Why Zohran Mamdani’s primary win is a sign of shifting U.S. politics
From publicly supporting Palestine, to fully embracing his Muslim faith, the New York mayoral candidate is a welcome challenge to the establishment
Zohran Mamdani at the 55th NYC Pride Parade on June 29.
GlobeTrotPix / Shutterstock.com
Words by Ali M. Latifi
When Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral race last month, he was heralded as the first Muslim and first Indian American to secure a major party nomination for the role. But his success against three-time former Gov. Andrew Cuomo also made history in a way few, if any, other high-profile U.S. politicians have ever dared to: He vehemently and very publicly supports the Palestinian cause.
Along the way, the media, Cuomo’s supporters and social media activists have tried to weaponize his stance on Israel and Palestine to derail his campaign, but the 33-year-old remains steadfast.
Debate moderators have also subjected the race’s sole Muslim candidate to a barrage of questions about Israel. In the final minutes of the June 4 mayoral debate, Mamdani was asked, “Would you visit Israel as mayor?” and “Yes or no, do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel?” As expected, much of the post-debate media coverage on Mamdani, including from his opponents, focused on Israel.
“Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Israel stance disqualifies him AND anyone who supports him,” the New York Post editorial board wrote the day after the debate, while a Times of Israel headline read, “NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani again refuses to acknowledge Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”
"You don’t support Israel enough"
This Jewish voter in Harlem told Mamdani: “You’re gonna lose the election because you don’t support Israel enough.” Via @bern_hogan https://t.co/N0UPQYv5xs pic.twitter.com/etwmIj3y1q
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) June 12, 2025
In the lead-up to the second debate on June 13, a Jewish voter in Harlem stopped him on the street to say, “You’re gonna lose the election because you don’t support Israel enough.”
Even his chief rival, Cuomo, a former New York governor whom the Justice Department said sexually harassed 13 women while in office, has deigned to police Mamdani’s tone and rhetoric. When he was asked how he feels about two other candidates co-campaigning with Mamdani, Cuomo weaponized the debate night exchange and asked, how do Adrienne Adams and Brad Lander “support (Mamdani’s) positions on Israel? Support his statements on Israel?”
A group supporting Cuomo also sent out a mailer saying voters should reject Mamdani because he “rejects Israel.”
On the final day of the election, Stephen Colbert asked Mamdani what he would say “to those New Yorkers who are afraid you wouldn’t be their mayor,” in reference to the more than one million Jewish-identifying residents of the city. Throughout it all, Mamdani stood by his statement that “every state should be a state of equal rights,” including Israel.
The American political and media establishment has long been accused of a clear bias towards Israel (Cuomo even served on Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense against the International Criminal Court). Still, there is something distinct about the veracity of the coverage and attacks—from both sides of the political aisle—on Mamdani.
It belies something greater.
A break in the establishment
The focus on Mamdani’s stance on Israel and Palestine exposes a fear among Israel’s most ardent supporters that global public opinion may finally be shifting from the side of Israel and the powerful establishment figures, like Cuomo—a nepo baby former governor who happens to be the son of another three-time ex-governor—who defend it. While Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are saying that anti-Israel protesters “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East,” and publicly declaring themselves as Zionists, Mamdani openly refers to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza as a genocide, supports the Boycott Divest Saction movement against Israel, pledges to arrest Netanyahu—who just made his third visit to the United States in a year—in accordance with an ICC warrant.
Mamdani also fully embraces his Muslim faith.
Despite all of this seemingly working against him, the “Muslim immigrant” still managed to secure the highest number of votes in New York City primary election history—565,639.
What’s more, Mamdani is far from alone in his criticism of Israel and support of Palestine. Also leading the charge are other upstarts from any number of industries including activist Greta Thunberg, NBA players Kyrie Irving and Jaylen Brown, model Bella Hadid, actresses Rachel Zegler and Jenna Ortega, R&B singer Kehlani, pop stars Dua Lipa and Charli XCX, actor Pedro Pascal, rapper and singer Doechii and punk band Bob Vylan. Each with massive social media followings and each vocal supporters of Gaza.
