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It’s just after sunset on Halloween evening in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, and Zohran Mamdani is booking it up Seventh Avenue as if he were a costumed eight-year-old who’d just heard there was a house giving out full-sized candy bars a few blocks away. The 34-year-old Democratic mayoral candidate—dressed in his usual non-costume of a navy suit and dark striped tie—is surrounded by his aides, two security guards, and hundreds of shrieking, delighted onlookers. He gamely greets and poses for photos with as many of them as he can: a Michael Myers, a Cher Horowitz, a pair of Ghostfaces, several Princess Elsas, countless KPop Demon Hunters. As he makes his way up the street, a teeming crowd forms in his wake. At one corner, when a curious passerby inquires (as many others are doing), “Who is that?” a member of his team begins to reply, “the mayor,” before she catches herself and clarifies, “Zohran Mamdani, candidate for mayor.” A little earlier, Mamdani draws a similar—if slightly more contained—swarm just down Seventh at Community Bookstore, the borough’s oldest operating bookshop, for a Halloween meet-and-greet pit stop that had been planned by Moms for Mamdani, a local organizing group. A quintessential kissing-babies photo op, it’s one of many New York City micro-locales that Mamdani has visited in the last 48 hours, among them a hospital in Elmhurst, the taxi-driver queue at LaGuardia Airport, and a senior center on the Lower East Side. As a crowd forms outside the bookstore awaiting his arrival, I encounter the first of several people I see that night dressed as Mamdani himself: a man named Arjun Bisen who lives nearby and does, in fact, bear an uncanny resemblance to the Democratic frontrunner. He is accompanied by his young son, who is dressed as a fare-free MTA bus—a nod to one of Mamdani’s most memorable policy proposals. (And before you start worrying whether this poor child’s parents dressed him as a municipal meme against his will, his father assures me that his son adores buses, trains, and planes of all sorts.) While Bisen and I speak, a passing woman stops, places her hand on his shoulder, and tells him, “I’m voting for you.” Moments later, the real Mamdani arrives to a rash of cheers. Inside the shop, he’s greeted by the young child of a Community Bookstore employee who is dressed as a Penguin Random House edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “It was my dad’s dream that I would read War and Peace,” Mamdani says. An onlooker asks, “How far did you get?” “Not very,” the candidate replies, laughing. “I want to be honest with you guys.” Seated on a stool, Mamdani grins his perpetual huge grin while handing out miniature Kit-Kats and Almond Joys to the trail of little ones and their parents, who cycle inside in quick succession. He seems especially moved by the sight of a toddler dressed as a tomato. His spirits remain steady even at the arrival of a Halloween stalwart: the requisite grumpy teenage boys, the sort who are still keen to receive free candy but seem otherwise mortified by the whole Halloween charade. “Carhartt, that’s fire,” Mamdani says to a young man whose costume seems to be “Carhartt vest.” Another teenager, in a paint-splattered jumpsuit, has a different proposal for the candidate: “Can I ask for money?” Mamdani, laughing, replies, “I only have candy.” A beat. “Are you sure about that?” says the kid, who begrudgingly accepts a piece of candy nonetheless. A few teens at Community Bookstore are indeed dressed in costumes with poignant economic undertones: One kid is Robert Pattinson’s death-bound clone-for-hire from Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17; his pal, the manic capitalist Jordan Belfort, complete with a stack of fake Benjamins in his shirt pocket, from Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. (Mamdani, recognizing the Mickey 17 costume, gives the wearer a few extra Reese’s cups.) After them, an older woman walks up to give the candidate a hug. (Also at the bookstore, Mamdani shares that he’s just discovered the existence of KPop Demon Hunters—a surprise Netflix phenomenon—thanks to his security guard, whose daughter is a big fan. The film’s success caught the streaming platform so off guard, they failed to make sufficient arrangements to manufacture enough Halloween costumes to meet demand.) After half an hour, Mamdani and company make a break for Seventh Avenue, and a sizable throng chases after him as they make their way to a brownstone for a pre-planned breather. (They’ve coordinated the stop with a local writer who’s been in touch with the campaign; she’d arranged the location by texting her book club and preschool group chat.) During the brief moment I’m able to catch the candidate’s speedy stride on the sidewalk, I say to him, “You’re sort of the Timothée Chalamet of Park Slope right now.” Mamdani laughs, probably harder than warranted. “Very specific description,” he says. It’s a description I stand by, as a firsthand witness of last October’s pandemoniac Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park. Tonight, this neighborhood—a paragon of gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, home to the wealthy stroller class—is greeting him like a rockstar. (When I later ask Mamdani’s advisor if they’d anticipated this caliber of chaos, she solemnly nods yes.) I’d expected we might encounter at least some angry dissenters, particularly those who are critical of Mamdani’s tax-the-rich policies and emphatic opposition to the war in Gaza, but the tone here is decidedly warm-hearted. Unlike most politicians, even the lefty ones, the frontrunner hasn’t yet had the chance to disappoint the masses, either by losing the election, or failing to deliver on his promises, or otherwise becoming a cog in a machine. Four days out from the election, the excitement—and early-voting momentum—remain very much on Mamdani’s side. (On Thursday evening, a grassroots collective called Hot Girls 4 Zohran threw a Halloween pregame at a hotel in Bushwick, where at least one attendee dressed as “Zohran Mamdani’s Hinge profile.” The candidate met his now-wife, Rama Duwaji, on the app.) Wearing his usual peacoat and armed with a bag of fun-sized candy, Mamdani bobs and weaves up the street. En route, we pass several other Zohran Mamdanis, as well as beret-clad Curtis Sliwas and scowling Andrew Cuomos. (Sadly, though, no Eric Adamses, with or without cigar.) The candidate stops for a photo with one such Zohran—Carlos Calzadilla-Palacio, the president of Brooklyn Young Democrats—who says, “I’m the Cuban-American version of Zohran Mamdani. I know the difference between spooky communism and basic childcare for all…and remember, the name is Mamdani,” emphasizing the oft-fumbled pronunciation. Minutes later, speaking to a PIX11 reporter stationed in the crowded courtyard of the brownstone just off Seventh, Mamdani acknowledges how his opponents—primarily former city mayor Cuomo, who’s running as an independent—are trying “to scare New Yorkers about the possibility of me being their mayor.” “The more and more that you listen to Andrew Cuomo, the more and more it sounds like you’re listening to Donald Trump,” says Mamdani, who also jokes that if he had worn a Halloween costume this year, he might have dressed as “the politics of the past. Very scary.” (About 90 minutes after Mamdami says this, Cuomo will post a cursed, AI-generated clip that depicts a crudely rendered Mamdani terrorizing a brownstone neighborhood on Halloween with spooky threats like “Some people need to get tricked so others get a treat.”) By seven o’clock, it’s time for Mamdani’s next stop. As he and the team pile into a waiting black Suburban, one of his staffers tells me he’s headed to a concert. (Regrettably, he was not the surprise guest to get “arrested” for “being hot” at pop star Sabrina Carpenter’s Madison Square Garden show on Friday.) As his car attempts to make a U-turn on the crowded street, a group of broccoli-haired teenagers gleefully stops its progress. Their phones held aloft, they shout at the tinted windows: Mr. Adams! Mr. Adams! Lemme get a pic! After a few moments, the candidate rolls down the window and gives them a wave. Nearby, a teenage girl shrieks into her phone: “I just met Zohran Mamdani, no joke! He just dapped me up.”
