What The Hell America!

After bringing in $8 million from donors across New York City at a pace never before seen in the city’s elections, mayoral candidate and state Rep. Zohran Kwame Mamdani called on his supporters to shift their focus away from donating money and toward creating “the single largest volunteer operation in New York City history.”

“I’m about to say something to you you’ve never heard a politician say: Please stop sending us money,” said Mamdani (D-36) in a video posted on social media Monday.

The fundraising haul from 18,000 donors makes Mamdani the first candidate in the mayoral race to reach the cap for donations, including projected matching funds from the city’s Campaign Finance Board, and comes three months before the Democratic primary.

Halting fundraising efforts—even though his current donations are only a projection and won’t be confirmed until the Campaign Finance Board makes its public funding decisions on April 15—”means that I don’t have to spend the hours that I have sitting at a table calling through our supporters and asking them for their money,” Mamdani told Gothamist. “It means that instead, I’m now asking New Yorkers for their time as we seek to build the single largest volunteer operation we’ve ever seen in the New York City’s mayor’s race.”

In the video posted on Monday, the democratic socialist explains that he aims to grow his 7,000-strong volunteer force to knock on more than 1 million doors across New York City before the June primary election.

“I teach New York City history for a living,” said historian Asad Dandia of Mamdani’s momentum. “This here is history in real time.”

A poll released Tuesday by Honan Strategy Group found that—as he was in the group’s February survey—Mamdani is currently in second place in the primary contest, with 18% of voters saying they favored him. Twelve percent of voters said they supported him last month.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in first place with 41% of voters backing him, while city Comptroller Brad Lander and Mayor Eric Adams—who is facing federal corruption charges—are trailing Mamdani with 8% and 6%, respectively.

“This is us while fasting,” Mamdani’s campaign said in response to the poll numbers, in reference to Ramadan.

Mamdani has made deft use of social media to promote his campaign, posting photos and videos of himself riding the subway alongside millions of working New Yorkers; interviewing people in the outer boroughs who either didn’t vote in the 2024 election or supported President Donald Trump; and announcing his proposal for city-owned grocery stores, which would “operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent, and would pass on those savings” to New Yorkers.

The state assembly member, who has represented District 36 in Queens since 2021, also wants to make rent stabilized housing units “the bedrock of economic security for the city’s working class” by freezing rent, expand a fare-free program for all city bus lines, and introduce no-cost childcare.

In addition to demanding answers from Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, on the abduction of former Columbia University student protester Mahmoud Khalil, Mamdani has taken aim in recent days at Cuomo over his refusal to take questions from the press and his demand that nursing homes accept residents who had recently had Covid at the beginning of the pandemic, followed by his understatement of the coronavirus death toll at nursing homes.

“New York City deserves a leader,” said Mamdani at a press conference outside Cuomo’s apartment building last week, “who will not pick and choose the moments in which they are accountable to this public.”