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Zohran Mamdani, the progressive firebrand Democrat, has stunned the political establishment and claimed a remarkable victory in the New York mayoral election. The 34-year-old from Queens ran on a sweeping populist platform that included taxing the city’s wealthiest residents, free city bus service, universal child care, and a rent freeze for roughly one million rent-regulated apartments. What does his victory mean for New York and the 8.5 million people who call it home: Newsweek writers give their verdicts. Nicholas Creel: Prepare for Multi-front War with Trump administration By electing Mamdani, New York City just signed itself up for a protracted multi-front war with the Trump administration. The city should immediately assemble a litigation team to prepare to fight the inevitable attempts by Trump to block their receipt of federal funds. These court battles will be costly and time-consuming, but they’re coming whether the city wants them or not. Every dollar of federal funding NYC receives—which New Yorkers’ own tax payments help fund—will now require legal warfare to secure. Photo by: NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx 2025 11/4/25 New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani (right) and his wife Rama Duwaji cast their vote in the general election at Frank Sinatra High School on November 4, 2025 in New York City. New York may well find that their coming legal fights over money could be the least of their problems in the coming months. We’ve already seen Trump deploy National Guard troops to several democratic controlled cities that defied his agenda. There’s no reason to believe NYC will be treated differently, particularly now that they have elected a democratic socialist mayor who Trump has labeled a threat. For New Yorkers, Mamdani’s election now means more than choosing progressive policies over moderate ones. It’s become a test case for whether American cities can chart their own course without federal interference. The economic stakes are massive, but the democratic stakes are even higher. Nicholas Creel is an associate professor of business law at Georgia College & State University. Kevin Powell: Mamdani Has Electrified This Metropolis Zohran Mamdani is a game-changer. He is an American politician born in Africa to parents birthed in India. He is a democratic socialist, a Muslim, only 34, a child of immigrants, and the next mayor of New York, my long-ago adopted hometown. Mamdani represents a supernatural sea change from politics as usual. He is a generational voice who is honest, real, accessible, smart, flexible and humanly clear of the privilege from whence he comes. I have been a part of and worked on many political campaigns. Mamdani’s was one for the ages to witness. We did not merely elect a mayor. We elected an unapologetic builder of rainbow coalitions in an era of ugly divides. Many have compared him to Barack Obama. I see instead Bobby Kennedy, Sr., also of inherited privilege, yet, like Mamdani, was a person of the people because he was unafraid to listen to, speak up for and advocate on behalf of us. That was RFK’s gift. This is Mamdani’s gift. Can he govern a wildly unpredictable New York? I don’t know. What I do know is that Zohran Mamdani has electrified this metropolis like no politician before him. Now we get to dream with him. Kevin Powell is a Grammy-nominated poet, humanitarian, author of 16 books, filmmaker, public speaker and frequent contributor to Newsweek. He lives in New York City. Costa Beavin Pappas: Win Inspires Hope at a Dark Time Zohran Mamdani’s win sets a new ethical standard of what a politician can accomplish—free of AIPAC funding—by breaking the myth that political success requires a Faustian bargain. While far-right rhetoric seeps deeper into the cultural sphere and can feel like it’s at a place of no return, his victory as a socialist, Muslim immigrant from outside the circles of wealth, is also a collective win for New Yorkers, who have agreed: “This is who we are—this is who represents us.” His win shows a collective institutional political fatigue, and inspires hope, in a particularly dark time, that there is new light and new solutions to be found in American politics beyond the binary confines of institutional Democrats. On a structural level, the success also puts further pressure on Democrats, who have lost the working-class, to reckon with its disconnect from the people and progressive ideas it once claimed to represent. Costa Beavin Pappas is a culture writer with bylines in ELLE, Oprah Daily, Business Insider, the Observer, and Newsweek, among others. He resides in New York City. Faisal Kutty: A Humane Reset for New York—If He’s Allowed to Govern Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City’s first Muslim mayor is both a cultural milestone and a governance test. His victory reflects a profound fatigue with inequality and political cynicism, but the real cha...
