It was almost weird to walk around New York City and not run into him. “Z was in just yesterday,” the barista at Little Flower in Astoria told me, pointing to a full-sized Zohran Mamdani cut-out stationed near the bathrooms. Mamdani is called Z by his friends, who now number in the millions. “Have you met Z yet?” a young canvasser named Jasmine asked, implying that for me, for all of us, it was only a matter of time. Her sidekick managed a clipboard, a jelly donut, a breakfast burrito, and two iced matchas while Jasmine scrolled through old photos of Mamdani on her phone. She’d met Z about ten years ago, she reckoned, while working on a project with the mayor-elect’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair. Did she ever predict he’d make it this far in politics? In fact, yes: “You can see he sees you,” she told me, a little enigmatically. But I knew just what she meant. Even from afar, in fact, you could watch it up close.
Like another thirtysomething pavement-pounder of yore, New York’s own Walt Whitman, Zohran Mamdani popped up nearby and unexpectedly. He was not under anybody’s boot-soles, but nevertheless there he was, everywhere and nowhere, a man who performed transformative politics inside our phones. “Missing me one place search another,” as Whitman put it. In the final stretch, Mamdani did tai chi and danced salsa with the elderly at a community center on the Lower East Side. In Richmond Hill, Queens, he joined a traditional Nagar Kirtan at a Sikh rec hall, wearing a canary yellow dastaar. In a video filmed on Steinway Street in Queens, Mamdani—who speaks, with “varying degrees of proficiency,” Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, Bangla, Luganda, and Arabic—greeted Syrian supporters in Levantine dialect and joked that, while he resembled “your brother-in-law from Damascus,” his Arabic could use some work. At a bodega in the Bronx, the candidate danced a sensual bachata with a blissed-out calico named Coca. This torrid spectacle must have crushed Mamdani’s Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, a rescue-cat advocate who had pandered to the feline vote, turning up at the polling booth on Tuesday in a cat-themed tie showing off a prized possession, a tome entitled Pawverbs for a Cat Lover’s Heart. (Sliwa was “not exactly prime time,” President Donald Trump told a reporter. “This isn’t exactly ideal,” Trump winced: “He wants to make Gracie Mansion…a home for the cats.”)
“It avails not, time or place,” as the poet boasted. But with the finish line fast approaching, the time stamps kicked in. Last Sunday dawned a bright orange and blue autumn morning in New England, but in my feed it was still the night before, 11:24 PM in Williamsburg, where Zohran, promising “no sleep till it’s over” and looking crisp as ever in his uniform dark suit and tie, took the mic at Gabriela, a sweaty bar. An instant later it was 11:41 and Mamdani danced at Toñitas, a Caribbean social club. A little after midnight the candidate, who once rapped professionally as “Mr. Cardamom,” posted up behind the booth at Damballa in Bushwick. At 1:00 AM an Instagram influencer spread the news that “Zohran just showed up at the gay bar”—Mood Ring, on Myrtle Avenue, where he danced “with the gworls gays n theys,” as another user put it. At 1:14 Mamdani was spotted at Papi Juice, a roving Brooklyn art party that “celebrates the lives of queer and trans people of color,” according to its social media feed. At precisely 1:24, still spruce but shivering in a worsted overcoat, Zohran fueled up at a halal truck, then finished the night at a rally in Greenpoint.
The man clearly needed to eat, and this made his opponents angry. In a 2023 interview Mamdani was filmed eating takeout biryani from Boishakhi Restaurant, in Astoria, with his hands, the way it’s done in his native Uganda. “Go back to the third world,” Representative Brandon Gill of Texas demanded on X when the video resurfaced this summer. (The congressman’s wife, Danielle D’Souza Gill, who is the daughter of the right-wing Indian American provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, chimed in: “I did not grow up eating rice with my hands and have always used a fork. I was born in America. I’m a Christian MAGA patriot.”) But why go all the way to “the third world” when you can head to Queens instead, for goat paya at Kabab King, Mamdani’s old high school hangout, or orata at Abuqir, or lamb adana laffa at Zyara?
