Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City’s first Asian American and first Muslim mayor—fueled by ebullient grassroots support—seemed to come out of nowhere. But the insurgent rise of the country’s premier Desi American politician did, in fact, come from somewhere: a generational evolution of youth and Asian American political power in the city.
Mamdani’s two key bases of support included some of the city’s most overlooked voter demographics: Youth voters, whose turnout reached about 28 percent, signalling a major increase from previous mayoral elections, the vast majority voting for Mamdani; and Asian Americans, whose turnout had been steadily increasing in recent election cycles but spiked for Mamdani—especially among South Asian communities like Bangladeshis and Nepalis, who turned out for the mayoral election at more than double or triple their typical rate. On the surface, Mamdani appears to have capitalized on his ethnic background and his youth, as many of his most energetic campaigners were young Asian American volunteers. But his appeal had less to do with shared demographics than with a unifying vision for New York’s future as a working-class city—one that includes universal child care, affordable rent, free public transit, and cheaper groceries. Beyond his campaign’s Bollywood aesthetics, polyglot social media monologues, and Desi-African rap deep cuts, Mamdani’s populist appeal was fueled not by symbolism but by deep conversations led by second-generation activists, who argued to their neighbors and aunties that Mamdani was not only “one of us,” but someone they could trust to fight for their communities.
For DRUM Beats, one of his early endorsers and the political sister group of the advocacy organization Desis Rising Up and Moving, Mamdani appealed to Asian immigrant enclaves as a progressive who understood the connection between economic instability and the social and political alienation their communities had endured. After the election, former DRUM Beats political director Jagpreet Singh tells The Progressive, the organization connected Mamdani to local fora that mainstream politicians tend to overlook: “masjids, gurdoras, mandars, temples. We were taking him to community fairs, community organizations, street festivals, neighbors’ meetings,” he says, “where he was able to share some of the ideas of fast and free buses, of universal childcare, of freezing the rent, which weren’t just platitudes.”
By contrast, says Singh, who was recently appointed first deputy commissioner in Mamdani’s new Office of Mass Engagement, electoral campaigning in South Asian communities has historically centered around old-school machine politics, in which elite gatekeepers of ethnic constituencies liaise with politicians with little grassroots involvement. “The only people that they end up really activating [are in] their circle, maybe the one degree of separation outside of them, but it’s not acting the entire community, nor is it speaking on behalf of the community,” Singh says. “So that’s really one of the dynamics that we were looking to upend.”
The kind of identity politics that Mamdani represents—rooted not in insular ethnonationalism but instinctive working-class cosmopolitanism—reflects how the activists who helped put him in office want him to govern: they don’t need symbolism or lofty rhetoric, just a leader who will help people meet their basic needs. It’s no coincidence that Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism foregrounds “affordability,” a general term that connotes economic fairness for communities at risk of being priced out of the city altogether.
The popularity of Mamdani’s pragmatic, concrete promises shows that “people don’t want platitudes . . . . They want action,” Singh says. “They want affordable groceries. They want affordable housing. They want to be able to stay in the communities they’re in. They want to be able to thrive. They want to be able to raise their families. These are the very basic issues that folks should be talking about with a love of your city . . . with the understanding of who are the people who live there, what is the culture of the city.”
When he campaigned for debt relief for taxi cab drivers as a state legislator, his participation in a weeks-long hunger strike aligned him with an immigrant-dominated workforce—with the overwhelming majority of drivers born outside the United States—that is both an iconic urban working-class livelihood and a victim of Wall Street’s financial predation.
The New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), the labor organization that was behind the protests, hopes to carry that same spirit into Mamdani’s first term as mayor. NYTWA executive director Bhairavi Desai, who is on Mamdani’s worker justice transition committee, anticipates this administration will be more responsive to activists’ demands than previous mayors regarding the oversight and regulation of the city’s taxi and rideshare industry. In January, New York City Council passed landmark legislation creating just-cause protections for rideshare drivers. Overriding the veto of former Mayor Eric Adams, the law aims to prevent arbitrary penalties or dismissal by their companies.
The city’s taxi workers will likely soon be voicing their concerns to Mamdani’s new deputy mayor for economic justice, Julie Su, who previously served as California Labor Secretary and acting Secretary of Labor under President Joe Biden. Known for spearheading labor enforcement initiatives that blend legal advocacy with multiracial community organizing, her office oversees the Taxi and Limousine Commission along with other agencies focused on labor, consumer, and civil rights.
“We still plan to organize in the same way we always have, which is a large and loud presence on the streets,” says Desai. “The difference this time around is we may be joined by our mayor, who feels comfortable with us when we’re loud and truly hears us even in silence. And that’s transformative for a workforce that has spent a generation in crisis poverty.”
The industry will continue to struggle with chronically low wages and a lack of basic labor rights, a predicament made worse by the chaos and fear induced by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. But, Desai says, electing a pro-labor, pro-immigrant mayor shows that in New York, “the possibilities are endless” for advancing the rights of workers and their communities. “This can be an era of tremendous imagination and creativity and boldness to truly begin to eradicate the underpinnings of both poverty and a society that lacks compassion for the vulnerable and the oppressed,” she says.
