Zohran Mamdani is, quite literally, everywhere.
The 34-year-old New York state assemblyman, who in recent months has ascended from relative political anonymity to become the presumptive winner of New York City’s November mayoral race, has already graced the covers of Time, New York, Vanity Fair, and The Nation, among other publications. He’s sparred with newscasters on CNN and Fox News, riffed with Stephen Colbert, and bantered like his life depended on it with the hosts of The View.
Mamdani’s ubiquity didn’t start with print pages or broadcast interviews. Much of that conventional media exposure, and Mamdani’s growing celebrity, is a collective byproduct of one single element of his mayoral campaign: a really, really good social strategy. One of Mamdani’s first viral videos, a 2024 supercut of short conversations between the assemblyman and New York–based Trump voters, laid the groundwork for a subsequent mayoral campaign built on clever, conversational clips. See: Very Cold Mamdani, emerging from a polar plunge in the Atlantic Ocean with a vow to freeze rent on rent-stabilized apartments. See also: Sneakers Mamdani, walking the length of Manhattan to advocate for accessible politicians; Citi Bike Mamdani, responding to a bystander’s howl of “Communist” before pedaling off as cameras roll; or Red Rose Mamdani, spoofing The Bachelor while wooing New Yorkers with promises of an equitable future. Yes, the #ZaddyZohran TikTok hashtag is nearly as prolific as the candidate who inspires it.
But as Mamdani acknowledged during a recent sit-down at his campaign’s spartan Manhattan headquarters, his outsized ubiquity also has its downsides: There’s the ire of President Trump, who has denounced Mamdani as “a 100% Communist lunatic,” threatened to arrest him, and, should the front-runner topple Andrew Cuomo in November, deploy the National Guard to New York City. Then there’s the risk of violence against Mamdani or his campaign staff; it’s a concern that increased markedly following the recent assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, and, for Mamdani, means “I’m never alone now.”
But for someone as everywhere as Mamdani, hunkering down in the secure confines of an office can only last so long. Forty-five minutes, to be exact, before our interview concludes and Mamdani (security detail in tow) gamely joins WIRED’s photographers on a bustling Manhattan street, posing inside a yellow cab and walking to and fro on the sidewalk. It would be an understatement to say that passersby took note. They did take selfies—at least five in fewer than 10 minutes. They also took campaign materials, seemingly so inspired by a mere glimpse of Zaddy Zohran that they were compelled to join his 80,000-strong army of volunteers. And, in typical New York fashion, they did all of this with no semblance of personal shame, screaming Mamdani’s name from the open windows of office towers and cars; hooting at him from across the street and down the block.
It remains to be seen whether Mamdani as mayor can satisfy these starstruck locals, along with his thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of presumed voters—not to mention the many millions more following along online. For now, Mamdani is embracing the life of a newly minted internet darling. After one last wave has been proffered, to a particularly loud fan shouting from a window across the street, the candidate and his team duck back inside their nondescript office building. Up the elevators and, presumably, on to the next interview.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: We always start these conversations with some rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?
ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I’m ready.
What is your screen time average in a given week? Don’t lie to me. It’s too early in the interview for that.
I’m gonna be honest, I haven’t looked at it, but mostly out of fear of what it could be.
It’s extremely elevated.
Elevated is a very kind word.
What is your internet guilty pleasure?
TikTok.
Same.
It’s been quite concerning. Now, a lot of my algorithm is AI videos of Jake Paul speaking Punjabi.
Sounds like quite a guilty pleasure to me. If you could design one civic app for New Yorkers, what would it do?
I’d say an app that distills how to vote, where to vote, all the information that you need on voting, because there’s still a lot of New Yorkers that don’t know the general election is coming up. They have early voting starting. They have the voter registration deadline on October 25. It should be one simple place to go.
You would think, wouldn’t you?
I feel that way about a lot of politics.
You met your wife on Hinge. Any tips?
Continue to have hope.
Just to be clear, I am married.
[Laughs] OK.
But for anyone else, you say, “Have hope.”
I wish you a happy marriage.
We’re doing great. Thank you. What is one tech tool that you actually find helpful in your day-to-day work? What do you use?
It’s very old-fashioned, but my alarm is very useful. I could not function without that alarm.
What time were you up this morning?
I was up at 7:30 am.
Oh, not too early.
Yeah, every now and then you get one of those.
Is technology making democracy stronger or weaker?
I think in its current use, weaker. But I don’t think that’s an innate aspect of technology.
If you could have dinner with any tech founder, living or dead, who would it be?