Various food scandals came and went, dinging the ravenous candidate not one iota. When he was spotted on a sushi date with his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, the New York Post cast the “radical socialist” as a secret fancy-pants; when he wolfed down a burrito on the Q train, “real New Yorkers”—that is, readers of the Post—suddenly pearl-clutched like Miss Manners. The signals then got crossed: on Fox News, a MAGA ex-congressman accused Mamdani of eating a burrito with his fingers. (“How the fuck else do you eat a burrito,” one commenter wondered.) The question on everyone’s mind was posed by a caffeinated influencer who interviewed Mamdani at a campaign stop: “Did you eat today?” He had: “a chicken shawarma.” Plus “I’ve also started having a lot of these,” he added, producing from his jacket pocket a foil packet of Premium Rajnigandha Silver Pearls, a brand of cardamom seeds dusted with saffron. Do yourself the favor: “It’s like a mint,” Mamdani beamed, like a pitchman. “Perfumes you can eat!”
“Roti and Roses” was the cheerful slogan of Mamdani’s 2020 campaign for state assembly. It neatly captures his socialism, which is hardly going to starve us or serve up bland bummers. His three signature proposals—free and fast buses, universal childcare, and a freeze on rent hikes for the roughly 2.5 million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments—are far from revolutionary, although the devils lurking in the details could bog him down. If he makes too many trade-offs, he’ll be branded as a classic “sewer socialist” who clung to power but lost sight of the horizon. If his rhetoric exceeds his results, he’ll enter the wax museum of lost causes.
The rickety socialist motto “Bread and Roses” brings to mind not striking millworkers dusty from the looms but banjo-pickin’ PBS telethons hosted by folk singers in suspenders. On election day I saw no suspenders along Steinway Street, where, if you can locate it anywhere, in any one place and not another, Mamdani’s socialism comes together. It is not a stale pocketful of old creeds but a dynamic system with small businesses, many of them family businesses, at its core. Anxiety about the “future of the Democratic Party,” like every other op-ed abstraction, vanishes on these blocks sometimes known as Little Egypt. If you’re too busy worrying about the name for this energy, the energy will devour you; you will be crushed under an avalanche of bags of onions or sucked down a cellar hatch to live out your days in the sub-basement of a bakkal. The mayor-elect took this neighborhood by fifty-five points.
*
In an election that has figuratively “redrawn the city’s electoral maps,” as the analysts say, one actual map became a trusted guide. Late in the campaign, the analyst Michael Lange posted an intricate, and mostly dead-on, prediction of Tuesday’s outcome on his Substack. Elections like yesterday’s lift a lot of boats: get ready to see plenty of Lange, your local lanyard-bearing Carville or Kornacki. Lange had broken the five boroughs into eleven categories, color-coded and tartly labeled. On Staten Island, “Archie Bunker’s Descendants” grimaced and taunted Mamdani from their solid block of blood red, though the borough, heeding the endorsement of their man in the White House, voted for Cuomo over Sliwa. Across the narrows, in places like Gravesend, Manhattan Beach, and Midwood (where Bernie Sanders grew up, but we’ll get to him in a moment), Lange identified the “Anti-Commie Corridor” of Eastern European immigrants whose American Dream did not exactly foresee any of this, balancing out the adjacent “Commie Corridor, Sr.,” comprising a swath of neighborhoods through central and north Brooklyn and into Mamdani’s stronghold of Astoria.
Some of those grizzled seniors are barely thirty, and, like their candidate, rose up within the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). An insurgent “Commie Corridor, Jr.” represents, for Lange, “the next era of progressive and socialist electoral expansion” in Manhattan neighborhoods like the East Village and Central Harlem. Lange’s light blue “Capitalist Corridor” is right where you’d imagine it, as are the “No Kings Marchers” and “MSNBC Viewers.” A few spots of emerald green mark the “Swing States,” including puny and remote City Island, “the New Hampshire of the Bronx,” where Lange found an electorate that mainly wanted Michael Bloomberg back. City Island ultimately picked Andrew Cuomo, who was seemingly loathed even among his tepid supporters. But Mamdani placed second: in the taffy shops and bait shacks, they appreciated the fact that the mayor-elect, alone among the candidates, had swung through for selfies and smiles.
