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ZOHRAN MAMDANI WANTS YOU TO DO MORE THAN SURVIVE  
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Liza Featherstone
December 31, 2025
Jacobin
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_ A democratic socialist will be inaugurated mayor tomorrow because
he told New Yorkers they deserve it all — love, leisure, pleasure,
sport. _

, Photo by Jack Califano

 

Preparing to go onstage for a 2022 Climate Week panel at Cooper Union,
Zohran Mamdani sat in the greenroom examining the tote bag given to
speakers, a compelling bit of swag featuring the names of past
A-listers who have addressed the Great Hall, including Frederick
Douglass, Emma Goldman, Norman Cousins, and Jacob Riis — not to
mention some world-historical villains like Henry Kissinger. Mamdani,
gesturing at the bag with a rueful air of certainty, turned to his
fellow panelists and declared that “none of us is ever going to be
as significant as these people.”

At that time, having been elected to the New York State Assembly just
two years before, Mamdani wasn’t well-known outside of his district
in Astoria or beyond his fellow New York City Democratic Socialists of
America (NYC-DSA) members. By now, in any case, the world would agree
that he’s well on his way to earning a spot on the next edition of
that tote bag.

In October 2024, two years after our humbling encounter in the Cooper
Union greenroom, Mamdani still wasn’t much better known. I sat down
with him at Sami’s Kabab House in Astoria, Queens, not far from his
apartment. Mamdani was giving Jacobin an exclusive interview to
announce his run for mayor of New York City.

We talked that day about his vision for New York City as a place
“where the people who built it can afford to live … and can afford
all the basic necessities of their life and even do more than that.
This is a city where we should be able to afford to dream.” We ate
abundantly: _mantu _dumplings, _borani banjan _(Afghan-style
eggplant), and salmon kebab. Or rather, I ate all that — Mamdani
had too much to say.

He described how he’d been inspired, like many of his generation, by
Senator Bernie Sanders’s twin presidential runs in 2016 and 2020. We
also talked about another losing campaign that had been formative in
his political evolution — that of Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian
Lutheran minister who, with the endorsement of NYC-DSA, ran for city
council in 2017. Mamdani worked on that campaign as a paid staff
organizer for its canvassing operation, an experience that he said
“transformed” his life. Of El-Yateem, the socialist assemblyman
mused, “He gave me a sense of belonging in a city that I had always
loved, but one in which I had not known if my politics had a clear
place.” Mamdani was convinced that his own run for mayor could “do
similar things for far more New Yorkers.”

I smiled and nodded. I certainly agreed with the sentiment. But to be
honest, I figured Mamdani didn’t stand a chance. (Astute political
forecaster that I am, I wrote as much in the article.)

I did, however, believe that his campaign would open more
possibilities simply by helping to build the socialist movement in New
York. Like his hero Bernie Sanders, Mamdani would run a losing
campaign, but one that would catalyze socialist politics in a
reactionary moment. I was certain he’d at least inspire more people
to join DSA, and that some of _them _would run for office, too. The
hope was that this would set off a chain reaction across the city,
bringing left politics and a fighting spirit into unions and
workplaces. Better-than-expected performances at the ballot box could
then scare the ruling class into some concessions and raise
expectations for workers.

At that time, several left-of-center candidates were entering the
mayoral primary. Mamdani told me that was a good thing, acknowledging
that the goal of defeating corrupt mayor Eric Adams and disgraced
former governor Andrew Cuomo was more important than becoming mayor
himself. And with ranked-choice voting, no one needed to play spoiler.
Rather, the left candidates could work together as a slate and see who
came out on top.

But despite acknowledging these practicalities, when describing his
promise to New Yorkers, Mamdani had been speaking in the future tense
about his mayoralty, as I realized only later:

Not a hop, skip, and a jump, not an “if then” or an
“inshallah,” but “I’m going to freeze your rent. I’m going
to make childcare free. I’m going to get you where you’re going on
that bus faster than ever before and without you having to even reach
into your pocket.”

Mamdani humbly acknowledged the contingencies and obstacles, and he
did, at the time, tell some in his inner circle that he doubted he
would prevail. But from the very start, he was not running to make a
statement, build organization, or move the Overton window. He was
running to win.

As almost everyone knows by now, Mamdani did win. He began the
campaign polling around 1 percent, with hardly any name recognition.
Powered by some one hundred thousand volunteers, he trounced a
candidate who spent more than $55 million against him, winning by
more than 8 percent. With just over 50 percent of the vote in a
three-way race, Mamdani heads into Gracie Mansion with a clear mandate
for his redistributive agenda.

