This November, New York City elected Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, son of Ugandan-Indian exiles, and former rapper. From Leeds, where rent, Gaza, and climate dominate student panels, Mamdani’s win feels almost unreal. The arguments that have been playing out in the debates and discussions across UK universities — about Palestine, housing and diversity — are suddenly sitting in the mayor’s office of one of the most powerful cities in the world. Mamdani’s story is not just about a fresh and energised democracy winning in NYC; it also opens up the door to discussions about whether this kind of leadership can survive the brutality of modern US politics.
Before he was a politician, Mamdani was (and still is, at his core) the child of exiles, growing up between Kampala and New York, where politics was dinner-table conversation—one of his main campaign points. Mamdani attended an American college and became a citizen in 2018. While New York has seen immigrant mayors before, Mamdani is the first South Asian and first Muslim to hold its highest office, a historic milestone in a city that is sustained by its diversity. At 34, energetic and visibly trendy, he became the youngest person in over a century to lead New York City.
So how did Mamdani rise to power in City Hall? The way I see it, the newly elected mayor is not just an appealing candidate but a genuinely likeable person — a breath of fresh air for tired Americans. When Mamdani’s run for mayor was first announced in October, he was a state lawmaker unknown to most NYC residents. He has not been in politics for long, and the contesting candidate representing democratic royalty, Andrew Cuomo, seemed much more credible at the time. Mamdani won people’s hearts through his online campaign, which gained momentum at an incredible speed, but also through his willingness to satisfy different audiences, from urging people to vote for him at a nightclub one night to greeting commuters at 6am the next morning. His journey from state assembly member to elected mayor of the largest city in the United States, and one of the most talked-about figures in international politics, shows how a TikTok-heavy strategy can be a powerful way to win over votes today.
Mamdani attracted the attention of many different audiences with his trendy and catchy campaign videos on TikTok and Instagram, often drawing on his Indian heritage with Bollywood references and jokes. This was a deliberate way of catching the eye of New York’s large Indian community (roughly 200,000–400,000 people of Indian descent, making the city a major hub). He also appealed to voters of colour more broadly by switching into Spanish and other languages in his TikToks.
According to PBS News, Mamdani’s online presence and down-to-earth image helped drive the highest turnout in a New York mayoral race in more than 50 years. The New York Times also reports that he attracted support from a range of different voting blocs. Even so, voters under 45 made up about 43% of all those who cast a ballot, suggesting that his strongest backing came from younger New Yorkers — the people most likely to have discovered him through TikTok and Instagram, reminding us how much difference a positive, optimistic candidate can make. It also serves as a reminder of the importance of social media to obtain voters’ trust.
But of course, the main reasons for Mamdani’s win are his progressive promises. If his biography explains how he reached the gates of power, his housing agenda explains why so many New Yorkers decided to hand him the keys. His optimistic vision to lower the cost of living has resonated with a big part of the population struggling with the city’s affordability, particularly with his suggestion to raise taxes on the wealthy to regulate the system. He appealed to the masses — with charisma and confidence — and that got him far. As Zohran himself puts it on his transition site, he was elected ‘on a mandate for transformational change’.
Unsurprisingly, Mamdani’s outspoken support for Palestinian causes was a central point in many of his speeches and debates. While affirming the nation’s right to exist, he openly criticised Israel, calling its military campaign in Gaza a ‘genocide’. This drew recriminations from Jewish groups, but it also helped him secure votes from pro-Palestinian residents, including the adherents of Islam and the Jewish left. More importantly, most reassuring was his commitment to work with people who disagree with him on controversial issues — a willingness that feels increasingly rare in contemporary politics.
Watching from the UK, where Labour still treats the word “socialism” with caution and pro-Palestine candidates are often treated as electoral poison, it is slightly surreal to see a figure like Mamdani not only survive a city-wide race but dominate it. At the same time, it’s worth being wary of treating any self-described socialist as a solution to the city’s problems, given how often ambitious left projects have crashed into economic limits—Syriza’s anti-austerity government in Greece being the most recent example.
This suggests that we should be cautious when romanticising socialist victories. The ideology has clearly succeeded at accomplishing some of the things promised in the past—in places like the Nordic states, for example, but whenever governments tried to run whole economies through rigid state ownership, the model tended to hit a wall. NPR remarks that political scientists have warned that ‘Mamdani’s approach may not be a winning blueprint for democratic socialist candidates’ outside of NYC, one of the most liberal cities in the USA.
While we can acknowledge the potential blessings of Mamdani’s win in the current political climate globally, we should be cautious when idolising any candidate. Mamdani’s programme is compelling on paper, and one could believe that he might help reshape what “socialism” means in the US and loosen its automatic association with communism, but we still have to see what his campaign looks like in practice.
Editor: Grace Lees