Zohran Mamdani on the Night Shift for Mayor

“We need new people who are going to bring change,” said Mohammed, the 54-year-old Bangladeshi Uber driver who brought me to the airport and voted early for Mamdani. ​“He cares about the people, the poor people.”

People joke that his main opponent is cooked. But per his campaign’s email around 6 p.m. on October 30, Mamdani is taking nothing for granted. Even with a commanding lead in the polls over disgraced former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, is out tonight meeting with workers across working-class neighborhoods in Queens.

If he’s elected mayor, Mamdani will be the second democratic socialist to lead America’s largest city. With less than five days until New York’s mayoral election, the political storms are raging, but Mamdani isn’t unmoored.

Many of the city’s unions — of all sizes — have lined up behind Mamdani’s affordability agenda. ​“Turning around labor’s decline is crucial for achieving Mamdani’s overarching goal of an affordable New York,” writes labor scholar and organizer Eric Blanc. 

“In a state with the highest income inequality in the nation, millions of workers urgently need the wage boost and job protections that only a union can provide.”

Mamdani has gone directly to meet with workers at picket lines and union halls. But rather than treat these as perfunctory glad-handling checklists or a necessary staple of retail politics, he appears to have successfully connected his platform to the base he wants to unite behind his economic agenda, using his national prominence to elevate worker struggles in his home state.

He’s also going to his working-class immigrant base to hold steady. He’s talking to night-shift yellow taxi drivers at the airport (with whom he went on 15-day hunger strike about four years ago for debt relief from predatory lending), to nurses at the Elmhurst public hospital, to diners and workers at Kabab King, (a 24-hour restaurant, which he’s frequented since high school). He’s holding a midnight press conference at Diversity Plaza, a short block of streets turned into a working-class town square for pedestrians.

He isn’t talking to workers as an abstraction. He’s specifically talking to a base of South Asian immigrants who have pounded the pavement for him, possibly catapulting him into Gracie Mansion as the first Muslim mayor in city history.

At the first stop on his night-shift canvass, he walks the length of the line of yellow taxis as cabbies from the hunger strike for debt relief join him. The drivers roll down their windows, shake hands, pose for selfies, FaceTime their families so they can speak with the mayoral candidate — who beams back a big smile and waves.

When yellow cabbie Kuber Sancho-Persad from Trinidad sees Mamdani, he offers him a bear hug, lifting the mayoral candidate into the air. Sancho-Persad tells me he can only stay for a few minutes to not miss curfew at the family-shelter where he lives with his mother. He earns about $750 weekly. Next month, he’ll receive his father’s medallion, as part of a settlement the city reached with lenders that forgave millions of dollars in debt. He’ll still have a loan, but the monthly expenses will be lower and allow him to rent. Part of his high costs he blames on Cuomo. 

“Every time I enter over 96^th Street, I always think of Gov. Cuomo, and the $14,000 he takes out of my pocket every year,” Sancho-Persad says, referring to congestion pricing taxes.

For others, the food costs are too high. ​“I live in this city, I shop in this city, I work in this city,” says Erhan Tuncel, 65, a member of the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance, and on hand tonight to help canvass. ​“As a working man, I feel it. I mean, I go to the supermarket, two bags, not even full, 160 bucks.”

Mamdani hands drivers in the cab line palm cards, head and hands jutting into their passenger side seat, switching between greetings in English, Hindi and Urdu.

Mohammed Alam, a 45-year-old Bangladeshi dispatcher at the airport for three years, says he called up his sister, his wife and a co-worker so they could see Mamdani. ​“Why are you so excited to show him to everyone?” I ask.

“Because we love him,” says Alam, who works the night shift from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.

It’s a sentiment I hear from taxi drivers, nurses and restaurant workers.

“I didn’t just read about what people are talking about — I saw him at the hunger strike for the medallion,” says Kadir Gaurab, a member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance of Algerian descent who leases his vehicle from a garage. ​“I didn’t know at the time he was gonna be mayor, but he wants to do right by people.”

Gaurab endorses Mamdani’s pledge to freeze rents and build more affordable housing. ​“Rent-stabilized or not rent-stabilized, you need to have more units,” he tells me as we drive to Elmhurst Hospital, the next canvass stop. ​“We need to also fine landlords for warehousing units. If you have a 4% to 8% vacancy rate, tenants will have more bargaining power, and if they don’t like the landlord’s rate, they just go somewhere else. Supply and demand, baby!”

Gaurab also thinks Muslim voters back Mamdani for his support for Palestine. ​“That is the icing on the cake for a Muslim voter,” he says.

In a recent speech addressing a spate of Islamophobic smears from opponents, Mamdani skillfully rejected both an abstract universality and a narrow representational politics. Instead, he highlighted his Muslim identity to define widely shared aspirations of equality and dignity.

