Can Zohran Mamdani, the first South Asian to run to be New York mayor, pull off an upset?

On a rainy Sunday evening in May, Kuber Sancho Persad found himself in an unusual place for a New York taxi driver: standing in line outside a popular concert venue in Brooklyn.

The venue was familiar territory for twentysomethings heading to indie shows, not for working immigrants like Persad. But this was not a concert. Persad was there to attend 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani’s first major campaign rally in his bid to become the mayor of New York.

Mamdani is competing for the Democratic Party nomination in the party “primary” on June 24 – effectively the main contest in a city where about two-thirds of voters are registered Democrats. The winner of the primary is very likely to prevail in the mayoral election in November.

Since Mamdani announced he would run for mayor in October 2024, he has transformed the election with a series of pathbreaking policy proposals and quirky videos – diving into the Atlantic Ocean on New Year’s Day to promote his rent-freeze plan, interviewing voters in “Little Bangladesh” about why they voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election and using Bollywood clips to explain the system of “ranked choice voting”.

But Kuber, an Indo-Caribbean cab driver living in Astoria in New York, did not discover Mamdani through campaign videos...

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