There is one question everyone who runs for New York City mayor should be able to answer with finesse: What’s your bodega order? Zohran Mamdani’s is an egg-and-cheese on a jalapeno roll and coffee with a little bit of milk, no sugar. “I do not need any help getting diabetic,” he jokes over a video call. The Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate’s campaign draws on the iconography of working-class America as “a politics that requires no translation.” Scrolling on his website you’ll see cheeky yellow-and-blue letters advertising candy, coffee, bagels, and soda. “The iconography of New York City is tied to the fight for working-class New Yorkers who made it mean something. That’s the commitment of this campaign.”

Now that former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has entered the mayoral race as a front-runner, Mamdani may be forced to emphasize his more radical proposals. If New Yorkers want another candidate embroiled in disgrace and assault accusations, Cuomo brings name recognition and years working inside the political machine. But Cuomo, like New York Mayor Eric Adams, offers more of the same: a focus on overhauling a city they claim has become far too dangerous. It’s a defensive rather than forward-thinking strategy. Mamdani may be able to provide a new way forward with a vision for a diverse city that has more to offer than simply being a culture-war target for the current Trump administration.

The question is whether New York is ready to chart a new course. In the wake of Bernie Sanders, many left-wing candidates struggle to break through the noise, but Mamdani’s galvanized base is eager to change voters’ minds. He has already been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), alongside Jewish Vote for Peace and New York Communities for Change. Even the so-called dirtbag left loves him. A few days before we spoke, the assemblyman appeared on the popular podcast Chapo Trap House to discuss his platform: freeze the rent, subsidize grocery stores, offer free buses and childcare. Appearing on such alternative outlets is a big part of his campaign. He loves to produce a slick TikTok that ends with his trademark smile and a snapshot of life on the subway. Part of his appeal to young voters lies in his willingness to talk about social issues alongside economic hardship and corruption—all while offering a listening ear to the politically vulnerable.

In one widely shared TikTok, he asked voters on a street corner why they didn’t vote during the last presidential election. Instead of ignoring typically unengaged voter bases, Mamdani has handed the microphone to ordinary Queens citizens to hear them out. “What would it take for you to vote for a Democrat in the future?” he asks at the end of one clip.

“In many ways I am what Donald Trump hates,” Mamdani said at a recent mayoral debate on the Upper West Side. “A Muslim lefty from the other side of Queens.” Born to Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia professor, and Mira Nair, the Indian filmmaker who directed Mississippi Masla, Mamdani was born in Uganda before moving to New York City at the age of 7. He attended Bronx High School of Science and graduated from Bowdoin College in 2014. Before turning to politics, he was a self-described “failed rapper”: “Once you’ve done that, it’s a lot easier to ask people on the Broadway platform of the N/W train if they’ll sign your petition to get on the ballot,” he told The Guardian.

Mamdani originally rose to fame while campaigning for fellow DSA candidate Khader El-Yateem. While the Palestinian Lutheran minister didn’t win the New York City Council race, Mamdani himself eventually won a seat in the New York Assembly in 2021. Shortly after assuming office, he went on a 15-day hunger strike to win debt relief for taxi drivers who owed money on their medallions. The controversial medallion system operates through transferable permits that are bought, sold, and leased at exorbitant prices.

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During a recent campaign rally for Mamdani, I spoke with Alicé Nascimento, policy director for New York Communities for Change. “There’s a difference between a politician who’s there to schmooze and make connections and people who are just deeply connected to people and love humanity and who are really committed to people who are often discarded. I saw Zohran dancing with the taxi workers after he had been fasting for two weeks—he’s the real deal!” For many he’s a source of inspiration, a call back to the optimistic campaign promises of Bernie Sanders. “We call [Mamdani] our political Xanax. During such dark times, he’s really showing us how to run a campaign,” Nascimento says. While the DSA is often seen as a primarily white coalition, Nascimento points out that Mamdani’s running a multiracial, working-class coalition across all five boroughs. He stands up for the many, regardless of their citizenship status.

