Zohran Mamdani wins New York City’s Democratic Mayor’s First Choice

Zohran Mamdani barely sleeps. At 5:30 yes On Tuesday, the city’s hottest day in more than a decade, he welcomed reporters to a press conference in Astoria Park, Queens, a green patch overlooking the East River, not far from his stable rental apartment. As the day breaks, the sky behind the candidates shines. Standing behind a naked podium, Mamdani rolled on her phone with her index finger and read a brief speech denouncing the city’s affordability crisis, calling on his main rival, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and hopefully sustaining the city. His right hand shivered slightly as he read it.

Even though the temperature rose to one hundred degrees, Mamdani, in a black suit, was surprised when asked about his campaign. “I was surprised by the speed of the sharp contrast with Andrew Cuomo,” he said. The speed of the incident has even shocked the candidate over the past few weeks, and he still sounds like a man preparing for the possibility of failure. “We’re already the second place we expected in this game.” Later, sitting on the warm curb of Jackson Heights, we discussed his efforts to reach the city’s black voters, especially. He told me: “I know that when I enter the church and talk to voters who voted in the mayoral election for decades and know voters who know politicians during a similar period, it’s a difficult task to learn someone’s name and throw it away in the same situation,” he told me. “I started the game with a percentage point recognition. Most of the game is one of the introductions.”

I asked Mamdani what he planned to do if he was second in the primary. Will he try to join the progressive family party voting line in the general election this fall and challenge the Democrats from the outside? “My only point is, I tell you sincerely,” he said. I asked him if he beat Cuomo and if he would call on the former governor to withdraw, rather than running in the general election, as Cuomo vowed to do. Mamdani smiled and said, “I will spend a day thinking about this.”

I now say Mamdani is understated by a guilty party, underestimated by his opponents and the media. Perhaps not at the start of the campaign, this winter, when he took his description as “nameless”, when his campaign went beyond the typical scope of municipal political debate, sure. (About 8 yes On the junior day, Mamdani’s team escorted him to a secret meeting, which turned out to be a videotape with Emily Ratajkowski. “Oh my god, thank you very much!” A young commuter wore big headphones, nose rings and tote bags with the inscription “Gender confirms that health care can save lives.” A woman in the bush gasped, pulled off her mask, whipped her cell phone, and showed Mamdani a picture of her “I vote” sticker. In the Bronx County near Yankee Stadium, a group of alumni passed by in a mad situation. “I saw him on TV!” a shouted. Mamdani shook hands and everyone walked away as if they were awarded a prize. “He came to us,” said a black woman named Rosa, who recorded the scene on her phone. “That’s what politicians used to do.” In northern Manhattan, he met a group of volunteers on the street, a rival smaller volunteer wearing Cuomo T-shirts. A Cuomo volunteer stopped and asked Mamdani to take a selfie with him.

Last Friday night, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan from Inwood to Inwood. The resulting campaign video captures all the stripes of New Yorkers on a hot summer night, along with their young, potential leaders, a portrait of the city. But when we talk about the curb of Jackson Heights, it’s clear that Mamdani has been reduced to a messy social media candidate. He has campaigned on a range of policy goals, which could be higher taxes for the wealthy and corporations, rents frozen by stable apartments, free buses, universal child care, and more, which helped him build support, isn’t this considered a democracy? It does happen when you get a vote. It seems that on Tuesday he not only won, he also re-launched the city’s political map, gaining obvious support in Upper Manhattan, Eastern Queens and South Brooklyn, which is considered a reliable Cuomo territory. As of Wednesday morning, Mamdani had 43.5% of the first-choice ballots in the city’s ranking elected election system, and 93% of the expected votes reportedly reportedly guaranteed his victory, when the votes for the elector were redistributed.

A public service that Mamdani has already offered to the city: Almost ended CuomoHe tried to recover four years after resigning from the governor who was a scandal of sexual harassment and abuse of power. Cuomo insisted on the campaign that the city was in chaos and that only he could solve the problem while avoiding direct contact with voters and the press. He leads in every poll of the game until the end. The city’s highest and most powerful politician, recognized among trade unions and community leaders; and taking itself as if victory was inevitable. Cuomo has been governor for nearly 11 years, and he has accumulated more power every year until the end, and he is arguably the most powerful governor in the history of the country. His mania reached his signature A five million dollar book deal Write a memoir boasting about its pandemic leadership before there is even a vaccine, although dozens of New Yorkers still die Coronavirus weekly. Finally, he was washed away by a thirty-three-year-old socialist who had over $25 million. In short, Cuomo underestimated the New Yorker’s fatigue with him. The city’s auditor-general Brad Lander was third in the game after crossing each other in the final days of the game.

On the roadside of Jackson Heights, Mamdani and I talked about New York, shaped by news of youth alliances and class consciousness, and the old New York defined by ethnic groups, institutions and communities. He called age the “definition aspect” of the election, but he insisted that the old and the new did not have to conflict. “I was very happy in many conversations with Greater New Yorkers who told me that their son or daughter, niece or their niece introduced them to the campaign,” he said. “I think it shows the leadership of the new generation.” The preliminary results on Tuesday showed that Mamdani fell behind Cuomo by 13% in the poorest neighborhoods in the city, indicating how much work Mamdani has in his lead to establishing himself as a candidate for the city’s working class. Mandani said even if people at the bottom of the city’s economy experience the cost of living in the city more intensely, even if it is stronger. He said renters and homeowners felt squeezed. “A quarter of New Yorkers live in poverty, but we know that more New Yorkers live in a permanent state of anxiety, whether they can continue to bear the city,” he told me. “This anxiety extends through multiple income ranges, and it shows how it is a crisis that makes many lives in these five boroughs suffocating, a crisis threatening to make the city once a city that once was the one you can spend it now.”