Zohran Mamdani's election victory in New York City has sparked a yearning for similar candidates in cities like Houston. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

Where is Houston’s Zohran Mamdani?

As a native New Yorker I got that question a lot from my Houston friends and neighbors. Mamdani’s decisive Election Day victory, buoyed by record voter turnout in the five boroughs, only intensified many Houstonians’ yearning for their own idealistic, anti-establishment happy warrior.

You needn’t be a Marxist scholar to understand his appeal. He’s a 34-year-old millennial with an easy smile who loves the Knicks and Arsenal FC and doesn’t have to try hard to look cool. Before he ran for state assembly he had a “B-list” rap career under the moniker Young Cardamom, and was a music director on movies made by his mother, an acclaimed indie filmmaker. He also has cred on his top issue, affordability, having toiled as a housing organizer in low-income neighborhoods in Queens.

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Some of his ideas sound outlandish, even naive – free buses, a rent freeze for rent-stabilized apartments, city-owned grocery stores – but they’re also straightforward and digestible. Made for online virality. His well-produced campaign videos force even the most hard-bitten cynic to let their guard down and – even for just the length of an Instagram reel – feel inspired, or at least ephemerally charmed.

So where’s the Houston Mamdani? This city has its own list of glaring inequities that can animate a viral social media campaign – including an increasingly unaffordable housing market, which Mamdani and other victorious candidates this year seized on as a winning issue. Houston doesn’t have any card-carrying democratic socialists in elected office, but there’s no shortage of young, progressive political talent.

Democrat Christian Menefee is one of them.

Menefee, 37, checks a lot of the Mamdani boxes. He’s young. He’s got a compelling personal story: the son of military service members who relied on government benefits to buy their first home, keep food on the table and pay for his........

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