Walking with Zohran Mamdani can feel like an extreme sport. During a mid-September stroll on Seventh Avenue, along the six blocks from his Manhattan campaign office to a favorite breakfast spot, he caused a noticeable amount of commotion, even in a city full of it. There was a selfie-seeking fan, then a campaign volunteer. A chance meeting with an old friend. Even a first-time encounter with the South African comedian Trevor Noah. He greeted Mamdani, who holds dual American and Ugandan citizenship, like the regional cousin he is. (After they embraced, Noah told the candidate he wanted him on his podcast.)

Amid the hubbub, I asked Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, why he decided to run. By the time he could answer in full, we were waiting to be seated at Johny’s Luncheonette, a testament to the obstacle course of interruptions that is currently his life. Mamdani favors the hole-in-the-wall Chelsea diner for its comfort food and low profile. Here, he can focus — over his usual order of four scrambled eggs piled on toast with a single pancake on the side.

“There was never going to be a poll that said, ‘The time is now for Zohran Mamdani and a campaign on affordability,’ ” he said, flashing his trademark full-face grin. “I would often be asked this question: ‘Are you running to win or running to run?’ I would say that you can be doing both. You can be serious and determined and ruthless in your dedication to winning the race. And then, also, you can develop it.”

The result has been historic. Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist backbench state assemblyman who before this year had almost no name recognition in New York City, is now the general-election favorite against a former governor and member of one of the most famous families in state politics. He has already shamed the incumbent mayor, who was running a distant fourth, into an early exit from the race.

In the June primary, Mamdani didn’t just beat the odds; he blew the door off the hinges, reshaping the electorate and taking advantage of ranked-choice voting to claim a commanding 12.8-point victory that reverberated through the country’s politics.

But what happened after the primary may turn out to be even more important. In the time since then, as this article was being reported, Mamdani has engaged in a second primary of sorts, meeting quietly with city power brokers to consolidate support and box out his main rivals, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams. Some of it was reported. Much of it wasn’t.

For months now, Mamdani has been meeting privately with former leaders in city government, business executives, heads of New York arts and cultural institutions and skeptical local Democrats. The talks are pitched as get-to-know-you discussions with the new political star. But they also serve a dual purpose, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. In them, Mamdani has sought to present himself as a new type of leftist, a listener who understands his shortcomings and is willing to grow. He has acknowledged his lack of managerial experience and asked for advice. He has sought common ground. He has heard out his critics, including wealthy New Yorkers in business and finance and some pro-Israel activists who are turned off by his lifelong advocacy for Palestinians or offended by his reluctance to immediately condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” the use of which he later discouraged.

‘Being right in and of itself is meaningless. We have to win. And we have to deliver.’

Zohran Mamdani

There have been two critical liaisons: Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama administration aide and director of the Democratic National Committee, and Sally Susman, a longtime corporate executive and member of the finance committees for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Gaspard met Mamdani years ago. Susman met him this summer, one of several C-suiters who privately reached out to him after his much-talked-about July meeting with the Partnership for New York City, a consortium of 350 members representing banks, law firms and corporations.

Susman, who describes herself as a moderate pro-business Democrat, said she was impressed by how Mamdani handled himself amid the hostile crowd. Weeks later, she met with him for an hour, at her request, and said she left that interaction “taken by” his curiosity. She recalled that he asked questions like “What do you know about game-changing leadership?” and “How should I form an administration?” and made clear that there would be no “litmus tests” for staff roles in his cabinet.

Susman has since become a valuable ally, convening two intimate gatherings at Mamdani’s campaign office — this time at his request — for business leaders and tech investors eager to meet him. “There’s something about him that makes people want to help him,” she told me.

Robert Wolf, another Partnership for New York City member and a major fund-raiser for the Democratic Party, told me that he has begun texting with the candidate, becoming an informal pulse check for the city’s finance and business community. Wolf also met with Mamdani for an hour at his campaign office this month, an in-person follow-up to an hourlong Zoom meeting in August.

“Zohran, to me, is more of a progressive capitalist,” Wolf told me, adding that he was convinced by their private interactions that Mamdani understood the importance of the private sector thriving in his New York. “He’s someone that wants to figure out how to use the government in an appropriate way on things that help equality and help the underserved.”

The conversations have allowed Mamdani to reframe his previous positions, tweaking the us-versus-them language of his democratic-socialist values to be a tad less punitive. He has made it clear that he wants to support renters, not punish landlords. He wants to support public education, not take a hammer to specialized schools with elite admissions. He supports Palestinian rights; he’s not anti-Zionist. He made key concessions when it comes to policing. Importantly, he made clear that he was open to compromise when it came to his proposed millionaires’ tax. Call it Mamdani 2.0.

