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PORTSIDE CULTURE

RUN ZOHRAN RUN! – INSIDE MAMDANI’S SENSATIONAL CAMPAIGN – BOOK
REVIEW  
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Paul Buhle with Jay Schaffner
November 13, 2025
Portside

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_ This book appeared in September. How the world around Mamdani has
changed since then! This book lays out how it all happened, who was
Zohran Mamdani, how he became an activist, how he was drawn to Bernie
Sanders and DSA, how Zohran became Zohran... _

Run Zohran Run! - Inside Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become
New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor, O/R Books

 

The subtitle reads, “Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign
To Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor.” The
book also anticipated the shift in the race with the sudden withdrawal
of the incumbent. The Establishment sought, of course, to make the
race about “socialism,” while Mamdani’s insistence upon
affordability and inclusion kept his campaign rolling. As the _New
York Times_ recorded, young people in particular found that getting
involved, reaching out, gave them a world of new friends and
comrades. 

 

 

Run Zohran Run!  [[link removed]]Inside
Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become New York City’s
First Democratic Socialist Mayor
[[link removed]]By Theodore HammO/R
Books; 240 pagesSeptember 2025Paperback:  $20.00;  E-book:  $10.00;
 Print + E-book:  $25.00ISBN: Paperback - 9781682194461; E-book -
9781682194515 

 
O/R Books
 

Let’s start somewhere else, with a bit of background. Author
Theodore Hamm is the Chair of Journalism in Clinton Hill, home to
Brooklyn’s own St. Joseph University. More to the point,  he
wrote _Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up _in _New York City
Shaped Bernie Sanders. _Hamm knows his (Greater) New York and the
world of the Left, within and beyond.

Hamm is a convincingly clear writer, with a keen sense of history.
Back in 2019, as he recalls, Biden debated Bernie, and MSNBC host
Chris Matthews followed with a warning that under President Bernie,
“executions in Central Park” would probably follow. Months later,
also after lots of Democratic Party resistance including many millions
of dollars, Bernie’s second presidential campaign ended in
disappointment. But this is far from the whole story. In Greater New
York, a dozen candidates for state and local offices backed by
Democratic Socialists of America won or made strong showings.
Something had already happened.Not that Opinion Leaders would (much)
care to notice. The current Mamdani Campaign met initially with
derision and raw hatred. Expectably, the _New York Post _called the
promise of free buses “something out of the Politburo,” while
Andrew Cuomo warned ominously that his beloved Democratic Party was
now in mortal danger. _The Times, _looking down its collective nose,
warned that any (democratic) socialist, even this very appealing one,
“often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.” (All
quotes, p.32) How could voters be so foolish as to put him into
office?

Even before the first Bernie Sanders campaign, _Nation_ journalist
John Nichols published a remarkable book, _The ’S’ Word: the
History of an American Tradition…Socialism_ (2012,) to remind
readers of all the social improvements in American life actually
proposed by the Left, with their origins conveniently forgotten. Now a
popular and avowed socialist has made a claim on the legacy. What Hamm
calls the “twin pillars” of the Manhattan elite’s worldview,
“capitalism is sacrosanct, and Israel must never be criticized,”
(p.34) have been badly shaken. Not shattered, mind you, but
shaken.Many readers will be familiar with as well as sympathetic to
large parts of the Mamdani biography laid out here, including his days
in Bronx Science, tutored by future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan.
New to me was the rising effects of Islamophobia in Greater New York
during Mamdani’s teen years, including his being detained by
security agents at JFK after a family trip to Uganda, pressed whether
he had attended a terrorist (!) training camp. Turned down by Columbia
after high school graduation, he traveled to Bowdoin College, a
liberal encampment, where studied Fanon, launched a chapter of
Students for Justice in Palestine, and became a bit of a rapper. Going
pro as a rapper, in Kampala shortly after graduation, Mamdani had
already become as multilingual as no Manhattan mayor since La Guardia,
who famously read the Sunday Funnies over the radio but not in musical
tones.

