June Roundup: Unpacking Zohran Mamdani's Victory in the Capital of Capitalism

Here are the five essential articles to read about Zohran Mamdani's landmark victory.

Winning is good in any circumstance. But it’s especially delicious in the face of the unbridled arrogance and consternation of the power elite, and their cynical weaponization of racism. The 33-year-old Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, by all accounts, was a long shot candidate for mayor of New York City, and the establishment spent $31 million to stop his momentum, powered by the Democratic Socialist of America and a volunteer army of 50,000 canvassers who knocked on 1.5 million doors. With that organizational disciple, Mamdani’s insurgent candidacy was a ripe opportunity for a national demonstration of people power against big money, an unparalleled matchup of capitalists against everyone else—taxi drivers, pharmacists, bodega owners, teachers, municipal workers, all struggling to eke out a living in the beating heart of capitalism.

“You want to have leadership that speaks to what New York is,” Scott Rechler, one of the city’s biggest landlords, told the New York Times. “It’s the capital of capitalism.”

When Mamdani took the lead in the early voting numbers on June 24, I had returned to Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights from a patch of sidewalk across the street from P.S. 89 in Elmhurst, Queens, after the polls closed at 9 p.m. One of the Democratic Socialist of America’s canvassing leads turned his phone towards me, showing me that Mamdani was in the lead in the unofficial election results. Soon after, people dispersed to head out to victory parties or home after a long day of poll-site visibility or door-knocking to remind voters to turnout to cast their ballots. My wife had asked me earlier if she should pick up a bottle of wine to celebrate on her way home from work. I told her that the polls indicated it was going to be a close election, and we wouldn’t know the results until one week later. (Today, New York City’s Board of Elections released its tabulation of rank-choice voting ballots. Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote, making him the second New York City mayoral candidate in a Democratic primary to win the most votes at 545,000 since Mayor David Dinkins in 1989 netted 547,000 votes.) I had taken the day off to canvass for Mamdani’s campaign, one of 50,000 volunteers who had poured out onto the streets to knock on 1.62 million doors across the five boroughs. On Election Day, I was toggling between poll sites in Jackson Heights from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., with an afternoon break to pick up the kids from school and make dinner.

At midnight, Mamdani spoke to supporters in Long Island City as part of victory celebrations happening throughout the city. “We can be free, and we can be fed,” he said to the dense throng of cheering supporters and elected officials gathered. The sentence was a fitting coda to a campaign propelled by a social democratic vision of making the city affordable to its vast working classes.

A 22-year-old Yadelis Avila, a daughter of Dominican immigrants in Washington Heights, told the New York Times, she ranked Mamdani first; her top issue was housing costs. “I just feel like he’s someone that I could identify with. His parents are immigrants, so it’s just like I see myself in him, and I trust him.” Mamdani decisively won the youth vote.

Hakeem Shaheed, a health care worker who voted in Harlem, told the New York Times he backed Mamdani because of his proposal to freeze rents on nearly one million rent-stabilized units. “The rent is really important to me because everything else means nothing if you can’t live here,” he said.

But Mamdani didn’t simply offer a class minimalism focused on the cost-of-living crisis as the avatars of economic populism contend is the winning campaign strategy; his was a class dynamism approach that didn’t shirk from a steadfast commitment to equality and freedom, especially when talking about the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza, the attacks on transgender people and gender-affirming care, or any cause championing human dignity and equality.

“In a greatly disillusioned period in American politics, one does not get 50,000 people to knock over 1.62 million doors for you because you have flashy videos, they come for the alternative vision of democratic socialism and relentless economic populism,” wrote Maeve Andersen, a DSA volunteer on the campaign. “Even the most niche policy prescriptions from bringing down halal cart prices to baby baskets for new parents are rooted in that core vision. Zohran has also notably made a point of coming to various trans rights rallies hosted by NYC-DSA and other organizations… Despite what punditry seems to believe, a bold economic agenda does not require abandoning the marginalized to appeal to voters.”

Proudest moment at the poll site on election night was talking to a group of young voters. I was standing across the street cheering for people who voted for Zohran when I heard someone shout Trump’s name. I called them over and asked, Do you know they’re snatching people who look like you and me off the street? They paused for a moment and asked, Why are you supporting Zohran? I gave them the affordability pitch. Told them: how I grew up in a cramped apartment, went to overcrowded schools, attending IS 145 in Jackson Heights for middle school. Asked them: How many jobs are your immigrant parents working? Then I told them: Trump says we’re all criminals because of the way we look. And I added: “Cuomo is just another Trump — a sex pest who’s harassed women.” Then they asked how to rank candidates. I explained how I ranked my ballot and said, You can choose whoever you want — but put Zohran #1 and leave Cuomo off. When they came out of the poll site, I asked if we could redo their earlier chant. They chanted Zohran!

