Video by Democracy Now! | The Rise of Zohran Mamdani: From 2021 Hunger Strike to Mayoral Election Victory | Working Class South Asian Organizers (9:20 min in)
🏙️ A Record-Breaking Election
As New York City heads to the polls on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, the stakes feel unusually high. Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 9 p.m., capping an early-voting period that saw more than 735,000 ballots cast — the highest in city history for a non-presidential race and nearly four times the usual turnout.
The contest among Democrat Zoran Mandani, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa has drawn national attention. Even Donald Trump weighed in on 60 Minutes, saying he’d pick Cuomo over Mandani, whom he labeled “a communist.” Days later, Barack Obama privately called Mandani’s campaign “impressive,” offering to serve as a sounding board. While initial returns will come in on election night, the New York City Board of Elections expects final certification to take several days, a reminder that this race may be as unpredictable as it is historic.
👣 Canvassing in Kensington
On a quiet Friday in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood, another kind of energy fills the air. A dozen women in bright headscarves gather at a community center, members of DRUM (Beats) — Desis Rising Up and Moving — a group that serves low-income South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers.
Armed with colorful flyers in Bengali and Urdu, they fan out in pairs, knocking on doors and calling out, “My mayor, your mayor!” They remind neighbors about polling sites and early-voting hours. The mood is joyful, almost festive. And that, organizers say, is exactly the point.
🤝 Beyond Identity, Toward Solidarity
For DRUM’s executive director Fahd Ahmed, the movement’s power lies in its message. “People assume it’s an identity thing,” he says. “But this campaign speaks to the material issues of working-class people first and foremost.”
According to political director Jagpreet Singh, Mandani’s campaign rests on three planks: leftist progressives, rent-stabilized tenants, and Muslim and South Asian communities long left out of New York politics. By June’s primary, turnout among Muslim voters had risen 60 percent and among South Asians 40 percent. “From the beginning,” Singh adds, “we knew our communities would be the backbone.”
👩🏽🏫 Women at the Core
That backbone, however, is most visible in the women who power it. Kazi Foya, DRUM’s organizing director and a Bangladeshi immigrant, describes volunteers who canvass after long shifts in cafeterias, retail stores, and home-health care. “They are not just volunteers,” she says. “They built a movement.”
Their persistence transformed neighborhoods once marked by low turnout into hubs of civic engagement. Through every conversation, they reminded one another that politics is not abstract, it’s the rent due, the school lunch shift, the bus ride home.
🌆 From 9/11 Shadows to City Hall
To understand what this moment means, it helps to look back. DRUM was founded in 2000, just before 9/11, when South Asian and Muslim communities were thrust into an era of fear and surveillance. Foya recalls discovering an NYPD informer tailing her in 2008; others were told to remove hijabs for safety. Sikh families cut their hair and wore American-flag T-shirts to avoid attacks.
Now, a generation later, those same communities are rallying behind a Muslim mayoral front-runner who refuses to hide his faith or his name. “From hiding ourselves to taking the stage — that’s the journey,” Singh says.
🕌 A Mayor Who Mirrors the City
At a Bangladeshi restaurant in Jackson Heights, Mandani told supporters, “To be a good Muslim is to be a good person, to help those in need and to harm no one.” His words resonated deeply, especially with youth volunteers who see in him a reflection of their own aspirations.
Seventeen-year-old Mifun Mahona says she can’t vote yet, “but if adults vote for the right person, it helps people like me too.” Between phone-banking in Nepali, Bengali, and Urdu, she and her friends joke and study, turning a campaign office into a classroom of civic possibility.
Video by Al Jazeera English | New York City just elected Zohran Mamdani. What now?
🧭 Movement Meets Governance
If Mandani wins, the transition from movement to governance will test the very coalition that carried him here. Groups like DRUM expect to shape city policy, and to push back when needed. “Zoran made the impossible possible,” Foya says, “but if he doesn’t keep his promises, we’ll hold him accountable.”
Ahmed agrees, calling it a new chapter: “Running a city from the left means meeting daily needs while still believing things can work differently, for everyday working people.”
🌅 A New Political Imagination
From the doorsteps of Brooklyn to the markets of Queens, Mandani’s campaign has given once-marginalized communities a sense of ownership over New York’s future. What began as a local organizing effort has become a larger experiment in democracy, showing that solidarity can be both practical and visionary.
As Mandani told his supporters in his final rally, “For all those who say our time is coming — my friends, our time is now.”
