I first met Zohran Mamdani at the end of 2017. He had just turned 26, and I had just turned 28. We were about to embark on a journey together: a campaign for political office. But Mamdani wasn’t the candidate — I was. I had veered, unexpectedly, from a career in journalism to an attempt at one in politics. My bid failed, but along the way, I caught a glimpse of Mamdani’s natural political talent, which has now catapulted him to the doorstep of Gracie Mansion, the New York City mayoral residence.
Mamdani was a rising organiser whom I wanted to hire for my bid for the state Senate. In the New York City neighbourhoods where I was campaigning, Mamdani had been the canvassing director on the City Council bid of a Palestinian pastor who nearly pulled off a stunning upset. The pastor, known as Father K, had thrilled the local youth, and canvassers constantly swarmed my apartment building. Many belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America. The concept of an openly socialist campaign winning office had always seemed far-fetched. But here was Father K, storming the ramparts. I wanted to know immediately who was working for him.
When I met Mamdani, he was intrigued by my campaign. I was a progressive Democrat unafraid of calling myself a socialist or criticising Israel, even though I was Jewish. We immediately bonded over a shared political vision, as well as a wicked sense of humour. But hiring Mamdani couldn’t happen automatically — not because I was waffling, but because he wanted to know whether I was serious.
He needed to know if I was going to raise a decent amount of money and make my run viable. He wasn’t interested in vanity campaigns or lost causes. I respected that. I was motivated to go out and raise money, proving my mettle to my supporters and to Mamdani. In early 2018, he signed on as my field director, and he rapidly rose to become my full-fledged campaign manager.
These days, Mamdani faces a far tougher challenge than helming a state legislative campaign. He’s got to win a general election against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (again), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Then he has to decide how to govern Gotham’s vast bureaucracies. Winning in November, by contrast, will be relatively easy. Some of his campaign promises, like freezing the rent on rent-stabilised apartments, are quite doable. Others, like raising corporate taxes or funding a $5 billion childcare expansion, will need the cooperation of a state government that may not be hospitable to a young socialist mayor. Business leaders are threatening to leave the city.
Mamdani will also have to decide how he would govern America’s largest police force — as a Leftist who once backed defunding the police but no longer advocates for this goal. Will he retain the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a well-regarded, Harvard-educated technocrat who is also critical of many of the criminal-justice reforms that he backs? And what would he do if President Trump keeps flooding New York streets with ICE agents?
There is a cliché, which is mostly true, that being mayor of New York is America’s toughest job after the presidency. City Hall has a way of wearing down the titans who swagger inside. Every local ill is laid at the mayor’s feet. A DC lawmaker doesn’t have to rush to the site of a gas explosion or a train derailment, but a mayor is expected to — immediately. If a police officer is killed, he must comfort the family.
Is Mamdani up for all of this? If he beats back Adams and Cuomo, as expected — neither man is very popular — we are going to find out. He would have less experience than any incoming mayor in modern times. There’s great promise there. And peril, too.
I can think back to my own campaign, when I saw how Mamdani moved through rooms and thrilled our volunteers. He was supremely good with people, in the way you still hear folk tales told about a young Bill Clinton. His charm and gravitas, for someone of his age, was striking even then. Though Mamdani worked for me — my campaign funds paid his salary — I very much worked for Mamdani and felt driven to give every ounce of myself to the cause. This was his superpower. I would stand at a subway station in the middle of summer to pass out campaign materials at six in the morning. I would knock on doors to talk to voters seven days a week, often until nine at night. The volunteers and paid canvassers were no less driven. Everyone wanted to give themselves — to him.
A surreal moment for me came just a short while ago when Mamdani appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the eve of the Democratic primary. Colbert pressed Mamdani on Israel and concerns about antisemitism. Mamdani is an unabashed critic of the Jewish state, a backer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and someone who, until not very long ago, could be called an anti-Zionist. I’m sympathetic to much of what Mamdani believes and, as an American Jew, I am weary of a nation many thousands of miles away defining how I should worship or how I am viewed by the world. When Colbert asked Mamdani how he could bring together Jews and Muslims, Mamdani, who is Muslim, replied, “Many years ago, I was the campaign manager of a Jewish candidate for state Senate, and I took him to a mosque in Bay Ridge, and after he gave his speech at Friday prayers, an older Palestinian man came over to him, and he looked at him, and he said, ‘cousins’.”
That candidate, of course, was me. Indeed, Mamdani and I went to many mosques — too many to count. I was, in many instances, one of the very first candidates for office who had ever spoken with these Muslim men. (Since the prayers were segregated by gender, I also spoke with Muslim women’s groups.) At one Eid prayer, I took the microphone and spoke to thousands of Muslims arrayed on a vast field. I went to churches and synagogues, too, of course, because the district, in all its New York diversity, demanded it. Mamdani believed, urgently, that a candidate should go everywhere possible. Unlike many other Leftists, he relished the art of persuasion: knocking on the door, finding a Donald Trump sympathiser, and convincing him to take another look at a Left-wing candidate like me.
I didn’t win. We ran competitively — an uphill, underdog campaign — and came up short. I was momentarily crushed but glad, in the end, to return to my writing career, which I valued more. I knew Mamdani would get his own chance to run soon. It was merely a question of where and when. He had learned several vital lessons from our defeat. One was that building a large field operation was incredibly important. We had an army of volunteers and paid canvassers, many of them in their twenties. But other traditional tactics, like sending campaign mail, mattered, too. Since we were running out of money by the end of the race, we didn’t have the budget to dispatch those glossy mailers, which are never terribly creative but do alert voters to your presence.
I invoked Clinton before, but there are uncanny parallels between Mamdani and Barack Obama: two young men with foreign-sounding names and African roots who upended the political establishment and won in such a fashion that few actually believed was possible. America had never had a black president, or even one who had spent less than one term in the US Senate before successfully vaulting to the White House. Obama was assailed relentlessly for his relative youth and inexperience in 2007 and 2008, especially in his bitter primary against Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Mamdani embodies much of what Obama’s feverish Right-wing critics accused him, falsely, of being: a Muslim socialist born in Africa. Mamdani, born to a Ugandan-Indian father in Kampala, can never legally serve as president. In some form, this inoculates him from attacks from the Right, since he is hiding nothing and is rarely on the defensive. The same is true of his parentage: his mother a renowned filmmaker, his father a celebrated scholar of the Middle East. Other Leftists might run from such a background, but Mamdani never fails to acknowledge his own privilege. He is always quite direct.
One political strength and saving grace for Mamdani, ultimately, may be his fan base. No local politician has captured so many imaginations. Mayoral races don’t normally attract tens of thousands of volunteers; in the case of Mamdani, the internet became real life, with his Instagram and TikTok virality morphing into a flesh-and-blood campaign apparatus that blew away the competition. As with Trump, Mamdani’s fans are bound to stick with him, and they’ll battle for him as he slogs onward as mayor. If he does win in November, it will herald a new political era for New York and perhaps the United States. All of it, at the very least, will be fascinating to watch.
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Author: Ross Barkan
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