READY OR NOT

Zohran Mamdani wants to transform New York City. Will the city let him?

- BY ERIC LACH

Zohran Mamdani is thirty-three years old—young enough that, despite not regularly working out, he has run the New York City Marathon twice in the past three years. In 2022, his second year in the New York State Assembly, he ran wearing a T-shirt that read “Eric Adams Raised My Rent!” and finished in six hours and four minutes. Few spectators paid him any mind. Last year, less than a month after launching his mayoral campaign, he trotted through the city at a 12:54-per-mile pace, wearing the same T-shirt, with “Zohran Will Freeze It!” added to the back. Again, he caught barely anyone’s attention. This year, Marathon Sunday falls two days before the New York mayoral election. Polls have Mamdani fifteen points ahead of his nearest competitor, the former governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s aides say that he’s not running the course this time, though it wouldn’t be out of character. His instinct is to be on the move, out in the city, where people can see him.

To walk through New York with Mamdani this spring and summer has been to watch a star being born, a process that is as spectacular and gaseous on earth as it is in Heaven. On the morning of the primary, in June, Mamdani crisscrossed the city as fast as his new security detail could drive him. Giddy commuters on a subway platform in Jackson Heights missed their trains just to show him their “I Voted” stickers. Aboveground, he dispatched an aide to a nearby Indian restaurant, to pick him up paan, a betel-leaf wrap, which he chewed daintily, careful not to spill any of the filling on the dark suit and tie that he has adopted as his political uniform. In Inwood, even a pair of volunteers for Cuomo sheepishly stopped him for selfies.