NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani photographed by Dina Litovsky for TIME Magazine: “I think the most important thing is that people see themselves and their struggles in your campaign,” Mamdani says.

Mamdani says he wants to be a mayor who breaks down barriers between politicians and the public. “I think the most important thing is that people see themselves and their struggles in your campaign,” he tells me during an hour-long interview in mid-July in a windowless conference room in his Manhattan campaign office. “And I think the larger struggle for us as Democrats is to ensure that we are practicing a politics that is direct, a politics of no translation, a politics that when you read the policy commitment, you understand it, as how it applies to your life.”

In interviews with more than 30 lawmakers, political figures, supporters, friends, and critics, Mamdani emerges as both more interesting and more complicated than the caricatures suggest. He is a very eloquent, very young man who is both less experienced than his predecessors and more gifted than almost any of his peers at connecting with the party’s voters. He is an ideologue interested in creative solutions, less radical than painted when you dig into his policy proposals and yet more sincere in his left-wing ambitions. He is a movement politician who won by being in touch with the streets, and who must now cloister himself inside as he prepares for the business of governing, not betraying the people by not failing them.

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani was raised in Uganda, South Africa, and New York by public-facing parents: Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of postcolonialism who landed at Columbia University, and filmmaker Mira Nair, an Academy Award nominee who has directed such luminaries as Denzel Washington. “In a sense he does come from a showbiz family,” says Amitav Ghosh, a Man Booker Prize–shortlisted writer and friend of Nair’s. From his father, Ghosh says, Mamdani took “his very deep commitment to social justice,” and from his mother, an “incredible energy” and “fine aesthetic sense.” His charmed upbringing instilled the stage presence that aided an amateur rapping career, plus opportunities like working on music in his mother’s film Queen of Katwe and getting celebrities Madhur Jaffrey and Lupita Nyong’o to appear in his music videos.

In 2020, Mamdani ran a campaign for state assembly focused on issues like “housing as a human right” for the kinds of vulnerable people he’d recently advised. He beat a five-term incumbent in a Queens district that included hip Astoria cafes as well as public-housing complexes. As a junior figure in state government, he quickly became part of a progressive ecosystem nudging the Democratic caucus left. In April 2021, Mamdani joined a “sleep-out” in the capitol’s so-called War Room to push for higher taxes on the wealthy and easier access to housing relief. He and a handful of other young lawmakers came prepared with sleeping bags and a tent, trying to pressure the party leaders negotiating the $200 billion state budget mostly behind closed doors. “It was part of an impatience with the nature of politics as it was,” says Mamdani, “and wanting to break out of the manner in which these issues are discussed and closer to the way in which they will actually be felt by New Yorkers.” In the end, the state budget did include some tax hikes on the rich—more than what then governor Cuomo had proposed, but much less than the tens of billions of dollars Mamdani and his progressive allies had called for.

Later that year, Mamdani took direct-action protest a step further, joining a 15-day hunger strike to support debt-ridden taxi drivers struggling to make payments on the wildly expensive “medallions” that allow them to legally pick up passengers. “Throughout that entire process, he treated us as equals,” says Bhairavi Desai of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. Mamdani helped liaise with senior politicians like U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in successful negotiations for a city-backed relief deal for drivers. After two weeks without food, he left the protest in a wheelchair.

Politically, physically, spiritually, emotionally: PHWOAR. I love this man and hope he makes it all the way to mayor.

Politics aside, this man is FINE

Bad day for Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdaddy

My goat is just aura farming atp. >!God I wish I could grow a beard 😔!<

His beautiful soul absolutely fucking emanates and radiates through his pores!!!!!