I would like to have dinner with Huge Ma. He created something called TurboVax, which was a portal that took publicly accessible information about vaccine appointments and made it much easier for New Yorkers to actually sign up at the peak of Covid. As an elected official, I was recommending to my own constituents that they not use the government website to find their appointments and find where they could actually get a test. I recommended they use TurboVax instead.
Kudos to you for not saying Steve Jobs, because that’s what most people go for. OK, let’s jump in—before you were an extremely online mayoral candidate, before you were a state assembly member, a community organizer, you were a kid, and you were a kid who grew up with the internet. Can you talk a little bit about some of your formative digital experiences? Were you an early adopter?
My parents didn’t let me watch TV on weekdays. I have a distinct memory of the beginning of Hulu, where you could watch TV on your computer, and thoroughly enjoying the loophole that created for my young childhood. “Early adopter” I think would be giving myself a little too much credit. But I played quite a few computer games, especially FIFA, SimCity, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Championship Manager, which then became Football Manager. That kind of introduced me to the world of chat rooms around games, things like that.
At least some of those seem relevant to your future political aspirations.
I also have my memories of the birth of iTunes and the free song of the week, and having an iPod. Before that, having a jog-proof Sony Walkman.
These were some of the memories that kind of informed the way I saw technology in the world.
In college you organized for Palestine, and you continued to do organizing work after that. I’m curious about how you approached digital activism as opposed to IRL activism and interaction. Is one approach better for achieving certain goals? Did you see them working in tandem?
I think, to be honest with you, that the digital aspect was quite underdeveloped at that time. It was a part of it, but it was more kind of perfunctory than it was adding a distinct utility to the way in which we organized. Even in high school, my sense of politics was Facebook wall debates going back and forth.
You know, people are still having them.
Wishing them the best.
Yeah, me too.
In college I stopped using Facebook for a few years. I would only keep an account to keep the Bowdoin [Students for Justice in Palestine] Facebook page going. It rarely, if ever, transformed the world that we were actually living in.
Sure.
It was just a way to share information. I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, but the most exciting part of this campaign, as it pertains to social media, has been the use of it to not only reflect the world that we live in, but to also transform that same world. That was something that I had not arrived at in my early years.
Like all of us who grew up online, you have a digital footprint. Much of which has been picked over. It’s been used to make fun of you. It’s been used to attack you. I read a piece over the weekend that quoted some experts saying anyone running for mayor should really scrub their digital profile. Did you?
Clearly not?
Clearly not.
Can you believe if I did? The worst scrub of all time.
Do you fire whoever was responsible for that? Do you ever wish you had? Do you ever wish that less of you as a 21-year-old was out there now that you’re running for mayor of New York City?
You know, I haven’t spent too much time on it. Frankly I think too much of politics has become artificial, has become the creation of a self that is actually divorced from the way in which you grew up in the world. Actually being able to show who you’ve been over a period of time, the growth, the consistency, all of these things at the same time, I think, is also something that reflects what many people go through in and outside of politics. Yet within politics, it’s almost as if we want to create a snapshot of who you are in this moment, and tell people to extrapolate it.
That’s who you’ve always been.
Who you’ve always been.
One of your earliest videos was you talking to Trump supporters about their vote. Obviously, the campaign on social media has been a meteoric success. It has been one of the foundational stories of this entire campaign. But take us back in time, back to before you were even polling at 1 percent. Where did that social media campaign come from?
It’s funny you mentioned the 1 percent because we were recently looking at that poll and I was quite literally tied with “Someone Else.” Not even a name.
Oh, it literally was “Someone Else”?
All the candidates. Then me, tied with Someone Else.
Literally. Anybody else? Anyone else.
Shout out to Someone Else. We beat you, man.
Yeah. Good for them.
By the time I ran for state assembly, especially with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s run in 2018 and the way in which her launch video so captivated people and distilled her politics into something that could be shared with everyone, the idea of having a launch video for social media was becoming more and more well established. There was a moment soon after my election where we started to think about what it could look like to use videos in a non-electoral capacity, to use them in a legislative advocacy capacity to try and take that same kind of approach as if it was a campaign.
Mm-hmm.
One of those approaches was with the campaign we started called Fix the MTA. We made this big launch video with this duo called Melted Solids, who continue to work on the campaign today. It’s this launch video that looks to speak about the MTA and distill the three key ways that we were going to transform the MTA.
If I look back at it, it didn’t reach that many people. But it was this moment in which we thought there could be more than just the approach and the model that we’ve seen. Since then, there have been a number of other politicians who continue to utilize these mediums in different and innovative ways. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most clear examples. City Council member Chi Ossé was someone who was also using short-form media, built for TikTok and Instagram. It was really taking issues that would previously only be of concern to those pre-existingly plugged into the politics of this city and making it of a far larger interest.