So much of the rest of the Young Person Story becomes complicated, it
may be best to focus on the Socialist Conversion. The 2019 election
campaign of Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister seeking to represent
Bay Ridge, ended in defeat, but it gave activist-supporter Zohran an
inspiration. He returned to run the senate campaign by progressive
journalist Ross Barkan, a Jewish critic of Israeli misbehavior.

These details and others, fascinating for close reading, are already
getting too much, so let’s jump ahead to Mamdani’s 2020 campaign
against a state assembly incumbent in Astoria, Northwest Queens. DSA
had already made inroads here, and Zohran had been a volunteer in a
hotly-contested race for Queens District Attorney. Tiffany Caban, a
young public defender, appealed strongly to the public school teachers
and employees of nonprofits who had already aligned themselves with
DSA. She lost, very narrowly. But Mamdani’s activism and his avowed
commitments drew real attention in progressive circles.

Astoria had changed dramatically since the presence of German-American
immigrant socialists, likely craft workers, reported during the
1870s-90s. But somehow, it had retained or renewed some of the
socialistic spirit. Zohran followed the advice of those  who urged
him to challenge the incumbent, whose Greek heritage counted less and
less with demographic shifts. Besides, incumbent Aravella Simotas had
supported  machine candidate Joe Crowley against AOC in 2018.

Old fashioned Dems could not comprehend why this young guy signaled
his Indian-Ugandan heritage. Sporting his African middle name and
wearing Kurtas, a South Asian choice of pants wear, he came on proudly
as a rapper, and in his posters, added something to the DSA red rose
with a depiction of roti. He won by less than 500 votes, but he was on
his way. He had the courage to lead a rally across the street from
Chuck Schumer’s apartment near the Grand Army Plaza and proclaim, as
a proud member of Jewish Voice for Peace, that “in the anti-Zionism
I believe in, there is NO ROOM for antisemitism.” (p.53).

Fast forward to October 2023, and the certainty of the Right, _City
Journal_ to _New York Post_, that they had found the club to beat
the Left into submission. Far from it. As Eric Adams suggested that
DSA members were wearing swastikas, Zohran, fellow DSA elected and
supporters, organized and marched for peace. As Hamm says, by this
time, Zohran was “battle-tested.” (p.60)

A longer essay would be required to handle the story of Zohran’s
attacks on Adams’ so-called Rental Control Board actually giving
landlords gift after gift. While the Democratic Party went on
insisting, through the 2024 campaign, that the US economy was strong,
Zohran pointed to the widespread poverty of New Yorkers. On the day he
entered the race for mayor, he called for drastically different urban
polities. Put simply: Freeze the rent, make buses free and fast, and
provide free childcare. This became the campaign mantra spread by
thousands or tens of thousands of his supporters, many of them already
socialists or becoming members of DSA.

We have only reached the half-way point in the book, although much of
the rest is the sort of Inside Baseball for campaign-watchers and can
be summarized, I hope. On the one hand, the billionaires and their
lackeys turned on the steam, charging that Mamdani’s proposals would
cost far too much money, and that any attempt to control crime with
social measures rather than the hard hand of the law was
soft-on-crime.

One striking response by Mamdani was to point to the surveillance and
persecution of Muslims. Suddenly, social media viewers could see a
hundred minute video of Mamdani walking through the streets of Queens
in a thigh-length, white Asian shirt and a Palestinians scarf. He was
also running….in  the New York Marathon (in a 48,000th place
finish, not quite winning but outstanding for a politician). He
gathered supporters repelled at Adams’ wooing of Trump, and at the
anti-Palestinian rhetoric that constantly hinted at Islamophobia,
reinforced by the local Hindu Right. He was unafraid to campaign
against “halalflation,” that is, for the home folks who loved him
more and more, as they got to know him.

Trump’s  increasing threats against New Yorkers (and the
unwillingness of the mayor to respond) actually helped his followers
mobilize nonwhite and Spanish-speaking communities. Finally, someone
was speaking for them. A review twice this length would be required to
tease out, for instance, his campaign’s links to the group “Desis
Rise Up & Moving,” employing a Sanskrit term for an immigrant social
movement. Or his attendance at the Durga Pula festival in Ridgewood,
Queens, or at Sikh Day in Manhattan. He aided progressive politicians
attacked by Israeli hawks, and joined the throng of activists  in
Chinatown, Brooklyn.