“I thought that if I could build a campaign of universality, I could define myself as the leader I aspire to be — one representing every New Yorker, no matter their skin color or religion, no matter where they were born,” he said. ​“I thought that if I worked hard enough, it would allow me to be that leader. And I thought that if I behaved well enough — or bit my tongue enough in the face of racist, baseless attacks, all while returning back to my central message — it would allow me to be more than just my faith. I was wrong. No amount of redirection is ever enough.”

What’s roiling the lives of the working class of New York City isn’t just bad weather. It’s the very rich turning to old prejudices and opening the spigot of money to buy the election for the city’s next mayor by stoking divisions among New Yorkers. More than 60 billionaires and their kin have contributed $18.7 million to defeat Mamdani, according to an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness.

Mamdani has run a campaign with a relentless focus on the affordability crisis, a rent freeze for more than 1 million units in rent-stabilized apartments, fast and free buses, city-owned grocery stores to lower the cost of food, free universal childcare starting at six weeks old, and building affordable housing.

Working-class New York found a champion in Mamdani. And they have hit the ground running to elect him. In coalition with liberals and progressives, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America marshalled an army of 50,000 volunteers who knocked on 1.6 million doors during the primary, which broke voter turnout records. (Note: I was one of these canvassers, and I am also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.) According to a campaign email, they are now aiming to set a single-day record and knock on 200,000 doors on Sunday, November 2, with volunteers numbering some 7,000.

“While my opponents in this race have brought hatred to the forefront, this is just a glimpse of what so many have to endure everyday across this city,” Mamdani said in his speech. ​“And while it would be easy for us to say that this is not who we are as a city — we know the truth. This is who we have allowed ourselves to become. And a question lies before each of us. Will we continue to accept a narrow definition of what it means to be a New Yorker, that makes smaller every day the number of those guaranteed a life of dignity? Will we remain in the shadows, or will we together step into the light?”

At Elmhurst Hospital, Heather Irobunda, an ob-gyn with the Doctors Council SEIU, steps forward to speak about the Black maternal health crisis in New York City. ​“Black women in the city are nine times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts,” she says. Mamdani has proposed providing new parents with baby baskets containing diapers, baby wipes and information about breastfeeding and postpartum depression.

“I’m a doctor, so obviously I see the health implications in literally everything that is related to our ability to live wonderful lives in the city,” Irobunda adds. ​“We’re talking about food access. We’re talking about transportation. We’re talking about housing. We’re talking about access to mental healthcare.” These social determinants, she says, are as important as the question often posed: ​“Is there racism happening within the halls of the hospital?”

She also ties these issues to broader affordability questions. ​“I’ve had patients come in by ambulance,” she says, speaking about Amazon workers. ​“They’re on their way to work, and they passed out on the train. They’re pregnant, and they chose to feed their children over themselves, and the only reason why they really passed out is because they could not afford to eat.” Sometimes, Irobunda says, workers can’t afford the $2.90 bus fare and miss their prenatal appointments. ​“This city is one of the richest cities in the entire world, and we have some of the most abysmal outcomes for health metrics in the country,” she says. ​“How is this happening? Right under the nose of some of the richest people in the world who live here?”

The last stop in the canvass brings workers together at Kabab King, where Mamdani breaks bread with the people who traveled alongside him for the night. In sharp contrast to Mayor Eric Adams — ​“All I know is all my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success,” Adams said during a news conference in 2023 — Mamdani begins serving the journalists’ table naan, kebabs and biryani.

Around midnight, Mamdani leaves the restaurant for a press conference outside. As the elevated 7 train clatters behind him, he talks about the people he met on the canvass, from the worker who commutes two hours from Pennsylvania to work at Elmhurst Hospital because he’s been priced out of the city, to the nurse who works in the ER with broken machines and is overwhelmed with high patient-to-staff ratios, to the chemist who whispered into his ear to do right by paramedics and firefighters because her son works in the sector.

“I think of all these workers who, every single day they toil at the hours when so many of us get to rest,” Mamdani says. ​“When we arrive at LaGuardia on a red-eye, these are the New Yorkers who pick us up. When we carry a feverish child into the ER at three in the morning, these are the New Yorkers who heal them. These are the taxi workers, these are the nurses, these are the factory workers, these are the office cleaners — those who toil in a city that we either do not see or choose not to see.”

But a significant number do. Balkar Singh, a yellow-cab driver for nearly 35 years, says he and his co-workers will go the extra mile to help Mamdani win — because of what they see in him.

“We’re going to help him,” Singh says. ​“We need a mayor who goes to the hospital to talk with the ambulance people, talks with the taxi driver, everybody. So we need a mayor who doesn’t sleep.”

Disclosure: As a 501©3 nonprofit, In These Times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.