Theodore Hamm is the author of Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics. He wrote about the 2025 race for The Indypendent and Drop Site, and his articles about New York City politics have also appeared in Jacobin. Hamm is chair of journalism at St. Joseph’s University in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Just after 12:15 am on June 25, 2025, a victorious Zohran Mamdani stepped on stage at a brewpub in Long Island City, Queens. A 33-year-old immigrant from Uganda, a Muslim, and an unapologetic democratic socialist, Mamdani had electrified New York City for the past several weeks.

At the outset of 2025, Polymarket, a Manhattan-based crypto-currency website, gave the upstart an 8% shot at winning the Democratic primary for mayor. Although he was not yet an official candidate, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo led the pack at 44%.

By election day, Polymarket listed Mamdani at 55%, nine points ahead of the figure with 100% name recognition who had continued to be the frontrunner since joining the race in March. The Wall Street crowd knows the trendlines.

In his victory speech, which was broadcast live on local TV and across social media, Zohran invoked Africa’s favorite son (and fellow socialist): “Tonight,” Mamdani calmly began, “we made history. In the words of Nelson Mandela, 'It always seems impossible until it is done.' My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.”

Local TV reporters told their mostly older viewers that the upset win was “stunning” and “historic.” Sundry social media platforms lit up. At election-night watch parties across the city hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani has long been a member, Zohran’s army of youthful volunteers went wild.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum came wails of bewilderment and exasperation. “Terror. Fear. Panic,” is how Kathryn Wilde (b. 1946), a ubiquitous spokesperson for city elite, summed up the collective reaction among the 1%. As one of the city’s largest landlords told the New York Times, "You want to have leadership that speaks to what New York is. It's the capital of capitalism."

After an extended smear campaign that resulted in in an election-day front-page denunciation of the insurgent candidate as a “radical, antisemitic socialist,” the extreme-right New York Post assembled its desperate follow-up cover page. “NYC SOS,” shrieked the influential tabloid, with a sub-headline wondering “Who will save our city after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral primary?” Throughout the city’s corridors of power, Mamdani Derangement Syndrome reverberated.

Zohran’s quote from Mandela provided his answer to the Post’s question. For democratic socialists, it is “we,” not a “she” or “he,” that win elected offices. When early voting began on Saturday, June 14, Mamdani’s massive ranks of passionately committed volunteers, which surpassed 50,000 by primary day, provided a voter turnout operation that far surpassed that of any mayoral contender in New York City history.

A massive number of Muslim and South Asian voters, including many in the city’s Bangladeshi enclaves, mobilized for the first time in a city election. Although quite union-friendly, Mamdani received support from only a few local labor leaders, most of whom prefer not to upset the status quo. Zohran’s coalition—under 50, multiracial, polyglot, pro-Palestine, unafraid to be called socialists—was nothing if not groundbreaking in New York City.

On the night early voting began, at a rally with AOC joining Zohran as headliners and influential local leaders providing the undercard, the ascending candidate addressed a crowd of mostly 20-somethings at Terminal 5, a performance venue on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. Exponentially more viewers caught clips across social media. “This victory,” Mamdani declared, “will be historic, not just for who I am—a Muslim immigrant and a proud democratic socialist—but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.”

*

Although he did not talk much about Uganda on the primary campaign trail, Zohran never tried to conceal his roots in among the South Asian diaspora in Africa. On the weekend before the primary, he informed an older Black audience at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters in Harlem that his middle name is Kwame in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and the father of African nationalism.

Although Zohran’s mother, acclaimed film director Mira Nair, often joined him on the campaign trail, internationally renowned Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, the candidate’s father, kept a low profile (both attended the primary victory celebration, however). But as the candidate told the Sharpton gathering, the elder Mamdani, now 79, risked deportation when he first came to the U.S. by joining SNCC protests in Montgomery. With Spike Lee smiling at The Rev’s side, Zohran cleverly quoted a Sharpton observation from 2004. It was about the Democrats’ longstanding pattern of relying on minority and working-class voters but not delivering anything meaningful in return.

Mahmood Mamdani is a leading scholar of decolonization, and his son’s ascent made him the most popular politician in the U.S. to be elected on a platform that fully supports Palestinian rights. (Zohran’s primary vote total of 460k [TK] doubled Bernie Sanders’ 2024 reelection tally in the tiny state of Vermont.) The morning after the primary, CUNY journalism professor Peter Beinart connected Mamdani’s success to shifts among younger Jewish voters regarding Palestine.