Seeing 22-year-old Ortega, the star of Netflix’s most-watched show ever, post that, “Palestinian cries are still being buried in every day media,” to her 37.3 million Instagram followers, or Charli XCX openly acknowledging the Palestinian flags in the audience during her performance at a festival in Barcelona only weeks after the June 4 debate was an unthinkable series of events even a few months ago. The cultural wall around discussion or even acknowledgement of Palestine is slowly crumbling, and it’s being led in large part by a charismatic, charming young male politician.
Mamdani’s unwillingness to back down—even in his effort to become mayor of a city where 1.4 million residents identify as Jewish, and where the building of a Lower Manhattan mosque was fiercely debated only a decade prior—is a sign of a slow, but meaningful break in the U.S. political establishment.
Mamdani’s unwillingness to back down—even in his effort to become mayor of a city where 1.4 million residents identify as Jewish, and where the building of a Lower Manhattan mosque was fiercely debated only a decade prior—is a sign of a slow, but meaningful break in the U.S. political establishment.
That break is terrifying to a party in which only 20 years ago, their own charismatic upstart with a vaguely Muslim name and an African parent had to spend much of the 2008 presidential election working hard to distance himself from Palestinian professor Edward Said, courting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and asserting his Christian faith to the world.
Zero to new hero
Mamdani has gone against all of that and managed to go from a literal zero in October 2024 to defeating one of the most well-known and longest-serving members of the Democratic establishment, 43.51 percent to 36.42 percent.
“A decade ago (it would have been) inconceivable that he would be in the running for New York City mayor and (his detractors) smearing him as an anti-Semite would have worked,” co-host of the Breaking Points online news platform, Krystal Ball, said of Mamdani’s unexpected success.
He did win, though.
And like the nationwide student-led movement in support of Palestine, Mamdani’s success is the sign of a (possibly slow) major change in U.S. politics and society.
A change that could bring fear to establishment politicians and thinkers like Cuomo.
That fear has not been without its repercussions, as political and media figures on the left and the right scramble to try and discredit the wunderkind who has stood firm on acknowledging a genocide while trying to take on the millionaire and billionaire class embodied by New York landlords.
Everything from Mamdani’s criticism of a Christopher Columbus statue, to self-identifying as both African and Asian on a college application (because he was born in Uganda and his parents are Indian), has been weaponized against him by both the more conservative New York Post, and left-leaning The New York Times. Beyond the trivial, former New York Gov. David Paterson, has called on his colleagues in New York’s Democratic Party to unite against Mamdani. John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania (and an ardent supporter of Israel), said, “He's not even a Democrat,” and claims that Mamdani’s primary win has "provided an opportunity for the GOP to brand our party."
“This is the future generation”
The depth of that fear is put best in a quote from The Encampments, a documentary about the pro-Palestine student movements spreading across American college campuses. “This is the future generation, and the future generation is risking arrest, suspension, expulsion for Palestine. They were terrified about what these encampments represented for the future of this country,” Sueda Polat, one of the organizers of the Columbia University encampment, says in the film.
As Polat and other students point out throughout the film, Columbia is an Ivy League college, long considered to be one of the most elite and prestigious institutions in the country. This makes the fact that it has become the vanguard of the pro-Palestine student movement all the more powerful and dangerous. Had it been University of California at Berkeley or Santa Cruz, both known for a decades-long culture of activism, it would have been much less threatening to the establishment.
Likewise, had Mamdani been running for mayor of Oakland, California, Dearborn, Michigan, or Minneapolis, Minnesota, it would have been much less jarring or meaningful. All smaller cities, with larger Arab, South Asian and Muslim populations.
What these student encampments—along with Mamdani’s debate answers, a 10,000-word New York Magazine feature,” Musab Abu Toha’s Pulitzer for his essays on Gaza, Kneecap’s pro-Palestine messaging at Coachella, the dancer waving the Palestinian and Sudanese flags during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, and No Other Land’s Oscar win—represent is a confrontation between those who aid and abet genocide and those who are willing to take their fight for the oppressed directly to the some of the most powerful and influential venues in the country.
Something that only a year ago would have been considered career and political suicide is becoming increasingly more common on some of the biggest stages. Including the New York mayoral election.
Published on July 15, 2025
Words by Ali M. Latifi
Ali M Latifi was born in Kabul and raised in California. He has been reporting from Afghanistan, Turkey and Greece since 2011. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, TIME and VICE News.