Sumaya Awad: Your high school social-studies teacher, Mr. Kagan, was recently at a campaign forum you participated in. What did you want to be when you were in high school? Did you ever imagine you would be running for mayor of your city?

Zohran Mamdani: When I was in high school, I wanted to be a journalist, and I was one of the editors in chief of The Bronx Science Survey. I wasn’t very good at my job. I would give credit to my fellow editors in chief who ran the paper. And when I went to Bowdoin College, I continued on that trajectory: I joined the student newspaper, and I was a reporter my first year and co–news editor my second year. It was around that time that I ended up cofounding Bowdoin’s first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, and I moved from journalism into organizing as my identity outside of the classroom. I never anticipated running for mayor when I was at Bronx Science, though I did run to be our school’s vice president, and I lost—despite making a rap video as my pitch to voters.

SA: You are the first Muslim elected running for mayor, and if elected, would be the first Muslim mayor of NYC, a city known for its mass surveillance of Muslims. There are hundreds of thousands of Muslim New Yorkers who have been let down by consecutive mayors. What is your message to Muslim New Yorkers?

ZM: I would be the first Muslim mayor and the first South Asian mayor. I think there is incredible power in representation, but I also believe that there is a ceiling to it and that the true potential in representation is that you see it in the policies as opposed to simply the person.

The policies are the places where Muslims have truly been erased from the civic and cultural fabric of this city. I think especially of the fact that I represent the very street, Steinway Street, where Michael Bloomberg deployed the Demographics Unit, a unit within the NYPD that he created illegally to surveil Muslims on the basis of our faith. The unit used to go into travel agencies, barber shops, hookah bars, even go to Astoria Park to write down when Muslims would play soccer. So many policies such as that one have had the effect of pushing Muslims to the margins of New York City and teaching newer generations of Muslim New Yorkers that the safest place to be is in the shadows.

There are a million Muslims in New York city, about 200,000 of which are registered as Democrats and in previous elections the turnout rate was about 7 percent. I will not blame anyone for not having voted, because I know in many elections it can feel as if there is nothing to vote for. I do think, however, this is an opportunity to show so many people who have never seen themselves or their lives in the political process that there is a path toward that recognition, to equality and respect. That path can begin on June 24.

SA: Your campaign identifies as progressive, and your platform reflects that. Would you say NYC has ever had a progressive mayor? Some would say the last progressive mayor was David Dinkins [1990–93], a card-carrying member of DSA at one point. What’s different about your candidacy? What would it mean for NYC to have a socialist mayor?

ZM: I think there have been a number of progressive mayors in NYC history. I consider [Bill] de Blasio to have been a progressive mayor. His record includes making universal pre-K a reality and freezing the rent on three different occasions for more than 2 million New Yorkers. I also admire Fiorello La Guardia as a mayor in New York City’s history and not just because his nickname was “Little Flower,” which is one of my favorite cafés in Astoria.

SA: You introduced the Not on Our Dime Act to strip illegal settler organizations of their charity status while they fund occupation and genocide. You also organized a hunger strike in DC two months into the genocide calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. In both cases, you made the argument that Palestine is not just a foreign policy issue but a struggle materially connected to the everyday lives of New Yorkers, to, say, the price of eggs, which is another topic you cover in your campaign videos. So what’s Palestine got to do with the price of eggs?

ZM: After the presidential election in November, when New York State had the furthest swing towards Trump of any state in the country [11.5 points toward Trump], I went to the neighborhoods that were at the heart of that swing, which were also neighborhoods at the heart of immigrant New York City [Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens], and I asked New Yorkers who they voted for and why. I met New Yorker after New Yorker, the vast majority of whom were Democrats, who said they either didn’t vote or they voted for Trump. And when I asked them why, they said they remember having more money in their pocket four years ago and being able to afford eggs, their rent, their childcare, their Con Ed bill, their MetroCard. And while they couldn’t afford any of these things, their federal government could afford genocide and multiple wars.

Those New Yorkers were identifying to me the ludicrous contradictions in our politics, where working people never seem to have enough money in their pockets and yet there’s always money for war. It is sad that decades after Tupac once said it, the line still resonates today.

