The Halal Cart at 2 AM
How Zohran Mamdani toppled a dynasty by meeting New York where it actually lives
On a bright New York day, they stood outside polling stations from dawn until the last ballot was cast. From Jamaica to Jackson Heights, from Kensington to Park Slope, they weren’t paid staffers in crisp suits clutching clipboards. They were neighbors. Teachers and taxi drivers. Students and seniors. Immigrants and the children of immigrants. They were there because somewhere along the way, a 34-year-old state assemblyman from Queens had done something radical in modern politics: he had seen them.
I have watched many campaigns, covered revolutions in distant lands, witnessed the machinery of power grind down hope with the efficiency of a bureaucrat stamping forms. But what happened in New York these past months was something different. While his opponents rented ballrooms and courted billionaires, Zohran Mamdani was stopping at six nightclubs in Brooklyn, just to do it all over again the next day. He appeared at clubs Gabriela and Toñitas in Williamsburg, then headed to Damballa and Mood Ring, attended a party hosted by the queer collective Papi Juice, grabbed a bite at a Halal food cart, and held a small rally where he danced among a crowd of Halloween costumes in Greenpoint.
This wasn’t a photo op. This was a man who understood that politics happens at 2 AM outside a halal cart as much as it happens in City Hall. It happens in the mosques and bodegas, on subway platforms and at marathon sidelines, in the nosebleeds at Madison Square Garden and in church services with his parents beside him. His volunteers canvassed in twelve languages, turning playgrounds, mosques, bodegas, community centers, and subway stations into campaign hubs. They didn’t just knock on doors they knocked on over 1 million doors. They didn’t just register voters; they sat with them, listened to their stories, shared meals, and built something that hadn’t existed before: a coalition bound not by demographics or data analytics, but by contact. By proximity. By showing up.
Look at his campaign materials and you won’t find patriotic red-white-and-blue or sleek consultant-approved gradients. Instead, you’ll see the warm yellow-and-green glow of New York bodegas, blocky type that looked hand-painted, and visual cues pulled from the actual streets of the city. His designer drew inspiration from vintage Bollywood film posters, bodega awnings, taxi cabs, and lottery scratch-off tickets the visual language of working New York. Even his volunteer tracking system honored the city’s soul: a “Zetro card” mimicking a MetroCard design, because in New York, the MetroCard isn’t just transit, it’s democracy in motion. It’s the great equalizer.
Eight canvassing shifts earned you a Mamdani poster, but what volunteers really earned was something deeper: they earned each other.
When political observers looked at the Mamdani campaign, they saw numbers that didn’t make sense. Tens of thousands of volunteers. Close to 50,000 volunteers who knocked on 1.5 million doors over eight months. Some of them woke before dawn to reach polling sites before they opened at 6 AM and stayed past 9 PM, braving 100-degree heat. Why? Why would someone give their Saturday to knocking on strangers’ doors? Why would a 15-year-old choose politics over TikTok? Why would working parents sacrifice their only day off?
Because Mamdani gave them something that had been missing from politics for too long: each other. The Left’s most vital asset has been conviction, the belief that people can effect change when they unite. His campaign didn’t just mobilize volunteers; it liberated them from doomscrolling and despair and offered them the community many crave. One volunteer put it simply: “I see people canvassing for him, volunteering for him...but I’ve never seen anyone from Cuomo’s side in my neighborhood.”
Kazi Fouzia remembers the days after September 11th when people told her to take off her hijab for her own safety. She remembers the informers, the suspicion, the fear that settled over her community like ash. For years, South Asian and Muslim New Yorkers learned to make themselves smaller, quieter, less visible. Then came Mamdani, a very outward Muslim man, South Asian, who is very much into his identity, who does not hide his identity. And Fouzia didn’t knock on doors despite her hijab. She knocked on them because someone like Mamdani made it safe to be visible again.
South Asian voter turnout increased by 40% during the Democratic primary. Not because of identity politics, but because Mamdani spoke to the material reality of working-class life. The rent that eats half your paycheck. The childcare that costs more than college. The bus fare that adds up when you’re working two jobs. The grocery bills that keep climbing while your wages stay frozen. When Mamdani joked at a campaign stop, “If I were mayor, halal would be eight bucks again,” it wasn’t just a punchline. It was a promise that someone was paying attention to the price of your lunch.
Mamdani carried Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, the neighborhoods where people live close together and rely on one another. His opponent’s strength was concentrated in Manhattan’s wealthier enclaves, areas defined more by capital than by community. But look closer at the map and you’ll see something remarkable. In Richmond Hill, which has a 31% Asian-American population and saw a 35% increase in Trump vote share, Mamdani won 51%. In Woodhaven, which saw votes for Trump increase by 46%, Mamdani got 49%. In Elmhurst, which is 48% Asian and saw a 30% increase for Trump, Mamdani got 56% of the votes.
