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Can Zohran really do it?
We’re a month and four days from the Democratic primary in New York City and State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani has more individual donors than the next four candidates combined. He’s got the backing of a number of exciting young famous people and has a double-digit lead polling over the next leading candidate. And yet …
—Matt Stieb
MAMDANI-MENTUM
Zohran vs. Cuomo
The mononymous mayoral election.
… A recent poll shows that the democratic-socialist candidate is 24 points behind Andrew Cuomo, the unpopular, but still dominant, ex-governor. While Mamdani has turned Central and North Brooklyn into a stronghold, the more conservative outer-borough electorate that put Eric Adams into office might not buy into his progressive positions on Palestine, universal child care, rent freezes, and free city buses. As one (kinda gross?) Democratic strategist told E. Alex Jung: “Zohran is Cuomo’s wet-dream opponent.” I spoke with Alex, who just profiled Mamdani for our latest issue, about the challenges facing the 33-year-old politician over the next month.
Zohran is so interesting because we've seen many elections where an effective online messager hasn’t had a ground game and they get wiped out. But he’s doing both. And it’s not enough? What does it take to become the mayor if you’re not named Andrew Cuomo?
I guess that sort of remains to be seen a little bit. The fact that he's really good online is translating into money and boots on the ground. I think it clearly translates in some material way, and I see canvassers all the time. I guess it's just a bigger question of, Is he making inroads into the communities that he needs in order to win? The polling does reflect what we see, which is a lot of strength among young white Brooklynites and not so much with older Black and Latino voters across Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. If he's serious about winning, he needs to invest heavily into tapping those networks that won't be as reachable via Instagram.
You write about movies. Zohran’s mom is a director. Did you guys talk about movies?
Just a little bit. He’s on the campaign trail or doing Assembly work basically 24/7, but on a day off he said he went to go see Sinners. But no, we didn’t chat a ton about movies. I do know that he likes Miyazaki. I can say that he’s a Princess Mononoke fan.
In the story, you write about how Zohran’s father was part of the Indian community expelled from Uganda by despot Idi Amin. When Mamdani met Eric Adams, the mayor said he was “fascinated” by the dictator. What?
I wish I had gotten more insight into that. Unfortunately, I feel like Zohran didn't really spill as much as I wanted about the content and quality of his conversation with Adams. He did say that the mayor had done a book report on Amin back in the day, which I don't think got included in the piece. I think this might have been a long fascination for him, although his team denies it.
What’s another fun detail that got cut?
Okay, so when he was running for VP at Bronx Science, Zohran made posters in the UPS style with its slogan, “What Can Brown Do for You?” I thought that was really funny, but he got yelled at by administrators who said that it was racist. He was like, How can this be racist?
One thing that I totally forgot was that in May 2021, Andrew Yang was leading the polls. Is that a hopeful sign for Zohran voters? Does it show how chaotic everything is? Or just that polling sucks?
Also, de Blasio was behind Christine Quinn and Anthony Weiner around this time in 2013, although some other stuff happened that summer. But I think polling is non-predictive in some ways, because Zohran is making a genuine effort to expand the electorate and that is not necessarily something that is going to be captured in polls.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Ask a Boss
It’s memoir season.
“Three tiny titans — rich man, poor man, Canadian — came to New York,” begins our old pal Choire Sicha’s review of new memoirs from Keith McNally, Barry Diller, and Graydon Carter (all excerpted in New York magazine). Reading through them, Choire has some wonderful thoughts on the city and how it rewards fake-it-til-you-make-it types. But his main takeaway is to just go big:
Click Your Way Out
Some mayoral editorial content that wasn’t: Last year I pitched a “story” in which I would make a Norman Mailer–style run for the mayor’s office with a plan to hijack the Republican primary on a single-issue platform of banning alternate-side parking. My editors thought better of it.