How Zahran Mamdani overcame New York’s elite and was elected mayor of New York | World news

Now, the city’s establishment giants were blocking the phones of the candidate and his small team. Most of them didn’t look happy.

“It’s a big problem,” said Maurice Katz, Mamdani’s 26-year-old political adviser, to real estate mogul William C. Rodin in one conversation: “It’s a great day in New York.”

The businessman stopped. “That’s certainly not how I see it,” he replied.

It only took hours for it to become clear that the power brokers and civilian gatekeepers accustomed to running New York saw Mamdani’s rise as akin to a hostile takeover.

A top Cuomo aide has been phoning unions and Democratic officials urging them to withhold support. The old real estate friends quickly began convincing President Donald Trump of the potential White House intervention.

Mamdani’s political rise may be remembered for his thriving primary run that united a new coalition around the city’s growing affordability crisis.

But his election on Tuesday as New York’s 111th mayor is thanks to the behind-the-scenes campaigning that followed.

The arc of his success is amazing. At the beginning of the year, Mamdani’s approval rating was 1%. Only a few New Yorkers knew his name, and his political team estimated the odds of winning at no more than 3%.

Now, at 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century. He will also be the first Muslim mayor and the first South Asian.

This account of how he did it is drawn from interviews with Mamdani’s senior advisers and allies, as well as his critics and rivals. Many spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ignore the referees

When Mamdani began planning a potential campaign a year ago, his challenge was far more basic: getting noticed at all.

A member of the state House of Representatives who had immigrated to New York City at the age of seven, he had almost no citywide profile. Even his fellow socialists thought his views on police and Israel would put a hard cap on his support. The competition against the city’s scandal-plagued mayor, Eric Adams, was expanding by the day.

Mamdani later told an ally that he confided in his then-fiancée, Rama Dawaji, that he didn’t really think he could win. The goal was to build a model for the kind of powerful left-wing campaign that might one day break the grip of the Democratic establishment.

Forget the New York conjured up by political strategists, one future adviser, Zara Rahim, told him last summer. Create a campaign around actual New York City.

The campaign decided to forego the sale of branded swag, a source of income for many candidates, and instead produced special items in limited quantities that could only be earned, incentivizing supporters to give time, not money.

It has hosted events — a scavenger hunt, a soccer tournament — that opponents derided as gimmicks but that attracted thousands of supporters. Many of them later became part of an unparalleled army of volunteers.

The contrast with Cuomo could not be more troubling. A scion of a political dynasty, he was fired from the governor’s office in a sexual harassment scandal. But when he entered the race in March, he acted as if he was still in power.

He rarely appeared in public, threatened unions and fellow Democrats by creating an air of inevitability around him, and relied on a massive $25 million in donations to a super PAC supporting him.

By the time Mamdani and his aides gathered at the Holiday Inn on June 24, the night of the primary, they thought their approach was working. But they were so certain that they would not win outright that first night that they did not prepare for a victory speech.

However, not long after 10 p.m., Mamdani found himself letting congratulatory calls go to voicemail, while he and a group of his aides raced to write one.

Everything is about to change

Inside the campaign, Mamdani and his advisors were exhausted. They planned their next steps as they retreated for a week. They had only hours to face the new reality.

Everything is about to change, Rahim and Katz told Mamdani.

They said he would need to quadruple his staff, carefully reassign his old aides to less important roles and start planning more seriously for the possibility of becoming mayor. If he needed any reminder, police details now accompanied his every move.

Some consolidation soon came after the primaries, especially as labor unions and local party leaders embraced his candidacy. But others, including some of the country’s top Democrats, balked, concerned that association with Mamdani’s far-left views could undermine the party’s chances in next year’s midterm elections.

Adams, who missed the primary, appeared to be regaining ground with support from the city’s business class. Cuomo put himself back in the race as an independent with new fanfare after a brief retreat.

Mamdani also took leave after primary school, traveling to Uganda in late July to attend a long-planned wedding at a family compound.