These weren’t natural Democratic strongholds. These were neighborhoods that had been written off, overlooked, taken for granted. Mamdani won them because he and his volunteers showed up. Not with attack ads or mailers. With conversations. With listening.
More than two million votes were cast, the first time since 1969. In an era of declining civic participation, in a city supposedly too cynical to care, more than two million New Yorkers believed enough to vote. When Mamdani took the stage on election night, he opened with a quote from Eugene Debs, the socialist who ran for president five times in the early 1900s: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”
And then he spoke words that will echo through the city’s history: “My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty. I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life, but let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.” He continued: “For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands, fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor.”
In the weeks before the primary, there was a phrase that kept circulating through the campaign: “We knew we would get here.” Not hope. Not maybe. Certainty born from work. A centerpiece of Mamdani’s winning primary strategy was an unprecedented ground game, including more than 50,000 volunteers who knocked on more than 1.5 million doors. After his primary victory, when he gave volunteers a seven-week break, they were already eager to return. “Come hang with your fellow volunteers,” read the email calling them back. Because by then, it wasn’t just about Mamdani anymore. It was about what they had discovered together: their own power.
A volunteer named Noah Popp captured it perfectly: “We don’t just want him to win the general election by two or three points. We want him to win in a way where he shows that he has a mandate to accomplish his agenda.” They got their wish. Mamdani won 50.4 percent of the vote with a million New Yorkers casting a ballot for him.
Mamdani will make history as the first Muslim and person of South Asian descent, as well as the youngest in over a century, to serve as New York City mayor. But those historic firsts matter less than what he represents: the possibility that democracy might actually work the way it’s supposed to. His platform is ambitious bordering on radical. Freeze rents for stabilized apartments. Free buses. Universal childcare. City-owned grocery stores. All paid for by taxing the wealthy. Critics dismissed these as impossible promises. But his voters saw something else: someone who took their struggles seriously enough to propose solutions at the scale of the problems.
When Kazi Fouzia said, “Zohran make impossible possible in his grassroot movement. So Zohran have to keep his promises and fulfill his commitment. And we will be support all the time him. And also, if he don’t fulfill or keep his promises, we will hold him accountable,” she articulated the social contract Mamdani has entered into. This wasn’t a cult of personality. This was a partnership.
In his victory speech, facing down threats from President Trump to withhold federal funding, facing down billionaires and real estate interests and all the forces that will resist change, Mamdani didn’t blink. “We will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another in this moment of political darkness. New York will be the light,” he said. “If anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him, and if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one.”
The consultants and the establishment never understood what they were watching. They saw Mamdani’s TikTok videos and wrote them off as “surface-level” and “tight memetic packages.” They saw his volunteer army and couldn’t comprehend why people would work for free. They saw his rallies and thought: charisma. They missed everything that mattered.
Mamdani is charismatic, quick on his feet and seems to genuinely enjoy being around people. He’s a happy warrior. But that’s not why he won. He won because his campaign did not lean on charisma or viral media; instead, it focused on the diligent, ongoing effort of grassroots organizing, including door-to-door canvassing, forming coalitions, engaging with diverse communities in multiple languages, and cultivating networks of volunteers. He won because he joined cab drivers on a 15-day hunger strike in 2021, long before he was running for mayor. Because he collaborated with “Deafies for Zohran” to make his campaign accessible. Because he hosted a city-wide scavenger hunt emphasizing local history. Because when he promised affordable halal, he meant it.
He won because in a city of eight million people, he made each one feel seen.
It’s now Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. Somewhere in New York, a volunteer who knocked on doors for eight weeks is heading to work. A mother in a hijab is taking her kids to school, walking a little taller. A taxi driver is telling his passenger about the mayor-elect who once went hungry alongside him. A teenager is thinking maybe, just maybe, politics isn’t just for other people after all. Every volunteer who witnessed a neighbor’s engagement and every tenant organizer who observed their community unite has experienced democracy at its finest.
They learned something that can’t be unlearned: that they are not powerless. That their labor, their time, their conviction actually matters. That when working people unite around their shared interests rather than their divisions, they can topple dynasties. Mamdani didn’t just win an election. He reminded New York of something it had almost forgotten: that the city belongs to the people who build it, clean it, drive it, feed it, and keep it running. Not to the billionaires looking down from their penthouses. Not to the political dynasties passing power between themselves like inheritance. Not to the consultants who think they can buy victory with attack ads.
The city belongs to the person knocking on doors in 100-degree heat. To the mother canvassing in twelve languages. To the 15-year-old who can’t wait to get back to the streets. To everyone who dared to believe that New York could be affordable, livable, and just. They were told it was impossible. They made it possible together.
And in doing so, they showed the rest of the country what democracy looks like when it actually comes from the people. Not from the top down, but from the bottom up. Not in ballrooms, but in bodegas. Not on TV screens, but on street corners where someone takes the time to listen to your story and says: I see you. Your struggle is ours too. That is how Zohran Mamdani really won.