In 2002, The New Yorker’s John Lahr visited Morningside Heights to write a Profile of the filmmaker Mira Nair, and took notice of her nine-year-old child: “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani.”
Sometimes early observations are trenchant ones. (The charm of the well-loved!) The already sweat-drenched summer of 2025 has been defined by Nonstop Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old left-wing state assemblyman from Queens, who, on Tuesday night, seemingly won a striking victory in the Democratic primary for mayor, defeating a former governor and lapping a field of candidates, most of whom were more established and initially better known. Mamdani’s campaign said it had knocked on a million and a half doors across the city—not unprecedented in the annals of municipal politics but probably essential for an unknown. The candidate himself appeared in every conceivable media venue, from the TikTok series “Subway Takes” to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” In the mid-June heat, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, from Inwood to the Battery. He beat Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, in the first round of ranked-choice voting by about seven percentage points, but, in campaign buttons and other merch visible across the five boroughs, it was a landslide. Mamdani got his central issue—affordability—exactly right, and, with his easy smile, his ubiquity, and his steady rise in the polls, he embodied his campaign’s essential theme, that life in New York doesn’t have to be so oppressively hard.
Even if Mamdani’s victory was built on the ultimate virtue of local politics—hustle—it also carries an unmissable message for his beleaguered national party: be new. During the long and often difficult years since Obama’s election, the Democrats have mostly worked from the top down and the inside out: the Party’s past three Presidential nominees have been Obama’s Secretary of State, Obama’s Vice-President, and Obama’s Vice-President’s Vice-President. Joe Biden’s age and fragility defined last year’s election, and may also threaten to define the Party for a generation. Even this past spring, Democrats in the House lost a vote they might have won—for passage of the “Big Beautiful” budget-reconciliation bill—because too many congressmen had died too recently to be replaced.
Now there is a glimmer of possibility. Donald Trump has, during the past six months, quite efficiently abandoned his brand as a populist for a more comfortable position as a straightforward right-winger. Trump let loose the richest man in the world in a hastily conceived blitzkrieg against the civil service; despite having spent years promising peace and “America First,” he ordered an impulsive bombing of Iran under pressure from hawks at home and allies in Israel; the current iteration of his “Big Beautiful Bill,” which is now on the verge of Senate passage, would strip millions of Americans of their health insurance in order to give deficit-increasing tax breaks to the very rich; and, though he campaigned and won the election by running against Biden’s inflation, he is fixated on tariffs that would bring more of it. Trump is seventy-nine years old and has been President twice. He and his party can’t run as the outsiders forever.
Does a generational change for the Democrats necessarily mean a sharp move toward the left, as Mamdani’s supporters might hope? T.B.D. So far, the experiments in explicitly left-wing governance—as opposed to the principled backbenching of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have gone badly for the Party. In Chicago, Brandon Johnson’s year and a half as mayor has been pretty disastrous, measured both by the city’s mounting budget crisis and his own plummeting popularity. Chesa Boudin’s brief tenure as the avowedly progressive district attorney in San Francisco ended with his removal by voter referendum and contributed to the tech backlash that helped power Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. (Michelle Wu, the young Boston mayor and Elizabeth Warren’s former protégé, offers a more pragmatic and successful model.) In New York this past spring, where Michael Bloomberg led an ill-advised stampede of the wealthy to back the lethargic and disgraced Cuomo, there was a fear of Mamdani that, at times, veered toward the hysterical: “Terror is the feeling,” Kathryn Wylde, the C.E.O. of Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of business leaders, told CNBC on primary day. Even Mamdani’s natural ally Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed him in early June, noted that, if elected, Mamdani would need to surround himself with a more experienced staff to succeed. City Hall, Albany—these have been fortresses of political entrenchment for a century. Is this really the guy—and the place—for the contemporary left to succeed where it has so far failed?
If Mamdani wins the general election in November, in which he will begin as the likeliest victor but not a sure thing, then his political fortunes and his significance to his party will hinge on his ability to actually improve what he has correctly identified as a crisis of affordability in New York. (His electoral coalition was less notably poor than it was young—Cuomo performed well among both the richest and the poorest New Yorkers, but Mamdani ran up the score among those under forty-five.) Surely Trump will see him as a target. Mamdani’s proposal of a rent freeze proved popular in the campaign, but Bill de Blasio froze the rent three times, and it has hardly made New York housing cheaper in a lasting way. Other ideas seem either a little fanciful (the establishment of five city-run grocery stores) or politically difficult (tax hikes). During the campaign, Mamdani sometimes appeared a little more flexible than his socialist image—he has been interested, for instance, in ideas about how to build more housing that have germinated in the abundance movement, and in cutting red tape for small businesses—but his affordability program still has some of the haziness of the well-loved.
But political change often depends less on the tectonic movement of demographics than on the arrival of new personalities. That Mamdani would become the presumptive Democratic nominee (the final result of the ranked-choice abacus is still pending) wasn’t fated at all. Other, more prominent young politicians could have sensed Eric Adams’s and Cuomo’s weaknesses and run: the thirty-five-year-old Ocasio-Cortez; the thirty-seven-year-old centrist congressman from the Bronx, Ritchie Torres (a friend of development and a loud defender of the Israeli cause); or the practically ancient forty-four-year-old pragmatist Jessica Tisch, who, as the former sanitation commissioner and now as police commissioner, has had a major hand in arguably the two most successful city initiatives since universal pre-K: trash containerization and the continuing abatement of violent crime. Had any of them decided to run, their candidacies might have suggested a quite different kind of Democratic future. But part of political talent is recognizing an opportunity, and Mamdani saw three things clearly: that the cost of living had surpassed public safety as the city’s cardinal issue, that fortune favors the relentless, and that generational change, however belated, was eventually bound to come. ♦
