Zohran Mamdani, the progressive Muslim immigrant who wants to be mayor of New York and challenge Trump

An immigrant, a Muslim, a progressive, a champion of Palestine, a son of intellectuals… Zohran Mamdani embodies everything that Donald Trump despises. Largely for that reason, the 33-year-old state assemblyman managed to win the Democratic primary for New York City mayor on Tuesday, after unseating the favorite, former state governor Andrew M. Cuomo. His victory is a breath of fresh air for an embattled Democratic Party that has yet to fully find its bearings under the Trump presidency, and for a city in need of change. Unknown to many before this campaign, Mamdani has long championed progressive causes that ultimately brought him victory, after nearly all pre-election polls showed him losing to the veteran politician.

The primary results won’t be official until July, as the city uses a ranked-choice voting system, which requires a runoff if no candidate receives 50% of the vote. Mamdani received less than 44%, and Cuomo, less than 34%. But the final tabulation will be a mere formality at this point: Cuomo conceded defeat less than two hours after the polls closed Tuesday night, and Mamdani declared victory. “In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done. My friends, we have done it,” he exclaimed to his supporters early Wednesday morning.

After officially receiving the Democratic nomination next month, Mamdani will continue to campaign until November 4th, when mayoral elections are to be held in the country’s most populated city. He will face at least two independent candidates, including the current mayor Eric Adams, and a Republican nominee (Cuomo is considering running again as an independent). But the young lawmaker will enter November with all the odds in his favor: he will be the favorite candidate in a city that hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 2008. And New Yorkers are unlikely to elect one now, given that one of their priorities is that whoever wins the mayoral race must be capable of standing up to President Trump.

That was precisely one of the issues that shaped Mamdani’s campaign. He has called himself “Trump’s worst nightmare,” calling the president a fascist and a racist. And in many ways, he is. For starters, Mamdani is an immigrant. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 2018, although he arrived in the country when he was seven years old. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, to an Indian-American mother and an Indian-Ugandan father of Muslim descent.

His parents met in the East African country while his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, was conducting interviews for her movie, Mississippi Masala, about the expulsion of Uganda’s Indian minority. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent author and professor of postcolonial studies who currently teaches at Columbia University in New York, had been expelled from the country due to his ethnicity more than a decade earlier. He was able to return to Uganda in the 1980s and participated in research for the film starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury.

The family lived in various countries—from India to South Africa—before settling permanently in New York City, where Mamdani grew up. The candidate describes himself as an Indian Ugandan New Yorker. “My father raised me with a real sense of being African, being proud of that heritage,” he said in a recent interview with New York Magazine.

Although he grew up as a Muslim in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in a climate of heightened Islamophobia, he was fairly protected from it. His environment was always progressive due to where he grew up, the schools he attended, and his parents. He never lacked for anything. In that sense, he is aware of his privilege. In the interview with New York Magazine, he acknowledged that it may seem contradictory that, as a candidate, he has focused his campaign on the working class to which he does not belong: “Sometimes the impulse is to wash your hands of the guilt, to slip away from it. But what that assumes is that your responsibility ends because you’re not directly involved when in fact it continues, just without you.”

He was a rapper for a few years and even a music producer. He began his political career in 2015 as a volunteer in a New York City Council campaign. Two years later, he joined the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, inspired by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has mobilized so many young progressives in recent years. Sanders endorsed Mamdani in the primaries, as did New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Mamdani continued working on various campaigns until, in 2019, he decided to launch his own. He ran to represent New York City’s 36th District, which encompasses part of Queens, in the State Assembly. In the June 2020 primaries, amid the coronavirus pandemic, he defeated the incumbent candidate and then won the general election in November. Since then, he has been reelected twice without opposition.

A young star was born. At a time when the city was emerging from the grip of the pandemic, after protests over the police killing of African American George Floyd shook the country. Change was in the air, not only in New York but across the nation, with Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. But the surge was short-lived. In the more than four years he’s spent in the state capital, he’s only managed to get three of his more than 20 bills passed.

One of those was a pilot program that made some public transit buses free. Five lines, one in each city borough, cost nothing for a year. It was a milestone for the young legislator and a hit with New Yorkers, especially those with low incomes. However, when it came time to renew the initiative, it fell apart. It was included in the 2024 state budget, but Mamdani refused to vote for the package because it contained some measures he disagreed with. He refused to budge, and it cost him his greatest achievement.

This earned him a reputation for being stubborn, incapable of negotiating, and overly idealistic. Cuomo repeatedly accused him of this during the primaries. But to no avail, because he managed to enthuse voters, particularly young ones, with a campaign in which he promised to revive the free bus program, build new housing, freeze rent on some apartments to combat the city’s severe affordability crisis, protect immigrants from the Trump administration’s offensive, raise taxes on the wealthy, and make childcare free for all, among other things. He conveyed all of this through social media, with viral videos, and a voter-friendly strategy in which he has described himself as “the candidate of all New Yorkers.”

The enthusiasm in the city is palpable, especially among the more progressive sectors. Mamdani is also a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause and of the young people who have demonstrated at the city’s and the country’s universities against the genocide in Gaza. This is another of the many reasons why the American establishment—both Democrats and Republicans, who have already turned against him—will tremble if he manages to become the next mayor of the Big Apple. Because, as he said in his victory speech: “In our New York, the power belongs to the people.”

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