Zohran Mamdani: From Rapper to New York City Mayoral Frontrunner

When he announced his run for mayor back in October 2024, Zohran Mamdani was a State lawmaker unknown to most New York City residents. On June 24, the 33-year-old marked his stunning political ascension when he declared victory in the Democratic primary from a Queens rooftop bar after former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded.

While the race’s ultimate outcome has yet to be confirmed by a ranked-choice count scheduled for July 1, the one-time rapper is seeking to become the city’s first Muslim and Indian American Mayor, and its youngest Mayor in generations.

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, to Indian parents and became an American citizen in 2018, shortly after graduating college. He lived with his family briefly in Cape Town, South Africa, before moving to New York City when he was 7.

Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake, and Mississippi Masala. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an anthropology professor at Columbia University. Mamdani married Rama Duwaji, a Syrian American artist, earlier this year. The couple, who met on the dating app Hinge, live in the Astoria section of Queens.

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Mamdani attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he cofounded the public school’s first cricket team, according to his legislative bio. He graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he earned a degree in Africana studies and cofounded his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. After college, he worked as a foreclosure prevention counsellor in Queens helping residents avoid eviction, the job he says inspired him to run for public office.

Mamdani also had a notable side hustle in the local hip-hop scene, rapping under the moniker Young Cardamom and later Mr. Cardamom. During his first run for State lawmaker, Mamdani gave a nod to his brief foray into music, describing himself as a “B-list rapper”. “Nani”, a song he made in 2019 to honour his grandmother, even found new life—and a vastly wider audience—as his mayoral campaign gained momentum. His critics, meanwhile, have seized on lyrics from “Salaam”, his 2017 ode to being Muslim in New York, to argue his views are too extreme for New Yorkers.

Grassroots politics

Mamdani cut his teeth in local politics working on campaigns for Democratic candidates in Queens and Brooklyn. He was first elected to the New York Assembly in 2020, knocking off a longtime Democratic incumbent for a Queens district covering Astoria and surrounding neighbourhoods. He has handily won re-election twice.

The democratic socialist’s most notable legislative accomplishment has been pushing through a pilot programme that made a handful of city buses free for a year. He has also proposed legislation banning nonprofits from “engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity”.

Mamdani’s opponents, particularly Cuomo, have dismissed him as woefully unprepared for managing the complexities of running America’s largest city. But Mamdani has framed his relative inexperience as a potential asset, saying in a mayoral debate he is “proud” he does not have Cuomo’s “experience of corruption, scandal and disgrace”.

Mamdani has used buzzy campaign videos—many with winking references to Bollywood and his Indian heritage—to help make inroads with voters outside his slice of Queens. On New Year’s Day, he took part in the annual polar plunge into the chilly waters off Coney Island in a full dress suit to break down his plan to “freeze” rents.

As the race was entering the final stretch, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan, documenting the roughly 13-mile (21 km) trip by posting photos and videos of his interactions along the way. In TikTok videos, he has even appealed to voters of colour by speaking in Spanish, Bangla, Hindi/Urdu, and other languages.

A more optimistic vision

Mamdani has offered a more optimistic vision, in contrast to candidates like Cuomo, who have largely focussed on crime and law-and-order issues. His campaign has been packed with big promises aimed at lowering the cost of living for everyday New Yorkers, from free child care, free buses, a rent freeze for people living in rent-regulated apartments, and new affordable housing—much of it by raising taxes on the wealthy.

The big promises have, unsurprisingly, endeared him to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Mamdani secured endorsements from two of the country’s foremost progressives: US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Mamdani’s outspoken support for Palestinian causes was a point of tension in the Mayor’s race as Cuomo and other opponents sought to label his defiant criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Mamdani has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a “genocide” and said the country should exist as “a state with equal rights”, rather than a “Jewish state”. That message has resonated among pro-Palestinian residents, including New York City’s roughly 8,00,000 adherents of Islam—the largest Muslim community in the country.

During an interview on CBS’ The Late Show on the eve of the election, host Stephen Colbert asked Mamdani if he believed the state of Israel had the right to exist. He responded: “Yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist—and a responsibility also to uphold international law.”

