How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor

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, Mr. Mamdani had just toppled former Gov. Andrew M. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Mamdani’s ascent as something closer to hostile takeover — one that many would do anything to block.

A top aide for Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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.

The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Ms. Wylde added, “It quieted the hysteria — just enough.”

Ignoring the referees

As Mr. 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.

Mr. 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. Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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.

“My experience of politics in the last nine years has been a lot of people being mean to each other on Twitter,” said Katie Riley, who oversaw campaign operations. “We wanted people to get out in the world together in real spaces.”

The contrast to Mr. Cuomo could not have been more jarring. The scion of a political dynasty, he had been run out of the governor’s office in a sexual harassment scandal. But when he entered the race in March, he acted as if he were still in charge.

He rarely appeared in public, threatened unions and fellow Democrats into creating an air of inevitability around him and relied on $25 million in big-money donations to a super PAC supporting him.

By the time Mr. Mamdani and aides gathered at a Holiday Inn on June 24, primary night, they thought their approach was working. But they were so certain they would not win outright that first night that they had not prepared a victory speech.

Yet not long after 10 p.m., Mr. Mamdani found himself letting congratulatory calls go through to voice mail, as he and a shocked clutch of aides raced to write one.

Speaking later on a rooftop near the hotel, he declared victory over the “billionaires and their big spending” and “elected officials who care more about self-enrichment than the public trust.” He proudly disclosed he had already spoken to Mr. Cuomo “about the need to bring this city together.”

The sentiment, it turns out, would last about eight hours.

‘Everything is about to change’

Patrick Gaspard, who began advising Mr. Mamdani late in the primary, had spent a lifetime accumulating contacts as a top Democratic organizer. The morning after the primary, so many of them were trying to reach him that he set his phone to do not disturb.

Many messages sounded outright panicked, including from prominent Black New Yorkers who knew little about the candidate. Why do you trust him? He seems shady. He is misleading our children, Mr. Gaspard recalled the messages saying.

Inside the campaign, Mr. Mamdani and his advisers were exhausted. They had planned to plot their next steps while on retreat for a week. They had mere hours to face a new reality.

Look, everything is about to change, Ms. Rahim and Mr. Katz told Mr. Mamdani as they idled in a car outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza after a post-primary television appearance.

He would need to quadruple his staff, delicately reassign longtime aides to less high-profile roles and begin more seriously planning for the possibility that he could be mayor, they said. If he needed any reminder, a police detail now accompanied his every movement.

“The exhausted disbelief was palpable,” Mr. Gaspard said. “You could tell they were having a tough time absorbing they were going to have to do it all over again.”

Some post-primary consolidation came quickly, especially as labor unions and local party leaders embraced his candidacy. But others, including some of the nation’s top Democrats, held back, worried that associating with Mr. Mamdani’s far-left views could tank the party’s chances in next year’s midterms.

“I was not aggressive enough,” he told supporters. “I promise you, I will not make that mistake again.”

Mr. Mamdani also took a post-primary break, traveling to Uganda in late July for a long-planned marriage celebration at a lavish family compound. The campaign was jittery, hiring an outside lawyer as a precaution in case immigration agents hassled him when he returned. Mr. Mamdani went through the airport in a mask and a hat to avoid a public spectacle.

But when a crisis did arrive, it was not the one they expected. Seven thousand miles away, back in New York, a gunman walked into a Midtown office tower and carried out a deadly mass shooting, including killing an off-duty police officer. The attacker had targeted a building that happened to house the offices of Mr. Rudin, the real estate executive, and killed one of his employees.

Aides woke Mr. Mamdani in the night to put out a statement, and he rushed to get on the first flight back to New York City. But by the time he landed two days later, Mr. Cuomo was on television screens across the city all but blaming his opponent, who once called for defunding the police, for the massacre.

It was a disaster. And the unfavorable optics might have changed the course of the whole campaign, but for one twist of fate: The officer killed turned out to be Bangladeshi and, like Mr. Mamdani, a Muslim. The family invited the candidate to join them at home, and he arrived directly from Kennedy Airport.

Afterward, he called a news conference that would be his longest since Primary Day. He chastised Mr. Cuomo for politicizing the moment but also used the platform to stress that his views on policing had evolved from the days when he called the institution “racist” and called for funding cuts.

For the first time in weeks, aides breathed a sigh of relief.

“To me, it was the first moment I felt like he was the mayor of New York,” Mr. Katz said.

A C-Suite Charm Offensive

Mr. Mamdani knew he still had a problem.

No mayor has led New York without at least some tacit support from the business elite since the fiscal crisis of 1970s. Running aggressively against them had worked in the primary, but as summer slid toward fall, his advisers worried that leaders of the group could push both Mr. Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, out of the race.

