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AMY GOODMAN: In this Democracy Now! special, we look at the rise of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. On November 4th, he made history by winning the race to become the next mayor of New York City. The democratic socialist is the first Muslim and first person of South Asian descent elected to lead the largest city in the United States. At 34 years old, he’s also the youngest person elected to the office in over a century. His meteoric rise from a little-known state assemblymember to his stunning upset over former Governor Andrew Cuomo has sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party.
Today, we spend the hour hearing Zohran Mamdani in his own words and look at the grassroots campaign behind him. Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved to New York as a child. His parents are the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani. In 2020, Zohran Mamdani won a seat in the New York Assembly representing Astoria, Queens.
In October 2021, Mamdani appeared on Democracy Now! for the first time while taking part in a 15-day hunger strike to demand debt relief for New York taxi drivers.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I’m participating in solidarity with the Taxi Worker Alliance and to try and bring to light what the consequences are of the city’s inaction for many years and now their completely insufficient plan for debt relief, because, you know, it is — we started this hunger strike last Wednesday. We’ve now completed seven full days of being without food, one of the most basic elements of dignity. And the consequences we have seen in our own bodies — you know, an inability to sleep, unrelenting hunger, moments of blurred vision, stress, headaches — these are the same consequences that I heard drivers talk about when they say what the physical realities are of being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, unable to take care of your family and seeing no way out. So, it’s important for us as legislators to bring to light what it is that people are suffering from out of view of those in the political elite, and bring it right front and center in front of City Hall.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2022, New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani came back on Democracy Now! after the Republican Party won control of the House of Representatives, in part because Republicans flipped four seats in New York.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You can only get so far presenting a negative version of the Republican vision. We can only get so far telling people that “Vote to defeat Lee Zeldin.” We need to have an affirmative vision. The Working Families Party has laid out what that vision could look like, and now the Democratic Party needs to do so, as well.
And when I think about that, I think particularly about two issues: housing and the climate crisis. Right? More than 75% of New Yorkers across the state are concerned about rising rents, and more than 67% believe that we need to pass good cause eviction as a means by which to keep those rents under control.
AMY GOODMAN: In October 2023, I spoke to Zohran Mamdani when he took part in a historic protest when the group Jewish Voice for Peace and their allies shut down the main terminal of Grand Central Station during rush hour to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: My name is Zohran Mamdani. I’m an assemblymember for parts of Astoria and Long Island City. And I’m here today to join thousands of Jewish New Yorkers, rabbis and allies to say that the time is now for an immediate ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean to you that on this Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, thousands of Jews are here at Grand Central saying “Ceasefire now”?
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: It shows that what we have been told about the consent for this genocide is not true. So many of the Jewish New Yorkers here are struggling through heartbreak and mourning of October 7th, and they have made it very clear that do not use their heartbreak, their tragedy as the justification for the genocide of Palestinians. In over two-and-a-half weeks, we’ve already seen more than 7,000 Palestinians be killed, close to 3,000 Palestinian children, one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes. These New Yorkers, and so many across the state, are saying the time is now for a ceasefire, and if you’re not calling for it, you’re supporting a genocide.
AMY GOODMAN: Last October, Mamdani joined Democracy Now! as he launched his mayoral campaign, and laid out the platform he’s now known for.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We are going to freeze the rent for every single rent-stabilized tenant for every single year of the mayoralty. We are going to make buses free and fast across this entire city. And we are going to enact universal child care at no cost for all New Yorkers for children from the ages of 6 weeks to 5 years. These are the policies that will set us apart, and these are the policies that resonate with New Yorkers’ concerns.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And if you could talk some more about your stance on the war in Gaza, which clearly — or, in the Palestinian territories, which clearly is not normally a plank of a candidate for mayor in New York City, but certainly will affect how people vote?
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You know, I think there’s tremendous anger and alienation across New York City today, whether it’s theses corruption crises or the cost of living or the fact that our tax dollars are continuing to fund a genocide across Palestine. And what voters are looking for is someone who can speak clearly to that crisis of confidence and of faith in the power of government to be a positive force in people’s lives, and to offer them a vision that is worth believing in.