A former New Republic editor who has moved to the left on Israel in recent years, Beinart succinctly explained that “social movements often become part of mainstream politics.” Thus, even though campus protests in New York City were forcefully shut down by university brass and Mayor Eric Adams’ NYPD, Mamdani was now bringing the activists’ viewpoint into the electoral realm.

Until Zohran’s successful primary run, Beinart noted, no leading New York City politician had taken a stand on behalf of Palestine. Although “he was very progressive on many issues,” Beinart said, Mayor Bill de Blasio (in office from 2014-2021), “made a clear exception regarding Palestine.”

In the homestretch of the campaign, State Senator John Liu—the first citywide Asian-American elected official, who ran against de Blasio for mayor as a left-wing populist in 2013—made a high-profile endorsement of Mamdani, serving as one of the speakers at the AOC rally. Attorney General Tish James similarly lent her high-profile backing, comparing the attacks on Zohran to the smears Barack Obama once endured. Alas, neither Liu nor James is progressive on Israel-Palestine.

The festive crowd at Mamdani’s victory party included a roster of notable Cuomo foes, including Tish James and 3rd-place mayoral finisher Brad Lander, along with countless next-generation leaders. Mingling about were anti-monopoly figureheads Lina Khan (like Zohran, a practicing Muslim) and Zephyr Teachout, who challenged then-Gov. Cuomo from the left in the 2014 primary. Actress Cynthia Nixon, who stepped to the plate four years later, continued to exude robust support for Zohran.

Two rising Black Brooklyn political stars, State Senator Jabari Brisport (a DSA member) and City Councilman Chi Ossé (a social media phenom), brought actual “joy” to the party. Ella Emhoff, the pro-Palestine stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, shared a crowded staircase with Ossé as the crowd cheered on Zohran. Antigun activist David Hogg, who cut viral clips with Mamdani as primary day neared, appeared less exuberant. But actor and activist Kal Penn, a longtime Zohran pal (who starred in Mira Nair’s 2006 film The Namesake), gave lots of hugs. Nair and her son’s wife Rama Duwaji shed tears of joy. Celebrities joined DSA legions in raucously singing “Hey, Hey Goodbye” to Cuomo.

*

Across the East River, the crowd was long gone at the Carpenters Union Hall in the West Village where Cuomo had conceded less than 90 minutes after the polls closed at 9 p.m. Earlier in the scorching hot day, the governor accused by many of sending nursing home residents to die during the pandemic obliviously advised voters that “It is warm—but not too warm” to head out to the polls. Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s longtime aide who has many enemies (especially among the disgraced governor’s 13 sexual harassment accusers), seemed rather out of place while handing out Cuomo campaign materials to working-class voters at Co-op City in the Bronx.

By election day, it was obvious that Cuomo’s “Potemkin campaign” needed high turnout, but his team never bothered to assemble the volunteer operation needed to help make that happen. The whopping numbers of young and new voters that turned out during the initial nine days that ballots could be cast signaled clear trouble for the former governor. The night before the Tuesday primary, Cuomo beseeched members of 1199, the city largest union (representing health care workers), to “please, please, please” help get people to the polls. Team Cuomo, as next-gen Democratic political consultant Nick Smith explained to Errol Louis on Inside City Hall that same night, had banked on the conventional wisdom that youthful and/or first-time voters would not show up for Mamdani. Even before the polls opened on June 24, Team Cuomo knew that they had blown it.

Their bet regarding Mamdani’s support was by no means the only shopworn, cynical calculation made by Cuomo and his inept crew.

At the Carpenters Union Hall on Hudson Street, the scene was tragicomic. Shortly after the polls closed, Errol Louis asked Inside City Hall reporter Ayana Harry if the people seen conversing behind her on camera seemed worn-out after doing election-day voter outreach in the heat. After thinking about it for a few seconds, Harry observed that “their work was through writing checks.” Northwestern journalism professor Steven Thrasher, a former staff writer for the Village Voice, posted a video of the clip with him laughing hysterically at Harry’s wry comment.

There was no joy at the Cuomo party, which was consistent with the dreary theme and messaging the campaign transmitted throughout the spring. According to the oh-so familiar candidate with a distinctly high-pitched voice, the city was in a “cri-sis” that only someone with his “expeer-ience” could “maan-age.” Unlike Zohran, Mario Cuomo’s son inspired no one. He started at 40% in the polls and ended with just over 36% of the 1st-place primary votes [TK].

