A week after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani was on Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx — microphone in hand — searching for working-class New Yorkers who voted for Trump, despite normally voting for Democrats.
Affordability was a driving factor in their decision, according to a video the then-nascent mayoral candidate posted of his visit to the neighborhood.
“Rent is expensive. Foods are going up. Utility bills are up,” one person Mamdani interviewed said.
Those voters became a key part of a strategy that led to his stunning victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this week’s Democratic primary. Eight months after Trump made significant gains among New York City’s working-class and immigrant communities, the city’s Democrats have chosen a self-described democratic socialist as their presumptive nominee. And Mamdani said his strategy of wooing Trump voters on affordability will continue into November’s general election.
“ What comes next is an ever-expanding coalition that is going to speak both to the New Yorkers that voted for this campaign,” Mamdani told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer in his first interview after winning the primary, “Whether they lived in Jackson Heights or Sunset Park and Inwood or in Washington Heights or in Bay Ridge, and also those New Yorkers that didn’t vote for me.”
It could offer a blueprint for Democrats about how to win by developing a clear message that connects with voters, according to political observers, especially in traditionally blue districts where Republicans gained ground in the last election.
“ What Zohran’s campaign did was not assume that anyone was beyond reach,” said Ana María Archila, co-director of the New York State Working Families Party, which made Mamdani its number one pick in a ranked-choice endorsement of anti-Cuomo candidates.
The target neighborhoods are clear.
A Gothamist analysis found that Mamdani won 30% of the primary election districts Trump won in the 2024 general election and garnered over 35,000 votes in districts that went for Trump. Around the Jamaica Hills, Queens intersection where Mamdani filmed last November, voters in 2024 moved toward the GOP by nearly 25 points. On Tuesday, Mamdani won there with 84.2% of the vote.
In addition to Hillside, Queens, Mamdani won Trump-leaning districts in Tottenville on the Republican stronghold of Staten Island, College Point in North Queens and Bath Beach in South Brooklyn.
Gothamist went out in search of voters on Hillside Avenue who cast ballots for both Trump and Mamdani. They weren’t hard to find.
“I know so many people voted for Trump, including my family and other people,” said Shah Rahman, 27, who said those same people are now supporting Mamdani.
Rahman said he is one of them. “I feel like [Mamdani] is for the people and he wants to make public transportation free for the city,” he said.
Kamal Hossain, 69, said his vote for Trump, who ran on an anti-immigration platform, was a “mistake” that he said many people in his largely Bangladeshi community made.
“The way he was talking, I was thinking he might be a change. He might do something better. Now, definitely not, no more Republicans,” Hossain said.
One of the reasons Mamdani appealed to him was because of his commitment to bring down the cost of living. “He is going to freeze the rent. I like that,” Hossain said, even though he himself is a homeowner who doesn’t pay rent.
He was also turned off by attacks on Mamdani’s religion and ethnicity, Hossain said. Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents from India. He moved to New York City with his family at the age of 7, and would be the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor if elected in November.
“They were calling him a terrorist, which doesn’t make any sense to me. You know why? He’s American. Give him a chance,” Hossain said.
The Mamdani campaign’s effort to expand the electorate included targeting Asian American voters, a broad, diverse and growing bloc. The campaign touted a key endorsement from state Sen. John Liu, one of the city’s most well-known Asian American elected officials, and sent out canvassers and campaign materials in the languages spoken in neighborhoods with growing Asian American communities.
A group of canvassers in Jamaica, where the South Asian population has grown by 20,000, had fliers in Bangla, which is spoken by the Bangladeshi community.
Amit Bagga, a political consultant who has not worked for any of the campaigns, pointed to Mamdani’s ability to increase turnout in areas where fewer people voted four years ago, including Jackson Heights and northeast Bay Ridge.
He said the key to Mamdani’s success was simple: “When you speak to people in the languages that they speak and about issues they care about, they respond, and when you don’t, they don’t.”
Attacks from the right have increased nationwide in the wake of Mamdani’s upset victory. Trump called Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, issued a series of broadsides against the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee on X.
“NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration,” he wrote Wednesday.
But in the wake of November’s loss, some on the left see Mamdani’s victory as a path forward that offers voters a more compelling alternative than a moderate Democrat like Cuomo, who is supported by the same people who have donated to Trump.
“People are sick and tired of so much negativity coming at them. We saw for New York City voters $25 million in attacks,” said Rebecca Katz, founder at Fight Agency Media, a progressive consulting firm that worked on Mamdani’s campaign, citing the money a Cuomo-aligned super PAC spent to defeat him.
She said Mamdani’s consistent focus on affordability was a response to what he was hearing from voters in the city.
“He related to the folks that were having real struggles and he wanted to hear why they were voting for Trump,” Katz said. She said there was one crucial element to his winning strategy that could be replicated by other Democrats, even those who don’t share Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism.
“He was curious,” Katz said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
