Mamdani, who proudly calls himself a socialist and ran as a Democrat, solidly clinched the win and will be sworn in on January 1.
Silver linings: At least now there’s one more rent-stabilized apartment in Astoria that could be made available to an actual poor person!
Zohran Mamdani, who proudly calls himself a socialist and ran as a Democrat, solidly clinched the win and will be sworn in as mayor of New York City on January 1. Turnout was enormous: More than 2 million voted this election day, the highest participation in a citywide election since 1969.
Full vote results aren’t in—just 91 percent currently reporting, per Associated Press tallies—but ex-gov Andrew Cuomo came in at 41.6 percent of the vote, with Republican Curtis Sliwa garnering merely 7.1 percent. Mamdani cleared the 50 percent threshold.
The 34-year-old Mamdani has no management experience, and very little work experience. (But «this new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed at odds with one another», he assures us in his victory speech.) He worked briefly at a nonprofit in Queens before launching a bid for state Assembly. He was mostly absent as an assemblyman, barely voting in Albany at all. Maybe it’s better that way. He’s spent a fair bit of time speaking on Democratic Socialists of America panels and at meetings, including one where he suggested, in 2023, that when the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) «boot» is «on your neck» it’s been «laced by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces].» This soundbite summarizes him perfectly: It’s not really clear what he’s talking about, except that there’s a vaguely anti-colonialist, anti-Israel sentiment that plays really well with his Frantz Fanon-reading liberal-arts-school base. (To take him more seriously, as we now must, it’s possible he’s referring to the NYPD’s international liaison program, which maintains offices—for training and counterterrorism purposes—in more than a dozen different countries; so why single out Israel?)
Other than his little speaking gigs, Mamdani’s experience is sparse. No matter. He’s now in charge of a workforce of 300,000. Whatever could go wrong?
I know a lot of people disagree with Zohran’s policies, but I think it’s distasteful to ruin the excitement by saying so. He’s a 34-year-old who just got his first real job, and we should let him (and his parents!) feel good about that.
Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) November 5, 2025
At least he’s highly educated: Mamdani went to the Bronx High School of Science, the elite public school where one must take an admissions test to get into, at which he «personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are.» He called for the specialized admissions test to be abolished, before mysteriously reversing course later in his campaign. He’s called for gifted programs for young kids to be abolished. He seeks to pull the ladder up after him now that he’s climbed it—and this is one area he’ll have a lot of control over.
After Bronx Science, Mamdani went to hoity-toity liberal arts school Bowdoin, in Maine, where he majored in Africana studies, graduating in 2014 right before peak «wokeness» took hold. Mamdani has been steeped in the language of postcolonial theory, of the oppression olympics, of third-worldism. He’s focused on class. He’s been marinading in these ideas for years.
«I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation», Mamdani told his followers in his victory speech.