While his “thanks” to Mayor Bloomberg seemed sincere, Cuomo’s concession speech claims about his “special, talented” campaign staff rang somewhat less than hollow. “Tonight,” Cuomo then acknowledged, was “Assemblyman Maan-donny’s” night, thus mangling the pronunciation of Zohran’s last name for the umpteenth time. With his three millennial daughters—twins Cara and Mariah (b. 1995) and Andrea (b. 1997)—at his side, a humiliated Cuomo offered half-hearted praise for the trio’s fellow millennial Mamdani’s “highly impactful campaign.” When he asked the crowd to give Zohran a round of applause, there was a smattering of one-hand clapping.

*

While Cuomo fizzled, Zohran sizzled. No serious observer of the 2025 mayoral primary would contest that point. But the how and why merit further scrutiny. Did the deluge of attacks funded by Michael Bloomberg, Trumper Bill Ackman, and their fellow 1%ers backfire? Zohran’s stance on Israel was a recurring target in the $25 million in outside spending waged on Cuomo’s behalf. Yet as Beinart surmised, many liberal Jews, and large numbers of all Democrats, do not support Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza.

ust four years earlier, the New York Post was instrumental in Eric Adams’ victory, and the New York Times helped Kathryn Garcia, a not-particularly charismatic novice politician, finish a very close second. This time around, the Post egregiously trashed Mamdani, and the Bloomberg-allied Times treated the upstart with absurdist condescension.

So what helped Zohran prevail? The answers include many players not previously involved in New York City politics, including the multi-platform media superstars Hasan Piker, Charlamagne the God, and Kid Mero. Asad Hadia, a Syrian-American Muslim, and next-gen South Asian leaders including Jaslin Kaur and Aaron Naaraph, were just two of the countless volunteers rallying their communities.

Immediately after the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, prominent right-wingers predicted the DSA would be crushed because of the group’s support for Palestine. Less than two years later, one of the group’s candidates garnered over 50% more 1st-place primary votes than Eric Adams tallied in 2021. No explanation that minimizes the DSA’s role in Zohran’s success passes muster.

As Zohran frequently intoned before, during and after primary day, his victory would close the books on the “politics of the past.” The task of any historian is to explain how we arrived at a particular watershed moment. As our curtain opens, Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs is about to step onto the stage.

Theodore Hamm is the author of Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sanders’ Politics. He wrote about the 2025 race for The Indypendent and Drop Site, and his articles about New York City politics have also appeared in Jacobin. Hamm is chair of journalism at St. Joseph’s University in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Just after 12:15 am on June 25, 2025, a victorious Zohran Mamdani stepped on stage at a brewpub in Long Island City, Queens. A 33-year-old immigrant from Uganda, a Muslim, and an unapologetic democratic socialist, Mamdani had electrified New York City for the past several weeks.

At the outset of 2025, Polymarket, a Manhattan-based crypto-currency website, gave the upstart an 8% shot at winning the Democratic primary for mayor. Although he was not yet an official candidate, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo led the pack at 44%.

By election day, Polymarket listed Mamdani at 55%, nine points ahead of the figure with 100% name recognition who had continued to be the frontrunner since joining the race in March. The Wall Street crowd knows the trendlines.

In his victory speech, which was broadcast live on local TV and across social media, Zohran invoked Africa’s favorite son (and fellow socialist): “Tonight,” Mamdani calmly began, “we made history. In the words of Nelson Mandela, 'It always seems impossible until it is done.' My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.”

Local TV reporters told their mostly older viewers that the upset win was “stunning” and “historic.” Sundry social media platforms lit up. At election-night watch parties across the city hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani has long been a member, Zohran’s army of youthful volunteers went wild.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum came wails of bewilderment and exasperation. “Terror. Fear. Panic,” is how Kathryn Wilde (b. 1946), a ubiquitous spokesperson for city elite, summed up the collective reaction among the 1%. As one of the city’s largest landlords told the New York Times, "You want to have leadership that speaks to what New York is. It's the capital of capitalism."

After an extended smear campaign that resulted in in an election-day front-page denunciation of the insurgent candidate as a “radical, antisemitic socialist,” the extreme-right New York Post assembled its desperate follow-up cover page. “NYC SOS,” shrieked the influential tabloid, with a sub-headline wondering “Who will save our city after radical socialist batters Cuomo in Dem mayoral primary?” Throughout the city’s corridors of power, Mamdani Derangement Syndrome reverberated.