Still, Asian American identity in New York is complex and multidimensional, and Mamdani’s support was not uniform across different ethnic communities. South Asians favored him by a large margin but his support was relatively weak in parts of Queens where Chinese Americans predominate, like Flushing, which Cuomo won by a narrow margin. Many Asian voters lean conservative, even among Mamdani supporters. About one in five Asian voters who voted for Trump in 2024 chose a democratic socialist mayor a year later, according to surveys by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
And while the 24 percent poverty rate among Asian New Yorkers is the highest in the city, along with Latine population, the politics of aspiration have pushed some working-class Asian Americans rightward on issues including education reform as well as policing and public safety, which became more prominent amid anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In recent years, Asian American families have clashed with liberal education reformers in the debate around the city’s elite specialized high schools, in which Asian students are heavily overrepresented, but Black and Latine representation is minimal and shrinking. Calls for admissions reform, which are focused on moving away from standardized testing, have been met with hostility from some Asian parents. The issue ties into a longstanding debate around school desegregation, which also points to gifted and talented programs for young children as a driver of racial and class hierarchy in public schools. Evoking anti-affirmative action and “model minority” rhetoric, some education advocates defend the elite programs as meritocratic avenues for social mobility and chafe at efforts to loosen the admissions system as discriminatory toward Asian students. Mamdani—himself a graduate of an elite public high school—has rankled conservatives by proposing to eventually end gifted and talented programs. His schools chancellor, Kamar H. Samuels, previously championed desegregation efforts as a superintendent by opening up local middle school admissions through a lottery system.
Celina Su, a professor of urban studies at City University of New York who has researched school reform organizing in the city and a member of Mamdani’s transition committee on community organizing, says that education can be a “wedge” issue for Asian American families in racial justice debates. “Certainly when folks are struggling, I think it’s understandable that a lot of folks become vulnerable to resentment in politics,” she says. “So changing the conversation is very difficult. And as someone who also grew up with a lot of immigrant tropes of deservingness and sacrifice, et cetera, I think that something that I’ve had to grapple with, personally, is how easily those can be distorted or weaponized to be neoliberal and to be exclusive.”
After the excitement of a populist electoral upset comes the brass tacks of actually governing, which will inevitably generate fresh tensions between the mayor’s office and the grassroots community organizations that got him elected. Mamdani’s first few weeks in office have already seen a cascade of crises that directly resonate with planks of his policy platform: an extreme cold front that left much of the city buried in snow and more than twenty people dead; the police shooting of a young South Asian American man in psychological distress; and an unexpected budget gap that could jeopardize his agenda for enhancing public transit and social programs.
Mamdani is facing scrutiny over the city’s failure to protect the unhoused from the harsh winter weather, along with his so-far unfulfilled promise to diminish the role of the police in responding to mental health-related incidents, especially in communities of color. Moreover, his decision to endorse Governor Kathy Hochul, despite her opposition to raising taxes, has put him somewhat at odds with the broad coalition that has coalesced under the “Tax the Rich” banner. Mamdani now faces a dilemma between cleaving to the mainstream to consolidate political clout and rallying his base to push mainstream politicians leftward. These battles will test both the strength of his relationship to the activists who sent him to city hall, as well as how far these movements are willing to split with the mayor to hold him to his campaign trail promises.
For Asian and other ethnic working-class communities, in particular, the ripple effect of the socialist mayor’s victory has already gone beyond Mamdani’s day-to-day machinations in City Hall. The grassroots activism of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an advocacy organization with roots in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, is one example. For years, CAAAV grappled with some ideological tensions while building a progressive base among working-class Asian immigrant communities. The group, which helped form the citywide labor and community coalition known as People’s Majority after Mamdani won the Democratic primary, has cultivated a network of neighborhood activists by focusing on principles of economic justice and housing rights.
Alina Shen, organizing director for CAAAV’s political arm, CAAAV Voice, says that after helping mobilize a multiracial working-class coalition to elect a progressive mayor, “now we need to refine what it looks like to continue to build this larger political identity outside of an election. And for our organization and the particular role that we play organizing working-class Asian immigrants and tenants, it means preparing our leaders to demand more where a rent freeze is the floor; building confidence that they can make . . . more happen; and really just getting into the practice of being in relationship with an administration and mayor who answers to our demands.”
Shen, who is on Mamdani’s housing transition committee, says CAAV is trying to work in tandem with the administration to build channels for the working class to participate meaningfully in the governance process, while also maintaining independence as a movement organization. “We’re seeing this first year as a massive experiment for mass governance,” she explains. That could take the form of mass meetings or assemblies to debate ideas and organizing strategy at the community level, or forging connections with “technical experts” at city agencies to shape how public services and benefits are delivered in their communities. The Office of Mass Engagement aims to give grassroots groups such a platform for voicing grievances and demands; the administration has stated that the office will “embed public feedback directly into city policies, programs, and services.”
But for CAAAV, organizing under Mamdani’s administration is not just about interfacing with the government but “developing people,” as Shen explains, to carry out the group’s grassroots mission on the street level. This means cultivating and training effective organizers in the neighborhoods where the group has fought predatory landlords and developers for decades.
CAAAV’s member-organizers see electoral politics as a mechanism to serve working class immigrants. “The reality is that it’s not enough to look like us and it’s not enough to share experiences,” Shen says. “We need people who are going to be elected representatives and willing to do the work to represent people, rather than be a placeholder or a figurehead.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to indicate the positions of Bhairavi Desai and Alina Shen in Mamdani’s mayoral administration.