It S Zohran Mamdani S New York Hyperallergic

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 27, 2025, 12:21 PM

it s zohran mamdani s new york hyperallergic

The city's art community played an outsized role in the young candidate's historic victory. Read our live coverage. Welcome to Hyperallergic’s live feed for New York City’s 2025 mayoral election. All day Tuesday, November 4, we’ll be reporting live from outside museums, artists’ watch parties, rallies, and polling sites to capture how the city’s cultural community is voting, feeling, and reacting. Drop your “I Voted” selfies and favorite memes, tell us what’s driving your vote, and sound off on ballot measures by tagging us on socials or emailing us at hello@hyperallergic.com. Thanks for following Hyperallergic's live coverage of the NYC mayoral election.

We had fun doing it. Please don't forget: Change is always possible. Good night! Meanwhile: Crackhead Barney takes the early celebrations to the streets. It's the dawn of a new era. Say hi to incoming NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani!

According to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Zohran Mamdani will not actually be the city’s hundred-and-eleventh mayor, as many people have assumed. A historian named Paul Hortenstine recently came across references to a previously unrecorded mayoral term served in 1674, by one Matthias Nicolls. Consequently, on New Year’s Day, after Mamdani places his right hand on the Quran and is sworn in at City Hall, he will become our hundred-and-twelfth mayor—or possibly even our hundred-and-thirty-third, based on the... “The numbering of New York City ‘Mayors’ has been somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent,” a department official disclosed in a blog post this month. “There may even be other missing Mayors.” New York City has already had youthful mayors (John Purroy Mitchel, a.k.a.

the Boy Mayor), ideological mayors (Bill de Blasio), celebrity mayors (Jimmy Walker, a.k.a. Beau James), idealistic mayors (John Lindsay), hard-charging mayors (Fiorello LaGuardia), mayors with little to no prior experience in elected office (Michael Bloomberg), immigrant mayors (Abe Beame), and even one who supported the Democratic Socialists... (That would be David Dinkins.) Whether Mamdani turns out to be a good or a bad mayor, he will also not be alone in either respect. He will, however, be the city’s first Muslim mayor, and the first with family roots in Asia. He is as avowedly of the left as any mayor in city history. And the velocity of his rise to power is the fastest that anyone in town can recall.

Since his general-election trouncing of the former governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani has been preparing for the sober realities of governing—appointments, negotiations, coalition management, policy development. Trying to preserve the movement energy he tapped during the campaign, he has also made an effort to continue the inventive outreach practices that brought him to broad public attention. Just last Sunday, for instance, he sat in a room in the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria (a few blocks from the rent-stabilized apartment he’s giving up to move into Gracie Mansion),... It was a gesture to show that he could look his constituents in the eye, and that he could listen to them. Mamdani ran a disciplined campaign, and he has run a disciplined transition. He didn’t take the bait when Mayor Eric Adams criticized him, told Jews to be afraid of him, and pulled other last-minute maneuvers seemingly designed to undermine him.

Mamdani met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office—and they startled everyone by having an outwardly productive meeting. (Trump happily told Mamdani that it was O.K. to call him a “fascist.”) Mamdani discouraged a young D.S.A. city-council member, Chi Ossé, from staging a primary challenge next year to the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries—a magnanimous move, considering Jeffries’s ongoing chilliness toward Mamdani. In rooms full of wealthy business leaders and in others filled with donors, he has tried to win over skeptics among New York’s élite. (“They are finding themselves, unexpectedly, charmed,” the Times reported recently.) It was a relief to the city’s political establishment when he asked Jessica Tisch, the current police commissioner, whom Adams appointed, to stay in...

Last week, when a top appointee’s old antisemitic tweets surfaced, Mamdani accepted her resignation within hours. Having rocketed, in a matter of months, from one per cent in the polls to mayor, Mamdani seems comfortable facing his doubters. But what he’s up against cannot be overstated. It’s been an open question for centuries as to whether New York is “governable” in a top-to-bottom, municipal, positive sense. For a long time, city government here was considered little more than a trough for Tammany Hall. In the past century, the city proved that it could (more or less) pick up its own garbage, get a handle on crime, and operate large school and hospital systems, even if sometimes just...

It can do more than that, of course, but can it durably make life in New York better, and not just more tolerable, for the bulk of its residents? In his effort to answer affirmatively, Mamdani will have to navigate problems of management, budget, and bureaucracy inside City Hall, and also Trump (does anyone think their chumminess will last?), ICE raids, intransigent billionaires,... The billionaire exodus that was forecast during his campaign has shown no signs of materializing, but one bad blizzard in January could hamper Mamdani’s ambitious agenda for months. The paths and lives of Zohran Mamdani and Ross Barkan are intertwined. Both are outsiders who call New York City home. The Ugandan-born Mamdani—Muslim, faculty brat, and son of a filmmaker—is on the verge of becoming the City’s youngest mayor.

Barkan, who is Jewish, grew up in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge in the shadow of the Verrazzano Bridge, the backdrop for Saturday Night Fever. Back in the day, Irish and Italian Catholic-Americans filled Bay Ridge’s streets. Once upon a time, pubs hosted Sunday night fundraisers for the Irish Republican Army. The neighborhood now boasts a large Palestinian-American population. The city never sleeps. “New York is not America, but it’s got, quite literally, every part of America,” Barkan blogs.

