A Knock at the Door

“Hello.” The voice I heard when I picked up the phone on Election Day was low, leaden and remote, as if spoken from a crypt. “This is Andrew Cuomo.” It was a recorded message urging me to vote. Even as his speech quickened — the city must “move forward,” he said, with rising emphasis — he sounded less inspired than irritated, like a father chiding a teenager for not putting gas in the family car. “Thank you,” it ended, with a click. But he didn’t seem thankful at all. At the ragged end of the primary campaign, this was Cuomo: contentless, dour, hectoring, dull.

The first widely circulated video from the Zohran Mamdani campaign, posted just days after the 2024 presidential election, was utterly different. Mamdani, then a New York state assemblyman little known outside his own district, walked around two neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens where many working-class people had either voted for Trump or not voted at all. In a series of street interviews, Mamdani asks them — without presumption or judgment — why. High prices, several say; unaffordable rents; wars in Palestine and Ukraine. Harris had no solution to these problems. “All they do is shame you,” one man says, of the Democrats. Already, Mamdani’s easy rapport with voters is evident; near the end of the three-minute video, he describes his platform to another man and tells him he’s running for mayor. “I’m going to vote for you,” the man responds. “Your energy is …” he trails off, smiling and pointing skyward. “My energy is getting up to inflation,” Mamdani laughs.

This was Mamdani: fun, earnest, engaged, listening.

We learned from an old New Yorker profile of his mother, the director Mira Nair, that one of Mamdani’s childhood nicknames was Nonstop Mamdani. This man did not stop. Far beyond the usual campaign circuit of donor dinners and industry glad-handing — and in contrast to Cuomo, who seemed to appear in public only when he was illegally parking his Dodge Charger in Midtown — Mamdani went everywhere. Parks, subway trains, grocery stores, barbershops, halal carts. He met everyone: Chinese elders in Flushing, West African taxi drivers in Parkchester, Dominican shop owners in Washington Heights. Then, of course, there was the man himself: warm and natural, impossible to dislike, a gifted talker equally at ease on-script or off-the-cuff, and with what a friend of mine called a “generational smile.” Further aided by bright, sign paint-style graphics and a near-constant output of ingenious online videos — some serious, others endearingly silly — Mamdani went from near-anonymity to total saturation in just eight months.¹

They have the money, we on the left like to say of our enemies, but we have the people. On the money, even the Mamdani campaign’s millions in public matching funds were paltry next to the bottomless war chests supplied by Cuomo’s longtime masters in real estate and finance, much of the moolah from Michael Bloomberg alone. As for the people, no comparison could be made. By the Mamdani team’s numbers, over 50,000 Mamdani volunteers knocked on more than 1.5 million doors across the city — and passed out flyers, made phone calls, put up posters and talked about the campaign to their friends, family and neighbors. If you’re a registered Democrat in New York, chances are good you spoke to a Mamdani volunteer. If you’ve walked down a street in the city in the past six months, you’ve seen the posters: sunbeam yellow, with the dimpled Mamdani gazing out cheerfully toward the future. Like most establishment Democrats, Cuomo had no grassroots ground game worth the name, instead relying on party hacks and paid canvassers to get his non-message out. Of the stream of charming Mamdani videos that appeared in the race’s last days, a favorite of mine showed a paid Cuomo canvasser — big blue T-shirt and all — giddily hugging and doing a little dance with Mamdani on the sidewalk.

In my seven years of knocking doors for candidates on the left, Mamdani’s platform was far and away the easiest to pitch. Stop raising my rent? Make my bus run on time? Build housing I can afford? Sign me up. The demands were simple and durable, and spoke to New York’s unremitting cost-of-living crisis not with small-bore reforms or wonky technicalities, but with invention and ambition. The political and fiscal barriers to achieving them — which are high — got Mamdani predictably painted as either a leftist naïf or a mere salesman, peddling proposals he could never deliver on. Never mind that much of the platform has its blueprint in the recent past: as an assemblyman, Mamdani himself won a pilot program for free buses in all five boroughs in 2023; a rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants was in place as recently as 2017; and the city has offered free universal preschool for almost a decade.² Further back, the CUNY system once offered free tuition to tens of thousands of working-class students, until that and other municipal services were gutted under the city’s 1975 fiscal compact with its big bank lenders. Fifty years on, as Ross Barkan has noted, that crisis still divides the city’s political imagination between a vision of a polity abounding in “free or cheap public goods” and one of neoliberal austerity.

