Copyright Fast Company
New York being a center of global finance and business means that its local elections will always attract some degree of attention outside of the five boroughs, but the city’s mayoral race this year has garnered far more national interest than usual. That’s in large part thanks to Zohran Mamdani, the assemblymember from Queens who was virtually unknown outside of New York before he launched his campaign a year ago. Mamdani went viral early in the race with entertaining person-on-the-street videos in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential election victory. With support from an energized base of younger voters, he rode that wave to a primary election victory against former Governor Andrew Cuomo in June. Since then, the national headlines about Mamdani and the broader race for mayor haven’t stopped, which is to say that no shortage of eyeballs will be focused on New York’s election results as they begin to pour in on November 4. Most polls have shown Democrat Mamdani with a comfortable lead over his two main opponents: Cuomo, who is running as an independent, and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, the Republican on the ballot. If Mamdani coasts to victory as expected, he would be the first Muslim mayor of New York and, at 34, the youngest person to lead the city in more than 100 years.
