Run Zohran Run!
Inside Zohran Mamdani's Sensational Campaign to Become New York City's First Democratic Socialist Mayor
By Theodore Hamm
Category: Politics | Reading Duration: 20 min
About the Book
Run, Zohran, Run! (2025) documents the rise of America's first democratic socialist mayor and the generational revolt that powered his victory through record youth turnout and grassroots organizing. The campaign's success in channeling economic anxiety into political action offers a blueprint for progressive movements by speaking directly to the material conditions of struggling Americans.
Who Should Read This?
- Young voters and political organizers seeking blueprints for successful grassroots campaigns
- New hounds curious about the real stories and people behind the latest headlines
- Anyone frustrated with machine politics and seeking alternatives to establishment candidates
What’s in it for me? Go beyond the headlines and discover the real story of Zohran Mamdani’s triumphant mayoral election, and the grassroots organizing that forged a new coalition for the future of New York City.
Just after midnight on November 5, 2025, Zohran Mamdani took the stage to speak at a Brooklyn victory party. The thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist had just accomplished what the political establishment said was impossible. But the crowd surrounding him that night was the real story. These weren’t typical political insiders, they were young New Yorkers who had knocked on thousands of doors and most had never worked on a campaign before.
From warehouse workers and tenants facing eviction, to students drowning in debt and young professionals, for them this was more than one election. It was a generational uprising. Young voters had watched Eric Adams cozy up to real estate developers while their rents became impossible. They saw a city that worked for the wealthy but left everyone else behind.
In Mamdani, they found someone who spoke their language of urgency and transformation. This Blink explores why this victory signals something larger than one mayoral race. It reveals how a new political generation refuses to accept that this is the best America can do.
Chapter 1: Kampala to Queens – making a movement
Zohran Mamdani's journey to New York's highest office began seven thousand miles away in Kampala, Uganda. Born in 1991 to parents who embodied the global diasporic experience, his story mirrors that of millions of young Americans navigating multiple identities. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, had been expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in 1972 for being Asian, only to return years later as a prominent scholar of colonialism. His mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, captured immigrant experiences on screen.
This background of displacement and resilience would shape young Zohran and his politics. When he first arrived in New York aged just seven, he entered a city where immigrant families like his struggled to find their place. While studying at Bronx High School of Science, he co-founded the school's first cricket team. Soon, the team was participating in a citywide league, giving Zohran a tour of South Asian and Caribbean communities all over New York City. While he doesn’t recall any particular islamophobia he encountered on the streets of New York, he did have an early encounter that left him shaken. In 2008, almost seven years after the events of September 11, 2001, young Zohran was on a flight back from Uganda when he was detained by Homeland Security with other Islamic men.
He was asked if he had attended a terrorist training camp while abroad and quickly released. But it made young Zohran acutely aware how his religion was perceived by others. At Bowdoin College in Maine, a prestigious liberal arts college, he studied Africana Studies and helped establish a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. These early experiences taught him how organizing could transform isolation into collective power. But it was his work as a foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens that truly opened his eyes to systemic injustice. Every day brought new heartbreak as Mamdani sat across from immigrant families facing eviction, negotiating with banks that valued profits over people.
Homeowners who had worked their entire lives lost everything to predatory lending and bureaucratic indifference. In Astoria, nearly a quarter of residents spent half their income on rent. This was not about abstract policy – these were his neighbors, people who looked like his family, with similar histories, and struggling with the same dreams deferred. Young voters identified with Mamdani's story. Here was someone who understood what it meant to carry multiple identities while being told you belong nowhere. He spoke Hindi, Kiswahili, Spanish, and Arabic, moving between communities that establishment politicians ignored.
His path from housing counselor to mayor represented possibility. If someone who spent years fighting evictions could run the city, maybe the system was not as fixed as they had been told. His campaign slogan, "roti and roses," updates the old labor motto, "bread and roses," signaling both cultural pride and economic justice. Mamdani offered something rare: genuine understanding born from shared struggle.
Chapter 2: The Nightlife Mayor and the New York nightmare
Eric Adams entered City Hall in January 2022 promising to restore the “swagger” to New York City. The former police captain who’d earned the nickname Nightlife Mayor for his Friday and Saturday club appearances, represented a change. He spoke the language of law and order while courting real estate developers with promises to build, baby, build. Young New Yorkers watched this cozy relationship with growing disgust.
They saw Adams celebrate at exclusive galas with the same developers pricing them out of their neighborhoods. Meanwhile, their reality grew grimmer. Nearly a quarter of residents in neighborhoods like Astoria spent half their income on rent. The mayor who promised to fight for those the city had betrayed seemed interested only in helping those who already owned it. His approval rating plummeted to just twenty percent by early 2025, the lowest in three decades of polling. Then came the indictments.
