If you’ve been anywhere on the Internet — Twitter, Instagram, TikTok — over the past five months, chances are high you’ve seen Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist lawmaker from Queens running to be the next Mayor of New York City.

His viral videos — “man-on-the-street” style interviews with Trump voters, halal cart workers, and first-time donors to his campaign — are the envy of the local political ecosystem (inspiring several, less successful, like-minded efforts). The charismatic millennial, caught eating a burrito on the subway (with a knife and fork no less), cannot even break fast during Ramadan without millions of people taking notice. After confronting border czar Tom Homan, Mamdani’s campaign raised nearly a quarter-of-a-million dollars in the ensuing twenty-four hours. Zohran Mamdani remains everywhere, or so it feels – all without missing a single day in Albany.

When Zohran launched his campaign last October, I wrote that, “Mamdani’s energy: his drive, willingness to experiment, and capacity to inspire, seared into the memories of those who saw him operate in Bay Ridge, could turn what has thus far been a relatively sleepy affair — given the stakes — upside down, delivering a political crusade New York City has not seen in the modern-era. In a race where viability boils down to exposure and press coverage, it is not far-fetched to foresee a scenario where Mamdani vacuums a lionshare of that oxygen — starving rivals looking to climb the polling ladder.”

A bullish prediction at the time, that has nevertheless been exceeded.

Astoria, once a predominantly Greek and Mediterranean enclave in Northwest Queens, is emblematic of this shift. Mamdani, elected to represent the neighborhood in the state legislature five years ago, defeated incumbent Aravella Simotas, an ally of the once-powerful Queens County Democratic Party, long the de-facto broker that hand-picked winners, and buried losers. Voters took kindly to his disavowal of donations from real estate developers and police unions (his opponent, did not); while embracing Mamdani, not as another run-of-the-mill “progressive,” but an unabashed democratic socialist. Symbolically, Zohran launched his campaign the same day Bernie Sanders hosted a rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queensbridge Park. Mamdani’s victory was aided by both the micro: a steady increase in left-leaning residents, some of whom successfully organized (for multiple years) while the local, nascent political machine crumbled; and macro: the near-term apex of both progressive popularity and civic engagement, social forces catalyzed by George Floyd’s murder, the upcoming Presidential Election, and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

While the political landscape shifted under President Joe Biden, the micro-conditions that underwrote the left’s burgeoning political power showed few signs of abating. Already, in a Democratic Primary, there were more votes to be had in places like Astoria than several of the outer borough, working-class neighborhoods that once forecasted victory in a citywide election. Indeed, the political evolution of these left-leaning, lively neighborhoods into a political bloc — spanning Alphabet City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, South Slope, Prospect Heights, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Long Island City, Sunnyside — capable of not only seizing political power in individual neighborhoods, but serving as the coalition bedrock for a top-tier Mayoral candidate, would have been inconceivable even ten years ago.

Here, where greater than half of the Democratic electorate is under the age of forty-five, the “generational aspect” of Mamdani’s campaign shines through. Indeed, to exit the subway during rush-hour on Jefferson Street in Bushwick or Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, is to be surrounded by hundreds of people of every race and religion — all of whom appear to be younger than 40.

While Mamdani has thus far trained his fire on Andrew Cuomo, not to mention the disgraced (but increasingly irrelevant) incumbent, Eric Adams, the majority of the insurgent’s energy is spent relentlessly championing an economic message, a thesis that New York City’s greatest crisis is not one of runaway crime or managerial incompetence — but of crippling costs-of-living, from housing to childcare. The broad scope of his platform — including freezing the rent for every rent-stabilized tenant, making buses “fast and free,” municipality-owned grocery stores (one in each borough, targeted towards food deserts) — stretches beyond the confines of traditional left-liberal policy pillars, and explicitly targets working-class communities. In an age of hedging and double-speak, Mamdani’s platform is well-defined and unique, while representing the unabashed economic populism and class-based agenda many have been clamoring for since Bernie Sanders ran for President.