And that is what I am going to do in this campaign, is to put forward an economic agenda that puts working-class New Yorkers first, all while recognizing the world as it actually is, which is one where there is a hierarchy of human life that the United States government is following that states it is fine for Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians and Yemenis to be killed, because that is simply the worth that they have in the eyes of our federal government.
AMY GOODMAN: Over the next 12 months, Mamdani would rise in the polls from last place to first, shocking the political establishment by building a historic grassroots coalition. In June, he defeated disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done. My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.
AMY GOODMAN: Zohran Mamdani came back on Democracy Now! in September, hours after New York Mayor Eric Adams ended his reelection campaign. Mamdani talked about his plans to “Trump-proof” New York City following the president’s threat to cut off federal funds to New York if Mamdani won the general election.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You know, I think it’s — it is a sad reality in this country, where we have a president who ran an entire campaign premised on cheaper groceries and lowering the cost of living, and what he has instead delivered, time and again, is an exacerbating of that very crisis, all while focusing on the persecution of his supposed political enemies. And when we talk about Trump-proofing the city, it’s not just the question of hiring the 200 additional lawyers at our law department to bring us back to the staffing levels prior to the pandemic. It’s a question of actually standing up and fighting Donald Trump, and fighting Donald Trump because what his agenda is doing is endangering the welfare of New Yorkers.
This bill that he recently ushered through Washington, D.C., it throws millions of New Yorkers off of their healthcare. It steals SNAP benefits from so many hungry New Yorkers. And it does all of this in the interest of the largest wealth transfer that we’ve seen in this country. And to do those things while speaking about a cost-of-living crisis, it is truly a betrayal of so much of what his campaign was premised on, and an illustration of why he is so fearful of our campaign, because, unlike him, we don’t just diagnose this crisis, we will deliver on it. We will actually ensure that we have New Yorkers who can afford the city that they call home, that we freeze the rent for more than 2 million New Yorkers, we make buses fast and free, which are currently the slowest ones in the nation, and we deliver universal child care. And that’s what Donald Trump is afraid of: the stark contrast between our delivery of those things and what he has done as the president of this country. …
New Yorkers are facing twin crises: authoritarianism from Washington, D.C., and an affordability crisis from the inside. And we often tend to separate these out. We think about democracy as an ideal that must be protected, but not that democracy also has to be able to deliver on the material needs of working people. And it was Fiorello La Guardia that said, “You cannot preach … liberty to a starving land.” You have to be able to deliver on both fronts.
AMY GOODMAN: Zohran Mamdani on Democracy Now! in September. Coming up, we look at how working-class South Asians helped propel Mamdani to victory.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
In this holiday special, we’re continuing to look at the rise of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Just prior to the November election, Democracy Now!‘s Anjali Kamat filed this report looking at a crucial, often overlooked portion of Mamdani’s base: working-class South Asians.
ANJALI KAMAT: It’s Friday afternoon in a quiet neighborhood in Kensington, Brooklyn. These women are members of DRUM Beats, an advocacy group for low-income South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities here in New York. and they’re getting ready to canvass for Zohran Mamdani.
KAZI FOUZIA: So, half of the list, you’re going to cover with them. Then they will — they will find them.
ANJALI KAMAT: They split up into groups, and I followed them as they knocked on dozens of doors. Armed with colorful flyers about the campaign in Bengali and Urdu and dozens of Zohran pins, they explained why they thought Mamdani was the best candidate, and reminded neighbors about early-voting times and locations.
DRUM BEATS CANVASSER: So, November 4th is the final vote. As-salamu alaykum.
ANJALI KAMAT: Their enthusiasm was infectious, often bursting into Bengali chants of “My mayor, your mayor.”
DRUM BEATS CANVASSERS: Āmāra mēẏara, tōmāra mēẏara. Āmāra mēẏara, tōmāra mēẏara. Āmāra mēẏara, tōmāra mēẏara.
ANJALI KAMAT: And for the most part, it seemed to work. I spoke to Fahd Ahmed, who runs DRUM Beats, which stands for Desis — or South Asians — Rising Up and Moving. Their organization was among the very first to endorse Zohran’s run for mayor last year.
