Zohran Mamdani was still asleep early in the morning after June’s Democratic primary when the phone calls started flooding in. There were the usual congratulations, certainly, but also signs of something more worrying.
A young democratic socialist, Mamdani had just toppled former Gov Andrew Cuomo, upending New York’s power structure in an upset so stunning and so swift that even he had not fully seen it coming.
Now, titans of the city establishment were clogging up the phones of the candidate and his small team, looking for belated introductions. Most did not sound happy.
“It’s a great day in New York,” Morris Katz, Mamdani’s 26-year-old political adviser, told the real estate magnate William C. Rudin in one of the conversations.
The businessman paused. That’s certainly not how I see it, he replied.
Many past primary winners had instantly been anointed as mayor-elect in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. But it took just hours to become clear that the power brokers and civic gatekeepers accustomed to running New York saw Mamdani’s ascent as something closer to hostile takeover — one that many would do anything to block.
A top aide for Cuomo was already phoning unions and Democratic officials urging them to withhold support. Old real estate friends soon began pitching President Trump on a possible White House intervention.
And Bill Ackman, the billionaire financier, fired off a warning on X, saying “hundreds of millions of dollars” would be available to clobber the young interloper in November and “save our City.”
Mamdani’s political rise may be remembered for what came first: the buoyant, flamboyant, rule-breaking primary run that united a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies around the city’s growing affordability crisis and the birth of a megawatt talent.
But his election on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York owes as much to the equally improbable backroom campaign that followed. In Midtown C-suites and intimate phone calls, a left-wing populist who had built his brand on taxing the rich wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.
The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mamdani was polling at 1 percent, tied, as he likes to say, with the candidate known as “someone else.” Few New Yorkers recognized his name, and his own political team put the odds of winning as low as 3 percent.
Now, at age 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century, amid a pile of historic firsts: the first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian and arguably the most influential democratic socialist in the country.
This account of how he did it draws from interviews with Mamdani’s top advisers and allies, as well as his critics and rivals. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to share previously unreported exchanges.
The final chapter was a high-wire act that at times appeared at risk of collapsing, as internal forces clashed over how much ground to give around the war in Gaza and policing, and Mr. Cuomo deftly sought to undermine him.
Behind the scenes, it featured a key apology to Gov. Kathy Hochul at a Midtown hotel; renewed contact with Mr. Rudin, after a horrific shooting touched the core of his business; a courtship of Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor, that bought Mr. Mamdani time, if not an alliance; and more than a bit of luck.
The meetings with establishment leaders turned out to be crucial. “I don’t think anything he said was nearly as important as the fact that he knew they were important enough to spend time on,” said Kathryn S Wylde, the head of a leading business group.
Deep misgivings still remain among the city’s elite that could affect his tenure. But, Wylde added, “It quieted the hysteria — just enough.”
Ignoring the referees
As Mamdani began sketching out a potential campaign a year earlier over cups of chai at a Yemeni cafe in Astoria, his challenge was far more basic: getting noticed at all.
A backbench assemblyman who had immigrated to New York City at age 7, he had almost no citywide profile. Even fellow socialists thought his views on policing and Israel would put a hard ceiling on his support. And the field running against the scandal-plagued mayor, Eric Adams, was growing by the day.
Mamdani later told an ally that he had confided in his fiancée, Rama Duwaji, that he didn’t really think he could win. The goal was to build a template for the kind of muscular leftist campaign that might one day crack the Democratic establishment’s hold.
How that long-shot candidacy caught fire has been amply dissected by political observers here and in Washington. Mamdani foregrounded the city’s affordability crisis when rivals focused elsewhere, lapped them with viral social media videos and benefited from Democrats’ hunger for generational change.
But as seen by Mamdani and his cadre of advisers, not one of whom had ever run a citywide campaign, none of it was going to work if they waited for traditional gatekeepers in media, civic institutions and elected office.
Forget the New York conjured by political strategists, one future adviser, Zara Rahim, advised him over coffee last summer. Make a campaign about the actual New York City.
Jonathan Rosen, a Democrat who helped mastermind Bill de Blasio’s 2013 mayoral victory and was advising a rival campaign, compared the strategy to those deployed by two other New Yorkers, Trump and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who “went direct, ignored all the institutions and referees and built a relationship with New Yorkers.”
“Mediums matter,” he said, “and who understands them first matters.”
The campaign decided to forgo selling branded swag, a revenue stream for many candidates, and adopted what it called “the Mets bobblehead strategy of merch.” It produced special items in limited quantities — a blue beanie, paper fans, bandannas — that could only be earned, incentivizing supporters to give not money but time.
It hosted a series of events — a citywide scavenger hunt, a soccer tournament at Coney Island — that opponents laughed off as gimmicks but attracted thousands of supporters. Many later became part of an unmatched army of volunteers.