Currently, Mamdani is trying to fight “halalflation.” In a similar fashion to the medallion fiasco, New York City is not issuing enough food cart permits, creating an artificial scarcity of legal certification that inflates the value of existing permits. Many vendors have to rent permits from those who have legally obtained them at dizzying prices. “The city loses money in the process,” Mamdani says. If the city just issued more permits, they would generate real revenue. “It’s another example of working-class New Yorkers being betrayed by the city they call home. It makes it all the easier to betray such a workforce when you make the assessment that this workforce does not have the political power to create a consequence for you.” But, Mamdani says, it’s “squarely” within the city’s power to fix these crises. I ask why he thinks the city refuses to solve such a simple problem. “You see a mixture of inaction and cruelty,” he notes. Some get stability and some must toil.

To win, Mamdani will have to distinguish himself from a range of left-leaning candidates—including progressive favorite Brad Lander, who has already received endorsements from Jumaane Williams and Tiffany Cabán. In 2019, Mamdani campaigned for Cabán during her unsuccessful run for Queens district attorney. It’s a crowded field, even if Mamdani’s radical platform and splashy viral marketing campaign have often set him apart. Even if he rises above the pack of alternatives, he’ll still have to rise above liberal titan Andrew Cuomo.

“We are here to break the mold of what electoral politics in this city can be,” Mamdani told a crowd at Grand Army Plaza in front of the Brooklyn Library. The problem is that many of Adams’s primary opponents are running as “change” candidates. Across events, Mamdani has pointed out that unlike Mayor Eric Adams, he would not defund the public library system, a vital ecosystem serving the unhoused and creative intelligentsia alike. But all the other candidates besides Adams make the same claim. All candidates want to unseat Adams, whom they see as already deep in Trump’s pocketbook.

Most of Mamdani’s fundraising comes from individual donors giving small amounts, people he often calls back one by one to thank. In just three months, he raised $641,000 from 6,518 individual donors. Such a ratio was integral to Bernie Sanders’s campaign as well. At a town hall, Mamdani echoed calls for “a relentless focus on economic agenda” that many mainstream Democrats, like the new DNC chair Ken Martin, are calling for. Unlike others, though, Mamdani wants to create a more progressive, citywide social safety net. This includes more affordable public housing, his arch “freeze the rent” polar plunge video campaign, free buses, universal childcare, and state-run grocery stores. It all sounds good in theory, inspiring even. The question is how such idealistic goals would be implemented.

The numbers are tricky. Mamdani proposes building 200,000 new affordable homes over the next decade, an amount arrived at by his housing policy working group. It’s three times the amount New York City is currently planning to build as part of the City of Yes zoning amendment proposal. Last summer, over 633,000 New Yorkers applied for Section 8 rental assistance. (Another mayoral hopeful, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, is hoping to build 700,000 new units in the future. In comparison, Mayor Adams is hoping for 500,000 over the next decade—though how likely or effective his policies are is anyone’s guess.) Freezing the rent is a bit less complicated, since the mayor appoints the Rent Guidelines Board and wields an enormous amount of influence, though such a position isn’t without its difficulties and limitations. The rent would be frozen only for “all stabilized tenants.” Still, almost half of all New York City apartments are rent stabilized—often without tenants realizing, making it easier for landlords to illegally destabilize their tenants. Mamdani hopes to lobby lawmakers in Albany to pass bills to require all new housing units be rent-stabilized. His campaign seems poised to primarily raise corporate taxes in order to fill the gaps and fund city-run programs like grocery stores and childcare. He would also seek to move funding around, like switching from stopgap measures such as the City FRESH program to state-run grocery stores with guaranteed lower prices. Alongside these measures, Mamdani is looking to increase revenue specifically for new affordable housing units through municipal bonds, utilizing city-owned land for new housing properties, and “pooling” housing vouchers to secure new development.

Harnessing national revenue may prove more elusive in what continues to be an age of austerity. Despite the cozy relationship between President Trump and Adams, the current administration has rescinded $80 million that was sent to New York City to help house migrants. While the new national regime has ordered that recent charges against Adams be dismissed despite his numerous indiscretions, it hardly seems poised to increase federal aid or support to the greatest city in the world—“the Islamabad of America,” as Mayor Adams often puts it.