As we were thinking about all that, I had a meeting with Anthony, who’s one member of the duo, with Deb, of Melted Solids. We met at Pye Boat Noodle in Astoria, just by where I live. I was talking to him about wanting this campaign to be one that didn’t just better the other candidates in terms of our use of digital, but really owned that medium and tried to do something different in the manner in which we used it and investing in it early at a level that I think most consultants would tell us was not the right move to make. Yet we decided we’re gonna make two highly produced videos every month, and we’re gonna supplement that with our own videos that we take with an iPhone here and there.
You’ve executed a lot of very fun stunts on social media during this campaign. Do you have a favorite? Do you have one that was the most fun, that you think was the most effective?
One of the first ones that really broke through was when I did the Polar Bear plunge.
It’s very unpleasant to watch.
It was very, very cold. I think specifically shooting the rest of that video after I’m out of the water, just dripping cold …
Oh yeah.
… trying to speak about the nine mayoral appointees on the rent guidelines board. That was quite fun. It was quite literally me and Andrew Epstein, who ran our entire comms operation for the primary and now is running our entire digital operation for the general, and his iPhone. It’s me in a $30 suit from the thrift store on Steinway. Deb from Melted Solids helped cut it. It became one of the most watched things we put out. And it cost us such little money. It cost us far more in terms of invention. I think also a willingness, frankly, to put yourself out there in all different kinds of ways. Many of which are embarrassing.
Speaking of embarrassing, your opponents. Namely, New York mayor Eric Adams before he dropped out. Andrew Cuomo. They have made valiant efforts to find the same success on social media that you have found. What’s it been like to watch that?
What I like about Eric Adams’ approach to social media is it’s distinct to Eric Adams. You wouldn’t confuse his video for mine. It’s not an imitation of my video. It’s very much Eric Adams.
It sure is.
I mean, the one where he’s getting stuff done, but he doesn’t seem to do anything …
Right.
… is incredible.
He is making a smoothie at 9:00 am but it’s 11:00 …
But the clock behind …
… is incredible.
I could not script that. My favorite one of his is the one with the Michael Bay–Linkin Park meme.
Yes.
“What I’ve Done.” And it’s like “POV: You’re the mayor,” but it’s on him. So it’s either a misuse of POV …
… or a bold new format. Exactly.
I did start listening to “What I’ve Done” by Linkin Park a lot after watching that video. I do credit the mayor for that.
Andrew Cuomo’s use of social media, it feels a little more of a reflection of, I just got beat by a guy who uses social media, so let’s try and get this show on the road.
There you go.
I do miss the half-cut sleeves that he had in the relaunch video.
Bring those back, Andrew. You still have time.
Please.
One of the consequences of your approach on social media, I would argue, is its own success. You are extremely famous online, which in the year 2025 means you are just famous, right? My family lives in Canada, they all know I’m interviewing you today. You are known to millions of people outside of New York City, outside of even this country. Outside of the voters you are courting. How have you had to adapt to that level of notoriety?
I think there are some logistical adaptations. You’ll see we make a lot more videos in this office now.
Sure.
Part of that is just because we don’t have enough time to make them outside anymore because of what making them outside means now. And part of that is a beautiful thing where people are stopping you and saying hello, because one of our many hopes from the beginning of this campaign was that we could break out of this bubble.
What I’ve really been overjoyed by is the blossoming of the video team that we have. There’s a real tendency when you’re successful with something to just continue to do that again and again and again. I have a very bad habit with food where if I like one dish, I’ll just eat it until I’m sick of it.
Mm-hmm.
What’s been so lovely is to work with a team whose hunger is undimmed by the success of that initial format. It would be very easy to just continue to make direct-to-cameras every single day. But they have the inventiveness of How do we stay consistent with our message, but continue to reinvent the medium and the way in which we’re using this? That’s something that is both exciting and also necessary as part of our political project. We cannot rest on our laurels.
You’ve been on the cover of Time magazine and New York magazine, among others. You’ve done The Late Show, The View, CNN, MSNBC. I’m here from WIRED. We are the third Condé Nast publication to publish an interview in the last month. I have to imagine the editor-in-chief of Glamour is somewhere outside. Do you worry about overexposure?
I don’t really think about it. I defer to my comms team to decide on questions of exposure or overexposure.
Assuming that you take office, how does your use of social media change? What does it look like to go from campaigning on social media to governing and thinking about these platforms as tools of governance rather than tools to galvanize an electorate?