As the mayor of New York City, you do not have the power to end the genocide, but you have what has been described as the second-largest pulpit in America. We have had a mayor who has used that bully pulpit to deny humanity to many, including Palestinians; who has used that bully pulpit to justify the killing of children and to refuse to call for a ceasefire; who has used the power of his office to, in his words, beg Columbia and NYU to send the police force into their campuses as a means of shutting down student protests—a decision that made students on Columbia’s campus more unsafe than anything that had been prior. Our mayor has sought to flout the idea of universal human rights, promising, instead, greater cooperation with settler leaders in Israel all while denying working-class New Yorkers the relief and dignity that they voted for when they picked him.

SA: In many ways your platform isn’t actually very radical. Free childcare, free buses, a rent freeze. These are basic things New Yorkers need to survive. Why do you think other candidates don’t adopt these into their platform? You’ve raised a lot of money, a record amount, and most of that money is coming from small donations. Who is funding your campaign? Why does that matter?

ZM: We are the only campaign in this race that proudly identifies itself as progressive. And we do so, because it’s an accurate description of what we are fighting for in our platform. I think that oftentimes when you want to fight for working-class people, your vision is termed radical when, as you’ve said, these platform planks are rooted in very recent New York City history. A rent freeze is something Bill de Blasio did three times for New York city tenants. Universal childcare is something that many candidates are in support of because of the success of universal pre-K. Free buses is built on the successes I’ve seen firsthand as someone who won the first free bus pilot in New York City history, where we saw ridership increase by more than 30 percent, assaults on bus drivers decrease by 39 percent, and a vast majority of new riders making $28,000 or less.

I think there’s been a fundamental misreading of what New Yorkers are hungry for. When we launched the campaign a little more than three months ago, we did so at a time when the media and political class had come to a consensus that corruption engulfing City Hall was the most pressing crisis in the lives of New Yorkers. We argued then that while it was important, what New Yorkers were thinking about most was cost, because if you couldn’t afford your rent or your childcare or your groceries or your MetroCard, you couldn’t afford to worry about anything in City Hall.

I think our campaign’s platform is resonating because people see themselves in it. Politics too often requires translation. It sounds like a five-step process where you struggle to understand how it’s relevant to your life. People deserve to understand how your policies impact them and how it would take the boot off their neck. I think that is why we have been able to raise more than $641,000 from more than 6,500 people and why we have one of the lowest average donations of any campaign. Working-class people are seeing themselves in this struggle. Our number one profession amongst our donors is educators. Our top five professions include students. These are not the categories that typically are empowering political campaigns. They understand that donating $20 to a campaign like ours is a down payment on a city that they can actually afford.

SA: You’re proudly running as a Democratic Socialist of America candidate. It’s been a critical part of the campaigning and organizing you’ve done in the past and present. Why is that important to you?

ZM: It’s important because my politics are a politics of consistency. My political home is NYC DSA. I had grown tired as a New Yorker of seeing politicians create exceptions—most notably for Palestine. When I worked at the Khader Yateem campaign for City Council in 2017, I was blown away by the fact that here was an organization of thousands of New Yorkers that I had never met before, many of whom were new to local politics. I saw a socialist organization that was committed to ending the inequality that is rampant within our city, our state, and our country and to fighting for working-class people and to doing so with consistency that included Palestinians. That was something that stood out for me and that is something that continues to make me proud to be a DSA member.

SA: The vast majority of New Yorkers would find their lives drastically improved if you were able to get some of these policies through as mayor. Why wouldn’t someone vote for you?

ZM: I’ve met people who have been failed by politicians many times. They look at this campaign and many campaigns through that lens. It’s our job to show them that the politics that we are practicing, the campaign that we are building is different than those that have come before and that these policies and promises are not a means to get elected but they are the mandate I want to be elected on. I want to win this race with everyone knowing that if they vote for me, they are voting for a rent freeze, they are voting for free buses, they are voting for universal childcare and city-run grocery stories with guaranteed lower prices. That’s what I want to be held accountable to as soon as I am the mayor of New York City. A political program that delivers a more affordable city for New Yorkers. That’s what makes me so excited when I meet people who have heard about the campaign. They recite that platform back to me sometimes word for word.

I also think politics is not just a competition of ideas; it’s also a competition of resources. We will still go up against millions of dollars in outside spending seeking to demonize the campaign and our mission. Our job is to make sure amidst all of that noise, we still have an opportunity to deliver our message directly to voters across the city.