Such federal cuts “heighten the necessity of us raising more revenue within New York State by taxing the wealthiest New Yorkers and most profitable businesses,” Mamdani argues. “That is revenue that needs to be put into improving working-class people’s lives and could replace what the Trump administration is potentially going to cut.” But it’s not all defensive posturing. “I also think as a leader you have to be willing to fight back against these kinds of cuts instead of treating them as inevitabilities. Every time the Republicans seek to make a cut they are also telling a story as to why that cut is to the benefit of working-class Americans. If we treat those cuts as inevitable, we treat that story as true. When in fact, it’s one that has been written without working-class Americans in mind at all.”

Mamdani holds similarly ardent views on social issues. Unlike many other Democratic candidates across the country, he’s not backed down on immigration, Palestine, or trans rights. Local news organization Hell Gate has praised his grassroots fundraising tactics even as the New York Post decries his overt support of Palestine. “Hate pays,” the tabloid’s headline moaned. Instead of backing down, Mamdani has continued to support Palestinian rights, whether by condemning Adams’s crackdowns on protest at college encampments or making TikToks asking voters why they didn’t vote during the last presidential election. Meanwhile, he wants to strengthen sanctuary laws, continue prohibitions on collaborating with ICE, and follow the de Blasio administration’s creative strategies for pushing back on conservative and powerful police agendas. How successful Bill de Blasio really was, and how successful someone following in his footsteps could be, is a bit dubious. Even liberals in New York face a dizzying amount of pushback at both the state and federal level. Mamdani faces a steep race before he can even fight to implement any reform. Polls still suggest that Andrew Cuomo (at 31 percent) and Eric Adams (at 11 percent) are still ahead of Mamdani (at 8 percent), though he is ahead of Brad Lander (at 5 percent).

Only a few weeks ago Mamdani attended a rally at Union Square protesting NYU Langone’s refusal to continue to care for trans children. He was the only mayoral candidate to do so, even telling The New York Times: “You need not even know a trans New Yorker to stand up for trans New Yorkers…. This is a trial of all of us to see who we are willing to give up. And our answer is no one.” He links the ongoing genocide in Palestine to attacks on immigrants and trans Americans: “These are trials of attacks to be conducted on many more Americans over the course of this administration. It’s a test of what people are willing to accept if it’s on someone they don’t see as themselves.” He knows that an attack on one group will inevitably lead to another being targeted. Like the poem says, “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.” Curiously, Martin Niemöller’s first stanza is about socialists. “There’s a real sense of living this poem right now,” Mamdani says.

Mamdani may be the biggest pro-police-reform candidate in the mayoral race, someone who continues to advocate for sweeping reform when it comes to public safety. He wants to eliminate police overtime and scale down the communications department. I ask if he thinks it will be hard to win against the police unions. “We’ve seen mayors run in the past speaking to that impunity,” he says. He cites de Blasio as a forerunner for his campaign promise to end stop-and-frisk. “For far too long we haven’t even been willing to fight for these ideas. There are far more New Yorkers who are looking to live in a city where they don’t have to choose between safety and justice and that’s exactly what Eric Adams told them he would do when he ran in 2021.” He does not think we must make such a choice, instead believing we can find new ways to address street violence by free and affordable housing alongside mental health resources.

The deadline to switch party affiliation as a New Yorker was February 14. To vote for the Democratic candidate in June, you must also be registered as a Democrat. Mamdani’s campaign has spent the past few weeks on a crusade to convince people to change their registration in time—and more importantly—that voting still matters. “To be a Democrat could mean to fight for working people,” Mamdani says toward the end of our call. Still, he recognizes that voting isn’t everything, paraphrasing Noam Chomsky to remind us that politics is everything that happens outside the voting booth. Casting a ballot is just one piece of the pie. “So often it feels like we are on a 24-hour loop of surrender to people who deserve to be fought at every single juncture,” he says. It’s a clear rallying cry from a candidate who’s looking to go far in the political machine without being subsumed by cynicism. The question isn’t whether he believes in his ideals, but whether we can truly stomach the fight for a better world.