And so on. After the primary, he could boast that having 500 trained
leaders and their  having knocked on 1.6 million doors. The stories
go on and on, so rich and so interesting the readers will need to
plumb the depths…and probably enjoy the trip. They will also note
the anti-Mamdani sentiment, embedded among the apartment kings and
the _New York Post_, encompassing Netanyahu’s minions and part but
not all of the Democratic machine. When the historically progressive
(for a long time socialist) Jewish _Forward_ came out for him,
insisting the 20% of Jews in New York supported
Mamdani, _Post _editorialists roiled. The Mayor called him a
“snake-oil salesman for socialism.” (131)

The book’s last section could be described as a guide for socialists
today, across the country and especially in urban areas where
demography is changing fast and new generations are coming of age. His
campaign showed by example how to organize and how to fight the hate
campaigns that inevitably came back to the charge of anti-Semitism.
Peter Beinart’s observation, after the victorious primary, was that
very large numbers of New Yorkers had become, by any measure,
pro-Palestinian. Jewish liberals over 35 who inclined toward Brad
Lander, nevertheless made Mamdani their second choice. Even the most
drastic and choreographed public attacks against him fell flat.

The anti-Mamdani assaults increasingly looked, by primary election day
and in the months after, punch drunk from too many lies. (“Remember,
he needs money from me, as President, to fulfill all of his FAKE
Communist promises. He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the
point of voting for him.…President DJT.”)   Notwithstanding
Adams’ withdrawal,  notwithstanding everything else thrown at him,
Mamdani won and won big.

But hold on for a moment. Neither Mamdani himself nor his followers
have claimed that his campaign offers a model for the fractured and
badly weakened Democratic Party to rebuild itself nationally and sweep
elections across the country. And yet the implication of a dynamic
youngster (same generation as AOC), exciting even the younger voters
who are the most disillusioned with the Dems, reaching ethnic/racial
minorities seemingly enticed by Trump, will not be welcomed by all.

A _New York Times_ Op-Ed by political-intellectual historian Timothy
Shenk points to a different model closer to the “sagebrush
rebellions” that have from time to time promised a leftish
alternative in the hinterlands, most notably (although he does not say
so) Fred Harris of Oklahoma, eight year Senator who sought the
Democratic nomination in 1976 and died in 2024. Dan Osborne, a fifty
year old military vet and avowed populist, running for the Senate in
Nebraska as an Independent, seems to have reclaimed the mantle. He
lost to the same opponent by only seven points last time around and
easily convinces supporters that he will make it in 2026. 

Osborne is not anybody’s model Democrat. He deeply mistrusts the
Chinese and “the swamp” of bureaucracy in Washington. In a bit of
bravado, he once offered to help Trump build a wall against illegal
migration from the South. He appears nowhere as leftwing as Fred
Harris, but these are not the 1960s-70s. Osborne’s attacks on the
takeover of the Republican Party by big business and their successful
efforts to bar desperately needed benefits to the working poor among
other issues epitomize his outreach to ordinary Republican voters.
Democratic candidates echoing his views in Red State may present the
best hope of overturning the current rush to authoritarianism. To
those who complain of his negative attitudes toward today’s
Democrats: Bernie Sanders, after all, is also an Independent.

Shenk does not claim to disprove anything about the appeal of Mamdani,
and that’s a good thing. The Osborne model (if we may) is its own
creature. We have a very different model in the Mamdani campaign, now
grandly successful. Let a thousand flowering plants blossom.
Progressive gardeners, get to work!

* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City
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* New York City mayoral election
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* 2025 Elections
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* DSA
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* democratic socialist
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Democratic Party
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* Democrats
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* Andrew Cuomo
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* Kathy Hochul
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* Chuck Schumer
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* Islamaphobia
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* young adult literature
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* Activism
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* Grassroots campaigns
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* Left Electoral Strategy
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