You have to be from these streets to pull that off, blending firm gentleness with the authority that comes from lived experience and political conviction. Any working-class New Yorker who grew up in Queens can speak in the declarative and use the imperative without condescension, and without the old sentimentalities that come from familiarity misremembered by nostalgia’s gilding touch. Maybe it was kids being kids, dropping Trump’s name to push a boundary. But there’s no reason to hide that Trump is a kidnapper, a threat to freedom and equality everywhere, limiting not only the freedoms of immigrants but those of U.S. citizens, too. We don’t need to feign humility about things that we know. It’s a tricky balancing act—speaking from a place of knowing without sacrificing curiosity. But far too often people bend the stick too far and refuse the responsibility and discipline of what we know as people from a concrete place and time. I am from these streets and speak standing firmly on the side of working-class New Yorkers without apology, without pulling any punches.

Below are my recommendations to better understand New York’s mayoral election. These readings offer you various vantage points from which to evaluate the making of Zohran Mamdani and the socialist movement from which he emerged.

1. To better understand Mamdani, you have to understand the parents who raised him. So I highly recommend a 2002 New Yorker profile of Mamdani’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair. “The great thing about yesterday was that we captured India in Brooklyn,” Nair said. “They were praying in the direction of Mecca, but in front of them was graffiti. What I want is a tapestry of the banality of the Muslim presence in New York. It’s just absolutely normal.”

2. Next up n+1 senior editor Colin Vanderburg captured something essential about Mamdani’s campaign, which is also part of what drives me politically as a materialist, the concrete of the concrete. “The campaign’s climax, for me, came with Zohran’s Whitmanic walk down the length of Manhattan on the Friday night before Election Day. Starting from Inwood at the top of the island, he walked for hours and miles, pausing for chats and photos with supporters along the way, gathering a jubilant crowd behind him. All the while, as he would recall in his victory speech days later, ‘New York worked. Garbage trucks weaved through empty streets. Fishmongers carried in tomorrow’s wares. And when we finally arrived at the Battery at 2:20 in the morning, the workers who run the Staten Island Ferry were on the job, too. Just as they are every hour of the day, every day of the week.’ Rhetorically, this was among the less-remarked gifts of this campaign: to see and speak to working people in both the bonds of universality and with the dignity of specificity.” I highly recommend reading the New Yorker profile about Nair and then Vanderburg’s piece, “A Knock at the Door.”

3. The journalist Hamilton Nolan has a great write up about Mamdani campaigning in Washington Heights, dropping the reader mise-en scene-style into the middle of a campaign stop. Great writing, per usual. “We all crossed the street and Zohran went into Kenny Bakery—“BIZCOCHO DOMINICANO. DULCES FINOS. REPOSTERIA.” Then he squeezed back out and stood on the sidewalk in front of the bakery windows that were plastered with stock photos of cookies and cakes, giving a little complimentary speech about Carmen de la Rosa, who was escorting him around the neighborhood. The reporters pressed in on him and the passersby, struck by a vague sense that someone notable was here, pressed in with them. I was back against the wall and Zohran was directly in front of me. By now he had shed his black jacket. The entire back of his white shirt had turned transparent with sweat, and you could see each individual dark hair on his back pressed up against the fabric. “He doesn’t usually sweat,” a campaign staffer next to me shrugged. He would be taping the Colbert Show in three hours. A teenage girl walking past got a glimpse of Zohran. Her hands flew up over her mouth. “Oh my god,” she gasped, in the manner of someone who has seen their teen idol. “Oh my god.” She had her cell phone camera out but was hovering shyly on the fringes. Seeing this, one of the older women who was volunteering for the campaign snatched her up and marched her directly into the heart of scrum. “ZOHRAN, there is a YOUNG PERSON here who wants to meet you!” she boomed, sweeping away all in her path. Thus the young woman got her picture, before swishing back out onto the fringes, hands still clasped in front of her mouth, vibrating.”

4. No round up would be complete without mentioning the role NYC-DSA played in Mamdani’s victory. Ben Davis has one of the best write ups over at Guardian. “Mamdani is the progeny of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the US’s largest socialist organization in a century. He is among the many young people inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The staying power of that campaign has asserted itself over the years. Most of the talented organizers and thinkers whom it shaped were in college or their early 20s. They were never going to stop being socialists. They just needed seasoning…Mamdani and the DSA cannot be separated. It’s a different, and for many Americans new, but a deeply old way of thinking about politics. Political organizations represent different classes, which are necessarily in conflict. To win for your class, you must be a representative of working-class democracy.”

5. Waleed Shahid has an excellent piece over at The Nation describing coalition building among Muslim New Yorkers from various nationalities, especially South Asians. “While national Democrats pulled back, Mamdani leaned in. He ran on a clear and grounded message: freeze rents, make buses free, build public grocery stores. His stance on Israel and Palestine wasn’t buried, and it wasn’t isolated. It was part of a broader argument about dignity, housing, and whose voices matter. He made democratic socialism sound like common sense. He invited people in—not to agree on everything, but to build something bigger than themselves.” On these coalition building efforts, I also recommend “Zohran Mamdani Spoke to Working-Class Immigrants’ Needs” by Sasha Wijeyeratne over at Jacobin, which is on a similar theme.

What articles did you find illuminating?