The Zohran Effect

A leftist takes off

Lately, journalists have been calling to talk to me about Zohran Mamdani. I expected this to happen, since when I ran for office in 2018, he was my campaign manager. I’ve spent, perhaps, hundreds of hours in his company. If we don’t see each other as much these days, we still chat. None of his political success has surprised me. When he was twenty-six, in the trenches of my State Senate effort—I felt like the elder of the campaign, at twenty-eight—I thought he would eventually run himself. He had all the tools, particularly the charisma and the nimble intelligence. Many progressives and leftists sputter if they encounter someone diametrically opposed to them. They get angry and unreasonable, and come off as weak. He was never like that. He has, in his political life, knocked on thousands of doors himself, so he is used to trying to woo recalcitrant conservatives at the door. He wants to be in the mix.

Now, he’s a serious candidate for mayor. Some polls show him in second or third. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is still the unquestioned frontrunner. Eric Adams, saved from prison by Donald Trump, is terminally weakened but hanging around for now. Brad Lander, the current city comptroller, and Scott Stringer, his predecessor, remain viable, and Zellnor Myrie, a state legislator like Mamdani, has fundraised well but hasn’t yet shown the same polling momentum. It’s the fundraising that’s stunned most of the political establishment: Mamdani, organically, really is better at it than anyone else. He is on track to easily hit the spending cap for public matching funds in the primary. He has access to several million dollars already and boasts, by far, the most individual donors within the five boroughs. I was bullish on him when he announced in October, but he has surpassed my cautious optimism for his viability; he’s speeding toward the top of the pack, and every other Democrat in the primary has noticed.

Mamdani, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, has grown popular through social media and attracted a significant youth following. He is the first leftist since Sanders to launch a potent campaign at mass scale. AOC beat Joe Crowley in a single New York City House district, while Mamdani is competing in a primary where one million Democrats might cast ballots. This is the equivalent of a statewide campaign in many other parts of America. This, for the left, is very real—especially for the Democratic Socialists of America, who have wisely invested much in Mamdani. After several years of stagnation or even decline, relative to the 2010s boom years, DSA is going to reap genuine rewards within the five boroughs if Mamdani finishes strong on primary day. AOC, who represents an overlapping district with Mamdani, hasn’t yet endorsed, and may even prefer Lander, whom she strongly supported when he won his comptroller’s race in 2021. But the reality now is that AOC may need to endorse Mamdani (or co-endorse him, with Lander) as much as Mamdani needs her backing. He is set to run up the score in the Queens side of her district, especially in the left-leaning neighborhoods where she’s most popular. Only two years apart in age, they are friendly but bound to collide in the coming years, as each seek influence within New York.

Mamdani’s got something else going for him that AOC doesn’t quite have anymore: effortless cool. The downtown set, cynical about Millennial-inflected liberalism and politics in general, is flocking to Mamdani. They don’t care much for Ocasio-Cortez. She still has a bright future in politics, but there’s a kind of Gen Z or young Millennial voter who views her as the embodiment of a certain late 2010s cringe. Overly earnest Instagram videos and calls for “self-care” aren’t in vogue any longer. And whereas AOC always had a whiff of radical chic, Mamdani’s leftism—plenty chic in some quarters, to be fair—seems much more unstinting. On Israel, for example, Mamdani is an anti-Zionist, which pleases a lot of the under-30 crowd. He’s been organizing in support of Palestinians since at least college. Ocasio-Cortez is a bit more uncomfortable around the issue, pleasing neither side. Few who are overly pro-Israel like her, and many on the left eye-rolled when she declared, on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris was working tirelessly toward a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mamdani, though, hasn’t made his mayoral campaign about Israel and he’s avoided some of DSA’s more toxic positions, like defunding the police or declaring, unequivocally, he wants an open border. Popularist centrists may take comfort in a leftist who is stumping almost entirely on cost-of-living issues: freezing rent, opening cheap city-owned grocery stores, and making buses free. He’s steered clear of culture war.

The question, for Mamdani, is how far he can go. Many people now ask me this question: can a 33-year-old state assemblyman and proud socialist actually get elected mayor of New York City?