The most sought-after fashion item in New York is a “Hot Girls for Zohran” T-shirt, the foxiest souvenir of an improbable campaign. A 34-year-old radical socialist who barely polled one per cent when he launched his run for mayor caught the zeitgeist and will soon be known as “Hizzoner” — New York-speak for His Honour.
Zohran Mamdani will become the first Muslim mayor of New York on January 1, 2026, in charge of a city of 8.5 million people, commanding a budget of $120bn and responsible for nearly 300,000 employees, with barely a shred of experience running anything. There are set to be fireworks, as he and Donald Trump clash over key issues, not least the incompatibility of Mamdani’s global outlook with Trump’s nationalist project. The big unknown for New Yorkers is how vengefully Trump will respond to the threat posed by Mamdani.
In the mayor-elect, the president has found an opponent who can rival his celebrity status and charisma. Mamdani won with dollops of charm and a happy-warrior campaign that captivated four out of five young voters and won him 50 per cent of the electorate in a hard-fought contest with Andrew Cuomo, the scandal-plagued former governor of New York.
What Mamdani has in charisma, he lacks in qualifications. Before entering politics, he worked as a housing counsellor, helping low-income homeowners in Queens fight eviction. Born in Kampala, Uganda, he moved to New York aged seven when his father Mahmood Mamdani became an anthropology professor at Columbia University; his mother Mira Nair is a celebrated film-maker. He met his wife Rama Duwaji, a visual artist and illustrator born in Houston, Texas, on Hinge. With her short fringe, choppy bob and cool-girl vintage closet, she will be the first Gen Z First Lady of New York.
See also: Why Zohran Mamdani can't be President of the US but Boris Johnson can
The comedy show, Saturday Night Live, parodied Mamdani’s TikTok-friendly message to affluent young women as, “Hey girl, I know you got a little white guilt for gentrifying that Spanish neighbourhood, don’t you. Why don’t you vote for me? You’ll feel a little less bad.” Pink hearts appeared on screen as the actor playing Mamdani delivered his plea.
Make New York affordable again
It was Mamdani’s message about affordability and the high cost of living that resonated with voters in the Bronx and other underserved areas of New York. Making the wildly expensive city more liveable for its hard-pressed residents will be the metric by which he will be judged. Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke, an acclaimed critique of cultural elites which has just been released in paperback, says, “Mamdani was very disciplined in his messaging on the cost of food, housing and public transportation.”
Mamdani did promise billion-dollar giveaways, such as “fast and free” buses, a rent-freeze on all rent-stabilised apartments, universal childcare for six-week infants to five-year olds and subsidised city-run grocery stores. Being a radical mayor carries risks as well as rewards, and these policies could bankrupt the city without care. To pay for all his free stuff, Mamdani proposes to raise corporation taxes from 7.25 per cent to 11.5 per cent and slap a two per cent tax increase on New Yorkers earning more than $1m (£760,000) a year, prompting fears that high net worth individuals and businesses will flee the city.
The beneficiary of an exodus could be London, led by the capital’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. According to a partner at Sotheby’s International Realty, enquiries about London property rose by 28 per cent as Mamdani’s poll ratings increased.
Ostensibly, the two mayors are natural allies. Shortly before Mamdani was elected, a spokesperson for Khan said: “The Mayor hopes that like in London, New Yorkers see through the politics of hatred and fear and embrace Mamdani’s hopeful and optimistic vision for the future.” They are also both natural enemies of Trump. Khan infuriated Trump by allowing a baby blimp of the US president in nappies to fly in 2018, while Maga views London as a crime and terror-infested no-go zone. Yet Khan is much more moderate and business-friendly than Mamdani.
If anything is likely to inhibit the flow of the rich to London, it is the threat of tax hikes in the Budget from the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, not the actions of its mayor. Some of the early warnings about wealthy bolters leaving New York have been put on hold. Harsh critics such as the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman poured millions into defeating the new mayor, to the extent that Mamdani joked, “He’s spending more money against me than I would even tax him!” But Ackman has since offered an olive branch, posting on X, “Congrats on the win. Now you have a big responsibility. If I can help NYC, just let me know what I can do.”
Spectre of the return of woke
Over the final few nights of Mamdani’s campaign, clips went viral on social media of him rallying partygoers in clubs across the city. At one club he stood in the DJ booth, singing along with the crowd to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ New York anthem Empire State of Mind. With young, well-educated, Left-wing elites flocking to Mamdani — whose own rap videos have emerged — could “woke”, the culture war which Trump decisively took a wrecking ball to, be back in vogue? Not if Mamdani can help it. During the campaign, he steered clear of identity politics, regarding wokeness as voter Kryptonite and the obsession of the privileged. At the same time, his attitude of “no enemies on the Left” could open the door to its return.
@ariathome You never know who’s gonna show up when you start rapping 😂 I was making music at Washington Sq park when I noticed this stranger @lifeofthom trying to get on the mic. A few people watching turned into a massive crowd thanks to Zohran, who had asked about pulling up to the stream earlier in the day. We didn’t plan a segment or anything, so bro ended up spawning in in the middle of this verse lol. Pretty sick moment 🔥🙌
♬ original sound - ARIatHOME
Critics accused Mamdani of antisemitism and tried to fight him on culture war issues, but he refused to engage. “If he had made Israel-Palestine central to his campaign and kept talking about LGBTQ+ issues and how he was going to ban fossil fuels,“ Al-Gharbi observes, “his campaign would have gone up in flames.”
Anger has, however, recently resurfaced in the UK about his support for US journalist Glenn Greenwald’s 2013 article which examined “conventional western narrative on terrorism”. In it, Greenwald questioned whether the murder of off-duty British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich was in fact “terrorism”. Mamdani shared the article on X, titled “important”.
According to John Avlon, a moderate Democrat and chair of Citizens Union of New York: “The job of mayor is to be a non-ideological problem-solver. You’ve got to keep crime low, quality of life high and the taxpayer base growing.” Avlon is concerned by Mamdani’s uncompromising victory speech. “It was stark and surprising to see a decisive tone shift. That was clearly conscious. It was a socialist and populist speech for the ramparts. He is a true believer.”
Mamdani’s doctrine is likely to rile businesses, and yet with the stock market booming; it will take a lot for Wall Street slickers to leave the city. And the tycoons know better than anybody that Mamdani’s power to raise taxes is limited by New York state’s moderate governor, Kathy Hochul, and the state assembly, 150 miles away in Albany.
Hochul praised Mamdani for “lighting politics on fire” but exasperatedly told a crowd chanting “Tax the rich” that, “The more you push me, the more I’m not going to do what you want.”
Mamdani versus Trump
According to Al-Gharbi, Mamdani’s best chance of success is “to make sure he can deliver one big thing”, such as free buses or universal childcare. Doing too much at once without the necessary resources could lead to embarrassing failure.
One of Mamdani’s key battles will be how to deal with Trump, his nemesis. Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from New York amounting to seven per cent of the city’s budget and is toying with sending in masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and the national guard.
But Trump has been on the back foot since the Republicans’ drubbing in New Jersey and Virginia, where two moderate female candidates for governor won their elections last week with wider, double-digit margins than Mamdani.
An opinion piece in the tabloid New York Post, no friend of the mayor-elect, warned that punishing New York could cause “irreversible financial damage” to the city and the US economy.
On election night, Mamdani taunted the president, saying, “So Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up.”
Trump responded in caps on Truth Social, “And So It Begins!” Start laying your bets on who is going to win.
