Zohran Mamdani Defies the Odds in Round 1. The Bigger Challenge Begins Now

Post Mamdani's win in the primary, racism and Islamophobia against him has only gotten worse, writes Meghnad Bose.

In the days following Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s historic victory to clinch the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, the 33-year-old Muslim immigrant with Indian and Ugandan roots has faced a cascading barrage of Islamophobia and racism.

(Photo: X/Zohran Mamdani/Altered by The Quint) 

In the days following Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s historic victory to clinch the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, the 33-year-old Muslim immigrant with Indian and Ugandan roots has faced a cascading barrage of Islamophobia and racism.

A Republican member of the House of Representatives has referred to him as “Zohran 'little muhammad' Mamdani” and called to strip him of his US citizenship. (Mamdani is a naturalised US citizen, and was born in Kampala, Uganda).

Another Republican House Representative has shared an image depicting the Statue of Liberty in a burqa after Mamdani’s win—and a prominent Donald Trump advisor said there will be another 9/11 in the city, and Mamdani will be to blame for it.

A Democratic Senator from New York has raised concerns over what she calls Mamdani’s “references to global jihad”.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More such vitriol is on its way, and millions of dollars more will be spent in attempting to block Mamdani from becoming the next mayor of New York City.

Zohran Mamdani has won Round 1 of this electoral battle. Round 2 is loading now.

A Fight on the Cards

The election is far from over. Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary, even in the deep blue Democratic city of New York, does not guarantee his mayoral prospects. The general election is on 4 November, and there is a fight on the cards.

Andrew Cuomo, the mayoral candidate and former governor of New York who conceded defeat to Mamdani on Tuesday, 24 June, may still run, with a ticket from the Fight and Deliver Party that he had founded to ensure that he could compete in the general election even if he lost the Democratic primary.

Cuomo’s prospects have received a further blow with some Democratic party bigwigs warming up to Mamdani.

For instance, former president Bill Clinton, who endorsed Cuomo for the primary, congratulated Mamdani after his win and wished him “much success in November”. Not all Democrats are feeling that way though, even after Mamdani’s victory in the primary. One Democratic House Representative from the state referred to Mamdani as “the absolute wrong choice for New York” and “too extreme to lead New York City”. Another said his concerns about Mamdani remain. The continuing criticism of Mamdani within some quarters of the Democratic party will be music to Cuomo’s ears.

Incumbent Democratic mayor Eric Adams has also announced his candidacy as an independent, though the corruption cases he is embroiled in could hurt his chances significantly.

And then there is Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee who would otherwise be considered a long shot, but is now suddenly in greater contention given that the race could potentially become a four-way one. Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of volunteers who engage in crime-fighting patrols wearing signature red berets, had run as the Republican nominee for mayor in 2021 as well, and secured 26.3 percent of the votes. 

That vote share could prove to be crucial.

The general election, unlike the primary, does not have ranked-choice voting and follows a first-past-the-post system. In a crowded field with possibly four key candidates, even Sliwa could pose a stiff challenge, especially if he can build on his 2021 vote share.

Additionally, billionaire hedge fund manager and Trump backer Bill Ackman has said he is exploring funding a new candidate to enter the race. Ackman has suggested that the way to do that might be to ask New Yorkers to write in the name of this candidate in the general election even if they couldn’t be on the ballot.

Elections in the US allow voters to write in the name of any individual they please instead of selecting one listed on the ballot. Those votes, too, are tallied. As a result, there are often hundreds of individuals listed in the results who have got a solitary vote, possibly from themselves. But in 2021, in the city of Buffalo in New York state, after losing the Democratic primary, Byron Brown won the mayoral general election by asking voters to write in his name instead. Brown’s campaign had distributed thousands of rubber stamps bearing his name to make it convenient for voters to write him in.

But why are billionaires like Bill Ackman announcing their plans to spend, and fundraise, millions of dollars to ensure that Mamdani doesn’t win?

The Bogey of ‘Socialism’, in One of America’s Most Unaffordable Cities

Mamdani’s campaign was laser focused on talking about making New York more affordable. At the heart of his campaign, and pretty much every speech he made on the campaign trail, were promises to freeze the rent in New York’s rent-stabilised apartments (of which there are around a million), make public buses fast and free, deliver free universal childcare, and build city-run groceries to make everyday essentials cheaper.