Seven thousand miles away, in New York, a gunman entered a midtown Manhattan office tower and carried out a deadly mass shooting, including the killing of an off-duty police officer. The attacker had targeted a building that housed Rodin’s offices and killed one of his employees.

Aides woke Mamdani in the night to issue a statement, and he rushed back to New York City. But by the time he landed two days later, Cuomo was on television across the city blaming his opponent, who once called for defunding the police, for the massacre.

It was a disaster. These unfavorable scenes might have changed the course of the entire campaign, had it not been for a twist of fate: the killed officer turned out to be Bangladeshi and Muslim. The family invited the candidate to join them at home, and he arrived directly from Kennedy Airport.

Then, he called a press conference that would be the longest since primary day. He criticized Cuomo for politicizing the moment but also used the platform to emphasize that his views on police have evolved since the days when he called for defunding.

For the first time in weeks, aides breathed a sigh of relief.

“For me, that was the first moment I felt like he was the mayor of New York,” Katz said.

C-Suite charm attack

Mamdani knew he still had a problem.

No mayor has led New York without at least some tacit support from the business elite since the financial crisis of the 1970s. He ran strongly against them in the primary, but as summer turned to fall, his advisers worried that the group’s leaders might be able to push both Adams and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, out of the race.

A one-on-one contest with Cuomo in the general election could be disastrous.

Mamdani got busy. He asked Katherine S. Wilde, head of the partnership in New York City, for a list of all the key business leaders he should contact and began reaching out to them one by one.

The only child of two prominent cultural figures, Mamdani was comfortable with the rich and powerful. He explained why he had not changed his basic positions, but he also asked for advice and showed more flexibility than his reputation suggested.

Mamdani said his goal was to expand child care and free buses in some groups, but he was open to repealing the proposed tax increase if he could find another funding source.

At a crowded meeting with the Association for a Better New York, a civic group of business leaders, he surprised attendees by proposing a regulatory change that developers had longed for to speed up construction.

Some who were expecting a sharp ideologue came away impressed. For others, his willingness to at least participate was a welcome contrast with former Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive who was eager to mock Manhattan’s elite, and with Cuomo’s hurtful style.

Mamdani also took a new tone with his Democratic colleagues.

He has been a thorn in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s side for years, once saying her actions were the reason people “don’t trust politicians.” But he knew she had the trust of business leaders and would hold the keys to move his ambitious plans across Albany.

When the pair sat down in late June, he apologized for his previous criticism of her and asked to work together, especially on a shared interest in childcare.

Hochul was a pleasant surprise. She initially told Mamdani she would consider endorsing him, but she wanted him to agree to keep Jessica Tisch, a respected technocrat appointed by Adams, as police commissioner. Mamdani initially refused, explaining that he had never met her.

And this question is at the heart of one of the campaign’s key conflicts: How far can Mamdani go to court the powerful without compromising his beliefs or alienating his progressive base?

He eventually endorsed Hochul Mamdani in September after agreeing to include her when he chose a commissioner. Weeks later, after private conversations with Tesh, Mamdani said publicly that he intended to keep her.

There was a similar debate over how strongly Mamdani should distance himself from the “globalization of the uprising,” a phrase that many Jewish New Yorkers heard as a call to violence.

Mamdani, the pro-Palestinian activist, told business leaders in July that he “would not encourage” the use of the phrase, but the decision not to directly condemn it helped spark a backlash that helped Cuomo.

Mamdani’s harsh criticism of Israel played a role in another, less successful courtship of former mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The campaign struggled to get a meeting, but when they finally met at Bloomberg’s downtown headquarters this fall, they spent a convivial hour talking. Bloomberg had privately told colleagues over the summer that he was done with Cuomo. Mamdani left the meeting thinking he had done enough to keep it that way.

He was wrong.

Angered by Mamdani’s comments about Israel and concerned about his inexperience, Bloomberg eventually sent $5 million to two super PACs to attack Mamdani and reinstated his endorsement of Cuomo — but he did so just six days before Election Day.