Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Kwame Mamdani (born October 18, 1991) is an American Democratic socialist politician. A member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, he is the representative for the 36th district of the New York State Assembly, in Queens since 2021.
Mamdani is a candidate in the Democratic primary for the 2025 New York City mayoral election.
Zohran Mamdani was born into a family of Indian parentage in Kampala, Uganda. He is the son of Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and Indian-born Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani. His father, Mahmood, is a Columbia University professor who studies colonialism, director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Uganda, and chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda. Mahmood gave Zohran the middle name Kwame after Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah.
Mamdani moved to Cape Town, South Africa, at five years old. He attended St. George’s Grammar School while his father worked at the University of Cape Town. The family moved to New York City when he was seven, where he graduated from Bank Street School for Children then Bronx High School of Science. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College in Maine with a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies.
Mamdani worked as a prevention counselor and cricketer, before running for office. He also tried to work as a rapper in the New York subway stations.
After leading student organizing campaigns, Mamdani became formally involved in politics. He volunteered for the unsuccessful campaign of New York City Council primary candidate democratic socialist Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian Lutheran minister running in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in 2017. Then he was the campaign manager for Ross Barkan's unsuccessful run for New York State Senate in 2018. He was then a field organizer for democratic socialist Tiffany Cabán's unsuccessful campaign for Queens District Attorney in 2019. He then ran for New York State Assembly himself and won.
In 2019, Mamdani announced his campaign for New York State Assembly in the 36th district, which encompasses Astoria and Long Island City in Queens. He was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and ran on statewide rent control, fare-free transit, ending mass incarceration, and single-payer healthcare in New York. Mamdani's narrow victory over four-term incumbent Aravella Simotas took almost a month to call, and he won the general election in 2021.
Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialists of America's eight-member "Socialists in Office" bloc, a member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, and one of three Muslim lawmakers, in the New York State Legislature. His Assembly district includes a section of Astoria, which has a significant population of Muslim and Arab voters and is also the center of the socialist movement in New York City.
Mamdani is a member of the following assembly committees:
As of January 2025, Mamdani had been the primary sponsor of 13 bills in the Assembly.
On October 23, 2024, Mamdani announced that he would be entering the upcoming race for New York City mayor as a Democrat running in the Democratic Party Primary, following Eric Adams' federal prosecution and several investigations into his administration. Mamdani's platform includes supporting a rent freeze, free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. He also said he wants the city government to run five grocery stores in the city to drive down grocery prices - one in each borough.
Mamdani started to consider himself a democratic socialist following the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States.
Mamdani is running on creating free, universal childcare for children aged 6 weeks to 5 years old, as well as increasing the wages for childcare workers. He also has proposed giving all new families in New York City "baby baskets" containing baby products such as diapers and nursing supplies.
Mamdani believes that to increase public safety, what is needed is "dignified work, economic stability, and well-resourced neighborhoods," rather than policing and prisons.
He is in favor of dismantling "mass incarceration in New York" by opposing the construction of new state prisons and jails, divesting from the New York prison system, and investing in jobs, services, and restorative justice approaches." Mamdani also supports the abolition of felony disenfranchisement, allowing those with felonies to vote.
Mamdani introduced a bill to eliminate New York University's and Columbia University's tax exempt status and direct those funds towards underfunded public universities.
As a New York State assembly member, Mamdani has advocated for capping rent increases, strengthening tenant protects, and creating a Social Housing Development Agency that would build publicly-owned affordable housing.
Early in 2023, Mamdani introduced a bill called the "Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act" which would prohibit registered charities from donating to organizations that support illegal Israeli settlers. In November 2023, Zohran joined Cynthia Nixon in a five day hunger strike outside of Washington DC in support of an immediate ceasefire and opposition to President Biden's support of Israel's attacks on Gaza. In 2024, he held an iftar for a ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan.
In 2025, Mamdani was the only mayoral candidate to make an appearance at a rally in Union Square in Manhattan to protest the Trump Administration and Mayor Eric Adams for their immigration policy and federal policy towards transgender Americans.
Mamdani supports raising minimum wage in New York to $30 per hour by 2030.
Mamdani supports an income tax increase on the top one percent of New York income earners to raise $20 billion to fund tuition-free CUNY and SUNY schools, statewide universal childcare, a subway fare freeze, free MTA buses, and tenant protections.
He is in favor of permanently eliminating bus fares. Mamdani advocated for an MTA bus fare-free pilot program, which was established on one MTA bus in each borough in September 2022, at a cost of $15 million. The program was a success: it saw a 30 percent increase in ridership on weekdays, which was predominantly from individuals earning less than $28,000 a year. Across the five routes made free, assaults on bus operators dropped by 38.9 percent. However, in April 2024 the MTA budget didn't set aside further money for a continuation of the pilot program, which Zohran denounced and said, "...the MTA was opposed to this program. And they were opposed to this program because they were saying that now is not the time to create any kind of confusion around fare collection.” Mamdani estimates that it would cost New York City approximately $650 million per year to eliminate bus fares.
In December 2022, Mamdani introduced a series of bills for the 2023 session called "Fix the MTA". He proposed free bus travel over the next four years across Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and then Manhattan and Staten Island. The Formula Three Act would fill the $2.5 billion dollar shortfall of the MTA with another plank freezing fares at $2.75. Another plank would have set aside further money for more frequency such as, six minute headways for trains and for the hundred most used bus-routes, then using any additional money towards increasing service by 20%.
In 2023, Mamdani co-introduced a bill that would enact a weight-based vehicle-registration fee to dissuade people from owning heavier vehicles in an effort to make streets safer.
Mamdani has been a vocal supporter of congestion pricing and drafted a bill with New York state senator Michael Gianaris called "Get Congestion Pricing Right." The purpose of the bill was to fund more frequent and reliable buses to "show New Yorkers that congestion pricing will be met with better public transit options, instead of simply saddling them with higher costs or longer commutes." The campaign won $12.3 million for increased peak service on five express bus routes and investments in reliability on 13 bus routes.
In 2018, Mamdani was naturalized as an American citizen. He is Muslim, practicing the Shia sect of Islam. He was married in a civil ceremony in 2025.