New York City mayoral election candidate Zohran Mamdani. Photo / Getty Images
Ron Allen’s T-shirt could be a mantra for so many in this seen-it-all city - “Fun Fact: I Don’t Care.”
But the 47-year-old New Yorker does care - about spiralling rents and grocery prices, about an ageing political class dominated by all-too familiar faces, which is why he joined Zohran Mamdani’s supporters in an impromptu dance party the other day as they awaited their candidate’s arrival in Harlem.
“Mamdani is for the people, he’s real and what the new generation needs,” Allen said as Michael Jackson’s Beat It blared from a loudspeaker. “It’s time for the old generation to pass the torch.”
New Yorkers have grown accustomed to mayoral candidates who pledge to make the city safer and more liveable. They’re as familiar as the steaming hotdogs served at Sabrett stands from Brooklyn to the Bronx.
The 2025 political menu includes someone altogether different: a 34-year-old democratic socialist, an Indian American born in Uganda, whose unexpected rise is rooted in the anxiety provoked by New York’s exorbitant cost of living, as well as demographic shifts that have remade neighbourhoods across the United States’ largest city.
Mamdani’s sudden success has riveted Democratic strategists around the country who see his brand of economic populism and attacks on billionaires and wealthy campaign donors as a potential road map to victory in the 2026 Midterm elections.
Yet Mamdani has also energised Republicans. US President Donald Trump branded him a “communist lunatic” and threatened to make him the face of the Democratic Party in the Midterms.
If his double-digit lead in polls over former governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa holds until November 4, Mamdani would become New York’s first Muslim mayor and the youngest person in a century to win City Hall.
More importantly, perhaps, his ascension would shake up a power structure of entrenched political, financial, and real estate interests.
“The focus he has put on affordability and his ability to deliver it in a way that people don’t feel is BS is a model people can replicate,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant. “People are deeply sceptical of anyone offering the status quo.”
At the same time, in a city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel, Mamdani’s sharp criticism of Israel and defence of Palestinian rights has angered many Jewish voters.
And his light resume - he is a former rapper in his third term as a Queens state lawmaker - is fodder for concern that he lacks the management chops to oversee 300,000 government employees and a US$112 billion ($195b) budget.
“To roll the dice on that is kind of scary,” said Andrew Fine, an Upper East Side real estate agent.
“There’s a lot of anxiety about him in my world. Moderates and Republicans are freaking out, to put it bluntly.”
Mamdani has shown he’s a deft campaigner who can command the attention of an electorate distracted by the stuff of New York life - subway delays, the latest Mets or Yankees drama, the controversy du jour engulfing Mayor Eric Adams.
With an ever-present smile and snappy social media videos, Mamdani offers supporters despondent over Trump a form of political Prozac, an opportunity to repudiate what they see as the President’s anti-urban and anti-immigrant agenda.
He also draws occasional vitriol as he travels the streets, such as the afternoon in Midtown when a woman, spotting him getting on a Citi Bike, screamed “Communist!” as he rode away.
“He has this hopeful energy that we haven’t seen, that reminds you of Obama,” said Kelly Adams, 34, a lawyer walking her cocker spaniel on Sutton Place, the wealthy East Side enclave. “He’s like a foil to Trump.”
Grant Harper Reid, 71, a retiree who joined the crowd in Harlem awaiting Mamdani, is backing him because “they can’t control him”.
“He’s not big business. He’s not going to go towards Trump. He wants to make things affordable. Even if he can’t, at least he wants to try.”
Mamdani arrived moments later, beaming for supporters’ selfies as he inched his way through a throng that included doubters like Monique Hendricks.
“Free buses?” scoffed Hendricks, 59, hovering at the crowd’s edge. “I’ve lived in this city my whole life. There’s no way they’re going to make them free.”
She leaned forward to punctuate her point. “You’ve got to tell me how you’re going to do it.”
George Arzt has been a prominent member of the city’s political class since the 1970s, when he was the New York Post’s City Hall bureau chief and Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. This spring, he came across a campaign flyer for a mayoral candidate whose name he did not know.
“He’s very popular. Maybe you’re out of touch,” Arzt’s daughter said when he asked about Mamdani.
Like most of the political establishment, he was astonished when Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, defeating Cuomo, who is now running as an independent.
“The guy had never held a major office,” said Arzt, 78. “How was this happening?”
The answer, in part, is in the demographic shifts that have reshaped the city, as neighbourhoods once dominated by Irish, Italian, and Jewish New Yorkers transformed with the arrival of Latino and South Asian immigrants.
