Son of Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia University who was among the Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. American Democratic Socialist politician and member of the Democratic Socialists of America who won New York City's Democratic mayoral primary on June 24th 2025 at the age of 33, defeating Andrew Cuomo. Until a few months before the race he was little known outside the Queens neighbourhood he represented as a state legislator in Albany.
Mamdani ran a grassroots campaign with 46,000 volunteers and strong online presence. On the eve of the election he walked the full 21km length of Manhattan from Inwood to Battery Park. When he won the Democratic nomination in June, he received a congratulatory call from Barack Obama; the two spoke about the transition from campaigning to governing. He is a vocal critic of Israel's war in Gaza and has been ambivalent about whether the intifada should be globalised. He won the endorsement of the Working Families Party and did best in precincts with the highest share of millennial voters.
His platform includes free buses, free child care (costing as much as $6bn a year), higher taxes on the rich, a $30 minimum wage by 2030, freezing rents for 2m residents in New York's rent-stabilised apartments (nearly half the city's total housing stock), and a "public option" for groceries: city-run supermarkets on city-owned land (thus paying no rent or property taxes) that would undercut private rivals. He has disavowed past calls to "defund the police", though the DSA to which he belongs still advocates abolishing "the carceral state". The plan is to pilot one store in each of the city's five boroughs. Critics note that grocery stores already make only 1-2% profit after tax and that publicly run stores would amount to a taxpayer subsidy.
Mamdani was born in 1991. He won the general election on November 4th 2025 at the age of 34 on high turnout, defeating his nearest challenger, Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent. His strident criticism of Israel and Zionism, which would once have been disqualifying, many voters now take as evidence of his authenticity. Donald Trump said he would "straighten out" New York shortly after Mamdani's election, threatening to deploy more federal agents and withhold crucial federal funds—which account for 6.4% of New York's budget. New York City's annual budget is $117bn; its GDP in 2024 was $1.3trn, greater than that of all but 16 countries. The metropolitan area's economy exceeds $2.3trn, bigger than that of Canada and representing about 9% of America's total. The top 1% of New Yorkers account for more than 40% of the city's personal income-tax receipts. Median rents are more than twice the average of America's 50 biggest cities. The cost of day care for babies and toddlers is $26,000 a year, up more than 40% in the past five years. New York state's welfare and education programmes are 72% more expensive per person than those in Texas.
Many of Mamdani's promises lie outside the mayor's authority. To pay for his plans he proposes an additional 2% tax on incomes above $1m a year and raising the top state corporate-tax rate to 11.5% from 7.25%. But mayors cannot set income or business taxes; doing so would require the state legislature to act plus the governor's signature. Kathy Hochul, New York's Democratic governor, has ruled the idea a nonstarter.
The new mayor will face an immediate budget shortfall of $6bn-8bn upon taking office in January 2026, and may also lose out from an expected $3bn cut in federal grants. Without the tax increases, Mamdani would face a $15bn-17bn shortfall in his spending plans. A quarter of the city's budget comes from the federal government (10%) or the state government (17%), and those transfers must be spent as directed.
Free buses are a call for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, to which the mayor can recommend only four of 23 members. Mamdani supported the "City of Yes" zoning amendments and says he wants to make it easier to build apartments with free-market rents by cutting red tape for all developers. He also wants to build 200,000 units of affordable housing by borrowing $70bn, which would exceed the debt limit by $30bn and require state approval. He has proposed surrendering mayoral authority over the school system to a mayor-appointed board, reversing a power other mayors have guarded closely.
Where the mayor does have power is over the police. Mamdani plans to disband a unit that breaks up protests, reduce police involvement in emergencies (giving a bigger role to mental-health workers) and cut overtime. During a mayoral debate in October 2025 he cited CAHOOTS, a programme in Eugene, Oregon, as a model for how New York could handle mental-health crises without using police.
Mamdani's campaign has been marked by message discipline, keeping his affordability platform—rent freezes, housing investment, free child care, free buses—as the main story while avoiding culture-war traps and shouting matches with Trump. His gifts as a TikTok video auteur are well known. In the closing weeks of the race he appeared to shift into governing mode, courting a nervous Democratic establishment and business community. He name-checked Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire former mayor, and said he would appoint "the best and the brightest…more akin to a 'Team of Rivals' approach". He said he would like to retain Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner and no favourite of progressives. He recognised he cannot achieve his affordable housing goals without heavy private investment. Kathy Hochul, the state governor, appeared alongside him in Astoria, and the two discussed how to get to universal child care.
His campaign's vision is suffused with nostalgia for a pre-fiscal-crisis New York—before the city came close to bankruptcy in 1975—when strong unions, affordable housing, good schools and free higher education sustained a middle-class compact. As he declared at a rally in Queens: "The era of government that deems an issue too small or a crisis too big must come to an end." Critics note that the economic and political basis of that compact proved unstable, and that beyond incremental proposals to speed up permits, Mamdani has suggested no new model to create jobs or to pay for his initiatives.
Mamdani was inaugurated on January 1st 2026, promising "a new approach to power" and pledging that "no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers' lives". In his inaugural address he drew an unflattering comparison between the private sector and government, citing the excellence of New York's cooks, athletes and Broadway stars before saying, "Let us demand the same from those who work in government"—a message likely to put him in conflict with the municipal unions that are pillars of the Democratic establishment.
His most surprising early move was to reverse a key campaign pledge to cede authority over the city's schools to parents, students, teachers and administrators, disappointing the teachers' union but suggesting he may be serious about using mayoral power rather than giving it up. He retained several key Eric Adams officials.
Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver to run the Office to Protect Tenants. Ms Weaver, a tenant organiser, lobbied for a 2019 law that constrained landlords from raising rents, including to pay for renovations. Critics say the law has led to some 50,000 vacant apartments citywide, because the cost of fixing them up exceeds what landlords can hope to make. She has called for all property to be "owned by a collective" and envisioned the city acting as a "non-speculative market actor" by becoming the "long-term owner" of foreclosed properties. Among her past social-media posts, she called for impoverishing the white middle class, seizing private property and supporting communists but not white men for public office. She called home ownership "a weapon of white supremacy".
In April 2026 Kathy Hochul proposed a pied-à-terre tax on second homes valued at $5m or more, backed by Mamdani, who promoted the tax in a video filmed outside the $238m New York apartment of Ken Griffin, a Miami-based hedge-fund magnate. The tax is expected to raise $500m annually.
Mamdani inherited favourable conditions from Eric Adams: rising pupil reading scores, low crime, a new zoning plan to speed homebuilding, and the end of the migrant crisis after Trump shut the border. Kathy Hochul, the governor, said she had found the money to pay for his promised expansion of public child care.
While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.