Zohran Mamdani

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City in 2025 represented a stunning political update by a seemingly unlikely candidate. A little-known member of the New York State Assembly when he announced his candidacy in October 2024, Mamdani stunned the Democratic establishment by winning the primary over highly favored former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he also defeated in the general election. Mamdani describes himself as a democratic socialist and centered his mayoral campaign on pledges to make the city more affordable.

In June 2026, less than a year into his first term in office, Mamdani endorsed and campaigned for three progressive candidates, including two democratic socialists, over incumbent Democrats in primary races for the House of Representatives. The move was seen as highly unusual for a mayor and a potential risk to his political capital and popularity in the city. All three won. Even in progressive New York City, the results were stunning and prompted The New York Times to dub Mamdani a “kingmaker.”

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Early life

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. His mother, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair, and his father, anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, met in 1989 when she was doing research in Kampala for her second film (Mississippi Masala [1991], starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury). Both Nair and Mamdani had been born in India, but he had grown up in Uganda.

While Zohran Mamdani was a child, he and his family moved around to accommodate his father’s teaching positions. When he was seven, he moved with his family to New York City, and his father became an anthropology professor at Columbia University. “My father raised me with a real sense of being African, being proud of that heritage,” Mamdani later told New York magazine. His middle name is Kwame, after Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister.

For his elementary education, Mamdani attended Bank Street College of Education’s School for Children, a progressive private school in Manhattan. Later he enrolled at the Bronx High School of Science, where he cofounded a cricket team and ran unsuccessfully to be the school’s student vice president.

Becoming politically active

In 2010 Mamdani enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he cofounded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and organized a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. He graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies.

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Mamdani has said that grappling with U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine was a formative political experience. “We say we care about freedom and justice and self-determination and yet for some reason we draw the line when it comes to Palestinians,” he said in a 2023 interview. “It became a driving force for me.”

After college, Mamdani joined Change Corps, a yearlong training program for community organizers, but after six months he resigned, because he had been organizing a union within the program and believed that he was about to be fired. He worked on one of his mother’s films and formed a hip-hop duo with a childhood friend, going by the name Young Cardamom (later Mr. Cardamom). Ultimately, he found a job as a foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens.

• Explore what it means to be “progressive” in the 21st century

Election to the New York State Assembly

That job, paired with his work on political campaigns, inspired Mamdani to run for office. In 2020 he defeated a Democratic incumbent to represent Astoria and other Queens neighborhoods in the New York State Assembly. He was part of a small wave of candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who were elected that year, and he won reelection twice. One of his legislative achievements was cocreating a pilot program to make a small number of New York City buses free for a year. In 2021 Mamdani went on a 15-day hunger strike to protest predatory loans that were afflicting New York City taxi drivers. The city eventually secured $450 million in debt relief for the drivers.

Mayor of New York City

In October 2024 Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. From the outset, he made affordability his main campaign issue: “What I will bring to this race is an explicit and relentless focus to the number one issue of importance to New York City voters,” he told The Guardian in announcing his candidacy. “They can’t afford their rent. They can’t afford their childcare. They can’t afford transit. They can’t afford their groceries.” The policy priorities he ran on were freezing rents for tenants of rent-stabilized apartments, making public buses fast and fare-free, and launching a pilot program that would open a city-owned grocery store in each borough.

Though Mamdani had little name recognition at the outset of his campaign, he quickly became a factor in the race, thanks in large part to the campaign’s skillful use of videos on Instagram and TikTok. Those videos showed the charismatic Mamdani walking the 13-mile (21-km) length of Manhattan, greeting residents, and participating in a polar plunge while wearing a business suit to show his commitment to freezing rents. Even as pundits raved about his style, polls showed him trailing the favorite, Cuomo.

During the campaign, Mamdani was often criticized for his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly the Israel-Hamas War. He has said that Israel has “a right to exist as a state with equal rights.” However, he has declined to condemn the slogan “Globalize the intifada.” Intifada, an Arabic word that means “rebellion” or “shaking off,” has been used to refer to two popular uprisings by Palestinians calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Mamdani has not used the slogan himself but has said that it speaks to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He has pointed to intifada’s literal definition and noted that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used the term when translating exhibits about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis into Arabic. Moreover, he has spoken often about his commitment to combating antisemitism.

On June 24, 2025, Mamdani won the New York City Democratic primary, taking 56 percent of the final vote to Andrew Cuomo’s 44 percent. NPR called his victory an “astonishing upset” and suggested that it could be the start of a transformation in national politics—the beginning of “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.” Mamdani drove tens of thousands of new voters to the polls; indeed, turnout in some neighborhoods doubled or tripled 2021 levels.

Mamdani again faced Cuomo, running as an independent, as well as Republican Curtis Sliwa in the November 2025 general election that featured the highest voter turnout in a New York City mayoral election since 1969. He faced continued questions about his relative lack of experience and his qualifications to run the United States’ largest city. His progressive policy proposals won him the enthusiastic support of some of the Democratic Party’s most liberal standard-bearers, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York as well as independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Former vice president Kamala Harris and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul also endorsed Mamdani. But some high-ranking New York Democrats—including Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries and U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer—were slow to endorse Mamdani. Jeffries threw his support to Mamdani less than two weeks before Election Day. Schumer never endorsed Mamdani.

U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, who endorsed Cuomo in the waning days of the campaign, threatened to withhold federal funds from New York City if Mamdani were elected. He also raised the possibility of arresting Mamdani and stripping him of his American citizenship. (Mamdani became a citizen in 2018.) But the two men had what was characterized as a surprisingly cordial meeting at the White House in the weeks after the election. “I met with a man who…really wants to see New York be great again,” Trump said, adding “I’ll be cheering for him.”

Upon taking office on January 1, 2026, Mamdani became New York City’s first Muslim mayor, its first Indian American mayor, and its youngest mayor since 30-year-old Hugh J. Grant was elected in 1889.

Mamdani struck a decidedly progressive tone in his inaugural address, delivered after being sworn in by Sanders. Saying he would not “abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical,” Mamdani also stressed that he would be a mayor to those who opposed him as well as the more than one million New Yorkers who voted for him, saying near the beginning of his speech:

If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.

Mamdani’s popularity in New York and growing role in the party has prompted conversation about a possible presidential run for the charismatic candidate. But Mamdani could not run for or be elected president as the U.S. Constitution currently stands. The requirement to be president outlined in Article II of the Constitution says that a person must be a “natural born citizen,” at least 35 years of age, and have lived in the United States for at least 14 years. Mamdani was born in Uganda and became a naturalized citizen in 2018.

While some presidential candidates, including the late Sen. John McCain, were not born in the United States, their parents were U.S. citizens, making their children citizens as well. (In McCain’s case, he was born in the Panama Canal region while his father was serving there in the Navy.)

For his part, Mamdani has said that he doesn’t think the Constitution should be changed to allow him to run. When asked in 2026, he responded: “I think the Constitution looks good the way it is.”