Zohran’s quote from Mandela provided his answer to the Post’s question. For democratic socialists, it is “we,” not a “she” or “he,” that win elected offices. When early voting began on Saturday, June 14, Mamdani’s massive ranks of passionately committed volunteers, which surpassed 50,000 by primary day, provided a voter turnout operation that far surpassed that of any mayoral contender in New York City history.

A massive number of Muslim and South Asian voters, including many in the city’s Bangladeshi enclaves, mobilized for the first time in a city election. Although quite union-friendly, Mamdani received support from only a few local labor leaders, most of whom prefer not to upset the status quo. Zohran’s coalition—under 50, multiracial, polyglot, pro-Palestine, unafraid to be called socialists—was nothing if not groundbreaking in New York City.

On the night early voting began, at a rally with AOC joining Zohran as headliners and influential local leaders providing the undercard, the ascending candidate addressed a crowd of mostly 20-somethings at Terminal 5, a performance venue on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. Exponentially more viewers caught clips across social media. “This victory,” Mamdani declared, “will be historic, not just for who I am—a Muslim immigrant and a proud democratic socialist—but for what we will do: make this city affordable for everyone.”

*

Although he did not talk much about Uganda on the primary campaign trail, Zohran never tried to conceal his roots in among the South Asian diaspora in Africa. On the weekend before the primary, he informed an older Black audience at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters in Harlem that his middle name is Kwame in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and the father of African nationalism.

Although Zohran’s mother, acclaimed film director Mira Nair, often joined him on the campaign trail, internationally renowned Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, the candidate’s father, kept a low profile (both attended the primary victory celebration, however). But as the candidate told the Sharpton gathering, the elder Mamdani, now 79, risked deportation when he first came to the U.S. by joining SNCC protests in Montgomery. With Spike Lee smiling at The Rev’s side, Zohran cleverly quoted a Sharpton observation from 2004. It was about the Democrats’ longstanding pattern of relying on minority and working-class voters but not delivering anything meaningful in return.

Mahmood Mamdani is a leading scholar of decolonization, and his son’s ascent made him the most popular politician in the U.S. to be elected on a platform that fully supports Palestinian rights. (Zohran’s primary vote total of 460k [TK] doubled Bernie Sanders’ 2024 reelection tally in the tiny state of Vermont.) The morning after the primary, CUNY journalism professor Peter Beinart connected Mamdani’s success to shifts among younger Jewish voters regarding Palestine.

A former New Republic editor who has moved to the left on Israel in recent years, Beinart succinctly explained that “social movements often become part of mainstream politics.” Thus, even though campus protests in New York City were forcefully shut down by university brass and Mayor Eric Adams’ NYPD, Mamdani was now bringing the activists’ viewpoint into the electoral realm.

Until Zohran’s successful primary run, Beinart noted, no leading New York City politician had taken a stand on behalf of Palestine. Although “he was very progressive on many issues,” Beinart said, Mayor Bill de Blasio (in office from 2014-2021), “made a clear exception regarding Palestine.”

In the homestretch of the campaign, State Senator John Liu—the first citywide Asian-American elected official, who ran against de Blasio for mayor as a left-wing populist in 2013—made a high-profile endorsement of Mamdani, serving as one of the speakers at the AOC rally. Attorney General Tish James similarly lent her high-profile backing, comparing the attacks on Zohran to the smears Barack Obama once endured. Alas, neither Liu nor James is progressive on Israel-Palestine.

The festive crowd at Mamdani’s victory party included a roster of notable Cuomo foes, including Tish James and 3rd-place mayoral finisher Brad Lander, along with countless next-generation leaders. Mingling about were anti-monopoly figureheads Lina Khan (like Zohran, a practicing Muslim) and Zephyr Teachout, who challenged then-Gov. Cuomo from the left in the 2014 primary. Actress Cynthia Nixon, who stepped to the plate four years later, continued to exude robust support for Zohran.

Two rising Black Brooklyn political stars, State Senator Jabari Brisport (a DSA member) and City Councilman Chi Ossé (a social media phenom), brought actual “joy” to the party. Ella Emhoff, the pro-Palestine stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, shared a crowded staircase with Ossé as the crowd cheered on Zohran. Antigun activist David Hogg, who cut viral clips with Mamdani as primary day neared, appeared less exuberant. But actor and activist Kal Penn, a longtime Zohran pal (who starred in Mira Nair’s 2006 film The Namesake), gave lots of hugs. Nair and her son’s wife Rama Duwaji shed tears of joy. Celebrities joined DSA legions in raucously singing “Hey, Hey Goodbye” to Cuomo.

