The sheer magnitude of Zohran Mamdani’s victory as the Democratic nominee for mayor was still sinking in for him a day and a half later. “We won College Point, Brighton Beach, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach,” he told me on the phone, ticking through neighborhoods known to be among the most right-leaning in the city. Power brokers across the party who had lined up behind Andrew Cuomo — the labor unions, county bosses, church leaders, and ward heelers — were now calling him, while business and real-estate executives burned up their own phone lines to figure out how to stop him in November.

Most of the party and the city’s elite had backed Cuomo, if reluctantly given his personality. The former governor had universal name recognition and a strategy to run a campaign much as campaigns had always been run in this city: Get labor unions and political machines on your side, raise a ton of money to blitz the airwaves and mailboxes with advertisements, secure the editorial boards, then roll out endorsements from party elders. Like many mayoral candidates before him, Cuomo would win by putting together a coalition of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers alongside a smattering of whites — the same blocs that had propelled Eric Adams to a primary victory in 2021. There just simply aren’t enough college-educated liberals to propel one of their own to victory, the thinking went, never mind an avowed socialist, especially at a moment when the city was said to be increasingly Trump-curious thanks to concerns over crime and immigration.

Mamdani had a different theory. When he started off at close to zero percent in the polls as a 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist from the backbenches of the State Assembly, his campaign seemed more like an effort at boosting his name recognition than an actual attempt at City Hall. Soon after Mamdani announced, Donald Trump reclaimed the presidency and took a considerable swath of the city with him. Two weeks later, Mamdani set out for Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, and Fordham Road in the Bronx, two areas that saw some of the steepest gains for MAGA. There, he asked voters why they had turned against the Democratic Party. The answers were familiar — the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the skyrocketing prices, the fact that nothing seemed to change. The resultant video of Mamdani in coat and tie respectfully asking working-class New Yorkers of color about their politics went viral, garnering more than 3 million views.

It was a perfect encapsulation of how Mamdani would go on to win: Meet voters where they are, engage on the issues of material concern to them, come up with tangible solutions, then blast the whole thing out to the........

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