Moment that mattered: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral election

“Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty,” Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected mayor of New York City, told a jubilant crowd at the Brooklyn Paramount during his victory rally. Andrew Epstein, Mamdani’s campaign communications manager, felt a sense of relief as he listened to the speech by the stage. “I’d been working seven days a week, sometimes 16 hours a day… finally I could just stop and breathe,” he recalls. “It was a surreal experience, and one that I’ll probably never repeat – to watch somebody become a global figure, that quickly, up close.”

Mamdani is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist as well as a Muslim of Indian descent, moved from Uganda to the US with his parents at the age of seven. He was a little-known New York state assemblyman representing a district in Queens when he launched his mayoral bid. “When I was hired in September 2024, we were polling less than one percent… Nobody in this city outside of his constituents and a handful of people on the organised left knew about Zohran Mamdani,” says Epstein, a Yale history graduate who had been working as chief of staff for the New York state assembly. “It was an incredible long shot, but I wouldn’t have left my state job with a pension and thrown my lot in with him if I didn’t think there was a chance that we could actually win.”

From the outset, Epstein knew social media would be crucial to the campaign. The choice was partly a savvy tactic, one that would utilise Mamdani’s easy-going charm, but was also pragmatic. “In the early days I was having to beg and cajole for any press coverage at all,” says Epstein. But social media gave Mamdani a direct line to New York’s young and disaffected voters, who are more likely to scroll TikTok – from which 43 percent of under 30s in the US now get their news – than to read newspapers or watch TV. Videos of the mayoral candidate flashing his trademark grin quickly went viral. Among the most watched clips were him vox-popping Trump voters in New York’s working-class districts, asking what it would take for them to vote Democrat and plunging into the Atlantic on New Year’s Day while explaining his rent freeze.

When I was hired in September 2024, we were polling less than one percent”

Part of Mamdani’s social media success, says Epstein, is that the mayoral candidate, who in his early twenties rapped in New York’s hip-hop scene under the name “Mr Cardamom”, doesn’t take himself too seriously. “Those years as a failed B-list rapper literally hawking his CDs on buses… [mean] he’s not afflicted with the same fear of cringe that many of us have when we put ourselves out there.” But while social media enabled Mamdani to reach voters, it was his three-pronged affordability platform that won them over, says Epstein. “Our position was that if you think rent should be frozen for millions of rent-stabilised tenants, that the slowest buses in the country should be fast and free and that every family deserves universal no-cost childcare, then we’re campaigning for you. And you can disagree with a million things we’ve said or done, but if you agree with these points then vote for us.”

Epstein purposefully avoided what he calls the ‘kitchen sink’ approach that many progressive candidates follow, “where you just list every single concern someone left of centre might have… the idea was to make Zohran the avatar for the affordability crisis. One in four New Yorkers live in poverty and half are severely rent-burdened. So not only are a great number of New Yorkers quite poor, but a whole other set is one job loss or rent hike away from total instability… The fundamental crisis in the lives of most New Yorkers is that they can’t afford to live here.”

The strategy’s first litmus test came in June 2025 when Mamdani ran against Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, in the Democratic mayoral primary. The political heavyweight’s campaign attracted big-name Democrat backers, including an endorsement from former president Bill Clinton. Three-term New York mayor Michael Bloomberg made a series of donations totalling $13.3 million. It was a stark contrast to Mamdani, who raised much of his funding from small grassroots donors and mobilised 100,000 volunteers to carry out three million door knocks on his behalf.

With the two candidates neck-and-neck in final polls, Mamdani’s team was braced for a down-to-the-wire result. So when Cuomo conceded just hours after the last ballots were cast, Epstein was floored. “It was an absolute political earthquake,” he recalls. “I just collapsed, truthfully, I wept, it was one of the hottest days of the year, I’d sweated through all my clothes and I was just stumbling around the room from hug to hug.” In the final tally of the primary’s votes Mamdani took 56.4 percent of the vote to Cuomo’s 43.6 percent.

Despite this victory, top figures in Mamdani’s own party still didn’t publicly endorse him in the mayoral race, and the defeated Cuomo chose to run as an independent. Epstein believes that the Democratic establishment’s reticence to endorse Mamdani helps explain why the party has struggled to make political gains against the Republicans. “[Its] resistance to the Trump administration has been procedural, cowardly and ineffective,” he says. “I think Zohran’s approach to politics, economically focused, populist, unafraid to call out the billionaire class and offering a real alternative to Trumpism, is what most Democrats are really hungry for, even if it makes some leaders of the party who are so dependent on donations from powerful corporations and lobbyists nervous.”

While Mamdani ran as an anti-establishment figure, he now has to work inside the system as mayor. One of his first challenges after taking up office in January 2026 was navigating a relationship with President Trump, who called Mamdani a “lunatic” during the campaign. In response Mamdani branded him a “despot”. At his first White House meeting, however, Mamdani appeared to charm the president, with Trump later declaring: “Bad policies, but a nice guy”. From there an unlikely bromance has flourished with the pair keeping in regular contact via text message.

At his first White House meeting, Mamdani appeared to charm the president, with Trump later declaring: ‘Bad policies, but a nice guy’”

From Mamdani’s perspective, wooing Trump is a smart move, says Epstein, who is now working as Mamdani’s “outside political advisor”. “His number one goal was to go into that meeting and serve the interests of New Yorkers, to ensure the significant federal funding the city receives doesn’t get shut off and to dissuade Trump from flooding our city with ICE agents as has been done elsewhere. So far, it has worked.” New York’s new mayor has also made headway on his key campaign pledge – rent freezes. In February 2026 he appointed five new members to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, giving his selections a majority on the panel that is expected to vote on the issue of freezing rent hikes in June. Elsewhere, however, Mamdani faces a rougher ride. “When the mayor walked in and got a look at the books, he was staring at a $12 billion budget gap,” says Epstein. “He needs not just to balance the books but to find money to spend on his flagship policies.”

However, while Mamdani has proposed raising income tax by two percent for the 33,000 New Yorkers earning over $1 million and increasing the levies paid by the city’s most profitable corporations, doing so will require the support of New York’s Democrat governor, Kathy Hochul, who staunchly opposes the idea. “If he can’t get this through, then in all honesty there are only some pretty terrible options to close that [budget] gap,” says Epstein. As a last resort, Mamdani has said the city would be forced to raise property taxes by 9.5 percent, which would affect three million middle- and working-class New Yorkers and likely prove unpopular. “It’s certainly a tough road ahead and there might be difficult choices down the line,” says Epstein. “But I think Zohran’s already shown us he has a way to get things done even when the odds are massively stacked against him.”

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