, I had been thinking of recent debates over the effectiveness of political canvassing and other ground-game techniques. I was reminded particularly of the former congressman Beto O’Rourke, who excited his supporters around the country with a pledge to knock on more than a million doors in Texas in his run for Senate, in 2018, only to come up short against Ted Cruz. Texas is big—two hundred and sixty-nine thousand square miles—and has resisted canvassing efforts for decades. But New York City’s four hundred and sixty-nine square miles might present an even harder challenge to door knocking: Who in this town answers the door to a stranger with an open mind? Who even opens the door?
What I hadn’t considered is that, even if knocking on a million doors isn’t the most efficient use of campaign resources in New York City, it makes for great content. The story of Mamdani’s door-knocking campaign and other old-fashioned efforts reached millions of people online, gave the campaign shape, and helped it become a movement. Ding-dong and TikTok. In politics today, one can feed off the other.
Mamdani has a movement behind him, but he has spent the closing days of the primary race struggling to build a coalition. Even in the polls that look best for him, Mamdani comes up short to Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who has led every ranked-choice poll since he entered the race. In one poll, conducted on behalf of a super PAC that supports Mamdani (in 2025, even socialists have super PACs), he comes out just two points behind Cuomo in the final round of ranked-choice voting. The cross tabs of that poll showed why. Among Black voters, Mamdani lost by more than forty points. Among Hispanic voters, he lost by nearly ten. Mamdani’s voters trended younger than Cuomo’s—no big surprise there—but also whiter, better educated, and more male. That he has aspired to speak for the city’s downtrodden but has done best drawing out the work-from-home creative class is a contradiction that he wasn’t able to resolve before primary day.
That same poll showed Mamdani leading among Asian voters. There are 1.5 million residents of Asian descent in the city, but that’s still less than twenty per cent of the city’s population. Mamdani, the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan Indian political scientist, and Mira Nair, an Indian American filmmaker, has also made a representation pitch to the city’s more than seven hundred thousand Muslims. But forming a coalition requires reaching voters beyond what might be considered a politician’s natural base, stitching together unlikely factions, communities, and blocs. In the race’s closing days, Mamdani’s campaign became fixated on “momentum,” reaching for the figurative in lieu of the numerical. (E-mail subject line, June 17th: “AS MOMENTUM REACHES A FEVER PITCH, BERNIE SANDERS ENDORSES ZOHRAN MAMDANI FOR MAYOR.”) When the votes get counted, though, coalitions trump momentum every time.
Mamdani has been stymied for several reasons that were apparent before primary day. For one thing, he is undeniably young, and he never found a way to reassure voters that he was truly up for the job of managing the city’s agencies, its hundred-billion-dollar budget, and its three-hundred-thousand-person workforce. In trying to become the youngest mayor since John Purroy Mitchel—the idealistic “Boy Mayor” who was elected at thirty-four, in 1914, and got crushed by Tammany’s man John Francis (Red Mike) Hylan three years later—Mamdani never explained how he might avoid Mitchel’s fate. The new program of public spending he has proposed is predicated on increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, taxes that would have to be approved in Albany. If the big shots in Albany—never a good bet for anything, politically—refuse him, what would become of Mayor Mamdani? No one can say.
Some voters are turned off by the socialist label, though most of Mamdani’s policies are hardly revolutionary. He’s calling for free buses (they have some free bus lines in Boston) and freezing the rent on rent-regulated apartments (which Bill de Blasio did three times in his eight years as mayor—and rents still kept rising in the city over all.) Mamdani has backed off some of the language that he’d espoused during his activist days in college and the years after—“I will not defund the police,” he said, at the final Democratic primary debate—but he has not fully explained what changed his mind, besides the fact that he is running for mayor.
Mamdani’s critics and opponents have cornered him for his views on Israel—a line of questioning that his supporters say is unfair. They’re right that outlets like the New York Post and the Free Press have tried to make him a bogeyman, and that attack ads funded by Cuomo and his allies have relied on Islamophobic tropes and racism. (“Less Safe. Too Radical,” read one mailer that arrived in my mailbox, next to what must be one of the only unflattering photographs of Mamdani in existence.) But part of the reason that reporters have kept asking Mamdani about Israel is because his answer isn’t very convincing. “I believe Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he says. For a guy who exudes authenticity, that sounds suspiciously like a line he arrived at not personally but after a series of increasingly frustrating meetings. There are nearly a million Jews living in New York City, many of them ardently Zionist, and the next mayor is going to have to speak on this issue. (Think of the protests at Columbia, and of the ongoing federal response to them.) This was a challenge for Mamdani, and not one he has yet met.
In the primary campaign’s closing days, Mamdani has shown signs of casting about for ways to win—he’s shown signs, in other words, of being a normal politician. He’s reached for the strains of liberalism and radicalism that have expressed themselves in the city in recent years, sometimes reaching for more than one at once. “Government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the ninety-nine per cent over the one per cent,” he told a huge rally crowd at the Manhattan music venue Terminal 5, serving up Occupy-tinged red meat with a side of centrist-slogan salad. He made a surprising overture to the city’s Orthodox Jewish communities, which were stung a few years ago by a Times investigation that revealed neglect and academic underperformance in Hasidic yeshivas. “The issue of your education is something I will listen to your leaders [about],” Mamdani told a Hasidic newspaper a few weeks ago. Were these the shrewd moves of a wunderkind on the doorstep of a historic election upset? Or were they compromises made by a precocious political talent seeing the numbers close in around him?
