Zohran K. Mamdani presents like a true man of the people. The 33-year-old Queens assemblyman frequently travels by Citi Bike, is unfailingly gregarious in encounters with his constituents, and, in March, showed up to the State Capitol to demand the release of Columbia graduate activist Mahmoud Khalil—still detained for his role in organizing the school’s protests against the war in Gaza. But Mamdani wants to be the man of the people, and his eye is set on the highest office in the five boroughs: mayor of New York.
When Mamdani announced his run last October, he (and, frankly, anyone else without the last name Cuomo) was considered a dark horse in the race. But in just five months, his grassroots, social media–driven campaign—inspired by fellow young, internet-savvy progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Florida representative Maxwell Frost, and City Council member Chi Ossé—and affordability–driven messaging made him the first candidate to max out on public fundraising, with more individual donors than all of his primary competition combined. According to a recent Intelligencer profile, around 22,000 volunteers and counting have canvassed on behalf of Zohran for NYC, as Mamdani challenges to win the Democratic nomination.
“There’s a lot of your life that you cannot live in the same way in the midst of a campaign of this scale,” Mamdani told me recently over the phone from Albany. “But music is one of the things that you can hold on to, because you can listen to it in the midst of doing something else.”
Mamdani has never found himself too far from the world of music. He volunteered for Ali Najmi’s campaign for City Council, in 2015, after learning about the candidate from former Das Racist rapper Heems, and even pursued his own short-lived hip-hop career under the name Mr. Cardamom. Earlier this spring, Mamdani turned an MJ Lenderman concert at Brooklyn Steel into an impromptu rally, speaking about his policies and concerns for the city for several minutes.
Summarizing his platform to me, Mamdani said “It’s about the fact that New Yorkers can’t afford to live in the city they call home.” To that end, he recently pledged to increase governmental assistance to one-to-one small business programs by $20 million and slash fines for those same businesses in half, to “ensure that the places that make this city feel like home, the places that make our city so special, are the ones that continue to thrive here.” Mamdani and I spoke about living on a “permanent digital tape delay,” making Spotify Blend playlists with his wife, and the New York hip-hop classic that he believes is the perfect anthem for Primary Day, Tuesday, June 24.
