Zohran Mamdani Leads in the New York City Democratic Mayoral Primary
Zohran Mamdani barely slept at night before primary day. At 5.30 p.m. AM Tuesday, the hottest day in the city for more than a decade, he welcomed journalists to a press conference in Astoria Park, Queens, a green plot overlooking the East river, not far from his stabilized rent apartment. As the day was broken, the sky behind the candidate blazed white. Mamdani was held behind a naked podium and scrolled with an index on his phone, reading a short speech describing the “architects” of the city’s affordability crisis – he called his main opponent, the former disgrace governor Andrew Cuomo – and promising a way to support the city. Reading, his right hand was shaking slightly.
Mamdani, dressed in a black suit despite the rise in temperature towards a hundred degrees, was invited to what, if necessary, about his campaign had surprised him. “The pace we have become clear contrast to Andrew Cuomo surprised me,” he said. The speed of events in recent weeks had even shocked the candidate, and he always looked like a man preparing the very real possibility of defeat. “We appeared as the second place for this race before what we expected,” added Mamdani. Later, sitting on a hot sidewalk at Jackson Heights, we discussed his difficulties to reach the city’s black voters in particular. “I understand that when I go to a church and that I speak to voters who have voted in the mayor’s elections for decades, and who have known politicians for a similar period, that to learn the name of someone and put aside everything they have known in the same case is a difficult task,” he told me. “I started this race for a name recognition to a hundred. A large part of this race was an introduction. ”
I asked Mamdani what he planned to do if he came second behind Cuomo in primary. Would he try to introduce himself to the general elections this fall on the progressive line of voting of workers’ families and to challenge the Democratic Party from the outside? “My only goal was on this today, I sincerely tell you,” he said. I asked him if he was beating Cuomo, if he would call on the former governor to abandon, instead of presenting himself in the general elections as a dismissal, as Cuomo had sworn to do so. Mamdani smiled and said, “I’m going to spend the rest of the day thinking about it.”
Mamdani, now said with the euphemism of a culprit, was underestimated by his opponents and by the press. Perhaps not at the start of the campaign this winter when it was, by its own description, a “non-name”, but in the end, when its campaign transcended the typical limits of the municipal political debate. (About 8 AM On the primary day, Mamdani’s team escorted him to a secret meeting, which turned out to be a video recording with Emily Ratajkowski.) When he succeeded in the Jackson Heights – Roosevelt Avenue metro station, one of the most popular metro terminals in the city, one of each dozen voders who are not part of him. “Oh, my God, thank you very much!” A young nave that has large headphones, a nose ring and a tote bag bearing the inscription “Health care affirming sex save lives”. A woman in Haleta scrub, lowered her facial mask and whipped her phone to show Mamdani a photo of her sticker “I voted”. In the Bronx, near the Yankee stadium, a group of schoolchildren went through him in a frenzy. “I saw him on TV!” One shouted. Mamdani shook his hand and everyone left as if they had received a prize. “He went out to us,” said a black woman named Rosa, who recorded the stage on her phone. “This is what politicians did.” In the north of Manhattan, he met in the street with a group of volunteers when a small group of rival volunteers carrying Cuomo t-shirts has passed. One of Cuomo’s volunteers stopped to ask Mamdani to take a selfie with him.
Last Friday evening, Mamdani traveled the length of Manhattan from Inwood to Battery Park. The resulting campaign video, which captured the New Yorkers from all the bands alongside their young potential in motion, was magnificent, a portrait of the city by a hot summer night. But, while we were talking about the sidewalk of Jackson Heights, it was clear that Mamdani bristled to be reduced to a Whi-Bang social mediation candidate. He had campaigned on a set of political objectives – slightly higher taxes on the rich and companies, a freeze for rents for stabilized apartments, free buses, universal daycare services, and more – who had helped him strengthen support, and shouldn’t that count for something in a democracy? This is the case when you get the votes. It seems that on Tuesday, he revised the political cards of the city, attracting notable support in the top of Manhattan, the Oriental Queens and the south of Brooklyn – which were considered a solid Cuomo territory. Wednesday morning, Mamdani had collected 43.5% of the votes of first choice in the electoral system of choice of the city, with eighty-three percent of the expected votes, practically guaranteeing its victory when the votes of the lower candidates are redistributed.
A public service that Mamdani has already rendered to the city: putting the long, substantial and harmful political career at the end of Cuomo, who was trying a rehabilitation four years after having resigned as governor in a scandal of sexual harassment and abuse. In his campaign, Cuomo insisted that the city was in chaos and that he alone could repair it, while avoiding direct contact with voters and the press. He led in each survey leads from the race to his closing days; Assagement adransiated among politicians, unions and the most senior community leaders in the city; And went as if the victory was inevitable. Cuomo has spent almost eleven years as governor, and each year he accumulated more power, until the end, he was undoubtedly the most powerful governor in state history. His mania has reached such a state that he signed a fifteenth-million dollar book agreement to write a dissertation of his pandemic direction even before a vaccine, and while dozens of New Yorkers still died of dying to die from dying to die from dying to die from dying to die Covid every week. In the end, he was rinsed in primary school by a socialist of thirty-three years which he exceeded by more than twenty-five million dollars. Quite simply, Cuomo underestimated how tired New Yorkers were tired of him. Tuesday evening, Brad Lander, the city’s controller, who arrived third in the race, after he and Mamdani were interspersed in the last days of the campaign, said what many voters thought: “good fucking overflow.”
On the sidewalk at Jackson Heights, Mamdani and I had talked about the new New York, shaped by a coalition for young people and a courier concerned with class, and the former New York, defined by ethnic blocks, institutions and neighborhoods. He described the age of a “decisive aspect” of the election, but he insisted that the old and the new ones did not have to be in conflict. “I have been encouraged in several of my conversations with older New Yorkers, who told me that they had been presented in the countryside by their son or daughter, their niece or their nephew,” he said. “I think it indicates a new generation of leadership.” The preliminary results on Tuesday showed that Mamdani dragging Cuomo in the poorest districts of the city by a total of thirteen percent, a fact that suggests how much work Mamdani has before him to settle as a candidate of the city’s working class. Mamdani said that the cost of living on the run in the city was universal, even if it was experienced more intensely by people at the bottom of the city economy. Tenants and owners, he said, feel the pressure. “One in four New Yorkers live in poverty, and yet we know that many more New Yorkers live in a permanent anxiety state as to whether they can continue to afford the city,” he told me. “And this anxiety extends through multiple income slices, and it shows the way in which it is a crisis that suffocates many levels of life in these five arrondissements, and a crisis that threatens to make this city which was one time you could do it now where you can spend it.”