No one has ever accused Andrew Cuomo of being “regular.” For more than a decade, he has loomed over New York politics like the Prince of Darkness. The son of a legendary former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, he is the closest thing in living memory that the state has to political royalty. Cuomo, who legalized same-sex marriage in New York and spearheaded major infrastructure projects such as the bridge across the Hudson River named for his father, is among the handful of paternalistic local leaders in history—like Peter Stuyvesant, who told the residents of New Amsterdam that he would rule over them “like a father,” Nelson Rockefeller, and Michael Bloomberg—whose legacies, good and bad, will endure for centuries.
The question is: what is he doing running for mayor? Four years out from a sexual-harassment and abuse-of-power scandal that forced him from office as governor, Cuomo is clearly running to redeem himself, if only in his own eyes. He has plodded through the race, parking his Dodge Charger wherever he pleases and apologizing for nothing and no one, making no promises to avoid the bullying, recalcitrance, handsiness, and tolerance of corruption that he was known for in the governor’s office. In fact, he’s avoided promises of any kind about what he’d do as mayor. Instead of focussing on policy pledges, Cuomo has made the campaign a demonstration of political might, garnering endorsements from elected officials—including many who called for him to resign four years ago—from labor union leaders (though DC 37, who represents most city workers, backed Mamdani over him), and from religious leaders in Black and Jewish communities. The power plays have at times been breathtaking. In June, a group of Orthodox leaders in South Brooklyn announced their support for Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council. A few days later, they announced that they had changed their minds and had decided to back Cuomo instead.
Cuomo doesn’t make good videos, but he knows that he doesn’t need to. Say what you will about the cynical old operator, he has spent the campaign stitching together a coalition. In 2013, Bill de Blasio won the mayoral election with a potent mix of Black votes plus liberals of various creeds and colors. In 2021, Eric Adams succeeded de Blasio with a potent mix of Black votes plus moderates of various creeds and colors. Cuomo is now attempting to re-create Adams’s formula. Sunday after Sunday, he has sat in the pews at Black churches. He has called the rise in antisemitism the “most important” issue in the election, and, though this is transparent pandering (most voters say affordability and public safety are top of mind for them), it has not blunted its political effectiveness. When Mamdani has wobbled on provocative slogans like “Globalize the intifada,” he has played right into Cuomo’s hands. The former governor’s chances of being a disaster as mayor are at least as high as Mamdani’s, but many rich and powerful New Yorkers appear willing to ignore that risk. (Bloomberg contributed more than eight million dollars to a super PAC backing Cuomo.) He simply might have the votes.
Since Mamdani gained on Cuomo in the last weeks of the spring, the Democratic primary has mostly looked like a two-man contest. But there was a moment last week when everyone was talking about Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who has spent much of the race polling at a distant third place. Within a matter of days, Lander was sort of endorsed by the Times and got himself detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while trying to escort a man out of immigration court. “I’m going to be just fine,” Lander told reporters after his release. “I lost a button.” The real issue, he said, was what happened to the man he was trying to help, who was now trapped somewhere in the country’s immigration-detention gulag. It was a good performance from a veteran of local government who hopes to lead a city of immigrants through a period of anti-immigrant terror. And, though the sight of masked plainclothes officers manhandling the city’s second-highest-ranking elected official was a terrifying omen for Trump’s encroachment on New York, it also made, not incidentally, for good videos.
Lander is a candidate who might have once hoped for an endorsement from the Times’ editorial board, and who was dismayed last year when the paper announced it would stop endorsing in local races. Everyone remembers the primary in 2021, when a Times endorsement helped propel Kathryn Garcia, the camera-shy former sanitation commissioner, within a few thousand votes of the front-runner, Eric Adams. This month, the paper’s opinion section relented in its determination to stay out of the mayoral race, sort of, and released a survey of fifteen notable New Yorkers, seven of whom picked Lander as their first-choice candidate. (No other candidates received the support of more than two respondents.)
Then, a few days later, the paper published an unsigned editorial that admonished New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani; described Lander as competent but uninspiring; and reluctantly supported Cuomo, despite “serious objections to his ethics and conduct.” The piece was bizarre. It glossed de Blasio’s eight years as mayor as the source of the city’s current decline, while making almost no mention of the pandemic’s devastation, the shoddy scandals of the Adams administration, or the hostility that the current President displays for the politics and people of his home town. But in its weird, jumpy antagonism, the editorial captured a mix of sentiments that a certain swath of New Yorkers, particularly the wealthy and the powerful, do feel: that the city is less nice and less safe than it was not so long ago, that they’d rather go with a disgraced establishment politician like Cuomo than than risk it with more progressive alternatives, and that the thirty-three-year-old socialist upstart with the good videos is a joke. The punch line is he’s still making them nervous. ♦