Driving over from MSNBC Land to Commie Corridor yesterday, through the crazy-straw tangle of on-ramps and off-ramps that lead across the East River and into Astoria, I tuned into Daniel Denvir’s podcast “The Dig” for an interview with two of the main Commies from the Corridor, the young cochairs of New York City’s chapter of the DSA, a group I had joined to get some skin in the game from my distant aerie in New England. Grace Mausser and Gustavo Gordillo described the organization’s nimble, decentralized structure, its all-hands-on-deck ethic of empowering volunteers to rise through its ranks, and, notably, its claim upon the career of Zohran Mamdani. The DSA made Mamdani, who has now made the DSA.
In the two dozen or so campaigns it has run since 2018, the DSA developed a “leadership layer…right out of the gate,” according to Mausser. Zohran’s first three hires were “cadre DSA members,” its core personnel, she explained. Everything flowed out of those hires: field coordination, volunteer coordination, strategic comms, coalition building, policy writing, endorsements, social media. “The structure was iterative as it grew, and it grew in ways that were beyond expectations”: door knockers became field leads became field coordinators, and on it went. The New York City DSA and the Zohran campaign “were two different entities, and remain so,” Gordillo clarified, but “our members were embedded in every aspect of the campaign.” Mausser neatly summed up the astonishing opportunities and risks of this moment: “You can’t disentangle Zohran from DSA. Even if he wanted to step away from us, which to be clear he does not, but even if he did I think it would be impossible at this point.” It wasn’t meant to be ominous; it was a simple statement of fact.
Once in Astoria, I stood with a group of newly recruited canvassers in a tidy park on Crescent Street. A DSA volunteer gave out marching orders and then yielded the top of the picnic table to Tiffany Cabán, the DSA-aligned city council member for the neighborhood. “This campaign has been about solidarity,” Cabán told the raucous group. “How often can you go out and campaign, and feel this good in your body?” I was feeling hungry in my body, so I pulled up to an incredible plate of Uzbek pulao at the Afghan restaurant across the street, Sami’s Kabab House.
As it happens, Sami’s was the site of the “Mayor to Mayor” beer summit in September—I think they drank iced tea, but someone found some ersatz steins for an amber liquid—between Zohran and Bernie Sanders. “We’re sitting here in one of my favorite restaurants in Astoria, in the heart of my district,” Mamdani told Bernie, who seemed unusually moved but typically eager to deflect. “My journey in running for office in the first place,” Mamdani said, began at Sanders’s Queensbridge rally in October 2019, his first after suffering a heart attack, and the largest rally of that election at the time. “I remember the excitement, the elation we had at the rebirth of that campaign”—Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign, which the Democratic establishment magically made go away as Covid spread in March 2020. But it was also “the birth of all of our campaigns.”
By “our,” of course, Mamdani meant the candidates endorsed and supported since then by the DSA, which, in its new, adrenalized instantiation, also claims Sanders as a kind of founder. Those who attended Bernie’s enormous rallies in the first two weeks of March 2020 did not hallucinate that energy. It was merely forced underground, where, judging by Tuesday’s results, it found ample nourishment for a renewal.
