میدل-ایست-آیZohran Mamdani makes history to become New York City's first Muslim mayor
Zohran Mamdani makes history to become New York City's first Muslim mayor
Mamdani polled at just one percent at the outset of the race, mobilising voters in a way not seen in decades
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In a race watched around the world, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist and assemblyman from Queens, New York, won the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday to become its youngest leader in at least a century.
Originally seen as an outsider candidate before his Democratic primary win in June made him the frontrunner, Mamdani ran an avowedly left-wing campaign promising rent controls and free bus travel - a platform funded by a proposed increase in taxes on the wealthiest residents of New York City.
Mamdani was also unapologetically pro-Palestinian throughout his campaign in a city that was convulsed by protests against Israel's war on Gaza. They were subsequently forcefully shut down by the New York Police Department and pressure on universities from the Trump administration. Data shows Mamdani's stance actually helped him seal the primary win, despite smears of antisemitism for his views on the war, which is now widely considered a genocide.
Results on Tuesday showed Mamdani handily beat his chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, a man more than twice his age who comes from a New York political dynasty and enjoys a national profile, with at least 50 percent of the vote at 9:34pm local time. That's just counting 69 percent of the precincts, but there is no pathway for Cuomo to catch up.
"We are on the brink of making history in our city. On the brink of saying goodbye to a politics of the past. A politics that tells you what it can't do, and really what it means to say is what it won't do, and to usher in a new era," Mamdani told reporters earlier in the day.
"We do not get to choose the scale of the crisis we face. We simply get to choose the manner in which we respond," he added.
His win sets multiple precedents.
Mamdani is an immigrant from his birthplace of Uganda, where his Indian-origin father was raised. His mother is Indian. He is also a Muslim.
On 1 January, he will be sworn in to run the largest and most diverse city in the United States, and arguably one of the most influential places in the entire world. It is also one of the most important governments in the US outside of the capital, Washington DC.
New York City has a population of 8.5 million.
According to the City Board of Elections, of the 4.7 million registered voters there, more than two million people voted in this election. This is the first time this has happened since 1969, and far surpasses the numbers from the 2001 election, which was held just weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
The New York Times reported that more than 735,000 New Yorkers cast early ballots ahead of Tuesday, making that the highest early in-person turnout ever in a non-presidential election year.
Only 1.15 million voters cast ballots in the last race in 2021.
Among those aged 35 and under, 100,000 showed up to vote over the weekend.
Grassroots campaign
Mobilisation was key to Mamdani's success.
His campaign said that volunteers knocked on a whopping three million doors on his behalf across the five boroughs that make up New York City.
"In my seven years of knocking doors for candidates on the left, Zohran’s platform was far and away the easiest to pitch. Stop raising my rent? Make my bus run on time? Build housing I can afford? Sign me up," Colin Vanderburg, a writer and canvasser for Mamdani, said of his experience.
'He's just on it': New Yorkers laud Mamdani's energy and progressive politics on election day
Read More » "The demands were simple and durable, and spoke to New York’s unremitting cost-of-living crisis not with small-bore reforms or wonky technicalities, but with invention and ambition."
But it was undoubtedly Mamdani's viral videos, seen around the globe, that captured the imaginations of millions far beyond the Big Apple.
In them, Mamdani wears his signature grin, speaking directly to the camera with his long gaze, while situated in some of the city's everyman landmarks: Street corners, bodegas, immigrant neighbourhoods. Sometimes he speaks in Spanish, or Arabic, or Urdu. His charm and eloquence - with credit also going to the stylised videos' shooters and editors - is undeniable.
"He is young. He is fresh. The others appear tired," Hank Sheinkopf, a political strategist, told Spectrum News NY1 broadcaster on Tuesday.
"He has a good story to tell. He knows how to tell that story, and he also represents an economic and demographic shift in the city that's real," he added. "What you have is a city that is much more diverse. It's more Chinese, it's more Muslim, it is more African than ever before. And when you have that kind of change, you're going to have a demographic shift, you're going to have something disruptive occur in the election system, and that's what happened here."
The Cuomo-Trump dynamic
Andrew Cuomo was the governor of the state of New York before he resigned in disgrace during the Covid-19 pandemic, as he was dogged by sexual assault allegations. He also came under federal investigation for the deaths of seniors at nursing homes as the virus rapidly spread.
After being defeated by Mamdani in the June Democratic primary, Cuomo bowed out of the race, then jumped back in as an Independent, saying he cares too much about New York City to let it go to Mamdani.
Political Action Committees (PACs), which are allowed to raise money on behalf of a candidate, raised well over $40m for Cuomo, with much of that coming from pro-Israel elites.
Mamdani did not take any money from PACs, instead relying on his own fundraising to collect some $16m.
'Disqualifying': Cuomo’s last-ditch attacks on Mamdani condemned as racist and Islamophobic
Read More » Cuomo’s campaign released two videos targeting Mamdani’s identity as a South Asian Muslim man. One, still live on Cuomo’s social media accounts, features just four men declaring themselves “Muslims Against Mamdani”.