It was an attempt to introduce a more mature left, focused on fulfilling its policy agenda rather than winning an ideological argument. Mamdani wants to be a good mayor — a great mayor. And he wants to be judged on the criteria that he has set for himself: no-cost universal child care, free buses for all and a four-year rent freeze for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, the core planks of the affordability agenda that powered his primary campaign to victory. And he knows he can’t do it by himself — or with progressives alone. “Being right in and of itself is meaningless,” Mamdani told me when I asked about his approach to these meetings. “We have to win. And we have to deliver.”

The subtle shifts, even the rhetorical ones, have helped fortify his lead, to the point where his victory is all but assured. This was not a foregone conclusion on primary night, when many of the city’s upper echelon — the same people who have warmed to Mamdani in recent months — had assumed that Cuomo or Adams would mount a bigger electoral challenge.

But Mamdani’s lead has withstood constant attacks by his opponents, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on negative advertisements and a full-on freak-out by the political establishment, including some Democrats who fear that he could be a useful wedge for Republicans, adversely affecting their swing-state candidates in next year’s midterm congressional elections. He has been called an antisemite for his pro-Palestinian advocacy and given the nickname “Mamdani the Commie” by President Trump, who has said he will withhold federal funds from New York if Mamdani is elected and baselessly suggested that Mamdani, a naturalized citizen, was in the country illegally.

At one point, I asked how much he followed the discussion regarding the takeaways from his primary win and its impact on the national Democratic Party. “I try not to spend too much time being engaged with the discourse of it all,” he said, though it is hard to believe him.

This is a “poster” we’re talking about, the millennial code word for someone who simply must share his thoughts on social media. The son of a celebrated filmmaker and an acclaimed academic who sought to start an indie rap career behind his mother’s Disney movie. Politics is his second act — an only-in-New York fairy tale that has captured the world’s attention, given his roots in India and Uganda and the immigrant-rich nature of the city’s electorate. And he has rewritten the rules for campaigning in the process, lapping opponents with an innovative digital strategy that has turned him into a bona fide internet celebrity in a signature suit and tie (he rotates three: one striped, one dotted, one red).

Mamdani stands out further against a backdrop of Democratic Party failure. The party enters the second Trump era devoid of galvanizing leaders and meaningful policy ideas, largely rudderless and certainly visionless. In June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that more than 60 percent of Democrats want fresh leadership, amid a wave of soul-searching and intraparty warfare that has been unleashed since the embarrassment of the 2024 election loss. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator and Democratic Socialist who ran for president in 2016 and 2020, told me that Mamdani “is running a brilliant grass-roots campaign.” You would think, he continued, that Democrats “would be jumping up and down with joy, saying: ‘Thank god! This is the future of the Democratic Party!’ Unfortunately, there are others who look at it differently.”

Over five months of following the campaign, including two interviews with the candidate and conversations with about 40 other people close to the race and its reverberations among national Democrats, I didn’t hear anyone express surprise that “Z” has almost pulled it off — such was the total belief in his charisma.

Mamdani excels at the game of interpersonal politics that Sanders so famously eschews. He loves a rope line as much as Joe Biden. Loves a selfie like Elizabeth Warren. And he stays until the end of a Black church service, noting that the rhythms of the Haitian drums are reminiscent of the Congolese music he grew up with. At New York’s West Indian American Day Parade this summer, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader — who has still withheld his endorsement of the nominee — made a pointed distinction between “jerk-chicken Brooklyn” and “Starbucks Brooklyn.” Mamdani moves easily through both.

Yet he increasingly feels the pressure of expectation, the natural consequence of the prospect of a weighty title: becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York City and one of the few elected officials in the country who is not just liberal or progressive but unapologetically leftist. Mamdani told me he understands that his success or failure will not be seen as only his own. He is right.

When I asked if there was a part of the city that had surprised him during the campaign, an experience or a neighborhood that inspired his connection to the city all over again, Mamdani took a beat to reflect. He can be prone to long pauses that can feel like a bit more of an awkward silence than a moment of building suspense.

More than 20 seconds later, he had an answer: during Ramadan, in March.

Mamdani told me he tried to “attend as many new prayers and gatherings as possible.” Not just going to one celebration of Chand Raat, or “night of the moon,” the traditional South Asian festival, but as many as he could — “getting in that moment,” he said, “a snapshot of Muslim life across New York City.”

‘None of this works without him speaking up on Gaza.’

Patrick Gaspard, director of the Democratic National Committee

His answer reminded me of just how different a candidate he is. Mamdani has placed his faith, his Indian-Ugandan roots and his pro-Palestinian activism at the center of the campaign, trusting the public to understand his vision and values even if the traditional gatekeepers did not. “I’ve met so many grandparents who’ve come up to me and said, ‘My grandkid told me if I don’t vote for you, then you can’t come home,’ ” he said, proud of the generational revolution he has inspired. “This redefinition of leadership,” he continued, “and the place of youth within our politics — it’s not just a question about me; it’s a question about New Yorkers themselves.”

