Zohran Mamdani, the millennial socialist whose unabashedly left-wing campaign for Mayor of New York City unnerved many national Democrats but emboldened others, prevailed Tuesday as expected at the ballot box, installing him as leader of the nation’s largest city and a potentially powerful figure within a party looking for its next act.
The Associated Press called the race for Mamdani less than an hour after polls across New York City closed.
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The 34-year-old democratic socialist is poised to take control of a 306,000-person municipal workforce in the global center of capitalism that also functions as a cultural hub that dictates trends around the world. Mamdani will not only become the city’s first Muslim Mayor, but likely the most prominent Muslim in the country, as well as a political figure whose bully pulpit could serve as a counterweight to President Donald Trump’s dictates from Washington.
Yet the win was far from absolute and a mandate is hardly guaranteed. Mamdani will face high expectations and even higher barriers to executing an agenda that includes enormous bureaucratic, political, and logistic hurdles. And it has to be said: there are fewer more constant truisms about New York City than that its denizens love to hate their Mayor.
The road to Tuesday’s win was one that bedeviled Democratic leaders for months. Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents Queens, emerged as a charismatic and polarizing figure among a crowded field of Democrats that included former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Democrats largely rejected Cuomo’s attempt to return to good standing after resigning his office amid allegations of sexual misconduct. (Cuomo to this day denies the charges, which were outlined in a detailed independent report and prompted widespread calls for his resignation.)
After losing the Democratic nomination, Cuomo, notoriously stubborn, refused to accept voters’ verdict and ran as an independent, as did incumbent Mayor Eric Adams who still appeared on the ballot Tuesday despite dropping out in September.
But many of the warnings about Mamdani proved dogged. National Democrats worry that Mamdani is destined to become the face of their party, forcing Democrats on the ballot across the country next year to defend themselves against charges of being radical Marxists, or as Trump has determined of Mamdani, a communist. (Democratic socialists are not communists.) Even as late as Tuesday morning, Trump was trying to lash Mamdani to a political ideology that many voters find incompatible with capitalism.
Mamdani’s political success is largely credited to a media-savvy campaign that centered affordability in one of the world’s most expensive cities, with Mamdani vowing to levy New York’s ultra-rich to pay for childcare, transportation, and even grocery stores. Critics lambasted those policies as impractical at best, reckless at worst. But many voters seemed to appreciate Mamdani’s acknowledging the challenges of living there, plus his upbeat, accessible timbre of the campaign.
Read more: ‘A Politics of No Translation.’ Zohran Mamdani on His Unlikely Rise
“I think the most important thing is that people see themselves and their struggles in your campaign,” Mamdani told TIME in July. “And I think the larger struggle for us as Democrats is to ensure that we are practicing a politics that is direct, a politics of no translation, a politics that when you read the policy commitment, you understand it, as how it applies to your life.”
Along with justifying his policy proposals, Mamdani found himself defending his past support for Palestinian causes and a perceived hostility toward Israel and Jewish concerns. Yet a drumbeat of Mamdani’s past statements about Israel did not prove politically fatal in New York City in 2025. Given chances to replicate his pivots toward moderation on subjects like Wall Street, housing, and policing, Mamdani did not bend on the Middle East. While he stressed he is pro-Palestinian causes and not anti-Zionist, he frustrated those in his party who thought he came off as too sympathetic toward Hamas.
Eventually, much of the Democratic Establishment fell into place. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New Yorker, endorsed Mamdani on the eve of early voting. Former President Barack Obama stopped short of endorsing but called Mamdani over the weekend, offering to be a sounding board. Yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New Yorker, chose to not endorse in the race.
As the campaign hit its final hours, Cuomo doubled down on his warnings that Mamdani would end New York’s independence because Trump would take over the city. “He will be President Trump and Mayor Trump,” Cuomo said. “He’s going to take over New York and send tanks down Fifth Avenue.”
(For his part, Trump told 60 Minutes in an interview that aired over the weekend that he would take a tough line with his city. “It’s going to be hard for me as the President to give a lot of money to New York because if you have a communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” he said.)
Cuomo also said Mamdani would bring socialism to a city that is home to legions of Hispanic voters who fled the ideology. “Socialism did not work in Venezuela,” Cuomo said Monday. “Socialism did not work in Cuba.”
Neither did Cuomo’s criticism.