The campaign’s climax, for me, came with Mamdani’s Whitmanic walk down the length of Manhattan on the Friday night before Election Day. Starting from Inwood at the top of the island, he walked for hours and miles, pausing for chats and photos with supporters along the way, gathering a jubilant crowd behind him. All the while, as he would recall in his victory speech days later,

New York worked. Garbage trucks weaved through empty streets. Fishmongers carried in tomorrow’s wares. And when we finally arrived at the Battery at 2:20 in the morning, the workers who run the Staten Island Ferry were on the job, too. Just as they are every hour of the day, every day of the week.

Rhetorically, this was among the less-remarked gifts of this campaign: to see and speak to working people in both the bonds of universality and with the dignity of specificity. But Mamdani wasn’t just making a gesture; he was choosing a side. While he vowed in the same speech to be “a mayor for every New Yorker,” his campaign has advocated, he said, “with no apology,” on behalf of a particular New York, a city where hours and commutes are long, paychecks stretched and housing precarious. Such commitment shouldn’t count as rare or brave in urban politics, but it does. As a candidate, Mamdani addresses city life with neither the doomsday paranoia of the MAGA right nor the vacuous optimism of so much mainstream Democratic rhetoric.

And Gaza. What does it mean that, in 2025, a mere call for equal rights for all Israeli citizens stirs more outrage than a plan for publicly owned grocery stores? Against two national parties in thrall to a genocidal regime and reflexively hostile to the very notion of Palestinian humanity, Mamdani spoke with the same force and clarity in defense of Gaza’s people as he did in support of working New Yorkers. Mamdani was always going to be labeled an antisemite by politicians and operators running cover for Zionist slaughter; his actual answers to all the rhetorical traps and ludicrous insinuations, the badgering questions about Israel and intifada, were almost irrelevant. Yet he did answer them, with conviction and without apology. Witness the interview with Stephen Colbert, where Mamdani meets the late night host’s anxious, circuitous interrogation about Jewish “safety” with plainspoken poise. The antisemitism panic has come so unmoored from empirical reality that any contact with that reality is a bracing risk.

Mamdani surpassed election-night expectations almost everywhere. The map of his first-round votes shows a colorful sprawl reaching deep into southern Brooklyn, eastern Queens, northern Staten Island, and most of Manhattan. To see, say, crowds of working-class Bangladeshi New Yorkers in Kensington lining up to take a photo with a 33-year-old socialist mayoral candidate, to see posters promoting free childcare in Chinese, Spanish, Urdu or Arabic, is to witness a turning point in U.S. politics. And the binding thread of the Mamdani coalition is youth. White, Black, Latino and Asian, in every borough, people under 40 overwhelmingly backed Mamdani in the first round, turning out to vote in unprecedented numbers — a feat that has eluded the post-Obama Democratic gerontocracy. Still, as we savor victory, we should recognize shortcomings. In New York, the democratic-socialist project has yet to make many inroads among older Black voters, public housing residents and outer-borough homeowners.³ A base among young and college-educated voters, however impressively expanded in this race, remains a fragile foundation for lasting power.

Starting in March, I helped lead a canvass every Sunday in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a dizzily gentrifying neighborhood that would ultimately break for Mamdani over Cuomo by 57 points. In the early spring chill, the canvasses started small: five, six, seven of us. Then, as the weather warmed and Mamdani’s poll numbers kept climbing, they got big: 15, 20 of us turned out, with more and more first-time canvassers. In the last weeks, they got even bigger: two dozen, 30, 40 people per shift. Other neighborhoods saw even larger crowds; the biggest canvasses drew hundreds. People who had never knocked doors for a candidate before or thought they never would again. Card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America and people who had never heard of DSA. At the start of each shift, I would ask volunteers to introduce themselves and share one thing that excited them about the campaign. I want a rent freeze. I’m excited for free childcare. I want cheap groceries. I support Palestine. I just want a normal person as mayor. Every week a litany of possibility, a chorus of hope for a working-class city. Then we would pass out folders and flyers, assign turf lists, and get to work.

