Zoharan Mamdani’s election as Mayor of New York marks a number of firsts. He is the first Muslim Mayor of New York, in a city which is 9 percent Muslim. He is the first person of South Asian descent to become Mayor, the previous two no-whites to have been Mayor having been African Americans. In a city of migrants, he is the first person born outside of the USA to have been elected. Perhaps more important than this and other firsts is the fact that he was one of a trio of ‘off-year- elections that the Democrats won, and which represent the reversal of the 2024 election result, which saw Donald Trump elected President for a second term. Apart from Mr Mamdani’s election, the Democratic candidate in New Jersey improved on the 2024 result, by getting 56 percent of the vote over the 51.97 percent for the Democrats in the presidential election. where the improvement was from 51.83 percent to 57.5 percent. Mr Trump had campaigned on the economy. So far, it seems, voters are unimpressed, and the swing against his policies seems to have begun.
It might be premature to see a trend this early for the 2026 midterms, but then they are merely a year away. Mr Mamdani’s election is likely to cause ructions, not least because he is something almost oldfashioned, an avowed socialist. Mr Trump went so far as to call him a ‘communist’, a remark which shows his age in his recourse to long-outdated Cold War rhetoric. The problem for Trump does not seem to be Mr Mamdani’s being a Democrat, or even a Muslim, as much as his outspoken support for Gazans in the recent genocide by Israel, which has extended to his threat to execute arrest warrants issued by the International Court against even Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Considering that New York is the largest Jewish city in the world, with a huge Zionist presence, this has been a courageous stand to take.
Mr Mamdani is less proof of a Muslim takeover of the USA, as Mr Trump and his MAGA supporters would like to portray, than of the democratic inclusion that the USA is supposed to represent. New York is still the city towards which Pakistanis gravitate when going to the USA, and it will help for its Mayor to not just a co-religionists, but to have ancestors who come from the same neck of the woods.
