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.
