Zohran Mamdani’s Win Could Change Everything

On a cold February day in 2017, the gates came down on thousands of bodegas across New York City. Many were Yemeni-owned, family-run stores—places that almost never closed, not for a blizzard, not for a blackout, not even for Eid. But just this once, they did. The occasion was Donald Trump’s first Muslim ban. The owners shut their lights, locked their doors, and taped notes to the glass: “Closed in protest. Closed for dignity. Closed for America.”

That day, they gathered outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall under a winter sky, praying in the cold and waving American flags. It looked like a protest, but it felt like something deeper. It was a collective act of defiance—and belonging. For years after 9/11, Arab and Muslim New Yorkers had lived under the long shadow of surveillance and suspicion, told to keep their heads down, stay quiet, and be grateful. The 2017 bodega strike broke that silence. Here were Muslim workers and small business owners—unapologetic, organized, and standing shoulder to shoulder—not asking for permission but asserting their place in the city they helped build. It wasn’t just about Trump’s ban. It was a rupture with the post-9/11 politics of fear. It marked the emergence of a new kind of Muslim American politics—rooted in solidarity, visible in public, and grounded in power, not just presence.

Few saw it for what it was. But that day was not only an end to hiding. It was the quiet beginning of a realignment that would take clearer shape years later, when New York Democrats chose Zohran Mamdani as their nominee for mayor.

Mamdani’s win is historic in the ways the headlines capture. He is the first Muslim and South Asian nominee for mayor of New York, and the first democratic socialist in generations to have a real shot at leading a major American city. But the basic facts aren’t the real story. The real story is how he won—and why.

When Andrew Cuomo launched his comeback bid, the Democratic establishment seemed eager to pretend the last decade hadn’t happened. Cuomo ran as if it were still 2010, leaning on the same donors, repeating the same talking points, spending millions on television ads, and betting that a weary electorate would settle for the devil they knew.

But Mamdani saw something they didn’t. He recognized how much the ground had shifted. That shift began, in part, with the bodega strike in 2017. Some of the people who had organized or participated in that protest helped power his campaign. Others, who had been politicized by it or had been ignored since, joined his coalition. The memory of that moment—when immigrant communities stood up to say, “We belong here”—did not fade. It deepened. It matured.

These weren’t symbolic gestures. They were seeds. Mamdani’s campaign grew from years of organizing, frustration, and grief, especially among young progressives, immigrants, and Arab and Muslim communities who had long been pushed to the party’s margins. He didn’t just run against Cuomo. He ran against the political amnesia that forgot the people who showed up when it mattered.

No issue revealed that disconnect more clearly than Gaza. Over the past 20 months, as tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed by American-made bombs, Democratic leaders offered excuses instead of action. Even as the party’s base shifted toward supporting Palestinian rights, the leadership stood firm.

In the primary, Cuomo followed this script, accusing Mamdani of extremism for his pro-Palestinian views and demanding loyalty tests. But Mamdani didn’t flinch. He named what was happening. He said that solidarity is not a slogan, that multiracial democracy must mean something for those most often asked to wait.

Voters didn’t punish him for it. They rewarded him. As a Bangladeshi Uber driver told me on election night, “Zohran is for peace, not war. He’s for ordinary people. We don’t want more wars. We need help here in New York.”