At that moment, I better understood the outsize reactions to Mamdani’s rise — among the people used to having power and money and among some in Democratic Party leadership. It’s not just what Mamdani believes in. Or that he was increasingly likely to occupy City Hall. It’s that he may have the temperament — and the public support — to sustain his political coalition past January’s inauguration and effect meaningful change to policy and legislation. Stardom is not what’s inherently threatening. Combining it with competence is.

To be clear: Nobody asked Zohran Mamdani to run for mayor. Not the Democratic Socialists of America. Not the city’s progressive donor base. Not the Working Families Party, the institutional home of the city’s left wing. Mamdani hatched this plan himself early last year, at Qahwah House in Astoria, a Yemeni coffee shop that served as his local hide-out and unofficial scheming headquarters just blocks from his apartment.

The 2021 mayoral election, won by Eric Adams, had humbled New York’s left, as had the backlash to progressive causes like “defund the police” and the elimination of cash bail. But Mamdani saw an opportunity to form a coalition built from his own life and convictions: Muslims, South Asians, renters, young people and progressives.

Over cups of creamy spiced mofawar, Mamdani made the case to allies, interest-group leaders and, not least, the D.S.A. “One of the beautiful things about going through a D.S.A. endorsement process is that it’s a microcosm of the larger race,” Mamdani said, explaining that most “political processes are coronations or predetermined.” Not this one.

The socialist group takes pride in its grueling endorsement process and bottom-up structure, meant to ensure that elected officials are committed to core values or face the wrath of rank-and-file members. D.S.A. leadership did not expect to support any candidate in the 2025 mayoral race, favoring an electoral strategy that focused on lower-level races.

“I had to rely on my own conviction and the conviction of those who mattered around me, no matter what the response was,” he continued. “And having gone through all of that before entering the larger race meant that we were steeled.”

Mamdani’s relationships with the D.S.A. and other allies go back a decade or more. He joined the D.S.A. after he was inspired by Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, which led to a longstanding connection with New York City’s housing organizers and activists, informing his policy focus of making the city more affordable for its residents. He was already a member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, where he connected with a growing network of Muslim and South Asian voters.

But there was one issue that was most formative to Mamdani’s political identity, the one he knew he would never compromise on: Israel and Palestinians. Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy dates to his high school days at Bronx Science, when he furiously traded Facebook posts with a pro-Israel classmate, and continued at Bowdoin College, where he founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

He told me these early experiences taught him the difference between seeing politics as an intellectual debate and a consequence of people’s lived experience. It also fueled his impatience with a worldview that he describes as “PEP” — or “progressive except Palestine” — a coinage that has been used on the left for years.

“That exception is one that I believe we should not only take issue with because of what it means for Palestinians and Palestinian human rights,” he said. “But also, whenever you are at peace with the making of an exception, you make it easier to make another exception — wherever, whenever.”

This defiant certitude was reflected in Mamdani’s campaign from the outset. He was convinced that the city’s diverse coalition of renters could unite behind an affordability agenda, even though polling encouraged a focus on public safety. He understood that many of the city’s immigrant communities were both underserved by the government and electoral resources that hadn’t been tapped. And over the last year, Americans’ views on Israel have drawn much closer to Mamdani’s than to Senator Chuck Schumer’s — perhaps the most establishment figure of all in New York — turning what was once assumed to be a political liability into a pillar of his truth-telling, anti-establishment credentials. In 2023, just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Mamdani was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct as he protested outside Schumer’s home — telling reporters at the time that Israel’s retaliatory campaign could risk “imminent genocide.”

“None of this works without him speaking up on Gaza,” said Gaspard, the former Obama administration aide, who likened it to Barack Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war before the 2008 presidential election. Gaspard has been a key figure connecting Mamdani with many of the city’s power players in the months since the primary, including Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York.

“For average people on the ground, having conversations in their barbecues or on their stoops, there’s a way that the issue of Gaza is a gateway to whether or not you can invite this political figure into your living room for a conversation about affordability or education or health care,” Gaspard said, citing new polling that shows growing disapproval of Israel’s actions among Democrats. “You don’t get to first base on the other things if you haven’t come out of the batter’s box on Gaza.”

Gaspard first met Mamdani in South Africa in 2016, at the premiere for “Queen of Katwe,” a Disney movie set in Uganda and directed by Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair. Gaspard said the young man, just 24 at the time, showed flashes of the charisma that would later serve his entrance into politics. He compared the curiosity and demeanor of young Mamdani to that of — yes — Barack Obama. But Mamdani’s is a story that, like that of many other first-generation immigrants, doesn’t fit neatly into American political conventions like the two-party system or our Black-white racial framework. A composite of multiple worlds: Indian, Ugandan, American, Muslim, New Yorker.

