Zohran Mamdani's Win—A Rare and Beautiful Moment In War
Can good things happen? Last night’s victory in New York City suggests they can.
Hamilton Nolan
Sometimes you get what you want. Not often. For leftists, maybe once a generation. But sometimes, you find someone who can both win power, and do what you would do with it. Someone who starts out their victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs. Who doesn’t apologize, doesn’t triangulate, doesn’t immediately set about doing less than when they are given the chance to do something. Who looks at the biggest villain and says, “we’re coming for you.” Who looks at the people and says, “I am you.”
Bona fide moments of transformation like this are rare and terrifying, their sense of possibility and wonder freighted immediately with the worry that it could all somehow collapse. Belief can nurture these moments into something bigger, just as a lack of it can choke them to death. When I interviewed New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a year ago, I thought I was doing the fringe candidate a favor. That was not the case. Since he won the Democratic primary in June, he has attracted a level of press interest comparable only to presidential campaigns. He has acquired the halo of fame, the omnipresent scrum of cameras and aides and gasping passersby that indicates a common agreement that this man is something special. It is a force field that can’t be bought with money or conjured up with brute force. It emerges when you inspire a lot of people to believe that the world can be something more than they previously thought it could be.
On Monday night, the night before Election Day, Mamdani made his final pre-election appearance at a canvassing event in a playground in Astoria, Queens. Half an hour beforehand there was already a full array of cameras arranged in a crescent around the podium where he would be standing. Local reporters and photographers jostled and elbowed one another and said “Your whole head is in my shot” to the other reporters and photographers. The candidate arrived and hugged and shook hands with all of the political world people who had, at long last, fallen in line, having accepted the inevitability of his ascent. He had shaved his dark beard down lower than his mustache, as if to get aerodynamic. For the first time I could remember, he looked weary. How many miles had he walked across this city’s streets over the past year, dragging a swelling army behind him? When the time came to shout out questions, I found that I didn’t have anything else to ask. All I could think of was: “Can you do it?”
Mamdani’s official Election Night party was at The Paramount in downtown Brooklyn, a beautifully restored theater with grand carved arches and a deep blue backlit ceiling traced by wooden scrimshaw. An opera house where you can go to see Raekwon. They let the media in well before they opened the doors to the public at 9 p.m., so for two hours, reporters just milled around taking photos of other reporters. Anyone with enough notoriety to be considered something more than anonymous found themselves the subject of interviews. The left-wing streamer Hasan Piker fielded a press scrum that rivaled a candidate. People there to talk to other people just talking to one another — a tableau of the inherent idiocy of campaign trail reporting. One photographer asked to take portraits of my notebook. “It’s like a bygone era,” he said.
Then they opened the doors and the crowd came in and the empty spaces were filled. Because this was the official party, the crowd was weighted towards political operatives and those with connections to the campaign. But in this particular campaign, that meant there were cab drivers and hotel workers holding union signs and DSA members in coveted yellow Zohran beanies and glamorous Sikh couples dancing to Punjabi MC, to a greater degree than there were white men in suits. As I thought about how to describe it — ”It looked like a Benneton ad” is the traditional thing for a journalist to say — it occurred to me that the real descriptor was much plainer. It looked like New York City.
The DJ was killing it. At 9:37, the race was officially called in Mamdani’s favor from the three huge television screens showing NY1, and the DJ played “Many Men” by 50 Cent. We goaded the universe, collectively.
“Many men, many many many many men, wish death ‘pon me. Lord I don’t cry no more, don’t look to the sky no more.”
He swung things upbeat, producing a mass karaoke session to “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield. When the TV announced that Mamdani had secured a million votes, he played “A Milli” by Lil Wayne, looping the hook over again.
“A milli a milli a milli a milli a milli a milli….”
When former Governor Andrew Cuomo came on screen to give his concession speech, the DJ played “She Works Hard For the Money.” They didn’t turn on the sound of Cuomo’s words. He was in Midtown, and we were in Brooklyn. He was grim, and we were partying.
It was well after 10 p.m. when they finally took the DJ off the stage and began to speak from the podium. Mamdani’s team thanked first DSA, and then organized labor. A new order of things. A time for us to feel our fucking oats.
For all of his natural grace and charisma and good cheer, Zohran Mamdani carries with him a glint of the righteous anger that must necessarily animate anyone willing to do this work for something other than an enormous payday. His victory speech carried the same inspiring hope-and-change flavor of Obama, but it was all gripped in a fist. A righteous fist coming to break down the door for the people. He resisted the urge to be conciliatory to his enemies, choosing instead to reach past them to the outsiders of the city who are never allowed to get into a position to be conciliated towards.
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few,” Mamdani said.
His victory is “about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside City Hall. He still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now,” he said.
“No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election,” he said.
“The billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30-an-hour that their enemies are those earning $20-an-hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us,” he said.
“If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power,” he said. “So Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching: I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.”
“When we enter City Hall in 58 days, expectations will be high. We will meet them,” he said.
If you read back the transcript of the speech, you will see that the nice things were in there too. The words of unity and gratitude and optimism. Yet what stood out were the words of power, of the willingness to fight, of revolution. Not the moments when Zohran Mamdani smiled, but the longer moments when he wore a grim expression of determination, the look of a boxer in the corner about to bite down on the mouthpiece and wade into war.
Once it was over you walked outside and saw that it wasn’t over at all. Directly outside the doors of The Paramount, behind metal police barriers, was a crowd of — Hundreds? Thousands? — of New Yorkers who didn’t have tickets to get into the event yet came and stood on the sidewalks of Flatbush Avenue just to be close to the place where the thing was happening. There they all huddled, like Broadway fans waiting for the stars to emerge after a show, smiling and raising fists and being there, so they could say that they were. So they could feel like part of the launch of a new city. It was one of those crackling center-of-the-universe moments. You could feel certain right then that you were at the single most important place in New York City, and, by extension, the world.
Then I stepped down into the Dekalb Avenue subway station and got on a Q train full of drowsy and silent people getting off the night shift. People who did not know or care about the spectacle happening just above their heads. The irony of Mamdani’s fame is that all of it will only be worthwhile if it can be used on behalf of all the people on that train — the people farthest away from the party. I hope his eyes will stay locked on that horizon. It’s nice to believe that good things will happen.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He has spent the past decade writing about labor and politics for Gawker, Splinter, The Guardian, and elsewhere. More of his work is on Substack.