*
The last time anything like this happened, the world had to squint to see it. Around 9:00 PM on the night of March 3, 1981, a down and out, snow-locked city of 38,000 elected as its mayor a political has-been, the notorious former “perennial candidate” of a petering-out Vietnam-era fringe party, Liberty Union. Bernie Sanders was a four-time bottom-dweller in statewide elections who, a few years earlier, had retired from politics rather than become a punch line. At thirty-nine, he seemed on his way to becoming a familiar Burlington street type: the dusty heckler or lost-cause pamphleteer, his zone of influence extending from the pick-up basketball court to the library periodicals room. An alternate timeline can be imagined where Sanders eventually found employment not as the mayor of Burlington but as an airport taxi driver, a shop teacher, or a shift supervisor at the Onion River Co-Op, refilling the bins of banana chips and carob-coated raisins. If podcasts had existed, it is a near certainty that he would have started one.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Bernie Sanders after winning reelection as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 1983
But Sanders, running as the standard bearer of the “independent coalition”—its core membership was perhaps ten at most, and included a philosopher, a nutritionist, an unruly tenant’s advocate, and an elderly church lady with a political score to settle—had somehow eked out a victory against a five-term incumbent who controlled the city’s Board of Aldermen and its dense thicket of municipal commissions. The issues were Playmobil-small compared to those facing New York City, but the Mamdani campaign makes them feel familiar: a regressive property tax increase, a mustache-twirling developer with his eyes on the sunsets over Lake Champlain, a working-class French-Canadian community that had slid, over two generations after the local mills closed, into grinding poverty, and an electorate resigned to stagnant, discouraging Democratic machine politics.
Mayor Gordon Paquette immediately headed to Florida to golf among the pelicans, confident that the Sanders “fluke” would be corrected after a recount; the recount, run by his allies, narrowed but preserved Bernie’s victory, and a political annus horribilis ensued. Sanders was besieged inside his own office by a city clerk who ransacked his mail, by aldermen who refused to allow him to hire a staff, by an anonymous gazetteer who circulated a weekly slander sheet, written partly in competent ballad stanzas, and by a badge-flashing FBI agent who turned up in Vermont the day after Sanders was inaugurated, looking to ask, as they say, a few questions about our mayor. By that time, Bernie’s epithet in the papers had already shifted from “perennial candidate” to “avowed socialist.”
These Lilliputian events of the distant past will now no doubt be scaled to a city of eight million; for the single, feckless FBI agent, substitute unprecedented, unimagined presidential power summoned in its entirety, expanding out to a federalized national guard and ICE stormtroopers carrying 9mm Lugers. The good stuff will be scaled too: as a teenager growing up in the People’s Republic of Burlington, I helped plant trees and clean up the parks and performed in little circuses and cheered on my friends at the battle of the bands because, as we understood, we were part of something, an experiment in human happiness in an American city.
The analogies are tempting, but they spotlight a difference. After retiring from Liberty Union in 1977, Sanders never again joined a political party; even the Progressive Coalition, which formed during his mayoralty and holds city hall still today, was kept somewhat at arm’s length. “Socialism” never really stuck to him; he often presented himself as a kind of flinty Yankee figure, at his core a libertarian hill farmer. And anyway, socialism was good business for Burlington: the downtown merchants thrived in our new, bustling city, with its telegenic mayor and smart, young administration.
Zohran Mamdani won the support of over one million New Yorkers, but now the New York City DSA, invigorated by his landslide, has risen along with him and promises to hold him to account. At a DSA watch party on election night in Tribeca, the mantra in the crowd was “affordability,” to be sure; but the hope, the buoyancy, the romance was that an expanding socialist movement, managed by the brilliant and passionate young activists who brought this moment to fruition, might recalibrate nationwide what progressives sometimes call “the left wing of the possible.” In Burlington the Sanders win played out as a series of apparently small-ball measures. Some were “socialist”—a modest housing trust for low-cost home ownership, new protections for tenants, a community and economic development fund, a new network of neighborhood groups empowered by city hall—and some, like the arrival of a minor league baseball team, a jazz festival, a fishing derby, a snow shoveling program, a teen center, were not. Maybe the crucial lessons of the Sanders years are in essence entrepreneurial. As Bernie told Mamdani at their iced-tea summit: with everybody chipping in, with a sense that a city can be perfected by the contributions of its citizens, “you’d be surprised that small amounts of money can really go a long way.”