On a humid June night in Queens, New York, Zohran Mamdani stood beside his mother and father, grinning as supporters chanted his name over and over again. He had just clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City after defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary—the first time a figure from the activist Left has come so close to leading America’s largest city.

For many New Yorkers, Zohran Mamdani’s victory heralded the arrival of a new political generation: unapologetically leftist, impatient with compromise, and ambitious for radical change. His policy platform reads like a catalogue of far-left fever dreams: defunding the police, freezing rents, establishing city-run grocery stores, and pushing a US$30 minimum wage.

Since the primary, Mamdani has shot ahead in the polls for the general election. A Siena Institute survey put him at 44 percent, nineteen points ahead of Andrew Cuomo and nearly doubling Eric Adams’s support. An AARP/Gotham Analytics poll found a similar pattern: Mamdani at 42 percent, Cuomo at 23, with Curtis Sliwa at 17 and Adams sinking into single digits.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mamdani’s rise is the long shadow of his father’s intellectual project. Mahmood Mamdani is a world-famous antinationalist academic at Columbia University, who argues that every sovereign country is built on exclusion and sustained by domination and violence. He has called for a political future in which every nation state including the United States would be “deconstructed.”