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On a rainy Sunday evening in May, the mood inside Brooklyn Steel was, like the candidate, jubilant and young. Around 1,500 people had gathered for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign rally for mayor of New York City. This was a congregation of true believers, the evangelists who not only plan to vote for the 33-year-old democratic socialist and three-term Queens assemblyman but are trying to convince everyone else to do so. The evening’s roster was a concentration of power and cool and changing winds. Before the event began, Julian Casablancas dropped by to say hello with his kids. Ella Emhoff and Councilmember Chi Ossé did a joint endorsement video on the step-and-repeat. Family friend Kal Penn emceed, and Jaboukie Young-White told some jokes. State Senator and “work BFF” Jabari Brisport led the audience in a rousing call-and-response of what has been the lodestone of Mamdani’s pitch: Freeze the … Rent! Make Buses Fast and … Free! Universal … Child Care!

When Mamdani entered the race in October, most wrote him off as just another hat in the ring. He was a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate with a short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy — qualities that were seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race. (Less than a million people voted in the Democratic primary Eric Adams won.) In the intervening six months, however, he’s transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi. His campaign videos are stylish, fun, direct, and in the language of the internet. The first of his to pop came this past fall, after the general election, when he interviewed Trump supporters in the Bronx and Queens, laying out the argument that Democrats had lost touch with the reality of everyday life. On New Year’s Day, he did a polar plunge, diving headfirst into the ocean in a full suit and yelling, “I’m freezing … your rent as the next mayor of New York City!” He’s done the rounds with the tastemakers of the dirtbag left (Hasan Piker, Crackhead Barney, Chapo Trap House) and become a media darling with the politically allergic (Vogue, GQ). He hung out at a “friendraiser” with Alison Roman’s baby. More than anyone else in the race, he looks like he’s having fun.

Mamdani has a genial presence — he is energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a “Who’s your brother’s friend?” kind of way. He has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country and looking for someone with real fight, showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back — and then posting it all on Instagram. The other serious contenders — Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — have failed to break through in a meaningful way. On March 24, Mamdani became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined. More compellingly, his campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls. Recent polls have him at around 20 percent with most of the other ten candidates stagnating in the single digits (or less). The primary will employ a ranked-choice ballot, and many progressives have been hedging their bets by endorsing a slate of candidates. But the rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday — that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Though the odds of that happening are not good. Despite his ignominious resignation in the wake of sexual-harassment allegations and the fact that everyone in Albany hated him, Cuomo’s near-universal name recognition had him polling at 22 percent before he even entered the race. He still commands a double-digit lead in first-round votes. Their respective campaigns are striking foils: Cuomo, who at 67 would become the oldest incoming mayor of New York City ever, has stayed out of the public eye while racking up endorsements from major labor unions. When he does appear, he’s working the Black church circuit. He knows that the path to the Democratic nomination has historically gone through Black and Latino voters, mostly in Southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn. In one simulation, Cuomo is winning those communities by 91 percent and 72 percent by the final round, respectively. To the ire of white liberals, he has a broad multi-racial coalition. While Mamdani is seemingly everywhere in the city, running from protests to rallies to galas, his base is largely white college-educated Brooklynites, with much of his early efforts going toward activating South Asian and Muslim voters, who have traditionally been ignored. “Zohran is Cuomo’s wet-dream opponent,” says one anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist. “Supported by online kids, on the record for ‘defund,’ on the record about Palestine, and little support in Black or Latino communities.”

Mamdani’s detractors think his campaign is more of a vanity project that has gotten out of control. Critics point to his performance in Albany, arguing that he’s someone drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes, and that his biggest achievement — the fare-free-bus pilot program in the 2023 budget — may not be the unqualified success he claims it was. “He’s such a talented communicator, and that’s quite a gift,” says a fellow Democratic legislator. “Yet it doesn’t suffice when it comes to moving legislation or getting something done in the budget process.”

But momentum is its own irrevocable force. Mamdani supporters have had a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left. At the rally, some party members were beginning to fall in line. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who just a week before had named Brad Lander as his first choice, welcomed Mamdani to the stage as “the next mayor of New York City.” Mamdani came out, smile wide, right dimple weaponized. He delivered his stump speech in a tight ten minutes, reciting his policy promises: to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department to handle mental-health crises. How he would actually do all of this was unclear, but tonight, he was selling the dream of a socialist New York.

“There is a myth about this city, one that has persisted for far too long: It’s the lie that life has to be hard in New York,” Mamdani said to a roar of approval. “I don’t believe that for a moment.” At the end of the speech, people cheered and stamped their feet and chanted his name. Some cried. Everyone in the room seemed to share a feeling: that he reminded them of you-know-who. It was the energy, messaging, and presence. The forward-looking, slightly corny confidence that somehow convinces other people to believe, even if just for a spell, that he might be able to pull this off.

A few days before the rally, Mamdani took the train to Albany. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria (rent stabilized) with his wife, Rama Duwaji, 27, an illustrator. He’d been commuting to the capital a couple of times a week as the Legislature hammered out the budget with Governor Kathy Hochul. At Moynihan Train Hall, his communications director, Andrew Epstein, filmed a couple takes on his iPhone of a promotional video for the ZetroCard, a frequent-canvasser card — eight punches and you get a poster.

Mamdani and Epstein finish shooting the video in the train’s café car. It’s the only time Mamdani exhibits the slightest bit of awkwardness, saying his lines next to a guy working on his laptop. Afterward, he settles into his seat with a bag of peanut M&M’s, a pack of Tylenol, and two phones by his side — one so he can take calls and text; the other logged into Zoom for an Assembly meeting so he can vote on the Medical Aid in Dying act, which would allow the terminally ill to end their own lives. “A right people should have, in my humble opinion,” he says.

He got personal dispensation to work remotely because that morning his father, Mahmood Mamdani, a prominent postcolonial-studies professor at Columbia University, had his U.S. citizenship interview. Mamdani and his wife waited at a café nearby while his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, went inside the courthouse with his father. When Mamdani became a U.S. citizen in 2018, “it was a joyful occasion,” he remembers. He’s been on edge about his father’s........

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