Jordan Daily – Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected as the youngest mayor of New York City in over a century, becoming the first Muslim and first South Asian in the role.
He based his campaign on a pledge to put working people first and tax the rich to pay for his policies.
Mamdani, a relatively unknown 34-year-old state assemblyman of Indian descent, declared victory against his stalwart opponents: Andrew Cuomo, the 67-year-old former governor of New York who ran as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, 71, founder of the Guardian Angels, a crime patrol group.
The older candidates had painted the millennial from Queens as being too inexperienced to run the nation’s largest city, a key financial hub. Cuomo said Mamdani would “kill the city.”
The race saw a clear generational and ideological split among voters. Cuomo and Sliwa courted support from older voters, while Mamdani, the front-runner, overwhelmingly appealed to the young.
His supporters were clear why they had voted for him.
“I feel like he had the best interests at heart for working people in New York City,” Matthew Maher, 54, from Brooklyn, told China Daily after casting his vote. “I liked (his policies) of free buses, free groceries.
“The main problem right now in America is how old everybody else is,” Maher said. “They are so old and they have such old ideas about how to make things work that are no longer (relevant), even the ones with the best intentions. He’s young, he has new ideas.”
Mamdani, a social media savvy candidate, campaigned on increasing the city’s corporate tax rate to pay for his ideas, a rent freeze for 1 million rent stabilized tenants, free government subsidized grocery stores and the elimination of city bus fares.
His win came as an ABC News exit poll showed the cost of living was the most important issue among over half of the electorate.
He also pledged to create a free childcare program for all New York City children aged six weeks to five-years-old.