Mamdani’s platform was touted as “radical” by individuals in the billionaire class such as Ackman, but they were embraced by a large section of Democratic voters in the primary. After all, the pangs of how expensive living in New York is, are felt by a wide cross-section of city residents, akin to what those in Mumbai often complain about.

Just as millions of those working in Mumbai live outside the city and commute to work, in large part because of how expensive the city is, there has been an exodus in recent years from New York City too. Mamdani’s campaign addressed these concerns head on.

His campaign’s direct and on-point messaging, addressing key pain points of city residents, struck a chord in a way that trumped the fear-mongering, anti-Mamdani attacks by Cuomo and his backers.

If there was one factor Cuomo had a major lead in, it was name recognition. The former governor was recognised by voters across the city, but Mamdani’s campaign ate into that advantage with a significantly stronger ground game. In the days leading up to the election, Mamdani said his campaign had around 36,000 volunteers who had knocked on more than a million doors. With 93 percent of the votes counted, Mamdani secured 432,305 votes—a dozen voters for every volunteer on his team. 

Additionally, it might not have helped that Cuomo’s campaign, and ads backing him, revolved more around attacking Mamdani, lending him greater name recognition.

The Fear Mongering, and an Indian Angle

On 22 June, just two days before Mamdani clinched the Democratic party’s nomination for mayor of New York City, a group named ‘Indian Americans for Cuomo’ had flown a banner across the city skies in a last-ditch effort to attack Mamdani, and to back the Democratic old-timer instead. The banner read, ‘Save NYC from global intifada, reject Mamdani’. The group also said that Mamdani’s actions alienate Hindu New Yorkers. 

In an ironic parallel, this group of Cuomo backers attempted to conflate Mamdani’s criticism of the Narendra Modi government’s divisive politics as anti-Hindu, in a way that pro-Israel groups try to conflate criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Jewish or antisemitic.

In a 2023 event in New York City titled ‘Howdy Democracy?!’ (a play on the 2019 ‘Howdy Modi’ event attended by Trump and Modi in Texas), Mamdani had introduced and read out a letter by Umar Khalid, a pro-democracy activist in India who has languished behind bars now for close to five years without credible evidence against him, in what is all too apparently a politically motivated case.

Mamdani read out Khalid’s words, “Hate can never triumph over love forever.” Mamdani added that Khalid’s words resonated with him deeply. At another protest in New York, Mamdani had said, “We fight for an India that is in line with the one that we knew, an India that is pluralistic, an India where everyone can belong, regardless of their religion.”

In a recent mayoral forum during this election cycle, Mamdani had also criticised Modi over the 2002 Gujarat riots, and said that he would not attend a joint press conference with Modi in New York if such an opportunity was presented to him.

The group claiming that Mamdani alienated Hindu New Yorkers with such statements critical of Modi attempted to speak for Hindu New Yorkers as a collective. However, there were those who spoke up against such efforts. Sunita Viswanath, co-founder of the group Hindus for Human Rights, wrote, “As a Hindu and a New Yorker, I stand with Zohran Mamdani. Through his compassionate politics, inclusive values, and his smart policies, he unites us all. He is neither anti-Hindu nor anti-Semitic.” 

Viswanath added, “To those who are attacking and threatening him, including some of my fellow Hindus, it is YOU who are Islamophobic. You are the divisive forces spreading hate. You don't represent me.”

Yet, the banner flown across the city by ‘Indian Americans for Cuomo’ represented only a tiny sliver of the millions of dollars poured into attack ads targeting Mamdani and attempting to portray him as a “radical” who would be “dangerous” for New York City. That targeting was, to put it simply, the crux of Cuomo’s campaign.

That, in addition to a significant amount of the ‘reporting’, analysis and opinion pieces in large sections of the mainstream US media, attempted to frame Mamdani as an antisemitic elected official who would not have the best interests of Jewish New Yorkers in mind were he to become mayor.

In the first mayoral primary debate, Mamdani was the only candidate on stage who was asked whether he “believed in a Jewish state of Israel.” He responded that Israel has a right to exist, as a state with equal rights (for all people). To minds that willingly and deliberately conflate criticism of the Israeli state’s policies of discrimination, and indeed their ongoing war crimes in Gaza, as antisemitism, that response by Mamdani was portrayed as supposed evidence of his antisemitism.