Mamdani told me that his Muslim faith, in particular, “has been a formative part of how I see the world — and how the world sees me,” particularly after the crackdown on mosques and the uptick in Islamophobia that came in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mamdani said he remembers once telling his father, a professor of international affairs and anthropology at Columbia, that he was exhausted with “always feeling like a minority.” But his father’s reply changed his perspective. “I was an Indian in Uganda. I was a Muslim in India. And I was all of these things in New York City,” Mahmood Mamdani explained to his son. And “to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place amidst the promise of it.”

“It was this moment which took me from a view of the world where I had this chip on my shoulder,” Mamdani told me, “to one which made me understand instead both what the world took — and what it offered.”

This is how Mamdani talks: in parables. He leans close and locks eyes. He collapses the room with held eye contact. He sprinkles in references to World Cup soccer and the English Premier League, as he knows I’m a fan of Tottenham Hotspur (Mamdani supports its rival club, Arsenal). He is one of the few politicians I can remember who sat for a 30-minute interview without a press person at hand and didn’t even bother recording themselves. Sanders was another.

No wonder both thrive in the male-dominated, bro-heavy digital podcast space. Mamdani has appeared on Pablo Torre’s show (sports), “Throwing Fits” (fashion), Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” (finance) — maybe the holy digital-media trinity for the millennial New York man. He has done “The View,” the “I’ve Had It” podcast and Hasan Piker’s popular Twitch stream, traversing the gamut of liberal-leftist media. On TikTok, he did a viral interview with Crackhead Barney — the New York performance artist and comedian who bombarded him with questions like “Would you claim African American status like Elon Musk?” The candidate answered each query earnestly, even the ridiculous ones, seemingly familiar with the bit.

Mamdani is ‘the first nominee in memory that has made a concerted effort to reach out to people who were against him in the primary.’

Mark Levine, Manhattan borough president

Ritchie Torres, the Bronx Democrat and frequent critic of progressives, said Mamdani is “a once-in-a-generation communicator” who has mastered what he called the “three threes”: A candidate in today’s day and age needs to be able to explain ideas in a 30-second vertical social media video, a three-minute television hit and a three-hour long-form podcast.

Considering their ideological differences, which are particularly stark when it comes to Israel in particular (Torres is a staunch defender), I asked why the congressman had been so complimentary of Mamdani publicly and privately.

His answer spoke to the effectiveness of the Mamdani charm offensive and the eternal fact that all elected officials trade on the currency of attention.

“Simple,” Torres said. “He reached out to me.”

Morris Katz, Mamdani’s senior adviser, told me that among the most important meetings of the campaign was its very first one.

Mamdani was presented with polling that represented the conventional wisdom of the time — that public safety was the top concern among voters — and he instinctively dismissed it. This was going to be a campaign about affordability, he said.

“People have given up on the city government’s ability to deliver on affordability and lowering costs, and what we’re seeing is that lack of faith,” Katz remembers Mamdani saying at the time.

Mamdani told me that his vision drew from his own experiences. The D.S.A. came after he volunteered for Ali Najmi, a civil rights lawyer and member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York who was running for City Council. Najmi connected Mamdani with the group, and Mamdani later worked for Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian American Lutheran pastor who was running for City Council in 2017.

Both campaigns created a model for Mamdani that he would implement citywide eight years later. They focused on housing, particularly the crisis for renters that had been accelerated by gentrification. Perhaps most significant was that El-Yateem did not seek to moderate his position on Israel and the Palestinians, saying he “100 percent” supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and campaigning with Linda Sarsour, the D.S.A. member and Palestinian American activist who has been accused of antisemitism.

But the thing about the campaigns that Mamdani worked on is that they all lost. What the comparison reveals is that his current electoral success springs not only from his values but also from his unique traits as a candidate.

Mamdani calls himself a Democrat, something many on the left (Sanders included) do not. In his hands, the cry of “gentrification” has become a focus on affordability, a more welcoming umbrella that tracks with his growing willingness to acknowledge a private-sector role in building more housing units. There is no Linda Sarsour on his campaign trail.

This willingness to temper his previous positions and allegiances, which Mamdani has proved since the primary, is what sets him apart from some leftist contemporaries, said Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president and the Democratic nominee for city comptroller. Levine contrasted Mamdani’s modus operandi with the governing style of Democratic mayors past, including Bill de Blasio, a progressive who racked up enemies through petty slights and misjudged moments, even as he shared many of Mamdani’s populist goals.

After Mamdani won the Democratic primary, his campaign compiled a list of the city’s top business leaders and called each of them one by one, underscoring his desire to build coalitions and establish an open line of communication. “I want to emphasize how unprecedented this is — the first nominee in memory that has made a concerted effort to reach out to people who were against him in the primary,” Levine told me.

Among New York’s progressives, no one has forgotten the cautionary tale of how de Blasio effectively lost the New York Police Department in his first term. The fraught relationship plummeted to a nadir after the killing of two officers in late 2014, when the police turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital and then at the funerals.

During the George Floyd protests of June 2020, Mamdani posted on Twitter: “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.”

