Zohran Mamdani: How a Queens Assemblyman Became New York's Democratic Socialist Mayor

Zohran Mamdani is the 112th mayor of New York City, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and, until the end of 2025, a state assembly member from Astoria with three signed bills to his name. He was born in Kampala, Uganda on October 18, 1991, naturalized as an American citizen in 2018, and took the oath of office just after midnight on January 1, 2026, at 34. He got there by winning the November 4, 2025 general election with more than 1.1 million votes, which made him the first candidate for mayor of New York to top a million since 1969.

The route from a Queens assembly seat to City Hall took five years, and part of it ran through a fifteen-day fast on the sidewalk outside the building he works in now.

Kampala, Cape Town, Queens

Mamdani is the only child of the filmmaker Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan-raised scholar of colonialism who has taught at Columbia University since the late 1990s. His father gave him the middle name Kwame, for Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president. The family left Kampala for Cape Town when he was five and for New York when he was seven, when his father took the Columbia post.

He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 2010 and from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 2014, with a degree in Africana studies. At Bowdoin he wrote for the campus paper and co-founded the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. He also made music, as Young Cardamom with the Ugandan artist HAB and later as Mr. Cardamom, and he assembled and produced the soundtrack for his mother’s 2016 film Queen of Katwe.

The job he held before running was duller and closer to the ground. He worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor at Chhaya Community Development Corporation in Queens, sitting across a desk from lower-income immigrant homeowners who had fallen behind on mortgage payments and wanted to keep their houses.

The Astoria upset, 2020

Aravella Simotas had held the 36th Assembly district for five two-year terms, across Astoria and part of Long Island City. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, challenged her in the Democratic primary on June 23, 2020 and won. He was sworn in that January and joined the small bloc of democratic socialists then sitting in Albany.

Fifteen days without food

New York’s taxi medallions were sold to drivers as retirement plans. Prices climbed past a million dollars, then collapsed to roughly a hundred thousand, leaving thousands of owner-drivers holding loans against an asset worth a fraction of the debt. By 2021 at least nine drivers had died by suicide.

In October 2021 the New York Taxi Workers Alliance set up outside City Hall and began a hunger strike for debt relief. Mamdani joined it. Democracy Now interviewed him on day eight, when he said it mattered for legislators to “bring to light what it is that people are suffering from out of view of those in the political elite,” and listed what a week without food had done to him: “an inability to sleep, unrelenting hunger, moments of blurred vision, stress, headaches.”

The fast ended on November 3, 2021, its fifteenth day, when the city, the alliance and the medallion lender Marblegate Asset Management reached terms. By the union’s own account, outstanding principal on medallion mortgages was restructured to no more than $170,000 per loan, with monthly payments capped at no more than $1,122. Bhairavi Desai, the alliance’s executive director, put it this way the day the deal landed: “After a long and painful journey, we made it home to victory.” Mamdani’s own summary of the method was less lyrical:

It’s a horrible feeling to go on a fast for 15 days, to deprive yourself of food for more than two weeks is to strip your body of one of the most basic elements of dignity.

Three bills, one bus pilot

Four and a half years in the Assembly produced three chapter laws. A 2021 bill set up a three-year pilot letting seven state agencies run public hearings differently: the public could question agency staff directly, roundtables were allowed, and hearings could be scheduled for evenings and weekends. A 2022 bill cut the number of petitioners needed to force a public hearing at certain agencies from 500 to 125. A 2023 bill amended the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Law so the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, which sits within 200 feet of an elementary school, could serve drinks in specified parts of the building.

His largest Albany result never became a chapter law with his name on it. Mamdani sponsored the fare-free bus pilot the legislature funded at $15 million: one route in each of the five boroughs went fare-free through 2023 and into 2024, and ridership on those lines rose by as much as 38 percent. Albany declined to renew it, and fares came back in September 2024. He then ran for mayor on doing it citywide.

The campaign

He announced on October 23, 2024, on a platform anyone could repeat from memory: freeze the rent on stabilized apartments, make the buses free, universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage by 2030, paid for by taxes on corporations and top earners. Almost every plank points at the same thing, which is what a month in New York costs.

By the account of the campaign’s field director, Tascha Van Auken, more than 100,000 volunteers knocked some three million doors. On June 24, 2025 Mamdani took 43.8 percent of the first-round primary vote to Andrew Cuomo’s 36.1, and 56.4 percent to Cuomo’s 43.6 once the ranked-choice rounds finished. Cuomo conceded that night, then ran in November on an independent line and lost again. The certified general-election count gave Mamdani 1,114,184 votes to Cuomo’s 906,614 and Republican Curtis Sliwa’s 153,749, out of a turnout above 2.2 million, the highest a New York mayoral race had drawn since 1969.

The Debs line

At his election night party in Brooklyn he opened with a borrowed sentence:

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

Debs said it on September 18, 1918, in the statement he made to the court after his conviction for an antiwar speech, minutes before the judge gave him ten years. He would run for president from the Atlanta penitentiary two years later and pull 913,693 votes, a number the American left has repeated ever since and one this site keeps in its own Debs biography. One hundred and seven years after the sentencing, a man reading the line out loud had just won a city with 1.1 million.

Eight months in

He was sworn in twice on January 1, 2026: once just after midnight by Attorney General Letitia James, in the decommissioned City Hall subway station under Broadway, on a Quran that had belonged to his grandfather; and again at one in the afternoon at City Hall by Bernie Sanders. The address left no ambiguity about the label. “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he told the crowd, and then listed the childcare, the rent freeze, and the fast and free buses.

Two of those have moved. On January 8 he and Governor Kathy Hochul announced free childcare for two-year-olds in the city, with the state paying $73 million in the first year for 2,000 seats and $425 million in the second for 12,000. On June 25 the Rent Guidelines Board, five of whose nine members he had appointed, voted 7 to 1 to freeze rents on one-year and two-year leases across nearly a million rent-stabilized apartments. The board has frozen one-year leases before, three times under Bill de Blasio; it had never frozen a two-year lease since its creation in 1969. Christina Smyth, the landlord-side member, resigned hours before the vote and accused the board of steering toward a predetermined outcome. In April the administration named La Marqueta in East Harlem as the first site for a city-owned grocery store, which as of this writing is a plan and a parcel rather than a shop.

The buses still cost money. The MTA is a state authority, Hochul and MTA chair Janno Lieber have not signed on to eliminating the fare, and the joint plan the three of them rolled out in Downtown Brooklyn on July 8, 2026 buys speed rather than free rides. Mamdani said so himself that day: “I’ve been very clear with New Yorkers that my commitment is to make buses fast and free. Today, we stand together on how we deliver the fast.”

The scoreboard is unusually legible for a first year in the largest city in the country: the rent freeze happened, the childcare seats exist, the grocery store does not yet, and the buses still charge. In October 2021 he sat on a sidewalk for fifteen days trying to get a mayor’s attention. Whoever is out on that sidewalk this fall is trying to get his.