“It was working-class, non-college-educated people who worked in construction or owned hardware stores or other small businesses,” said John Mollenkopf, a City University of New York political science professor.
“They aged out, retired and left, and their place has been taken by [new] immigrant communities.”
Many of the newer arrivals identify with Mamdani’s Muslim faith and immigrant background. But they’re also facing escalating housing and childcare costs, accentuating class tensions that Mamdani has seized on. “I don’t think we should have billionaires,” he told a TV interviewer.
“We’re all thirsting for someone who is not beholden to moneyed interests,” said Sanjay Patil, 49, a Queens-based lawyer. “It’s like a breath of fresh air.”
Economic pressures are not just the concern of working- and middle-class New Yorkers, though. Chief executives also worry about luring new hires when the city’s median monthly rent tops US$4000.
“Employers’ number one concern is the high cost of living in the city,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group. “They’ll leave New York when the best and brightest can’t afford to be here.”
Mamdani has also mastered the use of social media, enamouring him to younger voters.
In January, he dramatised his pledge to freeze rents by diving into the icy waters off Coney Island in his suit and tie, a moment captured in a TikTok video that drew more than a million views.
His video about what he called “halalflation” - how the city’s permitting process was driving up prices at carts selling food conforming to Islamic dietary laws - attracted another million clicks.
Julian Rodriguez, 20, who lives with his mother in Queens, had tuned out politics because it seems so nasty.
Then he caught a Mamdani video on YouTube and became intrigued enough that he plans to vote for him.
“He’s a vibe,” Rodriguez said as he strolled through a street festival in Woodhaven, Queens. “Positive and hopeful.”
Mamdani has retreated from past calls to defund the police and his descriptions of the department as “racist, anti-queer”. But voters skittish about crime still worry.
His promise of free bus and childcare services drive scepticism about where he’ll find the funding since Governor Kathy Hochul (Democrat) has opposed raising taxes.
“It’s silliness,” Candace Farmer, 67, a Manhattan art dealer, said as she paused on Broadway. “Telling people you can ride the bus for free is pandering.”
Although the mayor’s portfolio does not include foreign policy, Mamdani’s statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - he has refused to repudiate the phrase “globalise the intifada” - has been fodder for Cuomo’s attacks.
His charge that Israel committed genocide in Gaza has angered conservative segments of the Jewish electorate, even as he also has support among more liberal Jews.
“The guy is a radical,” said Bob Selya, 89, a retired lawyer on the Upper West Side, the heavily Jewish neighbourhood where Mamdani grew up. “He’s a Hamas sympathiser.”
Mamdani recently condemned Hamas for the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel in a statement in which he also assailed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “genocidal war”.
Fran Lebowitz, the writer who is as New York as alternate-side-of-the-street parking, said she couldn’t care less about Mamdani’s views on Israel and snickers at the mention of his cost-cutting plans.
“The city can’t even run the city - how will they run grocery stores?” she said in a phone interview.
Still, Lebowitz said she plans to vote for Mamdani, if only because she believes his growing power creates agita for establishment Democrats in New York like Senator Charles Schumer, whom she accuses of being too timid in responding to Trump.
“I’m sick of these people,” she said. “Politicians have an obligation to express the feelings of their constituents, and that’s what I think Mamdani does.”
In early October, Cuomo, 67, summoned reporters to a park near his Sutton Place apartment, where he dismissed Mamdani as a “Champagne socialist” whose “20 minutes” as a state lawmaker disqualifies him to helm the city.
“What he has been talking about is garbage,” Cuomo declared.
The son of former governor Mario Cuomo, a liberal icon in New York, Andrew Cuomo likes to remind audiences of his own credentials, including a decade as governor.
He’s not all talk, he says, citing projects like the renovation of LaGuardia Airport that was completed when he was in Albany.
Cuomo also has enough political baggage to fill a moving truck, most notably his 2021 resignation amid allegations of sexual harassment.
It’s an inventory even his supporters are apt to itemise when asked about him. Polls have shown that decidedly more New Yorkers have an unfavourable than a favourable view of him.
Barbara Berg, 79, a Westsider, said she supports Cuomo despite his history because she worries that businesses and the wealthy will leave if Mamdani wins.
“Good luck to us all in that case,” she said. “I know Cuomo is not a nice guy, I know he has a lot of faults. But he’s the most capable.”
As he left a supermarket on Broadway, Norman Needleman, 76, a retired social worker, said he was struggling to sort out his uneasiness about both Mamdani and Cuomo.
“I’m up a tree without a ladder. I’m screwed up,” he said, shrugging. “Get me a good political therapist.”
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