Colin Sheridan: New York loves an underdog story. So will Mamdani’s substance match the style?

Mamdani may not change the world, but he’s already changed the tone, writes Colin Sheridan

Mayor elect Zohran Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji react to supporters during an election night watch party in New York. Picture: Yuki Iwamura/AP

There’s something oddly serendipitous about how neatly Zohran Mamdani fits into the modern myth of New York. The city has always liked its stories messy but magnetic — the cabbie turned poet, the Wall St bro who has an epiphany at Equinox and converts to Buddhism.

And now, the city, hungover on the avarice of others, has elected a Ugandan-born, Indian-descended, Muslim socialist as its mayor. 

Not even Netflix, with all its soft-focus sincerity and diversity quotas, would dare script a story as prescient. Mamdani was born in Kampala to Indian parents, his mother a successful filmmaker, his father an academic. They moved to New York when he was still small enough to be dazzled by yellow taxis. 

Since then, he’s been very much a creature of the city: fluent in its rhythms, its contradictions, its endless performance of chaos. He speaks four languages, married a Syrian-American artist he met on Hinge, and somehow found time to charm the most impatient electorate in the world.

He ran as a Democrat — the only viable option in a city where Republicans are treated like wasps at a picnic — and did so on a platform of affordability, empathy, and that vague but intoxicating idea of the promise of a better tomorrow.

Sincerity

He has pledged to make one of the most expensive cities on the planet at least marginally less soul-destroying to live in. And, in a time of plastic politicians and PR-tested empathy, he has somehow come across as sincere. Central to that sincerity is his (mostly) unapologetic position on Palestine. 

Outspoken about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he has used words that most American politicians can’t pronounce without looking over their shoulder lest an AIPAC handler escorts them out of the room. He has consistently called out Israeli war crimes, accused Washington of cowardice, and even declared he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister ever set foot in New York again. 

Cue the hysteria, because in America — still traumatised by its own ghosts — a brown Muslim man with progressive opinions is apparently more frightening than a gun-toting Christian who thinks Jesus wrote the Constitution.

Mamdani has had to reassure a twitchy media that he has no plans to impose Sharia law on the Upper West Side, nor is he plotting a September 11 sequel from his office in City Hall

The subtext of every press conference so far seems to be: “Just to confirm, Mayor, you don’t hate Jews, correct?”

In addition to being accused of jihadist sympathies, Mamdani’s also been labelled a communist. Which is, frankly, an insult not only to communists but to anyone who’s ever read Marx while falling asleep. At best, Mamdani is an Aperol Spritz socialist — the kind of leftist who believes in justice, equality, and a decent brunch. It’s just about as radical as you can be while still getting elected in America.

Charm and charisma

What’s easier to define is his likeability. His social media presence is a masterclass in curated charm: self-deprecating humour, good lighting, and the occasional poetic prose about the escalating price of street food. He’s the housewife’s favourite, the granny’s favourite, and the college freshman’s favourite. Even his Hinge backstory — the hipster wannabe Hip Hop artist and would-be mayor who found love on a dating app — reads like the plot of a copycat Sally Rooney novel.

And his wife — Rama Sawaf Duwaji — only adds to the myth. A Syrian-American artist who summers in Damascus and winters in existential despair (judging by the Twitter buzz), she’s just mysterious enough to be threatening to cliché, and certainly aloof enough to make everyone wonder if she’s not taking the piss altogether. As a pair, they are the perfect metropolitan power couple: a mash-up of progressive fantasy and curated authenticity.

But beneath the aesthetics lies the real question: does Mamdani have the substance to match the style? His stance on Palestine is principled, but his flirtations with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hint at a politician strugglling to balance conviction with dreaded pragmatism. 

He talks revolution but plays the long game. That may frustrate the purists, but it’s also what keeps him electable

The memory of the GOB (Great Obama Betrayal) — the hope that curdled into sour compromise — still haunts a generation of young Americans. Mamdani carries their expectations like a kitten. They see in him the possibility of what Obama might have been if he’d stayed honest a little longer. Whether he lives up to that, or becomes another eloquent caretaker of the status quo, remains to be seen. What’s certain is that he’s shifted something in American politics. The Democratic Party didn’t want him; they only tolerated him once it became clear the people did. Now, they need him far more than he needs them.

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In an age of beige centrists and billionaire vanity projects, a brown, Muslim, polyglot socialist with charisma to burn feels almost revolutionary — or at least refreshingly implausible.

Mamdani may not change the world, but he’s already changed the tone. For now, that’s enough. Because in a city built on reinvention, it makes perfect sense that the next chapter would begin with a mayor who looks like the future and talks like the past never boterhed him.

New York has always loved an underdog story — it just never expected the guy to have a beard, a Quran, and a deactivated Hinge profile.