Before Mamdani, the conventional story of the American left in the
early twenty-first century went something like this: Senator Bernie
Sanders, the lone democratic socialist in national politics, runs for
president in 2016 and in 2020, inspiring a surge of young people
interested in socialism, many of whom run for local offices and even
some congressional offices, and some of whom actually win. Black Lives
Matter protests break out after the murder of George Floyd, further
buoying the Left, but ineptitude and inflation under Joe Biden
contribute to a right-wing backlash that helps reelect Donald Trump.
There was, in this narrative, a sense that the Left had run its
course — at least for now. Mamdani’s victory shows that, to the
contrary, the socialist movement has been organizing all this time,
and that its best days may still be ahead.

The Genius of the Mamdani Campaign Platform

For socialist electoral campaigns, the inert Democratic establishment
has long been a significant target of ire. But Mamdani’s campaign
persistently acknowledged that the main character in American politics
today was, in fact, none other than President Trump. From the very
beginning of his mayoral bid, Mamdani talked with working-class New
Yorkers who had voted for Trump, learning that some did so because
they were struggling to make ends meet. In Trump, they saw an outsider
who could shake up American politics — a mission Mamdani himself
embraced. “I am Donald Trump’s worst nightmare,” as he often put
it.

At the end of the campaign, Mamdani found himself onstage with some of
New York’s most important Democrats — Attorney General Letitia
James, Governor Kathy Hochul, Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez — all of whom vowed to stand together against
whatever Trump might bring, whether it be the military invasion of the
city, an attempt to deport the mayor-elect, the politically motivated
prosecution of James, the defunding of the city, or simply the
continued persecution of immigrants. With his popularity and striking
electoral mandate, Mamdani had unquestionably become a de facto leader
of the party, defying Trump but also talking relentlessly about how to
deliver the affordability Trump promised.

While Trump’s blather on the topic was fittingly abstract and
notional, each plank of Mamdani’s core platform (rent freeze, public
grocery stores, new affordable housing, universal childcare, free
buses) was carefully chosen to deliver affordability to New Yorkers in
a concrete way. The genius of this was that, when Mamdani campaign
volunteers knocked on their doors, New Yorkers tended to immediately
understand how they would personally benefit from his win. Even the
upper-middle class could see how their own lives would be materially
improved under Mayor Mamdani. Although rich white people were less
likely to support him than other groups, no demographic is excluded
from Mamdani’s platform and his invitation to help build a better
New York City. The campaign even posted a savings calculator on his
website so that individual voters could see how much money they would
save under Mamdani’s policies.

Of all his ideas, the least bureaucratically complicated is his
promise to freeze the rent for the one million tenants in
rent-stabilized buildings. The mayor appoints the members of the Rent
Guidelines Board, which decides when and whether to impose hikes on
those tenants, and he can simply select appointees likely to be
aligned with his thinking. You don’t even have to go back to the
halcyon days of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to find precedent — Bill
de Blasio froze the rent three times during his 2014–2021 mayoralty.
It’s also incredibly popular, with a recent poll finding that
78 percent of New Yorkers support a rent freeze. In an early example
of this campaign’s mix of serious ideas with an absurd sense of fun,
Mamdani announced this particular policy with a video of himself
participating in the New Year’s Day plunge at Coney Island. “I’m
freezing … your rent,” Mamdani said, emerging from the frigid
waters with a grin.

A rent freeze is a policy that seemingly only a landlord could hate.
In contrast, one of Mamdani’s more controversial planks is the idea
of public grocery stores, which evokes the specter of Soviet communism
for many on the Right. But in fact, Mamdani can implement these
relatively quickly because the plan is small-scale: a pilot program of
just five stores in areas not well served by traditional grocery
stores. The idea is both politically smart and necessary, given that
so many poor and working-class New Yorkers are suffering from food
insecurity, especially with the specter of inflation. Democrats spent
years gaslighting Americans about exorbitant grocery prices — one
of many reasons we are now living under Trump. Making even this small
pilot program work would provide some immediate relief and point a way
forward. If it works well, it could be scaled up.

Far more expansive is Mamdani’s plan to create more affordable
housing by building public social housing as well as making it easier
for private developers to do so. The best way to create more
affordable housing at scale is for the government to build it. But of
course, with Trump back in the White House, federal funding is out of
the question, nor could we expect the real estate industry to do
anything but resist expanding and improving this public option.
Private developers will be eager to take Mamdani up on his promise to
work with them, but since their priority will be profit-making rather
than housing those who need it, doing so will be fraught with peril.
What’s encouraging, however, is that due to extensive organizing
around the issue of housing in recent years, there is tremendous
talent ready to curb the real estate industry’s inevitable efforts
to simply build luxury housing, driving working-class New Yorkers out
of their neighborhoods.