But since the primary, Mamdani has repeatedly distanced himself from those statements, saying he would apologize to the Police Department if elected. He has gone even further in private, recently meeting with more than two dozen rank-and-file police officers in a closed-door session focused on officer retention and public safety. There, Mamdani explicitly apologized for the June 2020 tweet, a spokeswoman said. He has also spoken approvingly of Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, who is well liked by city institutions and the rank and file. In our interview, Mamdani stressed that his praise for Tisch was “sincere” and that he was considering keeping her on as commissioner.

I asked Mamdani how sincere could he be, considering that Tisch has been clear that she is opposed to criminal-justice reforms supported by most progressives.

“There is — and has to be — room for disagreement among those at the core of your City Hall,” Mamdani said in response. He said one of his staffing goals as mayor would be to ensure that the people around him “are not characterized by the quickness with which they can say yes to any one of your ideas.” This is also a theme that Mamdani has stressed in private, telling Susman he believed in a “team of rivals.”

Over the summer, Mamdani faced his first crisis related to public safety — when he was in Uganda, celebrating his wedding to Rama Duwaji, a 27-year-old illustrator, with family and friends.

On July 28, a gunman strode into a Park Avenue office tower and opened fire, killing four people, including two security guards, one of whom was an off-duty police officer. Soon after the news became public, Cuomo and Adams began to point the finger at Mamdani — because he was out of the country, but also to highlight his previous stances on public safety.

What happened next surprised everyone. That off-duty officer, Didarul Islam, was a Bangladeshi American Muslim and had actually been at the same mosque as Mamdani during the candidate’s tour of Eid services. And once Mamdani rushed back to the United States, after he was awakened by Katz’s 4 a.m. call, he went directly from Kennedy Airport to the family’s home in the Bronx, where he visited with the mourners for an hour. Later that day, he delivered a stirring rebuke to Cuomo and Adams, whom he accused of trying to score “cynical political points” rather than supporting the family. Standing with the co-founder of the Bangladeshi American Police Association, Mamdani made clear that he would not be intimidated by the soft-on-crime attacks that have doomed so many other progressives. If the tragic event was a grim sort of mayoral pop quiz, the candidate seemed to pass it.

Which is why his repeated promise to order the Police Department to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he were to come to New York City while Mamdani was mayor, has confounded several of Mamdani’s allies — and fed his enemies.

Mamdani has said he would be honoring the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court charging Netanyahu with crimes against humanity in Gaza. But the United States does not recognize the authority of the I.C.C., and legal experts regard such an arrest as most likely illegal. More to the point, the act could prompt something like a constitutional crisis with the Police Department. Trump has already promised that he would intercede.

Arresting Netanyahu is also not a primary goal of Mamdani’s leftist base. When I asked Gustavo Gordillo, who leads the New York City chapter of the D.S.A., about what he sees as Mamdani’s nonnegotiable campaign promises, he named the affordability agenda. I asked Murad Awawdeh, who leads the New York Immigrant Coalition and knows Mamdani from the Muslim Democratic Club, if arresting Netanyahu was important to him as a Palestinian. He said no.

Some of Mamdani’s Jewish supporters warn that an arrest attempt would permanently fracture the bonds he has painstakingly sought to form. Brad Lander, the city comptroller and former mayoral candidate, who was a key validator and an ally in liberal Jewish communities, shrugged off the candidate’s promise to arrest Netanyahu, refusing to comment on the record. What’s important, Lander said, is a different promise Mamdani made on the night of the primary, when he said: “‘I am going to reach out and listen and try to understand.’ And he has more than lived up to that commitment.” Lander recalled sitting with Mamdani as a group of Orthodox Jews described being called antisemitic slurs on the street. “He was just a very human, empathetic listener,” he said, “and in that case just communicated clearly that he thought that was awful.”

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic stalwart who endorsed Mamdani in June and is considered a more mainstream Jewish voice than Lander, said he believes that the pledge to arrest Netanyahu is “simply unrealistic.” He continued: “The City of New York has no jurisdiction to do such a thing,” though, he added, “I appreciate the sensibility behind” the candidate’s statements.

Still, Mamdani is resolute, even though it’s a campaign promise that is likely to be tested. Netanyahu, like Trump, is prone to provocation and could very well arrive in New York next year simply to call the new mayor’s bluff.

On our walk back from the luncheonette, Mamdani stood by his promise — again. “It is important that New York City is in compliance with international criminal law,” he said firmly.

I asked how this stance fit alongside the other things he had said to me: that his only goal was to deliver on buses and rent, that he knew his administration would be judged at a higher standard, that it bothered him when politicians did not focus on policies that effect material change.

But by now we were approaching his campaign office, stuck in a crammed Manhattan service elevator with a very large security guard. With my time running out, the candidate made his response quick, signaling that this interview was now over.

“Is this a campaign promise that’s compatible with governing?” I asked.