Federal prosecutors unveiled a decade-long corruption scheme involving Turkish nationals, illegal campaign contributions, and luxury travel worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The mayor who partied his way through weekends had allegedly pressured fire officials to approve an unsafe Turkish consulate building. Though the charges were eventually dismissed after pressure from the Trump administration, the damage was done. Young voters saw Adams as the embodiment of everything wrong with New York politics. As a result, Adams dropped his reelection bid in September 2025, and the Democratic establishment rallied behind a familiar name: Andrew Cuomo. He had resigned as governor in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, and saw a chance for redemption.
Party bosses and real estate moguls poured millions into his campaign. But young voters remembered Cuomo. They remembered his cuts to public housing during his time as governor. They watched him side with landlords over tenants, with developers over communities. His return felt like watching the same failed politicians shuffle positions while nothing really changed. The Democratic Socialists of America, once a fringe group in New York politics, suddenly found their message resonating with voters under forty who felt abandoned by both Adams and Cuomo.
These young organizers rejected the entire premise of machine politics. They refused to wait their turn or accept gradual progress. While Cuomo collected checks from Wall Street executives at thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraisers, DSA members organized in laundromats and subway stations. They spoke about universal childcare, free public transit, and rent freezes not as impossible dreams but as basic necessities for a functioning city. The generational divide became impossible to ignore. Older Democrats warned about electability and the dangers of socialism.
Younger voters responded that capitalism had already failed them. They pointed to their student debt, their impossible rents, their lack of healthcare. What, exactly, should they be afraid of losing?
Chapter 3: Power outside the machine
Zohran Mamdani did not appear from nowhere. When seventy-five percent of young voters backed him on election night in 2025, they were part of an historic surge. Youth turnout reached twenty-eight percent, far above the typical two to nine percent for municipal races. It wasn’t spontaneous.
It was the culmination of years of organizing by a movement that understood something fundamental about American politics. New York has always been a city of radical experiments. In the nineteen-thirties, Fiorello LaGuardia governed as a Republican. He ran for reelection on the Socialist Party line after his own party denied him the nomination. He created public housing, built hundreds of playgrounds, and established free health centers across the city. The New York Times called his proposals dangerous and socialist.
Today, LaGuardia Airport bears his name. The Democratic Socialists of America that Mamdani joined in 2017 had just sixteen hundred members nationwide. By 2025, DSA membership had reached eighty thousand, with twenty-six thousand people joining since January alone. This growth meant that thousands of young people were learning to organize in their neighborhood and workplaces. Places like Astoria, Greenpoint, and Bushwick saw turnout surge two to three times compared to previous elections. These were neighborhoods transformed by young renters, recent college graduates, and service workers.
Young Latino voters gave Mamdani eighty-five percent support while young Black voters gave him eighty-three percent. This coalition defied conventional political wisdom. The campaign itself looked nothing like traditional New York politics. With over fifty thousand volunteers, Mamdani built a ground game that brought online energy into real-world organizing. Young volunteers who had never worked on a campaign before knocked on doors, organized soccer tournaments in public parks, and held rallies that felt more like festivals than political events. Forty percent of those who voted early were under forty years old, and many were voting for the first time.
They weren’t motivated by party loyalty or political tradition, they cared most about one thing: affordability. Exit polls revealed Mamdani captured seventy-eight percent of voters under thirty, and sixty-six percent of voters aged thirty to forty-four. The political establishment misread this rise completely. They saw young people as unreliable voters who could be ignored, and believed machine politics still controlled New York. They assumed endorsements from party bosses mattered more than organizing in neighborhoods. Every assumption proved wrong.
Young people far outside New York began seeing Mamdani as a national leader. In small towns in Michigan and Mississippi, young voters watched his campaign and saw possibilities. This was not about one candidate or one city or one issue. It was about a generation discovering they could build political power outside traditional structures.
Chapter 4: Coalition of the future
So history was repeating itself in New York on that November evening in 2025. Just as Fiorello LaGuardia emerged from the Great Depression to build a coalition of workers, immigrants, and reformers in the nineteen-thirties, Zohran Mamdani emerged from a new crisis to unite a generation that transcended traditional political boundaries. The numbers told a story the establishment refused to hear. While Cuomo won voters over sixty-five by a solid nineteen points, Mamdani dominated among everyone under forty-five.
This wasn’t a simple age gap. It was a fundamental realignment around class and economic survival. Exit polls indicated that voters making between forty and eighty thousand dollars a year overwhelmingly chose Mamdani. These were teachers, nurses, restaurant workers, and junior professionals all facing the same impossible math of urban survival. The coalition also defied decades of conventional wisdom around racial and ethnic voting patterns. Young Muslims in Jackson Heights stood with Dominican families in Washington Heights.
