MAN ON THE STREET

ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS POISED TO BECOME NEW YORK'S NEXT MAYOR. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

- BY MARK CHIUSANO

IT'S NOT EASY TO MOVE AROUND NEW YORK CITY AS Zohran Mamdani anymore.

Like when the 33-year-old Democratic nominee for mayor leaves a union meeting to walk to his Manhattan campaign office, as he did one Monday morning in July. Within a block, a phone-wielding crowd forms and follows. "Oh my God, hello," someone blurts. People clap. Cars honk. Traffic down Fifth Avenue comes to a standstill as a plumber's van stops and a guy hops out to shake Mamdani's hand. There is some heckling. "Antisemitic!" someone shouts. But mostly it is star treatment, in multiple languages and from all generations.

All this is new: the adulation, the notoriety, the xenophobic death threats that have prompted an entourage of men with spaghetti earpieces. Before 2025, basically no one knew who Mamdani was. Over the course of eight months, the democratic socialist and backbench state assemblyman went from local long shot to likely mayor of America's biggest city. Suddenly he is a main character in national politics-the ubiquitous subject of cable news segments, a lightning rod on the left and right. Senior Democrats have weighed in for and against him. President Donald Trump has pioneered a dark new birtherism by questioning his immigration status and floating his possible arrest. (Mamdani, who would be the city's first South Asian and Muslim mayor, was born in Uganda and became a U.S. citizen in 2018.) To many progressives, his style of politics-principled, pocketbook-focused, and online-was an electrifying answer for a moribund party.