Socialism Rising? Cuomo Challenger Who Vows to End Capitalism in NYC Surges in the Polls – Twitchy

Officially, New Yorkers will select the Big Apple’s next mayor in November, but the election will most likely be decided in the primary election in June. A plethora of Democrats have thrown their hats into the ring in an effort to replace embattled incumbent mayor Eric Adams. The primary winner will enter November as the odds-on favorite to become New York City’s next mayor.

Andrew Cuomo currently leads the pack and has been leading in the polls since entering the race. Eric Adams has bounced and will run for re-election as an Independent. Adams has been plagued with a federal corruption scandal and approval ratings that have been consistently in the 20s. He’s hoping that he’ll be more competitive against Cuomo in November as an Independent than he would be in the primary as a Democrat.

With Adams out of the way, it looked like smooth sailing for Cuomo, but another candidate has surged in the polls. A Socialist State Assemblyman from Queens, Zohran Mamdani has separated himself from the rest of the pack in both polls and fundraising to challenge Cuomo for the Democratic nomination.

Mamdani is running on an anti-capitalist, anti-police, anti-Israel, anti-Trump platform, and he’s gaining traction.

I spoke to Zohran Mamdani’s former classmates, professors, and friends. Meet the socialist who wants to run NYC: https://t.co/OFD2HjpVvd

— Olivia Reingold (@Olivia_Reingold) April 14, 2025

Cuomo is still the odds-on favorite to win the primary and become the next mayor of NYC, but the rise of a radical Socialist can’t be ignored. While he currently trails in the polls, he claims his campaign has raised 8 million dollars, outpacing all other candidates, including Cuomo.

Six years ago, Mamdani was a total unknown, working as a foreclosure prevention counselor for Chhaya, a nonprofit focused on the “well-being of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City.” That year, only one year after moving to Astoria, Queens, from the Upper West Side, he decided to run in the 2020 election for his new neighborhood’s seat in the New York State Assembly.

“It was definitely a bit of a radicalizing experience, although I was already kind of a radical by that point,” Mamdani said about working as a housing counselor.

In July 2020, after an internal tally showed him winning the Democratic primary for the assembly seat by more than 300 votes, he posted a victory message on X: “Socialism won.”

As a state assemblymember he has focused on penalizing charities“engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement” in the West Bank and ensuring Middle Eastern and North African people are no longer characterized as “white” in New York state data—the kind of niche issues that speak to a narrow constituency, not a winning message for governing the 8.5 million people of New York City.

Normally, he’d be a kind of “curiosity” candidate, like the guy who said, “The rent is too damn high.” But Mamdani is currently polling in second place after former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He has also outraised all the competition, Cuomo included, and recently announced he is the first mayoral candidate to reach the $8 million cap. A longtime Democratic strategist, noting Mamdani’s charisma and knack for going viral, recently told me: “I think he’s going to win.”

Trip Yang, a top Democratic strategist, said Mamdani is “tracking toward a top two finish,” meaning first or second place.

“For a 33-year-old assemblymember to do that well, even if he loses the mayor’s race, he’s still won,” Yang said, adding that the race will only increase his name recognition and fundraising power.

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The immigrant son of a movie director mom and a Columbia professor dad, Mamdani is a private school-educated rich kid who has gained political success by denouncing the capitalism that provided him a privileged life. After a failed attempt at becoming a rap artist, he moved to Queens and worked for a non-profit before running for the New York State Assembly.

Born in Uganda, Mamdani moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of 7 and became a U.S. citizen in 2018. The son of a Columbia University scholar and an award-winning film director, he grew up in a faculty apartment in an elegant building on Riverside Drive, and attended the hyper-progressive Bank Street School for Children, a pre-K through eighth grade institution that currently charges as much as $66,147 per year in tuition and has taught that white students are born racist. Although he describes himself as a “graduate of the NYC public school system,” he didn’t attend any old public high school. His alma mater is the Bronx High School of Science, an elite institution that tens of thousands of studentsvie to get into each year. In 2014, he graduated from Bowdoin College, an $86,000-a-year private school, with a degree in Africana Studies.

After college, he pursued a career in music, going under the names Zohran Kwame, Mr. Cardamom, and Young Cardamom. One of his tracks from 2017, “Salaam,” he said, is about “being Muslim in America.”

Even with a moniker like ‘Young Cardamom,’ Mamdani has struggled to gain name recognition, a big disadvantage running against Cuomo. You may recognize him as the looney leftist screaming like a banshee as Tom Holman walked by him, eating an apple and smirking in Albany.

FOOTAGE of unhinged Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assemblymember and democratic socialist running for Mayor assaulting officers while trying to approach Tom Homan in Albany.

Put this lunatic in a cage! pic.twitter.com/fasuUKTESO

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) March 12, 2025

The ‘Not ready for prime time’ amateurish display may have actually helped. He has secured endorsements from CAIR and fellow looney leftist Rashida Tlaib.

Anti-Israel squad member Rashida Tlaib rallies ‘comrades’ to back socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani https://t.co/FOwXNONYYU pic.twitter.com/OEloJEI2l1

— New York Post (@nypost) April 1, 2025

The most troubling part of a self-proclaimed radicalized Socialist running a competitive race in a major, albeit a leftist, US city is the platform he is running on.

In a city where 61 percent of residents say they’re struggling to meet their basic needs, Mamdani is gaining traction by vowing to “lower the cost of living” in New York City. His housing plan, one of his ideas on how to make New York more affordable, costs $100 billion, only slightly less than the entire size of this year’s city budget. That’s on top of the $7 billion his other agenda items would cost, including $800 million for free buses, $1.1 billion to build a new Department of Community Safety, and $5 billionfunding free childcare for all kids ages 6 weeks to 5 years.

Mamdani is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that advocates abolishing prisons, granting voting rights to some “noncitizens,” ending “Israeli apartheid,” and establishing “a democratic secular state, from the river to the sea.” He has even said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister ever stepped foot in New York to prove “our values are in line with international law.”

Voting rights for illegal aliens, free everything, government-run grocery stores, and arresting Netanyahu. The guy is a walking Communist Manifesto, and he’s gaining popularity.

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani has announced he wants to implement government-owned supermarkets in NYC.

He is literally trying to implement communism in New York. What is wrong with him?pic.twitter.com/HMXTPrBHFV

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 19, 2025

We get it. This is a city election, but the fact that a socialist can raise this much money and get this much support in a city the size of New York should be a wake-up call. Cuomo is probably going to win the primary and go on to become the next mayor of NYC. They say losing freedom is always one election away. The socialist movement has a foothold in New York, and it is trying to expand.

Fires start with a spark, and the sooner this one is extinguished the better off we’ll all be.