In some ways, universal childcare is the most ambitious plank of
Mamdani’s platform, due to the funding and qualified labor it will
require. Yet it may turn out to be one of the more achievable goals,
given Hochul’s strong support for the policy and its deep appeal to
unions and other groups representing the city’s working class, most
of whom struggle to find both affordable and high-quality childcare.
New York City already operates a form of universal early childhood
education through its universal pre-K program, which guarantees free
full-day preschool for all four-year-olds and has begun expanding to
provide the same for three-year-olds. The city also offers
after-school childcare and enrichment activities, much of which are
free or subsidized.

Mamdani wants to build on and significantly broaden these efforts,
creating a fully universal system of free childcare from birth through
school age. Comptroller Brad Lander’s office issued a report on the
need for free universal childcare last January, estimating that such a
program could increase the disposable income of New York City
households with children by $1.9 billion. It seems possible that a
statewide program could emerge out of the legislative deliberations.

Another key plank of Mamdani’s platform with support in Albany is
his promise to end fare collection for city buses. “Fast and free
buses” has been a beloved and catchy mantra of his campaign, and
Mamdani’s delight in the idea (and hard work to make it real) is
rooted in his tenure in Albany. Last year, a nurse boarded the Bx18A
bus, which travels in a loop between Morris Heights and Highbridge in
the Bronx. She began fumbling in her bag, looking for her MetroCard,
until the driver tapped the sign indicating that it was a fare-free
bus. The nurse broke into a dance. “She cha-cha’d down the bus,”
Mamdani recalled, recounting the story in a speech last March on the
assembly floor, asking legislators to expand the successful free bus
pilot that he and state senator Mike Gianaris had crafted the year
before.

In his speech before the assembly, Mamdani asked his colleagues to
think of that dancing nurse and “expand that feeling of joy, of
relief” across the five boroughs. Out of this effort, Mamdani’s
“fast and free buses” demand was born; he was often seen riding
the bus during his campaign, and in one of his videos, he rides the
(free) Staten Island Ferry, reminding New Yorkers that we already
enjoy some free transit — there’s no reason buses can’t be
free, too. Not all transit advocates agree; some have argued that with
limited budgets, improving and expanding bus service should take
priority over dropping the fare. But Mamdani has pointed to data
showing that making buses free speeds boarding and boosts ridership,
getting more cars off the road. In any case, the mantra has become so
associated with his campaign that he’d be wise to immediately make a
few bus lines free in high-need neighborhoods, even if it takes longer
to debate and implement the rest of the plan citywide.

New York City has no taxation powers of its own, unfortunately, and
that means most of Mamdani’s plans, especially for housing and
childcare, require cooperation with the state to increase taxes on the
rich. The federal government’s One Big Beautiful Bill massively
reduced the funding available to cities, and Trump is threatening to
cut New York City’s flow of federal dollars still more, seemingly to
punish New Yorkers for electing Mamdani. A huge increase in funding
from the state could be necessary, then, for New York City to continue
its existing services and even partially fulfill Mamdani’s promises.
That’s entirely feasible, but taxing the rich is the best way to do
it. There isn’t, hiding in the city budget, a huge amount wasted on
stupid or misguided priorities. Almost everything the city does at
present — educating people from age three through college, picking
up garbage, providing laundry services for homeless schoolchildren,
planting more trees in shade-starved neighborhoods, operating
world-class libraries and parks (not to mention America’s best
transit system), to name just a few — is absolutely necessary.
Indeed, it is only because the city already provides so many needed
services that we know for sure that Mamdani’s socialist vision can
find deep roots here. But his big-ticket plans require both
maintaining a tax base and increasing taxes on the rich.

The Right to Live, Not Just Exist

More than anyone on the national stage, Mamdani has met the moment
with clear solutions to the affordability crisis. But he’s done that
while speaking to our hunger to not only survive day-to-day but to
live full and even wonderful lives — to flourish. New Yorkers
agree with Mamdani when he says it shouldn’t be so hard to live
here. But his message is more profound because he recognizes that we
all want, and deserve, much more than that.

During the landmark Lawrence, Massachusetts, mill workers’ strike of
1912, which ended in a victory that Eugene Debs — another hero of
Mamdani’s — called “one of the most decisive and far-reaching
ever won by organized workers,” labor leader Rose Schneiderman gave
a speech that popularized a new slogan for the Left:

What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply
exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life,
and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest
worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but
she must have roses, too.

That phrase wasn’t original to Schneiderman, but it hardly matters.
The strike is commemorated to this day as the Bread and Roses strike,
and her words are rightly remembered as a call for the Left to expand
its horizons — not only do workers deserve to eat, but they also
deserve the beauty and delight enjoyed by the rich. That idea endured
throughout the twentieth century, whether among Italian Communists or,
as scholar Wilson Sherwin has observed, in the US welfare rights
movement. But Mamdani might be the first twenty-first-century American
leader to bring this idea to the national stage.