FAHD AHMED: Many people will say that, “Oh, well, it’s a South Asian-descended candidate, and so it must be an identity thing.” But we’ve had several South Asian or Indo-Caribbean candidates, and none of them elicited this response. And I think the fact that the campaign spoke to the very material issues of working-class people has, first and foremost, has really made a very significant difference.
ANJALI KAMAT: I also spoke to Jagpreet Singh, DRUM Beats’ political director, who’s in charge of endorsing political candidates and getting the vote out.
JAGPREET SINGH: When Zohran had come to us, to begin with, he said his base, the base he was looking at, were three planks. Number one was the leftist progressives. His second plank was rent-stabilized tenants. And the third was Muslim and South Asian communities, communities that have not been previously galvanized, have not been previously activated, usually have some of the lowest voter turnout rates. So, from the get-go, our communities were going to be a big part of his base.
ANJALI KAMAT: Kazi Fouzia moved to New York City from Bangladesh in 2008. Now she’s DRUM’s organizing director. The tireless campaigning by women like her was crucial to Zohran’s victory in the primaries. In some neighborhoods, voter turnout among South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities doubled.
KAZI FOUZIA: Just 24/7, they are thinking how to win. Some of them work in the cafeteria in the school. Some of them also work in the retail store. Some of them are home health worker, take care of the patient. One of my leader actually restoring ship. They are not only just volunteers. They build, actually, movement.
ANJALI KAMAT: After a long evening of canvassing, they’re back at the office only to get ready for more of the same the next day and every day after until the elections.
KAZI FOUZIA: These all tired people come together and creating movement to show the world how political campaign supposed to be looked like. The early vote kick-off.
CAMPAIGNER: Six, seven million voters. In June, we won the primary because of historic numbers of new voters that turned out. We changed the electorate.
ANJALI KAMAT: Earlier this month, Zohran Mamdani addressed an excited crowd of supporters at a Bangladeshi restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens.
ANNOUNCER: And up next now we hear from the Zohran Mamdani!
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: What we did in the primary is we increased the turnout of Muslims by 60%, the turnout of South Asians by 40%. And when I stood in front of the world and gave a speech that night, I made sure to remember the Bangladeshi aunties that knocked on the doors across this city. And people have asked me, “What will it mean to have a Muslim mayor?” What my grandmother Kulsum taught me, that to be a good Muslim is to be a good person. It is to help those in need and to harm no one. The truth of this campaign, it is a truth that believes in each one of the people in this room and their possibility. It is the truth that looks at the youngest among us and sees that they could be anything in this city, anything they want.
ANJALI KAMAT: At the Jackson Heights farmers’ market that weekend, the high school students who met Mamdani at the restaurant were still thinking about his words.
MOHINI MEHBOOBA: If I could run for mayor, I think I would have a lot of great ideas, just like Zohran, making New York City affordable. I want to be able to live here without any worry about paying rent. I know I’m just 17, but I want to be able to move out next year and experience living in the city, because I know, even for my family, it’s really hard to pay the rent. So, yeah.
ANJALI KAMAT: Mohini Mehbooba is one of the youth members of DRUM Beats. A talented artist, Mohini was giving people henna tattoos that spelled “Zohran.”
MOHINI MEHBOOBA: We work so hard phone banking, canvassing. And I love doing it, and I’m going to do some more today, hopefully. And it’s just a really good feeling to do something that will be able to change for us, as well.
PHONE BANKER: Thank you so much.
ANJALI KAMAT: At the DRUM Beats office in Jackson Heights, there’s a different group of people phone banking every afternoon. They’re reaching out to communities in a variety of South Asian languages, with volunteers making calls in Nepali, Urdu and Bengali. A group of high school students are also making calls — in between joking around.
SAMMY: Hey. My name is Sammy, and I am a high school volunteer for the Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Have you ever heard about Zohran Mamdani? Are you planning to vote for him on the Election Day, November 4th?
ANJALI KAMAT: High school student Miftahun Mohona explains why she’s passionate about campaigning for Zohran Mamdani.