Seven years ago, Mamdani managed Barkan’s failed bid for a seat in the New York state legislature. Time presumably heals wounds. Regardless, Barkan was gob smacked by the magnitude of recent Mamdani’s win. “Mamdani’s victory was stunning in its breadth,” Barkan writes. “Mamdani is now a leader of the American left, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.” A regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine, Barkan has a new book, Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Disorder Broke American Politics, his third non-fiction book alongside...

Barkan’s own loss on the campaign trail has not derailed his arc as journalist or writer. In Fascism or Genocide, he closely examines the grinding tectonics within the Democratic Party. Generational and ideological fault-lines loudly clang as the calendar barrels toward the midterms. Fascism or Genocide trashes Joe Biden and his enablers. The 46th president’s age and disabilities were visible, yet voters were told to ignore what they saw: an old man with good days and bad days. Democrats and Republicans, both, suffer from delusions.

Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams just tried to thwart one of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s trademark proposals: freezing rents for around 1 million rent-stabilized units in the city. Less than two weeks before exiting City Hall, Adams on Thursday, Dec. 18, announced four appointments to the Rent Guidelines Board, after most of the nine-member board's terms expired. Adams, a one-term centrist Democratic mayor, has opposed Mamdani’s rent freeze proposal. Mamdani, who will be sworn in Jan. 1, campaigned on addressing affordability for New Yorkers and would need the board, which sets annual rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, to vote every year against raising rents.

“We’re using every tool in our toolbox to tackle our city’s housing crisis, and that includes appointing smart, seasoned experts to the city’s Rent Guidelines Board,” Adams said in a statement. A City Hall news release said Adams reappointed two current members and appointed two others who “reflect the Adams administration’s ongoing commitment to affordable housing and evidence-based policymaking.” The radicals are now in charge of NYC. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has unveiled his transition team and voters who agreed with his diagnosis that “everything is too expensive” will now have to live with the anti-police activists, anti-merit educrats and anti-Zionist radicals... The moderate center is in for a shock.Take Alex Vitale, Mamdani’s “safety advisor” and author of The End of Policing, who seeks to abolish police departments, viewing them as “a tool of white supremacy.”... They support Mamdani’s plan to replace the NYPD with a “Department of Community Safety” for a range of police calls.

They also reject federal law enforcement assistance – presumably including the successful efforts that recently cleared rival drug gangs from Washington Square Park and the ICE raids that cleaned up Canal Street.The education committee... Goldmark played politics with Yeshiva students’ education by delaying a report that showed students were not receiving the “substantially equivalent” education the law required in 39 schools, and got caught red-handed. Both promise a return to raw politics over quality education for public school families. Equity advocates are also returning, including Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, who serves on the Youth and Education Transition Advisory Committee, and admires convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur and supported every effort to rid NYC public schools of... Familiar figures include Linda “Nothing is creepier than Zionism” Sarsour, who shares Mamdani’s unbridled animus towards Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. The BDS contingent is particularly strong: Waleed Shahid, a “political strategist” who portrays Zionism as a capitalist conspiracy; Tamika Mallory, “equity committee co-chair” and defender of Holocaust denier Louis Farrakhan; Hassaan Chaudhary, a communications...

His campaign was nearly flawless, propelling him from relative obscurity to mayor of one of the world’s most important cities, but his radicalism will have a cost – and presents a unique opportunity for... Millions were spent trying to defeat him, and consequently more than a million voters – mostly Democrats and independents – did not vote for him. Andrew Cuomo’s independent “Fight and Deliver” line effectively served as an “Anyone But Mamdani” option, drawing Democrats, Republicans and independents, many of whom held their noses to vote for Cuomo, primarily to block Mamdani.Those... More New Yorkers voted for Cuomo than for past mayors like Giuliani, de Blasio, or Adams and though he lost, Cuomo demonstrated the depth of opposition to Mamdani’s vision. New York is better than rich-kid socialism and intersectional grievance studies as a governing philosophy and many New Yorkers know it. One clear voting divide was between longtime residents and recent arrivals: the longer one has lived in New York, the more likely they were to support Cuomo; newcomers (five years or less) overwhelmingly backed...

The long term native New Yorkers are the voters a revitalized GOP needs to court. The transition team’s extremism foreshadows challenging times ahead for New York City, but they also offer NYC a chance to reset. The question is will a real opposition emerge? Why everyone is talking about New York City’s new mayoral frontrunner. Thirty-three years old, socialist, Muslim – and now, the likely Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City – Zohran Mamdani was barely known a few months ago. Today, he may be the most popular political voice of a generation.

How did he get here – and could he be here to stay? This episode was produced by Ashish Malhotra, Sonia Bhagat, Amy Walters, with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Melanie Marich, Remas Al Hawari, Kisaa Zehra, Mariana Navarette, and our host, Manuel Rapalo. It was edited by Kylene Kiang and Noor Wazwaz. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer.

It S Zohran Mamdani S New York Hyperallergic

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