“We’re going to show how it is,” he said.

For better or worse, a remarkable number of the Democratic Party’s most influential figures currently live in New York. Schumer and Jeffries, both of Brooklyn, lead their respective caucuses in Congress. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of the Bronx, is the party’s most famous progressive and a possible presidential candidate in 2028. Mamdani has already positioned himself among this echelon, pushing his way into a struggle that is not just ideological but generational.

Most New York Democrats have now endorsed Mamdani, including the Albany elected officials most critical to his agenda, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Speaker Carl Heastie, as well as Nadler, who is retiring from the House, and Yvette Clarke, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Even some of the most towering national Democrats, including Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris, have made congratulatory calls to Mamdani — and they wanted everyone to know it, making clear they recognized the enthusiasm he inspired even if they disagreed with some of his stances and policies.

The establishment’s embrace has only made the actions — or rather inaction — of Jeffries, Schumer and other Mamdani holdouts, including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, stand out even more. Jeffries and Schumer have been vague, refraining from endorsing Mamdani after the primary but also not exactly refusing to. Representative Tom Suozzi, a swing-district Democrat who represents parts of eastern Queens and Long Island, has made clear that Mamdani will never receive his endorsement, saying that “Democratic Socialists should create their own party, because I don’t want that in my party.”

This tension was on full display at a fascinating moment I witnessed in August at the West Indian American Day Parade breakfast in Brooklyn, an annual fund-raising event that is a go-to stop on the summer schedule for all New York Democrats. There, I approached Jeffries and asked for an interview about Mamdani and the broader mayor’s race. He agreed and pointed me toward his political staff, who later affirmed that he would be interested in talking.

At the breakfast, Jeffries was in the middle of speaking, hammering on the economic chaos sown by Trump’s tariffs and the Medicaid cuts in the recent spending package passed by the Republican-led Congress — standard Democratic fare. But when Mamdani arrived, the immediate jolt of excitement was such that even Jeffries could not ignore it. Cameras flashed, people rushed for selfies and some of the reporters huddled around Jeffries fled for Mamdani instead.

It was a visual representation of how quickly Jeffries, the Brooklyn congressman handpicked by Nancy Pelosi to succeed her as House speaker and lead Democrats into the future, already seems as if he has missed his moment.

A month later, Jeffries still didn’t seem to have a clear idea about how to handle Mamdani. “I just haven’t weighed in one way or the other,” Jeffries said about the mayor’s race during an appearance on Don Lemon’s YouTube show in September. Schumer has said less, signaling through advisers that while he likes Mamdani personally, he is worried about the effect an endorsement could have on Senate candidates in the midterms (there’s also that 2023 arrest while protesting outside Schumer’s home). Gillibrand had to call Mamdani and apologize after she falsely claimed he had made “references to global jihad.”

I never did get to talk with Jeffries about Mamdani. Several phone calls to his team soon turned to voice mail messages that went unanswered. In October I told Jeffries’s staff that I would have to write that he avoided talking about Mamdani for months. There was still no response. Schumer and Gillibrand each declined an interview request.

Endorsements rarely have a tangible impact in an election. But they are a leading indicator of a candidate’s standing within his party, and the fact that so many national Democratic figures have refrained from embracing Mamdani speaks to a moment of real reckoning for the party. Mamdani has galvanized the exact voters who turned away from Democrats in 2024: working-class people of color, young people and first-generation Americans. But whether his playbook is adopted more broadly is one of political will. “Millionaire taxes poll extremely well,” Heastie said while endorsing Mamdani this year. Criticizing Israel polls just as well.

Which is why what’s most interesting about the Jeffries-Mamdani relationship (or the lack of one) is what’s beneath it. Mamdani won Jeffries’s congressional district by around 12 points, about the same margin as his overall victory. And he did so without the blessing of traditional Democratic gatekeepers, bringing new voters to the process of expanding the electorate: the exact same political strategy Sanders sought to accomplish in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

According to a recent data analysis of the primary by Gothamist, 7 percent of New York City primary voters were first-time registrants in 2025, up five points from the Democratic election four years earlier, amounting to 76,860 first-time voters out of 1,071,730 total, with a majority in the age group of 18 to 34 and in districts won by Mamdani. What all this means is that the city has changed, and its Democratic politics are changing with it, in ways that could portend shifting alliances across the country.

Both Jeffries and Schumer are also facing the prospect of left-wing primary challengers in the coming election cycles. Ocasio-Cortez could run for president in 2028 or mount a primary challenge to Schumer, with Mamdani as a likely ally in either run. Jeffries has a more immediate concern, considering that he’s up for re-election next year and Brooklyn’s Mamdani fever is especially hot in his district. Chi Ossé, a City Council member from Brooklyn and early Mamdani endorser, is one possible challenger. Another is Jabari Brisport, a state assemblyman who is a member of the D.S.A. and a close friend of Mamdani’s.