Andrew Cuomo and former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson were not asked by the debate moderators about their seemingly unqualified support for Israel.

Closer to the election, Mamdani was asked in an interview whether the phrase “globalise the intifada” made him uncomfortable. Part of his response included that the word ‘intifada’ means struggle in Arabic—Mamdani said, ”The very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw ghetto uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means ‘struggle’. As a Muslim man who grew up post 9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, distorted, used to justify any kind of meaning.” He concluded by saying that he would focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe.

The attempts to target Mamdani failed on several fronts. 

Firstly, large numbers of Jewish New Yorkers campaigned for Mamdani. There were groups such as ‘Jews For Zohran’ and Jewish Voice for Peace Action that canvassed extensively for him.

Secondly, the candidate who ranked third in the mayoral primary, city comptroller Brad Lander, cross-endorsed Mamdani wholeheartedly. Lander, who is Jewish, asked his supporters to rank Mamdani second, and Mamdani asked those choosing him first to rank Lander second. In the face of a campaign of hate and fear stoked against Mamdani on racist and Islamophobic lines, Lander and Mamdani’s solidarity with one another, a Jewish candidate and a Muslim one, worked in Mamdani’s favour. 

Lander ended up with 11.3 percent of the votes on Tuesday.

Thirdly, the almost single-minded focus on slamming Mamdani in the Cuomo campaign meant that the former governor’s proposals for the city were not the centrepiece of even his own campaign.

The Islamophobia, All Too Familiar

As I reported on Documented on the morning after his victory, on the campaign trail, Mamdani had spoken up about repeatedly facing anti-Muslim hate, including death threats.

Post his victory in the primary, that targeting has only gotten worse. Media publications, too, have been fuelling the fire, at times through flat-out misreporting.

For instance, Axios, in a report about the reactions to Mamdani’s win in the Democratic party, wrote, “Mamdani also dodged questions about whether Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state — an important issue to many Jewish voters in New York City.”

Mamdani had answered this specific question during the mayoral primary debate.

On MSNBC, a host ranted against Mamdani, calling the election result “shocking” and saying that it looks like Democrats in New York City want a socialist who is all for "globalising" the intifada.

In India, NDTV’s Sumit Awasthi presented a report on Mamdani in his show with the title ‘mool Hindustani, baatein Pakistani’ (‘Indian roots, Pakistani speech’).

On Tuesday night, at Mamdani’s victory party, I spoke to his parents. I asked his father, Mahmood Mamdani, renowned academic and the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, what he felt about the relentless attacks on his son, especially based on his identity as a Muslim man running for mayor. Professor Mamdani replied,

“If he's going to stand on a public platform, he has to be prepared to take on every kind of criticism, and he has managed to do it. We're proud of him.”

Zohran’s mother, acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, said, “This had to happen because my son is really a gift to the world, and he's changed it already.”

That Mamdani created history on Tuesday night is indisputable.

As Sasha Wijeyeratne, a member of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence and a volunteer on the Mamdani campaign, told me minutes after Cuomo conceded the race, they had beaten Cuomo’s millions of dollars in funding “with pure people power”.

That Mamdani did it with his identity is even more impressive. 

As Letitia James, New York’s attorney general told the crowd of supporters gathered at Mamdani’s victory party, “His critics said that he didn’t have the right name. Well, now all of them know his goddamn name.”

The crowd roared in response, and chanted, “Mamdani... Mamdani... Mamdani.”

History, then, has been made. But it may yet feel like a return from the cusp of history instead if Mamdani were to be upstaged in the general election in November.

The candidate, and his campaign, are bracing up. They know it’s not over. And once again, they’re digging their heels in for a fight.

The only difference is that this time, Mamdani won’t be a long-shot candidate at the starting line. Despite the mounting opposition, as the Democratic nominee in deep-blue New York City, Mamdani will be the frontrunner instead. The candidate to beat. 4 November will tell us if he finishes first, and makes his mark on history more unmistakable.

(Meghnad Bose is an award-winning multimedia journalist based in New York. He is a former Deputy Editor of The Quint. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)