Between the volunteer fervor and the sheer escape velocity of his charisma, Mamdani has brought comparisons to Barack Obama in 2008. You can see it: a fresh, inspired candidate of color able to hang with seemingly anyone, who marks a hopeful break with both the Republican barbarism and Democratic blockage of the preceding years — under Bush then and Trump now. Past this, though, the analogy runs thin. Even as a challenger to Hilary Clinton, Obama cozied to Silicon Valley and enjoyed the backing of sections of the party establishment. But this year, the whole weight of New York’s borough-level Democratic Party machines — sleazy vestiges of the ward-heeling clientelism that once defined American city governance — aligned against Mamdani. Even Jim Clyburn, the kingmaking South Carolina congressman who helped plunge the Democratic Party into its Biden death spiral in 2024, waded in to endorse Cuomo. And the tenor of capital’s response was expressed by local supermarket baron John Catsimatidis, who threatened to close his stores and leave town rather than live under a Mamdani regime.

We rightly smile to see billionaires such as Catsimatidis — a thumb-shaped windbag who himself made two failed tries for the mayoralty — running scared of the Democratic nominee. But with the primary all but won, a longer, fiercer fight begins. The redbaiting caricatures, antisemitism slanders and Islamophobic threats will intensify. Most chilling has been the anti-immigrant vitriol. Stephen Miller points to Mamdani as an example of the peril of “unchecked migration”; Vickie Paladino, a northern Queens Republican and the scummiest member of New York’s City Council, called for Mamdani to be deported. But the more material threat will come from genteeler quarters. Whether through a Cuomo revenge run as an independent in the general election, a last-ditch Eric Adams recuperation, or some other vehicle, real estate and finance — sectors long accustomed to pliable New York mayors and governors — will revolt. An injustice to the ruling class in New York is a threat to the ruling class everywhere. “What happens in NYC,” a worried Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, tweeted from Massachusetts last week, “is consequential for all of us.”

Of course, Summers’s us is not our us. I think of the people I met on canvasses. The older Polish woman in Greenpoint who took a thick stack of Mamdani flyers to give out to all her friends. The hijabi Indian American mother and daughter who drove in from Long Island to knock doors for Mamdani so that, the mother said, life could be as affordable for others as it was when she was growing up in the Bronx. The mobility-impaired man in Bay Ridge who said he rarely got visitors and invited me into his apartment, where he talked about his frustration with inaccessible transit and the hope Mamdani’s platform held for him.

The victory is extraordinary, and in some aspects — Cuomo’s scandals, Mamdani’s charm, the late cross-endorsement boost from third-place finisher Brad Lander — unrepeatable outside New York politics. But as a model, an example, the campaign holds promise everywhere. To risk some Gotham grandiosity: the world has always come to New York. This campaign has brought a vision of New York, of the city — affordable, equal, communal, just — to the world. And it starts with a knock at the door.

1. The momentum was less sudden or spontaneous than it might appear. Before seeking office, Mamdani spent several years in the electoral trenches as a member of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America, which since its rebirth in 2016 has won campaigns at most levels of city and state government, thanks to a deep and committed base of member-volunteers and to its crack research, strategy, and comms teams (almost all unpaid). As a local political force, NYC-DSA can only be compared to the city’s Socialist Party of a century or more ago — but in the geographic and social reach of its victories and candidates, NYC-DSA has already surpassed its precursor. ↩︎
2. The latter two of these were accomplished under Bill de Blasio, a gawky, little-loved Park Slope liberal whose two terms in office have come to look in retrospect like a miracle of principle and competence after four years of Eric Adams’s corrupt clown show. ↩︎
3. Mamdani nevertheless carried a far greater part of the Black vote than critics — good-faith or otherwise — would have predicted. “There were three Black people who ran” in the mayor’s race, the former Obama diplomat Patrick Gaspard noted to the Times. “One is the City Council speaker, one is a former assemblyperson who worked for Obama and has his own profile, and a sitting senator in an important district in Brooklyn.” Yet “Zohran got more Black votes than all of the Black candidates combined.” ↩︎