The video suggests that Mamdani is “not Muslim enough”, accusing him of promoting policies, such as the decriminalisation of prostitution and drugs, that they say contradict Islamic values. One of the men goes so far as to accuse Mamdani of being a “self-proclaimed” Hindu.
The other video, reportedly posted briefly to Cuomo’s X account before being deleted, was an AI-generated ad depicting “criminals” expressing support for Mamdani, including one shown stealing from a store while wearing a keffiyeh, and looters who were calling to "globalise the Intifada".
In addition to the videos, Cuomo drew criticism on Thursday morning for a remark on WABC’s Sid and Friends in the Morning, where the host joked that Mamdani would “be cheering” if 9/11 were to happen under his tenure as mayor, which Cuomo agreed with - a comment many condemned as deeply insensitive and Islamophobic.
On Monday, the New York City-born US president, Donald Trump, endorsed Cuomo for the election. That may very well have been the death knell for his campaign in a city as deeply liberal as New York City.
Trump had insisted for months that Mamdani is a "communist," and that he would withhold federal funds from the city if Mamdani is elected. While the president and Cuomo don't necessarily share the warmest relationship, they share many of the same donors - and Trump told CBS in an interview on Sunday that he'd take Cuomo any day over a "communist".
New York City's current mayor, Eric Adams, bowed to pressure to drop out of the race after being embroiled in a corruption scandal involving Turkish diplomats.
The Israel question
No mayor has ever been this outspoken about Israel's violations of international law, and the cause of the Palestinian people.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani faced repeated attacks from pro-Israel voices over his positions.
He has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, and has said he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - per the International Criminal Court warrant - if he visited New York. Mamdani later walked back that claim.
In a city with more Jews than Jerusalem itself - estimated to be at least one million, many of whom have dual US-Israeli citizenship - Mamdani was able to make inroads with young Jewish voters in particular who are concerned about affordability.
Two days before the election, Rabbi Moshe Indig, a political leader of the Ahronim faction of the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, endorsed Mamdani at a public meeting in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Mamdani first got involved in Palestine activism when he studied Africana Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He also worked as an editor for the student newspaper there.
He founded the college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and with other students attempted to make Bowdoin join a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, without success.
SJP is a leading voice in the campus protests that roiled the US political landscape last year, in response to Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Hundreds of students nationwide have faced disciplinary proceedings, been suspended, or altogether expelled for their participation in what pro-Israel critics insisted were antisemitic demonstrations. Several international students had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, which has made open criticism of Israel by non-citizens a potential immigration violation.
During the first of two mayoral debates, Cuomo, who has long been endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), demanded that Mamdani recognise Israel as specifically a "Jewish state," and accused him of not denouncing the phrase "globalise the intifada," which, Cuomo said, means "kill all Jews".
Intifada is the Arabic word for uprising, and it has grown in use across pro-Palestine mobilisations calling for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
"It took Andrew Cuomo being beaten by a Muslim candidate in the Democratic primary for him to set foot in a mosque. He had more than 10 years, and he couldn't name a single mosque at the last debate we had that he visited. And it took me to get you to even see those Muslims are part of this city, and that, frankly, is something that is shameful," Mamdani responded.
"I have denounced Hamas again and again. It will never be enough for Andrew Cuomo, because what he is willing to say, even though not on this stage, is to call me - the first Muslim on the precipice of leading this city - a terrorist sympathiser."
Smears
Early this year, Mamdani was the target of a smear campaign that painted him as an antisemite, funded to the tune of $25m by a Super PAC called "Fix the City".
He even faced death threats, with his office receiving voicemails including a threat to blow up his car. Mamdani teared up when speaking of the impact of such attacks during his campaign, saying he had received a message saying, “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim”.
More recently, he made it clear in a widely-lauded video released last month that his Muslim identity - even though he is largely secular - will be the singular issue that all of his opponents will try and use against him.
“To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity. But indignity does not make us distinct - there are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does,” he said.
“In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement".
Mamdani has faced openly racist attacks from Republicans in particular.
Over the summer, Congressman Andy Ogles called for Mamdani to be deported and denaturalised.
In a post on X on 26 June, Ogles said: "Zohran 'little muhammad' Mamdani is an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York. He needs to be DEPORTED. Which is why I am calling for him to be subject to denaturalization proceedings".
He attached a letter to attorney general Pam Bondi, accusing Mamdani of procuring his citizenship through “willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism”.
Ogles renewed this call last month.
Stephen Miller, the White House assistant chief of staff, who is frequently referred to as the architect behind Trump’s immigration policies, alluded to Mamdani in a post on X on 25 June, saying that “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration”.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) revealed in a 20-page document on Monday that Islamophobic and xenophobic discourse surrounding Mamdani on X had increased 450 percent between September and October.
While there were four different Islamophobic themes used to discredit Mamdani, CSOH found that "terrorist labeling" was the most dominant narrative, making up 72 percent of all original posts, and "reflecting persistent efforts to conflate Muslim identity with extremism".
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