It was the hottest day of the year, and the hottest man in New York was headed uptown. Way uptown. Inwood, where the street odometer clicks past the 200s, so far uptown it makes your eyes bleed if you have to come from Brooklyn on a 1 train with broken air conditioning. Kids splashed in the fountain in Fort Tryon Park. Fruit stands slung avocados. A whiteboard in the window of a barbershop advertised “MARY JANE- 8THS- $20- SOUR DIESEL.” The sun refracted off the pavement and bounced up into your eyelids. Election day was tomorrow. Like the heat, Zohran was rising.
The smiling 33-year-old running for mayor on the “Maybe, for once, we can have nice things?” platform had a campaign stop scheduled at a nondescript residential stone apartment building on Post Avenue. He would be accompanied by City Council member Carmen de la Rosa, who grew up in this building, and whose elderly mother peeked out from a second floor window over the door, surveying the growing crowd below. The scrum of politics-adjacent people grew by the minute as the early afternoon approached. Some reporters, some photographers, a couple of TV trucks, some campaign staffers, some high key volunteers in homemade Zohran t-shirts pushing literature on confused residents who were sitting out on the block holding those little plastic electric fans in front of their faces. The kind of people who can show up at a campaign stop at 2 pm on a Monday for quasi-professional reasons.
Jamaal Bowman, the former left wing Congressman from The Bronx who lost his reelection campaign last year, wandered up. Just for fun. He looked like a free man. White shorts, white polo shirt, white Nike high tops, shaved head, goatee. He’s not running for anything. He was just there for the energy. “It’s fucking awesome, man. Nothing else to say.” Bowman is built like a defensive lineman and talks with his hands and backslaps and daps people up constantly as he speaks. “It’s exciting, man. It’s exactly what we need, what the city needs, what the country needs, the world needs. We gotta win tomorrow so we can get right back to it and win the general. It’s fucking great.”
He talked so much like a regular person that I had a hard time believing he had spent even that small amount of time in Congress. “I was there [in DC] when Trump gave his joint address. And yeah man, I felt the energy level low amongst the party. That’s why this race is so important. We’re talking about the biggest city, in my opinion the best city, incredibly diverse city, working class city, labor driven city. So if we can do this here, it’s inspiring for the country. I already got people hitting me up like, ‘Jamaal, after you finish up with Zohran, I need you to help me in Rhode Island. I need you to help me in Jersey. I need you to help me in Kentucky.’ Local organizing and local movements can—especially with social media, right? We don’t have to rely on CNN to get shit out. It could be an inspiration.”
Bowman himself had lived the entire cycle: an inspiring local win, ascending to the national stage, then being redistricted and deposed, one more victim of the American political machine’s omnipresent determination to crush the left. Now he had found a new reason for hope. He was back in his element. He is a New York City dude. “Washington, they fugazi up there!” he said. “It’s a bunch of frauds.”
Eventually, just late enough to build the anticipation, Zohran arrived. He was wearing a black suit and a fresh white dress shirt and a burgundy tie. He had gotten a haircut and his beard was freshly trimmed. The press descended on him, a level of press comparable to what presidential candidates get on the campaign trail. Zohran stood with his back against the building wall with a halo of cameras bristling around him, responding to shouted questions. He talked about making New York City affordable. The city, he said, “is becoming a museum to what was once possible.” A nice phrase.
If you are Zohran Mamdani and you are a young DSA-aligned state legislator who was relatively unknown six months ago and who now is tied going into the last day of the Democratic mayoral primary in the biggest city in America, you owe your surging campaign to a lot of people who believe in you enough to volunteer on your behalf, and those people are going to show up at your campaign stops, and you are going to have to talk to them. The women with homemade “DOMINICANS FOR ZOHRAN” t-shirts, the older women from Harlem with loud voice decrying Andrew Cuomo to passersby, the young Brooklyn girls who canvassed for you and showed up to hand out signs, the extended universe of New Yorkers who once came across you somewhere or belonged to an organization that you belonged to and, now that you are famous, are anxious to come up and share that connection with you in person—all of these people want to speak to you. They want to whisper in your ear to describe their personal connection to you and to the grand thing that you are doing. They want to share the space with someone who may be on the verge of something surprisingly big. All of these people were there, on the hot sidewalk. They would come up and say a few words and Zohran would break out in a smile at the memory they shared, and he would hug them and pose for pictures. I have seen many politicians in many places go through this same routine and one thing that distinguishes Zohran from most of them is that, in my judgment, he looks genuinely happy doing this. He seems to actually like people. You can’t say that about everyone running for mayor.
After all the greetings, Zohran and the City Councilwoman set off walking down Post Avenue towards the main drag of Dyckman Street, trailed by a cloud of 100 reporters and enthusiasts. On the corner of Post, we all strode past a fire hydrant that had been unscrewed and was shooting water out onto the sizzling blacktop of Academy Street. A real fucking New York City tableau.