Mamdani’s refusal to condemn calls to “globalise the intifada” on a podcast—a common chant at pro-Palestinian protests—drew recriminations from Jewish groups and fellow candidates in the days leading up to the election.

In his victory speech on June 24, he pledged to work closely with those who do not share his views on controversial issues. “While I will not abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality, for humanity, for all those who walk this earth, you have my word to reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements,” Mamdani said.

Risks and rewards

The surprise outcome in the Democratic mayoral primary also generated excitement from a very different group of people: national Republicans.

Soon after it became clear that Mamdani was likely to prevail, US Vice President J.D. Vance, a Republican, sent congratulations on social media to the “new leader of the Democratic Party”. The Republican’s congressional campaign arm called him an “antisemitic socialist radical” and promised to tie him to every vulnerable Democrat in next year’s mid-term elections.

And on June 25, Republican President Donald Trump—a native New Yorker—piled on, writing on social media: “It’s finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line. Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor.”

The reactions underscore both the risks and the rewards for the Democratic Party—still trying to find its footing five months into Trump’s term—in having an unabashed left-wing nominee running in the country’s biggest city this fall.

Mamdani’s campaign, which drew plaudits for its cheery tone and clever viral videos, could help energise young voters, a demographic that Democrats are desperate to reach in 2026 and beyond. His rise from a virtual unknown was fuelled by a relentless focus on affordability, an issue Democrats struggled to address during last year’s presidential race.

“Cost of living is the issue of our time,” Neera Tanden, the chief executive of Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, wrote on X in response to Mamdani’s win. “It’s the through line animating all politics. Smart political leaders respond to it.”

His history-making candidacy could also drive engagement among Asian and especially Muslim voters, some of whom soured on the party after the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “These elections aren’t about left, right, or centre, they’re about whether you’re a change to the status quo. People don’t want more of the same, they want someone who plays a different game,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.

But Mamdani’s criticism of Israel and his democratic socialism are also likely to show up frequently in Republican attack ads. Much of the Democratic establishment had lined up behind Cuomo, including former President Bill Clinton, partly out of unease over Mamdani’s platform. Mamdani has repeatedly said he is not anti-Semitic.

“I think he’s an easy target for Republicans who want to use scare tactics to talk about the Muslim mayor from New York City who’s uber-left,” said Patrick Egan, a political science professor at New York University. But Egan noted, Mamdani has also proven to be an adept politician. “When people get exposed to this guy, they tend to like him,” he said.

No apology

Basil Smikle, a political analyst and professor at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, said heavy-handed attacks on Mamdani could backfire by energising “a lot of the Democratic voters to want to push more against Trump”. “I don’t think it hurts Democrats in the long run,” he said. “I actually think it helps them.”

For his part, Mamdani seemed ready to embrace his role as a party leader, telling supporters in his victory speech that he would govern the city “as a model for the Democratic Party—a party where we fight for working people with no apology”. He vowed to use his mayoral power to “reject Donald Trump’s fascism”.

Democratic voters say they want a new generation of leaders and a party that concentrates on economic issues, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier in June. “The Democratic Party is trying to figure itself out,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.

While Mamdani enters the general election as the favourite in a city dominated by Democrats, the race is more unsettled than usual. Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, is running as an independent after his popularity plummeted following his indictment on corruption charges and the subsequent decision by Trump’s Justice Department to drop the case. Cuomo also retains the ability to run as an independent, though he has not yet decided whether to do so.

The Republican candidate is Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels. Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor, is running as an independent, as well.

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The primary had become a two-man race by Election Day between Mamdani and Cuomo, echoing other Democratic nominating contests in which the party’s establishment and liberal wings have wrestled for power. But it was also a generational clash between Mamdani and Cuomo, the 67-year-old scion of a New York political family.

That said, Cuomo carried plenty of personal baggage, four years after he resigned the governorship amid allegations of sexual harassment, which he has denied. “Some people were voting for Mamdani to express their displeasure for Cuomo,” Greer said.

Mamdani’s unlikely rise bore some of the same hallmarks as those of two other democratic socialists, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Sanders, an independent, emerged as a leading Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, while Ocasio-Cortez pulled off an upset in 2018 by defeating a longtime incumbent Democrat.