Although Mamdani made his economic program central to his pitch to New
Yorkers, he never shied away from talk of roses either. (When he first
ran for the assembly, his slogan was “Roti and Roses.”) In a
poignant moment during his mayoral campaign, Mamdani was asked what
advice he had for New Yorkers struggling to find a mate. (Mamdani and
his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, famously met on Hinge, a dating app,
and married last year.) Amusingly, he stayed on his materialist
message, Bernie-style, while acknowledging the real importance of the
question, saying, “The love of your life may currently be too
stressed about whether they can afford the most expensive city in the
United States to find you.”

It’s not only romantic love that Mamdani has irresistibly sought to
democratize. Like many kids growing up in New York, he played soccer
and still has a passion for the game. This fall, as New York City
geared up to host the World Cup in 2026, Mamdani launched the Game
Over Greed campaign to pressure FIFA to both end its dynamic pricing
policy — which has led to $6,000 seats for some games — and
set aside 15 percent of the tickets for city residents to be sold at
a discount. Celebrating the proletarian cosmopolitanism of a sport
beloved around the world, Mamdani has argued that pricing
working-class New Yorkers out of the World Cup is bad for soccer
itself, because these are “the very people that make this game so
special.”

In October, his campaign even hosted a citywide soccer tournament
called the Cost of Living Classic for amateur players at Coney
Island’s Maimonides Park that was free for both players and the
audience. Explaining the Game Over Greed campaign in a recent
interview with the New York Times’ Athletic, Mamdani said, “In our
fight for making the most expensive city in America affordable, it’s
a fight that is not limited to just housing, childcare, and public
transit. It also extends to the moments that give New Yorkers such
joy, which will be the World Cup next year.”

In the waning days of his mayoral campaign, Mamdani continued to
emphasize our collective entitlement to the beautiful life. A few
nights before Election Day, he danced after midnight at queer
nightclubs. “In a city where so much is about struggle, it’s so
important to have a space for joy,” Mamdani said to a crowd of
partiers.

Today an internet subculture of right-leaning influencers in the
so-called manosphere urge young men to leave expensive cities like New
York and instead move to rural towns where they can afford to rent,
and perhaps eventually buy, a small house on warehouse wages. What
such advice overlooks — and what Mamdani recognizes — is that
places like New York City are awesome, and everyone who makes them
that way deserves to stay.

It’s clear that Mamdani would consider his mayoralty a failure if,
four years from now, New York City’s young people were still feeling
the desperation that fuels the anti-urban manosphere. Because
Mamdani’s love for New York is not only undeniable; it’s
contagious. He wants everyone to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, ride
the Staten Island Ferry, cheer for the Knicks, look forward to the
World Cup, and dance all day at the West Indian Day Parade and all
night at Bushwick’s gay bars — each of which he did during his
mayoral campaign.

From day one, Mamdani made clear that his materialist agenda includes
everyone. He not only emphasized that his administration would stand
up in defense of immigrant and trans New Yorkers; he consistently
celebrated those very communities, making clear that new immigrants,
drag queens, and people of every race and nationality are to be
uplifted, not just tolerated — they are, in fact, key to what
makes New York City great.

Everyone deserves it all, Mamdani’s campaign asserted: love,
leisure, pleasure, sport. For not only did Mamdani emphasize that you
deserve to enjoy your life — he also made politics itself fun. His
infectiously inspiring videos and joyful public events made following
the campaign a blast.

Mamdani Wants You to Talk With Your Neighbors

When Mamdani first ran for the New York State Assembly in 2020, he
allowed me to canvass with him on a rainy night in Astoria. While some
voters responded with excitement, others were simply touched by his
efforts, sometimes despite themselves. In that way, it was like any
other canvassing experience. I recall a woman of low affect who
allowed Mamdani to give his pitch and then agreed to vote for him,
explaining, with a shrug, “Well, if you’re going to be walking
around in the rain . . .”

Five years later, around one hundred thousand New Yorkers also knocked
on doors, badly wanting something good to finally happen in America.
Despite the media phenomenon surrounding him, this was the secret of
Mamdani’s victory: the desire among New Yorkers to finally rise
together as a community and reclaim their city. At his victory party,
Mamdani’s field director was even brought onstage to speak, a clear
message that the campaign’s volunteers and those who organized them
meant everything in this win. As Mamdani had recently told Jon Stewart
on The Daily Show, “Politics is not something you have; it’s
something that you do,” a mantra for today’s democratic socialists
and Trump resisters as well as an implicit rebuke to those inclined to
stay inside and post political laments on social media.

Mamdani and his movement simply looked at the working families of New
York City and said, “You deserve better. It doesn’t have to be
this way.” The challenge of left politics hasn’t been to get
people to prefer our vision — of course, most people
would — but to believe that it is possible. Zohran, New York
City’s DSA, and one hundred thousand volunteers convinced people
that it is.

_Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin, a freelance journalist,
and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for
Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart._

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