MIFTAHUN MOHONA: Even though I’m not at the age to vote, not yet, I still care about, like, people above 18, like for them to vote for Zohran, because the thing is, if they vote for the — if they vote for the right person, that also benefits me, because I live in a world where it’s very corrupt, and every action that the people over 18 taking, like voting, their action means a lot to me, as well, because I come from a working-class family. We don’t have many benefits. We don’t have much resources.
ANJALI KAMAT: Across working-class South Asian communities in the city, there’s a deep belief that Zohran Mamdani will stand up for them if he becomes mayor. A big reason for that is his role in the taxi workers’ protest against medallion debt back in 2021. When the drivers decided to go on a hunger strike, Assemblyman Mamdani joined them for the full 15 days. Kazi Fouzia remembers how moved the community was.
KAZI FOUZIA: I saw how long he’s doing the hunger strike, and he almost die in that time. So I feel this call, actually, real solidarity. Solidarity, not just come and talk and leave. Solidarity, also he put his body frontline.
ANJALI KAMAT: DRUM, or Desis Rising Up and Moving, was founded in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 2000 as a membership organization of low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean workers and youth. For most of its history, their membership has faced the brunt of domestic repression and hate crimes that followed the September 11th attacks. Kazi Fouzia found herself the target of NYPD surveillance when she started organizing in immigrant Muslim communities.
KAZI FOUZIA: I came 2008 this country, and I used to work in retail store in Jackson Heights. And that time, I’m doing volunteering organizing with the DRUM, and one day I found informer behind me.
ANJALI KAMAT: A few years later, as hate crimes against South Asian immigrants spiked again, many people suggested she stopped wearing her hijab.
KAZI FOUZIA: People asked me, 2013, “You should take off your hijab because it’s not safe anymore.” We saw how much isolations and fear community have after 9/11.
ANJALI KAMAT: Jagreet Singh remembers his Sikh family members cutting their hair and beards and wearing American flag T-shirts to stay safe after 9/11.
JAGPREET SINGH: This is a reality we lived with for a long time, that we had to hide ourselves, that we had to retreat back, that we had to fight for everything that we wanted. And we’re in this reality now where Zohran Mamdani is about to become mayor of our city, a very outward Muslim man, South Asian, who is very much into his identity, who does not hide his identity.
ANJALI KAMAT: From the shadows of post-9/11 repression and fear, the Mamdani campaign has given this community a new sense of political confidence and purpose.
KAZI FOUZIA: So, if you see now our member, our community member, our religious leader, our neighbors, all now talking, talking, talking for Zohran. If they go back to 9/11 era and they try to talk about Islamophobia, xenophobia, it’s not going to sell. It’s not going to sell. It’s over. People are not going to go back the isolating zone anymore. If they try to implementing this, they will push back.
ANJALI KAMAT: If Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election, DRUM Beats, like other progressive groups that backed Mamdani from the start, could find themselves in a brand-new role: collaborating with the administration to govern the city. It’s been a long journey from advocating for those on the margins to potentially having a seat at the table. Here’s Jagpreet Singh again.
JAGPREET SINGH: Talks about what the administration would look like are still a little premature, but the campaign and the administration has been very willing to work with organizations like ours at DRUM Beats. It feels amazing to see that we now get to take up leadership, that we get to not only have a seat at the table but run how our city runs. It’s not just going to happen by him being in office, no matter how charismatic he is.
ANJALI KAMAT: Kazi Fouzia says that if Mamdani wins the race but is unable to keep his campaign promises down the road, their members will not hesitate to push his administration and hold their feet to the fire.
KAZI FOUZIA: Zohran make impossible possible in his grassroot movement, too, in the mayoral campaign. So Zohran have to keep his promises and fulfill his commitment. And we will be support all the time him. And also, if he don’t fulfill or keep his promises, we will hold him accountable.
ANJALI KAMAT: In the event of a Mamdani victory, his administration will not face an easy path. People like Fahd Ahmed are already preparing for how to confront the many challenges and threats that may come, whether from the Trump administration or Wall Street and real estate interests.
FAHD AHMED: Our side, there will be real challenges of trying to run a city as a left, when we don’t have extensive experience of doing that. But how it is that we govern, tending to the actual material needs that come up in day-to-day administration of the city, while having a vision that is transformative, that does believe that cities and society can be shaped differently and can function in ways