A one-on-one matchup with Mr. Cuomo in a more conservative general electorate could be disastrous.

So Mr. Mamdani got busy. He asked Ms. Wylde, the head of the Partnership for New York City, for a list of every major business leader he should call and began reaching out one by one, including to Larry Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, and Hamilton E. James, the former head of Blackstone.

The only child of two prominent cultural figures, Mr. Mamdani was at ease with rich and powerful people. He explained why his core positions would not change, but he also solicited advice and signaled more flexibility that his reputation suggested.

At a packed meeting with the Association for a Better New York, a civic-minded group of business leaders, in a Midtown office suite in early August, he began by offering condolences to Mr. Rudin, whose father co-founded the organization, over the recent shooting. (The men had also spoken by phone in the days after it happened.) Then, he surprised attendees by proposing a regulatory change developers had longed for to speed up construction.

Some who were expecting a strident ideologue came away impressed. For others, his willingness to engage was at least a welcome contrast to Mr. de Blasio, a progressive who had made a point of conspicuously thumbing his nose at Manhattan elite, and to Mr. Cuomo’s bruising style.

“He asked more questions and listened more intently to me and others in the room than I’ve ever seen any politician — surely in this city — do,” said Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Mamdani also took on a new tone with fellow Democrats.

When Chi Ossé, a progressive City Council member he was close to, began talking in October about potentially running in the primary next year against Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the moderate House Democratic leader, Mr. Mamdani and his team tried to shut it down.

Mr. Mamdani himself had been a thorn in side of Ms. Hochul for years, once saying her actions were why “people don’t trust politicians.” But he knew she had the trust of business leaders and would hold the keys to moving his ambitious plans through Albany.

When the pair sat down in late June after the city’s Pride parade, he apologized for his earlier criticism of her and asked to work together, particularly around a shared interest in child care.

Ms. Hochul was pleasantly surprised. She initially told Mr. Mamdani that she would consider endorsing him, but she wanted him to agree to keep Jessica Tisch, a well-respected technocrat appointed by Mr. Adams, as police commissioner. Mr. Mamdani initially balked, explaining he had never even met her.

The question cut to the heart of one of the campaign’s leading conflicts: How far could Mr. Mamdani go courting the powerful without compromising his beliefs or, crucially, alienating his progressive base?

Mr. Katz described the general election campaign as a “story of a constant friction between trying to unite a party and not lose a populist edge.”

While he saw a political advantage in locking in Ms. Tisch quickly, Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mr. Mamdani’s longtime chief of staff, wanted to take a slower approach. The appointment would be one of the most significant he would make, and Mr. Mamdani needed to know he would have a partner to implement a series of progressive reforms he had pitched for the Police Department.

Ultimately, both Ms. Hochul and Mr. Mamdani came around. The governor endorsed him in September after he agreed to involve her when he selected a commissioner. Weeks later, after private conversations with Ms. Tisch, Mr. Mamdani said publicly he intended to keep her.

A similar argument played out around how forcefully Mr. Mamdani should distance himself from “globalize the intifada,” a phrase that many Jewish New Yorkers heard as a call to violence.

Mr. Mamdani, a pro-Palestinian activist, told business leaders in July that he would “discourage” the use of the phrase, but the decision not to condemn it outright eventually helped fan a full-fledged backlash from prominent Jewish institutions, which aided Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Mamdani’s harsh criticism of Israel played a role in another, less successful courtship of Mr. Bloomberg.

The candidate knew the former mayor had the unique stature and fortune to influence the general election. Mr. Mamdani needed to sideline him.

The campaign struggled to get a meeting, but when the two finally met at Bloomberg’s Midtown headquarters this fall, they spent a convivial hour debating management styles and looking at old photos of Mr. Bloomberg’s time in City Hall. Mr. Bloomberg had privately told associates over the summer he was done with Mr. Cuomo after spending more than $8 million to back him in the primary. Mr. Mamdani left the meeting thinking he had done enough to keep it that way.

He was wrong. Angry over Mr. Mamdani’s comments on Israel and worried about his inexperience, Mr. Bloomberg ultimately sent $5 million to two super PACs attacking Mr. Mamdani and re-upped his endorsement of Mr. Cuomo — but did so only six days before Election Day.

By then it was too late.

Mr. Mamdani had fortified his unlikely coalition for the general election, its strength on display a week before Election Day, when he nearly filled Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

Onstage were Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, giants of the left, but also, awkward as it seemed to all involved, Ms. Hochul and the top legislative leaders in Albany. They were all uniting around the Democratic nominee.