*

Across the East River, the crowd was long gone at the Carpenters Union Hall in the West Village where Cuomo had conceded less than 90 minutes after the polls closed at 9 p.m. Earlier in the scorching hot day, the governor accused by many of sending nursing home residents to die during the pandemic obliviously advised voters that “It is warm—but not too warm” to head out to the polls. Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s longtime aide who has many enemies (especially among the disgraced governor’s 13 sexual harassment accusers), seemed rather out of place while handing out Cuomo campaign materials to working-class voters at Co-op City in the Bronx.

By election day, it was obvious that Cuomo’s “Potemkin campaign” needed high turnout, but his team never bothered to assemble the volunteer operation needed to help make that happen. The whopping numbers of young and new voters that turned out during the initial nine days that ballots could be cast signaled clear trouble for the former governor. The night before the Tuesday primary, Cuomo beseeched members of 1199, the city largest union (representing health care workers), to “please, please, please” help get people to the polls. Team Cuomo, as next-gen Democratic political consultant Nick Smith explained to Errol Louis on Inside City Hall that same night, had banked on the conventional wisdom that youthful and/or first-time voters would not show up for Mamdani. Even before the polls opened on June 24, Team Cuomo knew that they had blown it.

Their bet regarding Mamdani’s support was by no means the only shopworn, cynical calculation made by Cuomo and his inept crew.

At the Carpenters Union Hall on Hudson Street, the scene was tragicomic. Shortly after the polls closed, Errol Louis asked Inside City Hall reporter Ayana Harry if the people seen conversing behind her on camera seemed worn-out after doing election-day voter outreach in the heat. After thinking about it for a few seconds, Harry observed that “their work was through writing checks.” Northwestern journalism professor Steven Thrasher, a former staff writer for the Village Voice, posted a video of the clip with him laughing hysterically at Harry’s wry comment.

There was no joy at the Cuomo party, which was consistent with the dreary theme and messaging the campaign transmitted throughout the spring. According to the oh-so familiar candidate with a distinctly high-pitched voice, the city was in a “cri-sis” that only someone with his “expeer-ience” could “maan-age.” Unlike Zohran, Mario Cuomo’s son inspired no one. He started at 40% in the polls and ended with just over 36% of the 1st-place primary votes [TK].

While his “thanks” to Mayor Bloomberg seemed sincere, Cuomo’s concession speech claims about his “special, talented” campaign staff rang somewhat less than hollow. “Tonight,” Cuomo then acknowledged, was “Assemblyman Maan-donny’s” night, thus mangling the pronunciation of Zohran’s last name for the umpteenth time. With his three millennial daughters—twins Cara and Mariah (b. 1995) and Andrea (b. 1997)—at his side, a humiliated Cuomo offered half-hearted praise for the trio’s fellow millennial Mamdani’s “highly impactful campaign.” When he asked the crowd to give Zohran a round of applause, there was a smattering of one-hand clapping.

*

While Cuomo fizzled, Zohran sizzled. No serious observer of the 2025 mayoral primary would contest that point. But the how and why merit further scrutiny. Did the deluge of attacks funded by Michael Bloomberg, Trumper Bill Ackman, and their fellow 1%ers backfire? Zohran’s stance on Israel was a recurring target in the $25 million in outside spending waged on Cuomo’s behalf. Yet as Beinart surmised, many liberal Jews, and large numbers of all Democrats, do not support Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza.

ust four years earlier, the New York Post was instrumental in Eric Adams’ victory, and the New York Times helped Kathryn Garcia, a not-particularly charismatic novice politician, finish a very close second. This time around, the Post egregiously trashed Mamdani, and the Bloomberg-allied Times treated the upstart with absurdist condescension.

So what helped Zohran prevail? The answers include many players not previously involved in New York City politics, including the multi-platform media superstars Hasan Piker, Charlamagne the God, and Kid Mero. Asad Hadia, a Syrian-American Muslim, and next-gen South Asian leaders including Jaslin Kaur and Aaron Naaraph, were just two of the countless volunteers rallying their communities.

Immediately after the October 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, prominent right-wingers predicted the DSA would be crushed because of the group’s support for Palestine. Less than two years later, one of the group’s candidates garnered over 50% more 1st-place primary votes than Eric Adams tallied in 2021. No explanation that minimizes the DSA’s role in Zohran’s success passes muster.

As Zohran frequently intoned before, during and after primary day, his victory would close the books on the “politics of the past.” The task of any historian is to explain how we arrived at a particular watershed moment. As our curtain opens, Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs is about to step onto the stage.