On Dyckman, Zohran ducked into a few businesses. No use trying to follow. He went into Pizza Palace and a dozen cameramen immediately surge in behind him, blocking the door like mosquitoes in an air filter. Someone handed a campaign sign reading “FAST FREE BUSES” to a man selling shaved ice from a cart, who looked confused. But then Zohran came back and bought a red shaved ice as the crowd surrounded him and the man seemed to get caught up in the spirit of the moment, and looked excited to be in the middle of something important. The guy working in the empanada spot gave a thumbs up as we passed. The women in the nail salon pounded on the window gleefully.
We all crossed the street and Zohran went into Kenny Bakery—“BIZCOCHO DOMINICANO. DULCES FINOS. REPOSTERIA.” Then he squeezed back out and stood on the sidewalk in front of the bakery windows that were plastered with stock photos of cookies and cakes, giving a little complimentary speech about Carmen de la Rosa, who was escorting him around the neighborhood. The reporters pressed in on him and the passersby, struck by a vague sense that someone notable was here, pressed in with them. I was back against the wall and Zohran was directly in front of me. By now he had shed his black jacket. The entire back of his white shirt had turned transparent with sweat, and you could see each individual dark hair on his back pressed up against the fabric. “He doesn’t usually sweat,” a campaign staffer next to me shrugged. He would be taping the Colbert Show in three hours.
A teenage girl walking past got a glimpse of Zohran. Her hands flew up over her mouth. “Oh my god,” she gasped, in the manner of someone who has seen their teen idol. “Oh my god.” She had her cell phone camera out but was hovering shyly on the fringes. Seeing this, one of the older women who was volunteering for the campaign snatched her up and marched her directly into the heart of scrum. “ZOHRAN, there is a YOUNG PERSON here who wants to meet you!” she boomed, sweeping away all in her path. Thus the young woman got her picture, before swishing back out onto the fringes, hands still clasped in front of her mouth, vibrating.
There was a very Bobby Kennedy vibe to it all. A young politician, exciting, relatable, idealistic, kind, creating a growing center of political power by attracting people to his cause. (Zohran has better politics than Bobby Kennedy, though.) American politics is dirty and oligarchical, but there are some races, like this mayoral primary, that throw it all into exceptionally sharp relief. On one side, the likable young believer who wants affordable homes and free buses and seems to actually enjoy the presence of his fellow humans, enough to inspire forty thousand people to go fan out across the big city knocking on doors for him. On the other side, the grim, disgraced, sexually harassing ex-governor, high-handed, dismissive, remote, inaccessible, campaigning from on high, fueled by a super PAC filled with more than $20 million by a handful of billionaires, endorsed by the skeletal faces of the old establishment. Most of that super PAC’s money has been spent to produce a tsunami of negative advertisements about Zohran, all of which end up in my building’s trash chute. The city has been blanketed for weeks in a layer of glossy mailers that say “Zohran Mamdani is a SOCIALIST who wants to ELIMINATE POLICE and put HOMELESS PEOPLE right on YOUR subway train, sitting right next to you, probably. Can we risk that?” And then at the bottom in small letters it says “Paid for by the Normal Regular Folks Who Love New York City PAC—Top three funders, Mike Bloomberg, Satan, Amalgamated Poison Corporation.”
Is it possible to have one nice thing? We shall see. Somehow Zohran’s penetration into the public consciousness has peaked exactly, on the very day, of the election, with the polls drawing even at the last moment, so that anything seems possible. Everyone who believes that it is possible for politics to suck less will be smashed with a wave of either euphoria or crushing cynicism very soon.
But when people believe in things, they work. As the rally dispersed, one supporter, a pregnant woman with a white Zohran t-shirt hugging her belly, strode down Dyckman with a fistful of fliers. She wasn’t done yet. She went straight up to every person on the street she walked by—aggressively, I must say—thrusting a flier into their hands, berating them in Spanish to go vote. “No clasifique a Cuomo!” she would declare. Old men sitting on folding chairs in the shade would shrink back a bit, and accept the flier, looking a little intimidated. “Vota por Mamdani! Zohran Mamdani!” Then she would beeline to the next person on the sidewalk who was not fast enough to dodge her. There was no escape from her zeal. Because it was real. Andrew Cuomo cannot buy that.
Zohran’s staff discussed having him take the train down to his next campaign stop, but vetoed the idea— “The subway would be a whole thing.” The rest of us trudged back to the 1 train. The air conditioning was broken again. Among the sweating crowd was a woman in a blue “Hot Girls for Zohran” shirt. She was hot, it’s true. But so were we all. And so can we all be. All we have to do is believe.
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Related reading: Our interview with Zohran; Stand For Something; How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself.
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Wow, what a glorious piece of writing and a wonderful way to start the day. We need this kind of leader/representative everywhere. Thank you for writing this.
So *many* anti-Zohran mailers in the last 3 weeks, it's sick! Someone feels threatened and is VERY frightened.
I voted early (and made sure to do it on Juneteenth). *How come* can't we have nice things?