I first came across Zohran Mamdani in September 2021. I had just given my two weeks’ notice at the NYC Board of Correction, the watchdog agency for the city’s blighted jail system where I had spent the last few years investigating a rising number of deaths at Rikers Island. The city jails had long been horror houses, but the pandemic plus years of political infighting and inaction had left the jails in an increasingly deadly state. While the bodies continued to pile up, the most that the Democratic city leadership could seem to offer the desperate family members and survivors who testified over and over at public hearings was an endless loop of task forces, subcommittees, and interagency meetings. Eric Adams had just won the primary two months earlier, and there was no reason to think the situation was going to get better (and in fact it would get demonstrably worse). With that backdrop, I had decided to accept a job outside of city government where I could focus on diverting people from jail.
Meanwhile, a group of 14 progressive elected officials decided to make an unannounced trip to see Rikers for themselves, raising public alarm with a press conference in front of the Rikers Island Bridge. They appeared shell shocked as they described in detail the “human rights nightmare” they had witnessed in their hours inside, including people without food and medication, cells covered in feces and urine, and an alarming spike in self-harm. Zohran Mamdani was one of these officials.
I made note of his name again two days later when he took over the Zoom screen at a very long virtual City Council hearing on the devolving crisis at Rikers. Twenty-nine years old and in his first year as a State Assemblymember, Zohran wasn’t a fixture in city politics. I’d never heard of him in my decade working in city government, and so I was unprepared when he cut right through the bullshit and gave voice to the very frustration that had just led me to resign:
I’ve been sitting through this hearing for four hours and I am just as furious as I was when I logged on this morning. And that’s because person after person is speaking about this issue as if the solution is external to them - and it’s the other department, and it’s the other executive, and it’s the other office that can take action here … It’s ridiculous that we have people saying that this is a crisis, that we have to take action, but not for me.
He called out the DA for continuing to set unaffordable bail on nonviolent offenses, he called out the Mayor’s Office for not doing more to release dozens of people under the state’s 6-A Program, and he called on the members of the City Council to visit Rikers in person. Certainly other people had made each of these points, but there was something undeniable in the way he communicated that snapped me to attention when he spoke, even after hearing hours of similar testimony. You could tell he had distinct political gifts, but more than that, these talents were in service of a clear moral center that felt authentic and unhandled. In common parlance: he was a real one. I remember telling my colleagues as much and giving him a follow on Instagram.
The next month, October 2021, Zohran went on a hunger strike in front of City Hall alongside the NY Taxi Workers Alliance. The strike was on behalf of drivers who were being crushed by hundreds of thousands in lender debt related to the depreciating value of their city-issued medallions as Ubers and Lyfts flooded the boroughs. The growing rideshare landscape (enabled by the city) had plunged so many cabbies into despair that it set off a suicide epidemic, including a man in his 60s who shot himself one morning in front of City Hall.
After 15-days, the hunger strike resulted in a deal between Chuck Schumer’s office, the transit union, and the city to provide thousands of taxi drivers more than $450 million in debt relief. Zohran was jubilant. On Instagram at the time, he posted a picture of the cover of the amNewYork Metro free paper with the headline “RELIEF AT LAST!” over a photograph of him hugging the other hunger striking drivers as they heard the news. In the caption, he wrote:
I will hold on to that moment for the rest of my life. It’s been a few days and I still can’t quite believe it all. Augie Tang, we won my brother. We said we wouldn’t eat without a city-backed guarantee. We said we wouldn’t leave without affordable payments. And how we have both. We really did it. God bless the NY Taxi Workers Alliance.
And to have it captured on the front page of Metro? The same newspaper I read on the train to [Bronx Science High School] all those years ago? Just surreal.
Surreal indeed.
Today, not even four years later and at the ripe old age of 33, Zohran Mamdani is not just on a free subway handout — but on the cover of newspapers throughout the world. After upsetting Andrew Cuomo and his $30 million SuperPAC war chest on Tuesday to run away with the NYC democratic mayoral primary, Zohran has singlehandedly sent the national Democratic establishment reeling about what his meteoric rise means for the future of the party and politics as usual. In a matter of months he has managed to mobilize tens of thousands of volunteers and accumulated more than 1.5 million Instagram followers, a number that seems to be leaping up by the hundred thousand every few hours since election day.
There’s a lot more to say about what the takeaways are from his extraordinary primary campaign and what lies ahead before the general election (I’ll write in more detail about all that soon). But for today I’m returning for a moment to that Zohran I first observed in 2021 and marveling at the great distance he’s traveled in such a short time.
There are those who will criticize his lack of years of experience, and who will resent him for cutting in line and not waiting his turn. But a meteor is going to meteor, and the urgent energy he’s always demonstrated is exactly what voters are clamoring for in this transformative moment. What could it look like to have a city government that behaves more like Zohran? That doesn’t simply accept the idea that change must be slow, that punting is progress? I for one can’t wait to find out.