Well, I’m gonna make the Adams videos.
Well, obviously. You’re clearly inspired.
It’s POV. You’re the mayor of New York City. I’m getting stuff done. I’m gonna get the clock …
… and it just always says 11:00.
Yeah, it’s just always 11. He has left us a model.
We’ll kind of wrestle with it, but I think social media is often discussed as a way in which you can escape the world. What’s been exciting is to be part of a team that’s looking to use it as a way to tell the stories of that world and then to transform it. The use of the medium has allowed us to build a campaign that now has more than 85,000 volunteers, so many of whom first engaged with the campaign through a video that they saw, or a tweet, or a photo.
We recently put out a request for submissions for a sticker, and we had hundreds of artists send in their submissions. We had thousands of people vote on them. The other day the winning artist came into the office, and it was so lovely to meet this man and get a sense of who he was, the design that he made. None of this would’ve been possible without social media.
Mm-hmm.
Our scavenger hunt brought together about 5,000 people or so from across New York City with a premise that we just shared online. Now here they were in person.
The other day I was at a paper-shredding event that we had in the Bronx, and a woman came over to me and she was confiding in me about an issue that her parents were facing. At the end of her telling me her story, she mentioned that she first met me at the scavenger hunt. These are the ways in which social media can actually transform the world around us.
Right.
That’s why I don’t think that there’s an innate positive or negative with social media; it depends on how you use these tools. In governing, it has to continue to be a tool that speaks to as many New Yorkers as possible, because today so many more New Yorkers are getting their news or their sense of self, or their sense of their city, from the social media that they use. To ignore that is to ignore reality. So we have to be not only present there, but we have to be thinking about how do we treat these forms of media with the seriousness and the legitimacy that they deserve?
I don’t think you can divorce the political approach to social media from the political approach to young people. There’s so often a condescension about both the medium and the people themselves. That it doesn’t require that kind of time and study and approach, when in fact it requires just as much if not more. If you show that, then people are willing to engage with you. If you just treat young people as you would anyone else with the same concerns, the same stakes, the same consequences.
If you prep for that Instagram video in the way that you would for a print media interview, you’ll see that there is the possibility of reaching far more people.
You talked about shooting more videos in the office as opposed to out on the sidewalk for good reason. You are extremely visible. You are a person of color, you are a self-described Democratic socialist. You’re Muslim. You hold values and positions, whether on Gaza or the LGBTQIA community, that are anathema to large segments of this country.
I don’t need to tell you that political violence has risen in this country, markedly in recent years. You’ve been yelled at on the street, you’ve been on the receiving end of death threats. So has your staff. I’m curious, particularly following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, have you thought differently about your safety and your exposure? How do you think about the risk of violence? How does that change your campaign? How does it change, ultimately, what that means for you as mayor?
I haven’t let it change the way in which I move through the city that I love. I have to also take every precaution, not only for myself, but frankly for my staff and the team that are around me, because these threats that are being made, they’re not just threats on myself, as you’ve said, they’re threats on my team, and the fact is that I’m never alone now.
So if there is a threat to me, it’s also to those who are in my immediate proximity. There are things that I used to do that were instinctual, you know? If I just missed the train, I would hop on a Citi Bike and bike as fast as I could to the meeting. Now I have a detail with me. Now I have a team around me.
Now it also just means a little bit more of a negotiation and intentional planning around the use of whatever means by which I’m getting around this city.
But that just means you have to take that extra time. It doesn’t mean that you stop taking the train, you stop biking, you stop taking the bus. I think the way that you move around the city, it influences the way in which you see the city. Too often if you’re riding around only in a car with tinted windows, the only New Yorker you might see is a reflection of yourself.
Right.
That is part of what leads to politicians who do not engage with the public in the manner that they should. My not only hope and dream, but my commitment, is to live in the city as New Yorkers live in it. To take the train, to take the bus, to ride a bike. You will not feel the pain of the slowest buses in the United States until you ride that bus.
You know, me sitting on the M57, going 4.9 miles an hour to a press conference, is a great reminder to myself and everyone around me as to why we’re fighting to make buses fast and free. I think these are the kinds of reminders you need. So that you don’t get separated from the people that you’re actually looking to serve.
A big area of focus for WIRED this year has been documenting the relationship between leaders in the tech industry and President Trump. Some of those same leaders are people who are not thrilled about the prospect of you as New York’s mayor. Why do you think technology leaders—and I use that a little bit as a proxy for business leaders writ large—have moved so far to the right? How do you bring them back?