For the city’s old guard, Jeffries’s antipathy for the D.S.A. is not without merit. For years, the organization represented the worst of the so-called Bernie Bro — overwhelmingly white, male and in possession of a degree from an elite school that they would be happy to tell you about. They posted about politics and rarely participated in the actual messy work of it. Even some of the group’s own members, like State Senator Julia Salazar, the first D.S.A. member elevated to Albany in 2018, said that the organization has grown from its past and that Mamdani has shown how, with the right candidate, the organizational model can be deployed beyond its original base.

But that expansion is not without growing pains — and electoral risk. During this mayoral campaign, Mamdani has faced criticism from the left, for maybe the first time in his electoral career. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have disrupted his events, critical of his position that Israel has a right to exist. And he is increasingly cast as a sellout by some on leftist social media.

Gordillo, the co-chairman of the city chapter, told me that he expects a Mamdani mayoralty to showcase the organization’s maturation, just as the primary did. So I ran through a list of hypotheticals of Mamdani in office: What if he keeps Jessica Tisch as police commissioner? What if he doesn’t back D.S.A. primary challengers against Democratic incumbents?

When I first spoke to Gordillo, he said he could see a world in which none of those Mamdani reversals would be a clear red line with the D.S.A. left. But weeks later, as the prospect of Tisch staying on seemed to grow more real, Gordillo said that would be more of a problem — reflecting the potential tension between Mamdani the mayor and the uncompromising base that helped get him elected.

Another thing Gordillo made clear: He did not want Mamdani to abandon his call for a millionaires’ tax.

“Supporting a millionaires’ tax and supporting taxing the rich is something we all want and expect,” Gordillo said. “To back off on taxing the rich would be to change the kind of project we’re pursuing.” I pointed out that Mamdani has already shown signs of being flexible on the tax, telling me that “it’s more important what we fund than how.”

“If there was magically federal funding for all the things that he wanted, that would be a conversation,” Gordillo responded. “That’s just so out of the realm of what anyone expects.”

Unlike Gordillo, Mamdani calls himself a Democrat. But that doesn’t mean he agrees with Jeffries’s position that Democratic primary challengers are distractions to the job at hand: a united opposition to Trump.

‘We have brought so many to politics for the first time in a long time, and there’s a responsibility that you don’t waste that hope.’

Zohran Mamdani

“I see the next several years as an opportunity to fulfill the agenda,” Mamdani said when I asked if he would consider endorsing a primary challenger to a Democratic incumbent. “And I think the possibility of delivering on these political commitments in a material way is something that cannot only transform our political reality but also people’s relationship to politics.” It wasn’t really an answer.

I tried again. “Is the moment ever coming where you’ll put the D.S.A. at arm’s length and say, ‘I’m a Democrat now’?”

At that moment, our server arrived, giving Mamdani an opportunity to take another one of his signature pauses. He then asked me to clarify the question, and I asked whether he would ever back a Democratic incumbent over a D.S.A. challenger.

“The conditions within which I accept and make endorsements are on the basis of the agenda that I’m running on,” he said deliberately, and then brought the point home. “I have an openness to working with anyone to achieve that agenda.”

Mamdani’s embrace of mass politics could reinvigorate the Democrats’ left wing. Since Biden’s 2020 victory, that side of the party had gone quiet, such was the establishment capture among Democrats over the last several years. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, once critical voices, were key validators for the Biden White House on domestic economic policy and climate change. Ocasio-Cortez — far and away the Democrats’ most important millennial voice — defended Biden’s re-election bid after his disastrous debate performance. Ocasio-Cortez also did not respond to several requests for comment. (Like Jeffries, her staff indicated several times that she would be open to speaking — and several messages then went unanswered.)

Adriano Espaillat, the Dominican American congressman who originally backed Cuomo before endorsing Mamdani, told me that the generational and political divide Mamdani has highlighted in Black and Jewish communities also applies to Latinos. He said that Cuomo was a “familiar name” in his district but that Mamdani has something more valuable — fresh ideas.

The disruption has also caused some concern. Some Democrats fear that the rising tide of immigration, including South Asians, Latinos and first-generation Americans, could displace their own political power within the party. And scores of local elected officials refused to talk about Mamdani and the impact of the changing alliances, including Representative Gregory Meeks, a Queens Democrat and head of the Congressional Black Caucus’s political-action committee, who has also declined to endorse Mamdani; and Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker and a mayoral candidate in the primary.

With their silence, they reveal the left’s ultimate advantage in this period of upheaval. Political triangulation runs dangerously close to inauthenticity, but it has been the model for most mainstream Democratic candidates since Obama made the Clintonian posture his own in 2008. But separated from its unique candidate, and the myth that Trump was an aberration, Obama-ism has been exposed, leaving the Democratic establishment in a frantic search for a Plan B.

