NEW YORK — First there was Bernie. Then AOC. And now Zohran.
New York City’s democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani secured his spot as one of the country’s three biggest socialist stars at a huge Queens rally Sunday night.
“We must remember in a time such as this, we are not the crazy ones, New York City. We are not the outlandish ones,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at Mamdani’s “New York is Not for Sale” campaign event. “They want us to think we are crazy. We are sane to demand affordable and decent housing, a decent wage, the right to health care, that we pay to care for our people instead of the flattening of Palestinians and oppressed people abroad.”
When it was Mamdani’s turn before the nearly 13,000 people at Forest Hills Stadium, he credited Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had just introduced him.
“I stand before you tonight only because the senator dared to stand alone for so long,” he said. “I speak the language of democratic socialism, only because he spoke it first.”
Six decades after the Beatles played the same venue, Zohranmania came to Queens. And the stadium was a big tent. Along with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani’s rally also featured Gov. Kathy Hochul, a more moderate, business-friendly Democrat who campaigned for him Sunday night for the first time since endorsing him in a September New York Times op-ed.
While much has been made of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ long-delayed and lukewarm endorsement of Mamdani, the event showed the extent to which the democratic socialist candidate has not just been accepted, but championed by mainstream Democratic players in New York.
State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie spoke on stage too. With Hochul, the three leaders negotiate New York’s $250 billion-plus budget, and all three reiterated support for Mamdani priorities like free, universal child care.
Hochul would have been an unlikely sight at a Sanders presidential rally in 2016 or 2020, but she was there Sunday urging New Yorkers to vote for Mamdani — and once again defeat the man who once appointed her as lieutenant governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Aside from doubling as a democratic socialist apostolic succession of sorts, the rally served to demonstrate just how much mainstream Democratic leaders have been forced to respond to the populist demands energizing Mamdani’s campaign, as well as those of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s before him.
As Hochul spoke, the crowd broke out into spontaneous chants of “tax the rich!” several times. Increasing the personal income tax on city residents making more than $1 million is a key Mamdani proposal to fund his plans — a plank of his platform Hochul has said she’s not willing to support.
“I hear you,” she said to the chanting crowd with an awkward chuckle. “I love to see this energy and this passion.”
When Mamdani got the same chant, he laughed too. “Hell yeah,” he said. “Obviously.”
Mamdani made sure to affirm his status as frontrunner in all recent polls with a double-digit lead over his competitors, Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Cuomo is now running as an independent, after losing to Mamdani in the June Democratic primary by 13 points. Once a singularly dominant figure in the New York Democratic Party, the former governor was a singular target Sunday night.
“Imagine how bad you have to be if all your former coworkers get together to complain about you to a stadium full of people?” joked the comedian Sarah Sherman, who emceed the event.
Despite losing the Democratic primary, Cuomo has been calling himself the real Democrat in the race, while Mamdani is “what they call a democratic socialist, which is a cute play on words.”
“The socialists want to take over the Democratic party. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. That’s what AOC is all about,” Cuomo said Sunday morning on the Cats Roundtable, a radio show hosted by billionaire Republican political donor John Catsimatidis, who has endorsed his campaign.
Cuomo has been appealing to Republicans and conservatives, arguing that Sliwa isn’t viable and that he’s the only one with a chance to defeat Mamdani.
Mamdani has tried to counter that messaging, running a TV ad on Fox News appearing as “the actual Zohran Mamdani, not the guy they talk about on this channel.”
At the same time, Mamdani doubled down on his democratic socialist politics at the rally, campaigning against the “oligarchs” and “billionaires” who have poured millions of dollars into super PACs to stop him. He pledged, as he has throughout his campaign, to “freeze the rent,” to “use every resource at our disposal to build housing for everyone who needs it,” and to provide free child care.
“No longer will we allow the Republican Party to be the one of ambition. No longer will we have to open a history book to read about Democrats leading with big ideas,” he said.
His predecessor socialist stars had rallied for Mamdani separately prior to Sunday night — Ocasio-Cortez railed against the “gerontocracy” at a pre-primary party in June, while Sanders brought out Mamdani for a Brooklyn stop on his Fight Oligarchy Tour in September. Before that event, they both joined Mamdani for kebabs in his Queens district.
But this was their first rally all together. The poster for the event evoked a new troika, the three socialists leading the left flank of the Democratic Party. A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim, but all New Yorkers.
“At a moment when Americans are extremely distressed about where we are as a nation, economically and politically,” Sanders said, “a victory here in New York will give hope and inspiration to people throughout our country and throughout the world.”