I had a number of meetings over the summer, and have continued to, with business leaders, and there was one week where I had a meeting with the Partnership for New York City, hundreds of top CEOs, and the next day I had a meeting with those specifically within the tech sector. One thing that I found fascinating in that meeting with the tech sector is that there are a lot of parallels in the ethos that drives that sector, and the kind of politics that we espouse. An ethos where you are hungry, you are unwilling to accept a status quo, and you are interested in both innovating, and frankly disrupting, the style of the politics or the business approach that you see in front of you.
I think that, to me, has provided a real building block for a number of the relationships we’ve been building over these last few months with a number of leaders within the tech industry because we are looking to bring excellence into public service and to build upon the excellence that exists and also to deliver that which has been denied. Part of that means looking at the current state of city government and reckoning with that which has failed.
Mm-hmm.
It is sad, to say the least, that we have allowed the language of efficiency and fraud and waste to become bywords of right-wing politics or Elon Musk’s DOGE, when in fact any progressive politics worth its salt—that’s focused on working people—has to be concerned with the quality of life for those same working people, with the efficiency of the services you’re delivering to them, with the fact that there cannot be any tolerance for fraud or waste in the pursuit of delivering those services.
I think that opens up the possibility of working together on a number of these things. I’ve been honestly surprised in the openness that many have had. Now, there will be some who oppose this campaign. Absolutely. Sure. But I will always leave the door open to anyone and everyone to both explain the positions that I have, and also to make clear that my vision of success for this city is a success where everyone stays and that includes business leaders. That includes the workers who are working at those businesses and that there’s room for others to join us.
You’ve been asked a lot about ICE, and the National Guard coming into New York City. In the last few weeks, Apple and Google have been on the receiving end of a lot of coverage because they have taken down several ICE-tracking apps. These are apps in their stores that allow individuals to notify their communities when ICE is spotted in a given neighborhood. The Trump administration has been very vocal in their disapproval of this kind of product. What do you make of that decision by these tech companies?
I think it’s the wrong decision, and I think what we’re seeing across this country is the terrorizing of people, and it’s not simply something that is happening in cities far off from the one that we’re sitting in.
I spoke to a pastor in East Flatbush who told me about a congregant approaching him after services and saying that she’d been served a deportation order.
She had no one to go with her to 26 Federal Plaza. He went with her for the hearing with the judge. The judge asked her in this hearing, “Are you wearing the clothes that you are ready to leave in? Have you told your family you’ll be deported today?” And she starts to break down crying.
Over the course of the hearing, the judge decides to, in fact, provide her with [Temporary Protected Status] protections, but the ICE agents outside do not care, and so the pastor has to send some of the Court Watch activists outside to distract those agents. Send another person who’s there to run to grab the elevator, and then takes this woman under his arm and runs her into the elevator, smuggling her out of a federal building for her own safety.
That’s what ICE is in the city and across this country. Whether we’re talking about a priest standing outside of an ICE facility being shot with a beanbag in the head, or whether we’re talking about the ways in which people are being treated all in the name of law enforcement.
It is a betrayal of those very words. There is a clear need for everyone across this country to both understand the authoritarianism that we are seeing and use every single tool we have to ensure that we’re standing up for everyone.
WIRED is ostensibly optimistic about the future. Your campaign has been very optimistic. I would argue, as WIRED’s editor in chief, that optimism in this moment looks a little bit different than it did a few years ago. Optimism to me right now is, maybe the National Guard doesn’t invade New York City. What does optimism look like to you right now?
I think it means not losing sight of the examples of a better world that we see each and every day. There is an immense amount of work to do to build the world that we deserve, but we’d be doing it a disservice if we didn’t see the ingredients of it around us already. Even amidst these horrific acts of cruelty, you will see New Yorkers—you will see Americans—show that which we wish were reflected on a far larger scale, show that which we wish were embedded within the structures of politics of this country.
Those are the opportunities for us to build something new. Amidst all of the talk of New Yorkers being people who have no time for others, I also find that we are a kind people. We are people in a rush, we have places to go. But in the same subway station that you’ll find in violation of ADA compliance, you will see a New Yorker who is trying to help a young mother carry her stroller down the stairs. You will see a New Yorker looking to help others in those moments where structures have failed them. I think those are the examples I hold onto as ones that can actually deliver us to the world that we want.
Fast forward to November. You’ve won the mayoral election. What’s your first post?
I’m very tempted to say the Eric Adams video, POV you’re the mayor.
You leave us with those parting words.
It could be, as we say, inshallah.
We may find out.
Thank you, Linkin Park.
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