It’s a place that is all too reminiscent of where Republicans were about a decade earlier, after Obama’s re-election revealed a chasm between the interests of party leaders and its working-class base. The 2016 election was approaching. We all know what happened next.

Mamdani and I are both fans of European soccer, the kind who will set an alarm at 7 a.m. to watch a team halfway across the world inevitably disappoint us week after week. It’s why I was vaguely aware of him outside of politics before the mayoral run — I knew he liked Arsenal (and he tweeted about it). But it’s also why I knew that this September afternoon in Brooklyn meant so much to him, as he sat in a Fort Greene bar called FancyFree watching Arsenal with Spike Lee, maybe the only famous New Yorker who loves the team as much as he does.

Over 30 minutes of game time, the two made fast friends as they writhed in agony, banged the wall in frustration and helped lead the bar in Arsenal chants. (Lee was seemingly peeved that I had been invited by Mamdani’s team to join them and made clear to me that he was there only to watch soccer, not to talk politics to a reporter). When the half ended, patrons serenaded Mamdani on his way out, chanting the candidate’s name to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” — the universal soccer sign of approval.

Mamdani has made this kind of celebrity encounter a feature of his campaign. He has appeared at concerts by Wu-Tang Clan at Madison Square Garden and Lucy Dacus. Emily Ratajkowski, the model, actress and social media celebrity, posted an Instagram video on the day of the primary of herself standing with Mamdani and wearing a “Hot Girls For Zohran” T-shirt. The video got more than 300,000 likes.

This blend of culture and politics was always part of the plan drawn up over coffee at Qahwah House, when Mamdani stressed that any successful candidacy would require a social media movement. He was Mira Nair’s son after all, raised with an understanding of how storytelling can shape political reality. During his time in the State Assembly, he studied people like Ocasio-Cortez and Ossé, the City Council member who is popular on TikTok, reaching out to learn about their social media strategy in an effort to create his own. It required a pivot, a step away from the condensation of X to platforms like YouTube and Instagram reels, where the tone and format were a better match for political organizing.

Mamdani’s digital operation, led by the creative director Andrew Epstein, has been a prized part of the campaign from its early stages, when the return on investment was immediately clear: In one of the first videos, Mamdani explained the rising food costs for halal trucks in New York City (“halalflation”), and it racked up more than 360,000 views on YouTube alone, driving home the organic audience the message was finding online.

Mamdani says his political imagination is born out of necessity. To deliver on his promised agenda and maintain the first-of-its-kind coalition that has brought him to the doorstep of power, Mamdani will test the limits of his political capital, even with the help of more than four million Instagram followers and an extensive volunteer operation. “Politics is not something that they must simply have,” Mamdani said. “It’s something that they must do.”

“We have brought so many to politics for the first time in a long time, and there’s a responsibility that you don’t waste that hope,” he continued. “You don’t get a second chance in convincing someone that they have a place in the politics of our city and our country.”

After Lee and Mamdani posed for photos, I joined the candidate on his drive uptown, as he hurried to make it to the African American Day Parade in Harlem, the annual event along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The last time I interviewed him, earlier in September, we parted hours before the news broke that the conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed in Utah, reigniting discussions about America’s deep polarization and the violence it begets.

This time, Kirk’s death was where I wanted to start, considering that Mamdani lives a similarly public life. Mamdani said that the killing was “horrific” and that he learned about it on social media, where he, like many others, was served a graphic video of the disturbing moment.

The shooting, he told me, was “illustrative of the fabric of this country coming apart at the seams and this being a moment where we are really staring into the abyss.” Mamdani added that he worries more for “the people around me” than himself — and that his team had made some changes to his security protocols in response to the shooting.

“Really?” I asked. “You don’t see that and worry about yourself?”

I wondered because the prospect of violence was something Mamdani’s allies had worried openly about to me, invoking the concerns that many Black voters had about Obama’s historic run in 2008.

“I try not to,” he said. But just the previous week, a Texas man was charged with making death threats against Mamdani and his family, saying he wanted to “see an I.D.F. bullet go through” Mamdani’s skull.

“I think for a long time, it’s felt as if the safest place, especially as a Muslim in public life, was to be in the shadows,” Mamdani said. “And yet we see that that safety is all too tenuous. And to allow ourselves to be intimidated is to, in some ways, allow for the continuation of that very kind of politics.”

The conversation turned to the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, specifically ABC’s decision to take the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air in response to complaints by Trump and conservative activists. Mamdani denounced the decision, and the next day he would pull out of a scheduled town hall with a local ABC affiliate, helping to kick off a wave of boycotts that helped get Kimmel reinstated.

“The story of Trump’s authoritarianism cannot be told without the cowardice of so many institutions across this country,” Mamdani told me. He then offered some advice for those institutional leaders, for the Democratic Party, for the public.

“If you want to defeat this attack on our city and our values and our people,” he said, “the most effective way to do so is to fight back. It’s not to acquiesce.”