Chinese American renters in Sunset Park joined Black tenants in Crown Heights. They were not united by identity politics but by their material reality. They all paid too much rent, feared medical bankruptcy, and worked multiple jobs but still didn’t have enough to live on. Even more striking were those who outright crossed traditional political lines. Eighty-one percent of New Yorkers who had lived in the city less than ten years voted for Mamdani. These newcomers included Midwestern tech workers, Southern artists, and healthcare workers from the Philippines who all came seeking opportunity in the Big Apple, but instead found exploitation.
The city that once welcomed American dreamers now extracted everything from them, giving nothing back. The campaign's message was simple and radical. Free buses. Universal childcare. Rent freezes. City-owned grocery stores.
These were not new ideas. They echoed demands from the nineteen-thirties when socialists held real power in New York. But for young voters who had only known austerity and inequality, they felt revolutionary. Religious communities split in ways that shocked pollsters as well. While older Jewish voters backed Cuomo two to one, for instance, young Jewish voters under forty-four supported Mamdani by similar margins. Young Catholics, Muslims, and secular voters all found common ground in demanding economic justice over symbolic representation.
The business press warned of capital flight and economic disaster. But young voters had already lived through that. They graduated into the financial crisis, entered the workforce during a pandemic, and watched billionaires profit while they struggled. On election night, as results poured in from across the five boroughs, a new political map emerged. This was not Democrats versus Republicans or progressives versus moderates. It was between those who owned the city and those who just lived in it, and the tenants won.
Chapter 5: What Zohran teaches America
Between the June primary and November election, attacks came from everywhere. Eleven hundred rabbis signed an open letter denouncing Mamdani, the business press predicted economic catastrophe, while cable news warned of Islamic extremism. Zohran was accused of mainstreaming antisemitism for pointing out that the Israeli military had trained hundreds of NYPD officers. Every debate moderator demanded that he denounce phrases he had never used.
But the attacks didn’t work. Mamdani did not sacrifice his Palestinian solidarity to win the election or pander to endless false claims of antisemitism. He was focused on what mattered to working New Yorkers: rent, childcare, groceries, survival. His discipline revealed something profound about US politics: when candidates speak directly to material conditions, culture war attacks lose their power. Young Jewish New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani were energized by his economic agenda and unbothered by, even sympathetic to, his views on Israel and Gaza. They cared more about rent freezes than foreign policy debates.
The generational divide within Jewish communities mirrored this broader realignment. While fifty-six percent of Jewish Americans say they are emotionally attached to Israel, that number falls to thirty-six percent among those aged eighteen to thirty-four. Young Jewish voters saw a Muslim candidate promising universal programs that would help everyone, including them. Mamdani attended Yom Kippur services at progressive synagogues, and met with Orthodox families in Brooklyn homes. He listened to their concerns about safety and promised increased security funding. But he never abandoned his principles or pretended his views on Gaza were different than they were.
This authenticity cut through decades of political calculations. While establishment Democrats and consultants stick to tested messages, Mamdani simply said what he believed. Free buses, for instance, would help everyone get to work. Universal childcare would help every parent. Rent freezes would help every tenant. These are not radical ideas, they are common sense.
Mamdani proved something important. In an era of manufactured outrage and endless distraction, a politics grounded in material reality could still win. His coalition wasn’t built on identity or ideology but through shared struggle. That may be the most radical thing about it; It is a wake up call for anyone still invested in the status quo. In this Blink to Run Zohran Run!
Final summary
by Theodore Hamm, you’ve learned that… Young voters delivered a simple message to politicians in 2025’s New York Mayoral race: talk about what actually matters. The media obsessed over foreign policy positions and manufactured controversies. Meanwhile, seventy-eight percent of voters under thirty backed the candidate promising free buses and rent freezes. The Democratic Socialists of America grew from sixteen hundred to eighty thousand members, providing infrastructure for a movement bigger than any single organization.
Mamdani won not through party politics and PR strategies, but through authentic focus on his voters’ material reality. With Zohran’s victory, the tenants finally beat the landlords, proving that shared economic struggle creates more powerful coalitions than identity or ideology ever could. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Theodore Hamm, founding editor of The Brooklyn Rail and chair of journalism at St. Joseph's University, has chronicled progressive politics through books including Bernie's Brooklyn, Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn, and The New Blue Media. Hamm has written for Jacobin, The Indypendent, and City Limits while teaching in both university classrooms and San Quentin State Prison, where he received an Outstanding Volunteer Service award.